Hello! I want to write a horror book with characters that are not human but were a long time ago and now are something changed. What I want to do is explore themes of body horror, but what I do not want to do is be offensive or stereotypical towards physically disabled people. I have been doing some research and making sure the horror I am writing doesn’t have real world people it is affecting. (for example, characters with multiple eyes or arms or who have bare skeletons on their limbs) Do you have any tips to be non-offensive in my writing?
P.S. thank you! Your blog has been so helpful to me 💛
We have a post on body horror right there! I would just do your research very thoroughly (read Sasza's part, he worded it much better than me). Characters transforming into something non-human is such a cool concept and cool to explore. And while this isn't our area, I would also research stuff like identity, race, body dysphoria, dysmorphia, Ethnicity, queerness, on their intersectionality with body horror, outside of disability and such. It's really interesting and it all intersects in such a fascinating way!
I think that as long as you're making sure you're not passing off symptoms of disabilities as said body horror, you're fine. If there's no connection between the two, then it won't be offensive to physically/visibly disabled people.
With that said, there's an incredible number of conditions that can be disabling (literally thousands). So to avoid including any of them as "body horror" or "gore" or what have you, you will need to do research.
There are disabilities that involve extra fingers (polydactyly), extra limbs (polymelia), extra eyes (diprosopus), and other things that involve what's widely considered "body horror" by the genre. Yes, they're very rare (except for polydactyly) but they're still very much real; the Witches movie tried to pretend that limb difference was just some magical scary thing rather than an actually existing disability and it was horrible.
That doesn't mean you can't do it, just don't mimic it 1:1. Put the eyes on their neck, or make their fingers come out of their mouth, whatever. Things that don't happen to visibly disabled people, including the ones that die from complications of their disabilities—I think it's incredibly cruel of the horror genre to treat many of them as some sort of "evil creature inspo" because of severe congenital conditions.
That's just my view on it, I hope it makes sense. Good luck with your writing.