[Editorial] Interview with Ariel Baska on Access:Horror Film Festival

Access: Horror is “a two-day event packed full of academic panels, short films, and talks exploring and celebrating the history, impact and future of disability in the horror genre”, and as you can see from the festival’s website, the subjects under discussion and the panels alike are all rather fascinating. Earlier this week, I spent half an hour in the company of Ariel Baska, the person who came up with the idea for Access: Horror to dig into her motivation and what pass-holders might expect.

I started off by asking Ariel about herself. “The most important thing to know about me is that I spent fifteen years as a Latin teacher until my disabilities became so bad that they pushed me out of teaching completely and I really wrestled with my disability identity. I’ve always been disabled, but I didn’t come to terms with it until it prevented me from actually having a job. For two years, I was housebound in a really crucial way and really wrestled with what it means to be disabled, confronting a lot of my internalised ableism and figuring out what it means to be part of the disability community… and then the pandemic hit! When that time came, I thought ‘you know what? I’m ready to go: I’m not holding back anymore.’ At that point, I realised I had to have brain surgery: they found four aneurysms and I was positive I was going to die on the operating table, and so I made a movie about medical gaslighting, because that was where I was at the time. I’ve been doing a lot of different projects since then, because luckily I didn’t die on the operating table, but went on to do a lot more. One of the things I wanted to do from the very beginning was to create a horror and disability film festival and luckily I was able to put that together this year; but it took a lot of doing to get it together to the point where it is now.”

Referring to her phrase “my disabilities”, I asked if Ariel would mind clarifying what it is she struggles with. “Not at all,” she said. “I identify as being ‘multiply disabled’, because I was born with disfigurement: the right side of my face had a birthmark, a haemangioma that actually covered the entire right side of my face, so it was bright red and purple; and my right ear was adult sized when I was a baby; and my right eye was swollen shut. So it took several steroid injections at six-months old to open the eye, but the optic nerve never developed correctly, so I’m blind and deaf on my right side. That’s what I was born with, but my parents never wanted me labelled as ‘disabled’ under any set of circumstances, and they did not realise that I had a very rare disease called Phace syndrome that affected my arteries, my heart, my eyes, my ears and various different systems within the body. There wasn’t actually a word for the disease until I was twenty, and I wasn’t diagnosed with it until I was thirty-five; so I had a lot of medical gaslighting from a lot of different doctors, pretty much all my life. I also acquired several other rare diseases along the way, including intracranial hypertension (my brain makes too much cerebrospinal fluid), which causes chronic migraines, chronic vertigo and various other ailments. I also have ADHD, severe depression, various other ailments, maladies, complex PTSD, and so forth… but really, for me, I tend to identify as ‘multiply disabled’ because people get overwhelmed if I give them the whole laundry list of things!”

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I had to acknowledge that, and also the sense that dealing with one issue can often lead to addressing another. I wouldn’t ordinarily want to ask personal questions, but I’m acutely aware that one’s own perspective and experience can feed into what we watch and how we interpret those films; and to a degree, that’s what Access: Horror is going to address. My own case is seemingly pedestrian in comparison, but I was keen to exchange perspectives, especially as I related to Ariel’s comments about wrestling with the disability identity. I am autistic, but didn’t explicitly know that until a few years ago; and it is apparent, looking back, that it was autistic traits that brought about the end of my marriage (perhaps we might have handled those issues differently if we had understood why my mind works the way it does). Once I arrived at my diagnosis, I went through various stages of acceptance for several months, while at the same time not knowing how to accept it; whether “autistic” is a label one is supposed to embrace or just package up somehow and put away. But if it was a significant factor in the ending of my marriage (I have no doubt), then it may well impact other areas of my life, which I’m understanding more as time goes on.

So now that I understood Ariel’s viewpoint, and she understands the perspective behind my questions, I brought the conversation back on topic: I asked Ariel what prompted her to establish this Access: Horror event. “This is something I’ve been trying to figure out how to do for years,” she said. “I approached Zoë at Ghouls Magazine, specifically about creating a horror and disability film festival with Ghouls a few years ago, and it was something we looked into, but couldn’t work out a cost-effective way to do it. She knew it was something near and dear to my heart and so she suggested a Disability and Horror Day at Ghouls Magazine, which I did, a couple of years ago. Then in January this year, I thought I had found a perfect venue to have it, which was very interested in accessibility and partnering in the right ways. But the problem was I couldn’t get the funding to make it happen in the real space; I could only get enough funding to make it happen in the virtual space. Because it is my first year doing something like this, so I have to build the audience, also prove to people that there is an audience, and bring together a lot of really amazing folks to make it happen. They’re all such wonderful people, too: I deliberately only invited people who I knew to not be assholes, people who are genuinely interested in this type of conversation, interested to take part.”

