All By Yourself: DIY Filmmaking, Trans Identity, and the Horror of Seeing What Others Cannot

• In Event: Haunting, Horror, Monstrosity: Undoing Genres of Oppression

Abstract

Recent histories of queer cinema have commented on the prevalence of DIY filmmaking in the genre. For instance, Caden Gardner and Willow Maclay’s Corpses, Fools, and Monsters (2024) explores low-budget trans-led films like Maggots and Men (2009) and The People’s Joker (2022). Likewise, Curran Nault’s “Three Dollar Cinema” (2019) makes a compelling case for “the reality of DIY’s predominance within the queer cultural realm” (63). However, less has been done to connect queer DIY filmmaking to the themes of recent trans-led horror films, which utilize low-budget aesthetics to emphasize the alienation trans people experience in a hostile society. Taking T-Blockers (2023) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024) as examples, this paper presentation identifies the unique vision of trans horror, wherein a character’s subversive ability to see things others cannot (body-snatching parasites, the falseness of the universe, or their own gender identity) is expressed through the visual qualities of low-budget filmmaking.

T-Blockers, directed by Alice Maio Mackay on a slim $10,000 budget, centers a trans filmmaker who can sense evil parasites (i.e. transphobes) and teams up with her friends to fight them. T-Blockers embraces its budget through its lead, whose psychic ability and filmmaking eye go hand-in-hand. Meanwhile, despite working with an exponentially higher budget, I Saw the TV Glow retains the low-budget aesthetics of director Jane Schoenbrun’s previous work, revealing the importance of DIY filmmaking to the themes of trans horror and the subgenre’s larger intervention against a US imperialist film landscape. TV Glow’s Owen rejects their trans identity, engaging with low-budget filmmaking as a spectator and fan rather than as a filmmaker. Yet, their latent transness allows them to realize that they live in a false reality, forcing them to reckon with the horror of either staying put in their current identity–typified by the cookiecutter landscape of suburban Jersey–or re-emerging into the “real world” of the low-budget film.

Biographical Information

Dorian Cole (they/them) is a first-year doctoral student in American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in religious studies and the effect of mass media representations on historical memory. Dorian received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2022 and a Master's degree from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware in 2024. At Winterthur, they served as a Louis F. McNeil Fellow and created the first scholarly history of the Ouija board, interrogating how this once-innocuous religious object developed its dark reputation as a demonic conduit through its representation within the mass media of the twentieth century. This work was conducted through several awards: The Strong National Museum of Play’s Mary Valentine and Andrew Cosman Research Fellowship, the Sweeney Award, and a generous grant from the CMCS Graduate Research Presentation Fund.

Dorian’s current research concerns the relationship between horror aesthetics, public history, and historical fiction and film. Their recent work has been featured in the edited collections Toys and Stories in Interplay (ed. Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West), Writing Artifacts (ed. Cydney Alexis and Hannah Rule), and Horror Capital: Labor, Ideology, and Aesthetics as Cinematic Nightmare Fuel (ed. William Chavez and Valeria Dani).

Author

• Dorian Cole, Harvard University