Non guardarmi: non ti sento… ma ti ammazzo. Le disabilità sensoriali nel cinema thriller-horror contemporaneo

The complex set of conditions collectively referred to as “sensory disabilities” has been increasingly explored in popular cinema, albeit often with a specific dominant perspective, that of drama, which has enveloped conditions such as deafness or blindness with a rhetorical layer, establishing an ideological canon. It is in genre cinema, specifically horror-thriller, that one can access a different perspective on these disabilities, perhaps more direct and less clichéd, at times intersecting with some of the ideological patterns of drama. There seems to be, in fact, a specific wave, predominantly associated with marginal and heterogeneous cinema (in terms of geography and eras) compared to mainstream productions, capable of approaching the theme of sensory disabilities from a seemingly more cynical standpoint but also capable of highlighting some of the value systems associated with disability as a form of otherness that would otherwise remain unspoken. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to provide a relevant corpus of films unified by these premises and then propose a specific analytical placement within the broader landscape of disability-themed cinema.