Zefyr Lisowski’s Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love is a raw, introspective memoir and collection of essays about horror’s profound impact on her life. More so, it’s an unflinching reflection of her life in its many stages — not just as a trans woman but as a disabled one as well. Lisowski writes prose that jumps off the page and demands your attention. It’s also achingly romantic and melancholic as she dwells in the memories of her past.
The mix of autobiographical and sharp criticism lends itself to a more urgent tone. Despite the retelling of experiences, Lisowski makes them relevant to what’s happening now. Horror becomes a conduit for the more complex and difficult parts of her past to express. It’s in the ambiguity and the uncanny that Lisowski’s work shines a light on the contradictions of our world and our own resistance towards them.
Screen Speck got the chance to talk with Zefyr Lisowski about her new book, Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love, and the complexities of the horror genre, love through communal watching, and radical acceptance.
Screen Speck: This mix of memoir with a more clinical and critical look at a genre is a writing style that really stood out to me. How did you balance the more personal aspects of the memoir genre with the nonfiction, critical prose, and scholarly references you make?
Zefyr Lisowski: I’m really excited by work that connects critical scholarship and more personal reflections—there’s a long history of writing doing this, ranging from Audre Lorde’s A Burst of Light to more contemporaneous writers like Johanna Hedva and Melissa Febos. Writing Uncanny Valley Girls was an opportunity to think through horror movies’ impact on a life with love and care, but also to contribute to this canon of memoir/criticism as well. It was important for me to think through horror with rigor and discipline— a balance my editor, Ezra Kupor, helped me strike with greater effectiveness as well.
Screen Speck: The mention of visibility and disability. The softness of femme bodies versus the hardness of masculine bodies. What do you think it is about bodies in general that invites so much policing over them? And how does that relate to the genre of horror for you?
Lisowski: Horror is all about bodies—what happens when they fail us, how we fail them, and all the fleshy bits in between. It’s a cliché to note at this point, but horror is really adept at reflecting a society’s beliefs and prejudices—one of the reasons, I believe, why the genre alternates so wildly between films with really progressive politics and reactionary ones. (Which is a whole other topic!)
One of the main dictums of fascism is to restrict the body—both how bodies can move through space (through hostile and inaccessible architecture) and which bodies are allowed to be visible (through eugenicist and transphobic policies). Because of its often-subversive societal positioning, horror refracts these anxieties, providing a space to think through the impact of bodies in space. Through the reflection these films provided, I could love my own complex body more, too.
Screen Speck: The horror genre is such a visceral one where bodies are almost always the source of that horror. How do we reconcile with bodies as a source of both horror and wonder?
Lisowski: I’d actually argue there’s quite a bit of wonder in horror, as well! In scary movies, we see bodies pushed past their limit, but that can be a source of endurance as well, a kind of radical faith in the body to endure. I’m thinking about the end of Martyrs, a nasty and complex film (that I don’t write about!) where, through extraordinary violence, one is able to reach a kind of transcendence. Or the ending of Saint Maud (a movie I do write about), which argues the opposite—that there is nothing transcendent about pain, that the idea of bliss in suffering is a deeply deleterious one. Horror is especially effective, I feel, at holding those complicated and contradictory ideas in tandem. Fear tells us things about ourselves, after all; through these movies, we can capture it all.
Screen Speck: It seems modern horror films have a preoccupation with the aging of bodies; female bodies, to be exact. How do you view the way bodies change throughout time, with the way trans bodies also change, not just physically but emotionally? Especially when bodies not only become physical representations of ourselves but also historians of our lives (which ties in well with a lot of your personal anecdotes)? Is the rejection of change also a rejection of our own histories?
Lisowski: Yes, absolutely! It was really important for me as I was writing Uncanny Valley Girls to chart an individual body as something that’s always changing—more disabled, less, varying across gender, age, aesthetics, and more. But also, “an individual body” is kind of an impossibility, right? We all exist collectively and interpersonally, and our own bodies, as you note, bear not just our own histories but the histories of whoever have touched, interacted with, or abutted us.
I think that horror films’ preoccupation with aging women’s bodies is most revealing when it touches on other fears of change. It’s a somewhat common practice to put a man in old age drag for these movies—I talk about Zelda in Pet Sematary being an embodiment of the buried transphobia in that decision, but also the ableism intrinsic in it as well. All these systems of judgement and fear are interconnected! I’m most interested in the ways that women are depicted as “wrong,” and how that’s a source of fear—old, trans, promiscuous, disabled. How can we invert those terms? What ways can they provide ways for us to think about the power we wield, as well?
Screen Speck: You state how people politicize bodies by purposefully limiting their complexities. Different kinds of care are assigned to different bodies. How would you define the differences of visibility apply to disability and “otherness”? How does being visible become a signal of resistance? Or survival?
Lisowski: I don’t think that visibility in itself is a form of resistance at this point—speaking as a trans woman, our rights are being steadily stripped, and nominal “visibility” is proving, at least conditionally, more a liability than anything else. I’m much more interested in other strategies—ones of subterfuge, disguise, and community building. Instead of visibility, I’m most heartened by moments of solidarity—who is us, and who do we consider our comrades? That’s one of the things the book is really trying to do, use personal narrative as a way to forge connections and encourage others to build networks of care as well. I just did that through, among other things, watching scary movies with loved ones, but there are many other ways to that as well. Find your community, and stick tight to them!
Screen Speck: Freedom is in rejecting the mainstream paradigm and carving out your own. With others who understand and have similar lived experiences. Create a world where these supremacies don’t weigh down the existence of disabled people, trans people, and marginalized people. How does self-love, even in its more visceral moments, also form a part of that radical form of resistance?
Lisowski: You have to love yourself, however hard that is! However, part of that self-love needs to include an unflinching look at ourselves, our actions, and how we show up for others. The main arc of the book is vehemently anti-suicide, which was something that emerged early in the writing process. In many ways, I wrote the book to save myself. However, in writing, I discovered the work that I was trying to do on the page had to be lived through first, and I did that work with others—lovers, friends, community members, therapists, and more. Uncanny Valley Girls is about a lot of things—scary movies, dating, fear, survival—but above all, it’s about how important community is, how necessary it is to find and hold as close to you as you can. If there’s any takeaway a reader has from the book, I hope it’s that one.
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