The Access: Horror schedule takes place over a weekend, starting with three blocks of short films. Those blocks were curated by programmers from three other festivals: Fantastic Fest, Final Girls Berlin, and Superfest Disability Film Festival; so I asked Ariel whether this indicated these three festivals get her accessibility thumbs up. “Yes, that’s correct,” she said. “They are three festivals that – in my personal journey with Our First Priority, my short film – I found to be very embracing and accessible. Our First Priority didn’t play at Fantastic Fest, but I did find the experience there to be really powerful and I loved what they were able to bring to this space in terms of what they were curating as well: they were really terrific thought partners.”

After the short films, the event is made up of themed discussion panels. I asked Ariel how she went about finding the right panelists for each subject. “Honestly, I started with the people,” Ariel said, “and then I created the subjects. I knew I wanted to have very specific kinds of conversations about media representation as a whole; and I knew in a general way the sort of programming I wanted to have. But I basically just reached out to people I’d met over the course of the last few years in the horror community and thought I’d find out who was interested in having these conversations. And out of about seventy-five people I talked to, only a few said ‘no’.”

It sounded almost like the process involved in drafting a dissertation: seeing what themes emerge as the research takes shape. “Exactly,” Ariel agreed. “It was not deliberately framed that way, but it was something that I think worked out very effectively despite that. It’s very antithetical to the way most people work, but I feel like by figuring out who was willing to come and get involved with this, and then developing the programme that I felt was necessary, I think it did work well.”

I think the day themes of Where We've Been and Where We're Going certainly make sense. It will be interesting to look back on all the discussions at the end, to see if there are any obvious gaps which might make a potential programme for next time around. “That’s certainly something I’m interested to do,” said Ariel.

The programme itself is intriguing, but there is one panel description that I couldn’t quite grasp, never having been that closely involved within the industry myself. I asked Ariel to explain a bit more about the one entitled Restructuring Film Production. “That session is targeted at people who have been in filmmaking as a whole, but it specifically talks about how the structures of filmmaking are fundamentally broken. Most of us who work in filmmaking are used to 12 to 15-hour days, an absolutely untenable practice of self-abrogation in the worst possible way; as opposed to accessibility, where you consider what everybody’s needs are and actually creating access in these spaces. And so Restructuring Film Production is the one segment that – in a lot of ways – is the most necessary within the filmmaking space, because we need to be creating spaces that can actually be made with the people in mind, as opposed to the budget, as opposed to profit, some clock on the wall that says ‘you must be here by this point in time’.”

That sounded to me like what I would know of as “reasonable adjustments” in an office environment, but for the film industry; Ariel agreed.

We talked a little about the other panel discussions in the Access: Horror programme, starting with the first one, on the subject of The History of Horror. That panel description had brought to my mind The Phantom of the Opera, which I had watched with live organ music for Halloween a couple of years ago. I thought at the time about the way everyone was enjoying it as a piece of classical cinema (and it was clearly a remarkable piece of work for the 1930’s), yet it was all about ableism. I asked Ariel whether there was a film from contemporary cinema that might be looked back on in similar ways in years to come. “Oh there are a bunch of them,” she answered. “I mean honestly, any film that doesn’t have authentic disability representation, where you have someone ‘cripping up’ (I don’t know if you’re familiar with that phrase); I think people in the future will look at that very unkindly in general. Think about films like Hush: yes, it’s a good horror film by many standards, though it does feature someone who is not actually deaf playing deaf. You look at a lot of other films that feature that kind of representation in the modern era, and there are quite a few that have featured different kinds of heroes and villains with disabilities; from every Bond film to lots of horror films. At the same time, there are films like A Quiet Place that do showcase disabled heroes in a very important way; you’ve got George Romero who did a wonderful job with his work in Day of the Dead and so forth, trying to showcase disabled heroes in a very different way from where you see the disabled villainy in things like The Hills Have Eyes (both the original and the remake are kind of appalling to me).”

Ariel’s comments about disabled characters being played by able-bodied actors rang true to me; I’ve often looked out for that, and even raised the issue when interviewing a director or two. Perhaps if the writer or director also lived with disability, they may recognise the way authentic experience can feed the part.

