MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Among a recent crop of horror films featuring deaf or hard-of-hearing protagonists, director Mike Flanagan’s Hush (2016) stands out for its ability to wrap conventional tropes associated with the slasher subgenre around an unconventional main character who, as a deaf-mute novelist forced to fend for herself when a nameless serial killer darkens her doorstep, embodies the sense of isolation that Martin Norden, Travis Sutton, and other critics detect in many disability narratives. Trapped inside a solitary writer’s retreat far removed from her nearest neighbors, Maddie becomes a boxed-in prey to the initially masked man who, for no apparent reason, predatorially menaces her from outside the house, threatening her with the same deadly violence that he has dealt to her ill-fated friend Sarah. The literal containment of the protagonist, who can see but not hear the killer through the glass partitions that temporarily keep him at bay, suggests the metaphorical but very real institutional limitations placed on people with disabilities in a society that continues to turn a “blind eye” or “deaf ear” to their needs; obstacles to accessibility and inclusion that horror films might solidify or shatter by either adhering to or breaking from genre conventions. In this presentation, I explore Maddie’s initial reliance on assistive technologies, including text-messaging systems through which she communicates with the outside world, and then turn my attention to the hermeneutic possibilities as well as limitations of the closed captioning services provided for this and other films by Netflix. The streaming service, which purchased the worldwide distribution rights to Flanagan’s film before it premiered at South by Southwest in March of 2016, has come under scrutiny for its notoriously “low standards” of subtitling, which, as one cultural commentator notes, “continue to alienate subscribers who are deaf, hard of hearing, or simply have difficulty understanding dialogue.”