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Italian director Dario Argento’s film Phenomena (1985) represents, through the diegetic response to protagonist Jennifer Corvino’s ability to communicate with insects, a cultural association between disability and deviance. This connection places Jennifer in a horror film lineage that includes Charlie McGee from Firestarter (1984), Johnny Smith from The Dead Zone (1983), Cameron Vale from Scanners (1981), and Carrie White from Carrie (1976). The ways in which these films forge this connection follow a similar path: An official, and usually oppressive, entity categorises the main character’s unusual physical or mental trait as both a disability deserving of treatment or repair and as a characteristic likely to lead to wrongdoing. Education psychologist Kaoru Yamamoto’s configuration of disability and deviance suggests the cultural importance of classifying and interpreting disabled bodies by fitting them into a narrative of deviance for surveillance and control. Throughout Argento’s film, characters attempt to classify Jennifer; scientists seek to diagnose her ‘affliction’ through the medical model of disability, while Jennifer’s schoolmistresses interpret Jennifer’s behaviour as a disciplinary problem based in environmental factors. This represents the structural model of disability, but in each instance, the attempt to classify Jennifer fails to diagnose or discipline the supposed deviant, disabled body. Through this failure, the film dramatises contemporary critiques of traditional models that examine disability, moving beyond to explore what Fiona Kumari Campbell has called the maintenance of abledness in sexed, raced, and modified bodies. By normalising Jennifer’s ability, then, Phenomena offers a framework for examining the process through which elements of abledness become normalised, a concept which many theorists now argue should maintain the focus of disability studies.
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