Another panel in the Access: Horror programme is about Mental Health and Horror; this one featuring familiar names from the Ghouls Magazine team. Judging by the films I’ve watched over the years, people with mental illness have for a long time been demonised or shown as dangerous. I asked Ariel whether that is something she expected to be explored in this discussion. “It is something I would hope they touch on,” Ariel said. “It is important that we talk about how mental health is characterised in the media, and one of the things that I find so difficult is that a lot of the time, to get any representation at all, you have to get bad representation. It’s unfortunate, but I do think there’s going to be extensive discussion about what constitutes good representation.”

Meandering a little, as my interviews are prone to do, I related to Ariel a recent conversation with my kid. We had struggled to think of films we’d watched together that had significant disabled characters, and pondered whether they are found more in the low-budget arena than the blockbusters. Granted, A Quiet Place is a good exception, but a rare one; and even in that one, Regan’s deafness was surely a plot device. “It is one of those films where I feel like using the assistive medical device for powerful good is really important,” commented Ariel. “Powerful good is really important to showcase.” OK, I admit it: a very positive plot device! And that character did have some depth to her; and real agency, especially in the sequel.

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Moving back to the festival programme, we looked briefly at the topic of Intersectional Identities on Film, and this time, I was able to contribute a positive example: See for Me is about a visually impaired person defending the home she is looking after from burglars, and the character is played by the visually impaired Skyler Davenport. I had appreciated that casting when I watched the film, and also appreciated seeing a non-binary person playing a lead when I got to talk to Skyler about it prior to its Grimmfest screening. That intersection wasn’t apparent to the film audience, mind you, and it’s not often acknowledged on screen; people so often have multiple facets, which don’t often align with token representation. We see black people on screen, for example, or disabled people on screen, but not many characters who embody both “People can easily assume that there aren’t black disabled people out there,” said Ariel, “because they don’t see them in media, and so the assumption is that there is no intersectionality. And it’s something that I think is important to reframe: we need to be looking at people from other cultures who also experience disability, because disability is the one thing that affects absolutely everybody, regardless of race, status, class. And it’s really important that we acknowledge the way these overlapping identities make life more difficult and lead to problems of erasure from the record in many ways.” Not to forget amplified discrimination as well, of course.

Stepping back from the festival’s content, I asked Ariel next what she did to make sure the event itself was accessible to all. “So, we have ASL [American Sign Language] and captioning for every event that we are planning,” said Ariel, “but unfortunately, I don’t feel that it is fully accessible, because we don’t have all the films audio-described as well. Every film has closed-captioning, but we only have one block of films that has audio-descriptioning this time around, and that was just a lack of resources that we need to resolve for our next edition, planned for 2025, when we are planning on making all the films fully accessible. We have already scheduled 15-minute breaks in between every session, to allow for some flexibility. We have planned for financial accessibility as well, making sure we have kept the costs low, and people who cannot afford the full ticket price are still able to reach out to us to seek a lower price or free ticket as necessary. We felt really centrally, at the core of our mission for this festival is to make it as accessible as possible for as many people as possible; and we took that to heart in terms of the geo-locking too: the panels are available to watch from anywhere in the world, and (because of the deals with filmmakers) the films are available to view from the home countries of the filmmakers. So anyone from the UK, USA, Australia, Germany, Greenland or Canada can view that content. It’s one of those things where you have to be constantly vigilant about the many ways that you mean ‘accessibility’, because it’s not just one thing.”

I had to agree: from a neurodivergent point of view, I had some feedback to share with Ariel about the website, acknowledging that it must be hard to accommodate every perspective.

Now, having brought the interview back to my perspective again (sorry, that’s just how the autism works sometimes), I raised two issues about autistic representation on screen that have been bugging me for some time: the use of an autistic character as a lazy plot device, and stereotypes. I asked Ariel how audience members might combat issues like those. “Honest, I say voting with your wallet is the easiest way to do it,” she said, with no hesitation. “Just say ‘oh there’s a film coming out about someone who’s autistic, and I know they’re portrayed in xyz way’, so choose not to go.”

That’s fine, except it was only after I went to see The Predator at the cinema that I discovered Jacob Tremblay’s character was written in such an awful way. “It’s interesting,” Ariel pondered. “There definitely needs to be further conversation about what it is that people are achieving or not by choosing how to portray their characters. It’s funny: I just had a conversation with a friend of mine who is a really noted writer, done a lot with Netflix and major studios; he said that everyone is scared to touch disability because they’re afraid of being ragged on Twitter for some reason. At the same time, I feel like that’s the only place we have power, where people listen to us. So I don’t want to shut down conversation, ever: there’s so much power to be had there, if we have people willing to listen and then do the hard work at the same time. So it’s a matter of making sure you have people’s ear and then interacting in valuable ways.”

