The Demonization of Fat Bodies in Horror
Trigger warnings for fatphobia and emetophobia.
I’ve come to love the horror genre over the years.
There’s something therapeutic about it, a way of examining the darkest parts of humanity without any real danger. A way to escape from the terrors of reality and lose ourselves in another world, only unlike ours, we can stop the terrors at any moment by closing the book or pausing the movie. I appreciate it from a writing standpoint, too. It takes great deal skill to create a story that engrosses us and frightens us as well as a good horror story. I love how many scary stories, films, and games there are that truly immerse me.
But there’s one thing that often breaks me out of that immersion, forces a jarring shift back to reality, and leaves me feeling frustrated and disappointed: the way that bodies like mine are depicted within those fictional tales.
In horror, fatness tends to be used as a tool to scare and disgust audiences, often by leaning in to negative stereotypes. There are several examples of fat antagonists in horror media whose weight is clearly meant to be a large part — no pun intended — of what makes them terrifying. While many fat characters in fiction are presented in a dehumanizing way, making their fatness their primary character trait, in horror this is often taken a step further by presenting characters as horrifying because they are fat. Perhaps the strongest — and most unsettling — example I’ve found of this trope is the character of Darlene Fleischermacher.
Darlene is one of the worst and most offensive depictions of a fat person that I’ve ever seen. She appears as a minor antagonist in the 2013 Capcom horror game Dead Rising 3, which tells the story of a man named Nick trying to survive in the middle of a zombie outbreak. There are various mini-bosses in the game the player has the option to fight in a side mission separate from the main storyline, some of whom are based on the Seven Deadly Sins. Darlene is meant to represent the sin of gluttony.
Darlene is depicted as a massively fat woman who requires a mobility scooter to get around (so we’re starting off by painting a picture of mobility aids = bad, which is not a good start). Her appearance and mannerisms play into the stereotype that fat people are inherently slobs. Her chin is covered in grease from her messy eating and her clothes are tattered and filthy, including a stained bib and a poorly fitting dress with cupcake-patterned fabric. She wears two blue ribbons pinned on her chest to signify her history as a competitive eater (a backstory confirmed by an old newspaper article the player can find).
She’s introduced when Nick and another survivor character go to an all-you-can-eat buffet searching for food. In the introductory cutscene, Nick slips on a puddle of green on the floor which is later revealed to be Darlene’s vomit. The sound of his fall alerts her to their presence, and as she turns a nearby corner, the game shows close-ups of her scooter, chest, and mouth to emphasize her more “grotesque” details. She noisily eats a chicken leg while ordering the survivors to “get away from her food.” While trying to keep them away, the survivor remarks that she’ll never be able to eat it all herself, which she takes as a challenge. She begins to gorge herself at the buffet, passing gas and even vomiting again in the process. When the survivor tries to sneak past her to the kitchen, she stabs him to death with a spork. The actual boss fight begins when Darlene flies into a rage, believing that Nick has called her fat.
During the fight, Darlene uses her scooter to charge at the player and uses plates and cutlery as projectile weapons. In one of her attacks she spins her scooter around while vomiting, coating the floor to try and get Nick to slip. Throughout the fight she’ll pause to eat in order to regain health, giving Nick an opportunity to grab her from behind and force burgers down her throat. When she’s defeated, she complains of horrible indigestion and makes one final charge at Nick, only for her scooter to slip on a puddle on the floor and pin her down on her back.
She dies by choking on her own vomit.
I could probably write an entire essay about why this onecharacter is horrible and why every element of her design fills me with the rage of a million burning suns, but I’ll try to keep it short.
Darlene’s character design is a checklist of almost every negative stereotype about fat people there is. Her taking offense to being seen as fat is based on the idea that those of us who are fat aren’t aware of it, when in fact most of us are overly aware of our bodies due to living in a society that demands we scrutinize and judge every inch and imperfection from an alarmingly young age. Her body is portrayed as an object of disgust, as she’s covered in grease, she constantly burps, and she constantly throws up. Perhaps the most common — and the laziest — stereotype that she embodies is the idea that fat people are ruled by food above all else. Her entire personality and motivation is based on this idea, to the point where she murders a guy for even thinking about eating what she views as her “hoard.”
An obsession with food is present in fat characters from all genres of media, though in horror, it often takes a much darker twist. As an example, let’s talk about the character of Pearl from the 1998 Marvel film Blade. While technically a superhero film, it incorporates horror elements, most notably in its vampire-centric worldbuilding. Pearl is also included here because he’s clearly intended to disturb us.
