Can’t Hurt Me Anymore
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As a child I was scared by everything. Even a scary movie promo would give me nightmares. As a teen I wanted to seem cool. As the fat friend I often went along with things, like watching a scary movie, for fear of being left out, made fun of more, or losing friends. We often call that people pleasing but as a therapist I have learned that it was fawning. A trauma response to “just go along with it” in hopes of minimizing more trauma and rejection.
The first Halloween that I finally, actually embraced scary movies, I was 22-years-old. It was my first Halloween alone and I watched George Romero’s Dawn of The Dead. I became enthralled with the allegories for racism and sexism; I was captivated with the way zombie madness was played out in a mall (which looked very much like the one I hung out in as a teen) and illustrated how our culture worked. As I delved more into the horror genre, I developed a love for scream queens – women unafraid to fight back, to do more than run, to be more than the bad things that had happened to them.
At 22, I was knee-deep in my eating disorder and discovered the movie Halloween. I watched Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode running from and fighting Michael Myers and it clicked: Michael was my eating disorder. Silent, deadly, no discernable idea where he came from or why, and yet he was going to alienate and kill everyone around Laurie (me). That’s how my eating disorder felt. When watching the film, I felt like Laurie, and I was finally seen. I was now beautiful, and I wasn’t the fat friend who wanted to fit in, or the fat girl trying to fit in an airline seat, or the fat woman next to you on the train. I was me. And, Michael Myers was the eating disorder that alienated everyone around me. My eating disorder had taken something much bigger from me than I had imagined.
Shortly after that year, I moved home and healed from my eating disorder, which then opened up a slew of trauma I wasn’t prepared for. It was then that I discovered the movie Scream. I could swoon at that whole series. Scream can be viewed through a lens that many film critics call a gay allegory. First, the movie is campy as all get out, with each sequel more camp than the one before. The characters of Stu and Billy are clearly gay lovers (they’re even based on a real-life gay couple who were in fact serial killers). In the Scream franchise, there are two
“Final Girls” – Sidney and Gale, who look so badass and not at all like the waifish leading women of the 90’s and early 2000’s. ( A Final Girl is a horror movie trope where there is at least one woman still alive in the end to confront the killer.) But, what was most impactful, was that I actually felt like Ghostface, the films’ killer: no one knew who they were, why they were angry, or what was going on. I felt like that underneath my eating disorder.
I felt like I didn’t entirely know (but I kind of knew) the films were campy and queer, and I could be Billy or Sidney or frankly anyone in between. And for me, the character of Ghostface represented unconditional permission for me to be ANYONE I WANTED. And, that was something I had never felt I could be before. However, I didn’t want to wear the mask. I wanted to be what that mask secretly gave permission to be. I wanted to be anything and everything.
After Halloween and Scream, I watched them all: Psycho; Carrie (and everything Stephen King); Hellraiser (every single one); anything Vincent Price; and, of course, the oddly queerest of them all, Jennifer’s Body. It was like each one gave me permission to sublimate my trauma and dysphoria into something tangible, exciting, shocking, unexpected. And, then it hit me. That word . . . dysphoria. It was cradled so deep underneath my eating disorder, I had forgotten that that pain was the deepest of them all.
The pain of trauma, weight stigma, years of having my medical issues ignored, years of being the “ugly fat friend,” years of rejection not because of me but because of my body size, and years of hiding who I was, hiding so much that I forgot it was there. Underneath my dysphoria, I longed for the mask of Ghostface, the unconditional permission to be anyone. And that, dear readers, is when I realized horror movies were also allowing me to discover my GenderQueerness.
These movies had allowed me to slowly unravel the twisted yarn ball that was Non-Binary underneath it all. My eating disorder was content to be Michael, to be a ruthless and silent killer that no one would be able to protect me from, and yet, my gender wasn’t having it. If Ghostface and Michael were in a face-off movie, in my life, Ghostface would win. And now through horror, I have unlearned so much of my eating disorder, I have stepped into the best iteration of myself, my life, and it opened up this beautiful window where I no longer need to run from Michael and Ghostface - where I no longer have to seek permission.
I was able to be out as Non-Binary, to become a therapist, to embrace my body in spite of the truest horrors, anti-fatness and transphobia. So now, as October is here, I turn on the TV and I watch Scream, Beetlejuice, and Halloween, and I laugh, I gasp, I relive them as if it was the first time. And when I’m watching, if you watch me closely, you’ll see I often smirk with my bowl of popcorn, because I have become so much more than a scared girl watching Halloween or Scream for the first time. In my movie, I am the Final Them, and Michael can’t hurt me anymore.
