The Horror of Wheelchairs

The importance of wheelchairs in horror films is often overlooked. Off the top of my head, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Homicidal, Friday the 13th Part 2, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and Misery all contain characters who are confined to wheelchairs. And there's probably a lot more that I'm just not thinking of at the moment.

Wheelchairs are important because I think it gets to one of the main fears that everybody, regardless of class, age, or ethnicity, is fundamentally afraid of: being paralyzed. Short of death, I can't think of something that would be worse for day-to-day life than not being able to use your legs. With paralyzation (is that a word?) comes the sense of hopelessness, one of the greatest emotions that the horror genre feeds on. When you take that and manifest it into a single character, the audience becomes immediately sympathetic to that character. Everybody knows how much it would suck to have to rely on someone else to be with you and help you constantly, and I think that notion of a certain lack of freedom really gets to viewers. More than other disabilities such as being blind, deaf, or mute, the idea that you are essentially stuck in one place is deeply unsettling to many viewers.

In horror, this is used with great effect. Wheelchairs are clunky and tough to maneuver unless you are on a level surface, and even then, you aren't going to wheel yourself away from a killer on two legs no matter how ripped your upper body is. Things get even dicier when steps are involved. Horror movies love to exploit surfaces and terrain. When Joan Crawford looks down the stairs to the waiting phone, and possible salvation, the roadblock is her wheelchair being unable to go down the stairs. The threat that Davis could come home before she could drag her legs down the stairs is what initially keeps her from attempting to get to the phone.

Other than maybe blindness, I think being confined to a wheelchair would easily be the one disability most people would not prefer. When Annie takes the sledgehammer to Paul's feet, we cringe not only because the physical idea is nasty, but we know that Paul will now be completely hampered in any attempts to escape. Not only is Annie's house now a prison, but Paul's own body becomes a prison. Instead of escaping one, he must now escape two.

I'm not sure if anyone has ever really looked into the psychology of this and how characters in wheelchairs affect audiences toward the genre, but I think it would be fascinating to really delve into it.