Pearl is a minor antagonist appearing in one scene of the movie. He’s a large, likely immobile vampire surrounded by computer screens. The film’s main character, Blade, finds him here and uses UV light to torture him for information. Just like Darlene, his body is displayed as a spectacle of poor hygiene and bodily functions. As Blade and his female companion, Karen, approach, Karen remarks, “What’s that smell?” And, like Darlene, the film goes out of its way to emphasize Pearl loudly passing gas.
Pearl’s scene is only a couple of minutes long and doesn’t touch upon his eating habits. This surprised me, as I’m used to food being a central focus with fat characters. However, the director of the film, Stephen Norrington, has been quoted as revealing that Pearl’s size is the result of him “gaining a cannibalistic lust for children and infants as he loves to eat their hearts.” This of course reinforces the stereotype of fat people possessing an inherent insatiable hunger for food, but also takes it a step further by equating this obsession with cannibalism (with bonus child murder).
This link between fatness and cannibalism is also shown in the first Dead Rising game, which includes a minor fat antagonist named Larry Chiang. Larry is described “a butcher obsessed with his work,” according to the in-game notebook of character information. In the game, he views humans as “fresh meat” and zombies as “spoiled meat” and captures another human character with the intent to kill, cook, and serve him. (Given Larry’s race, there may also be racial undertones at play here, but being white, I am nowhere near qualified enough to write about them.)
Finally, this link is present — along with child murder, like Pearl — in Joey Graceffa’s YouTube Original series Escape the Night, specifically season 2. The series can be described as a live, mostly unscripted escape room starring YouTube creators attempting to solve puzzles to defeat an overarching villain. Each episode features a secondary villain, similar to Darlene and Larry functioning as mini-bosses in their respective games. I feel I should mention that I’ve seen this season of Escape the Night all the way through and I loved it, particularly the character design. But there was one villain I definitely had a problem with: the Gingerbread Woman in episode five.
The Gingerbread Woman is based on the witch from Hansel & Gretel, using trails of candy to lure unsuspecting children to her bakery, trap them in her oven, and cook them into meat pies. In addition to the obvious fat/food connection, she touches upon some of the subtler but still problematic patterns found in fat characters: negative personality traits. She acts sugary sweet, sharing her baked goods with the protagonists, but makes a sudden shift into enraged and violent when she suspects that they’re trying to steal her meat pie recipe. She’s verbally and physically abusive to Samson, the man she forces to work as an assistant in her bakery, chopping off his fingers with a meat cleaver when he tries to help the protagonists save the children she’s trapped. Her desperation to protect her recipe is similar to Darlene attempting to protect the buffet food, displaying an irrational and unhinged greed.
This is something common in fat characters across all genres. Fatness is often bundled in with negative traits and behaviors — cruelty, meanness, greed, abusiveness. (Looking at you, Harry Potter series.) Whether intentional or not, this creates a link in our minds that fatness is a moral failing, too.
The Gingerbread Woman also stood out to me from an aesthetic perspective. Many of the villains on the show are designed to be equal parts terrifying and beautiful. In season two, for example, almost all of the other female villains are conventionally attractive (read: thin and young) with makeup that makes them appear alluring — for example, the Snow Queen in episode six and the overarching villain of the Sorceress. And aside from a vampire extra or two in the first two episodes, the Gingerbread Woman is the only fat character in the season…and the only one associated with food and gluttony.
At this point, it’s clear that there’s a bit of a pattern in horror media, isn’t there? But what we really need to consider is why, and why it’s so problematic.
The elements of a horror story are intentionally placed with one primary purpose: to frighten and disturb us, to push us to the limits of our discomfort within a controlled setting. The message that characters like these send is that fat people are inherently monstrous. That we deserve to be feared and reviled as much as the sadistic heartless killers, demonic entities, and vicious animalistic beasts also found in the horror genre. That we aren’t seen as actual complex human beings with feelings and dreams and passions and fears, but inhuman, disgusting, and gluttonous blobs. The consequences of this message are alienating fat fans of horror and reinforcing the idea that thin people should fear us, which many, if not most, already do. They fear looking like us. They fear accepting us. They fear our humanity. Characters like the ones listed above only perpetuate the actual horror that fat people face every day: living in a world that hates us and wants to erase us.
All I can say to horror creators is this: try to do better. Try to think about who you might be demonizing in your work. Try to identify the harmful stereotypes and tropes you might be spreading. Try to think of who might be coming upon your work looking for a good time and some good scares. Do you want them to leave disappointed, angry, and hurt, feeling utterly unwelcome in the world you’ve created, because of your perception of their bodies? Ask yourself why you fear fatness. Ask yourself why you see us as the monsters. Then push your answers and biases aside and remember your own humanity. Remember that humanity exists in us, too.