So keep raising the issues (which – I guess – is what Access: Horror is here to do, too). “You have to,” Ariel confirmed with a big smile. “You don’t have any choice! I wish we did, but we don’t.”

There are, thankfully, some exceptions where autistic people aren’t presented as lazy stereotypes, but not many. “I’d say the best thing you can do is celebrate the people who do it right,” Ariel went on. “If I think about disability representation of the last few years, Sound of Metal is one of the ones that, to me, was absolutely phenomenal, in terms of celebrating disability in just the right ways. In spite of the fact that it featured a main character played by Riz Ahmed who was not experiencing a hearing impairment, but was able to present that character as authentically as possible through use of sound design and people from the deaf community in the film. I personally spent a long time trying to celebrate that film and telling as many people as possible about it, because that’s what I chose to do rather than rail against Coda all the time; because I hated Coda, which came out the same year, I thought it was terrible representation.”

The writing in Sound of Metal compensated for the casting choice, in Ariel’s opinion, then? “It did, yes,” she said, “and also it helped that Riz Ahmed took it upon himself as an actor to spend a lot of time with the community. And that came through in the performance as well: because in Sound of Metal, the emphasis was that he was still an outsider to the deaf community, even though he had a hearing impairment; he had a lot to learn, so it was a clear divide between him and the community. Because of the script, it is not ‘cripping up’ in the usual sense, so I would defend the casting too. But there are lots of other films where I wouldn’t.”

I’m planning to see as much of Access: Horror as I can, and I asked Ariel what other kinds of people would also be relevant for me to tell about it. “Invite absolutely everybody,” she said. “Anyone who is open to disability, or open to horror, is going to find something to enjoy. I very specifically wanted to create an event where as long as you have a foot in one of those worlds, a familiarity with or curiosity about one, you would find something worthwhile to watch, celebrate or enjoy about the festival.”

I had wondered, while reading the programme, whether there should be Access events like this for other genres; crime, romance, etc. “I’ll let you in on a little secret,” said Ariel, “I designed the name as Access: Horror because I figured we could reframe it as Access: Science Fiction very easily, or Access: Comedy and so on. Because the same issues do recur in other genres as well. Horror is the one I wanted to tackle first, as it is my most beloved genre, but also the genre that has the most complicated portrayals of disability in general; there’s a lot to tackle there. So I feel that it is the first one I had to do, regardless, but I’d love to do more with more genres going forward.”

Ariel had mentioned an Access: Horror event in 2025; I asked her whether she is working towards that already. “I am. It’s going to be quite a lot of planning to get there, but I know for a fact that the George A Romero Foundation is going to be supporting us in 2025 and we’re hoping to go in person then. But I have to do a lot more planning and a lot more learning before we get there.”

Thinking that this would be a good way to mark the end of my interview, I gave Ariel my “big” question: does she think there might ever be a time that Access: Horror (or another genre) is no longer needed? “I hope there comes a time that it’s no longer needed,” she said, naturally enough, “when disability is an integral part of what we’re talking about. The thing is so many people don’t even realise what there is at the heart of any of this: so many people sneak these conversations under the rug because they don’t want to have them or they think they’re too hard, or they’ll say the wrong thing; and there’s a terror of being wrong, or being called out in some way by ‘the internet’ and then being suddenly ‘cancelled’. But the thing is we need to force people to have the conversations, whether they’re in the right or not, it doesn’t matter: we need people to learn and grow, so to me that’s the most important thing. When we can start having the conversations out in the open, then maybe there’s no need for Access: Horror, but until then, I think we do need it. And we also need other festivals to see what’s possible in terms of accessibility, and what can be done to make events more accessible to more people, the world over.”

I exposed my ignorance a little, by suggesting it would be interesting to write some guidelines to pass on to other festivals about how to do it in a way that would be accessible to everyone; that could be one step forwards. “There is already an organisation,” Ariel revealed. “A Festival Event Accessibility Working group has created checklists for filmmakers, film programmers and for film event planners that basically go over what people should be looking to create in general. It’s just guidelines, but that’s all anyone has.” (Ooh I’m going to fill in their Film Event Accessibility Scorecard Survey for every film event I attend from now on!)

Access: Horror will be taking place during 8 and 9 July (with the content available to pass-holders for two weeks, as mentioned earlier) in the “virtual space”, wherever you are. 

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