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Smith, Angela M. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 368 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-0-231-15717-9. $27.50.
A welcome addition to criticism on horror, film, and disability, Angela M. Smith's Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema is an excellent example of emerging scholarship that deals with the productive crossover between disability studies and the field of "the fantastic." Suitable for faculty and graduate students, the book covers a lot of theoretical and filmic ground, including five thematically independent chapters in addition to a full introduction and conclusion. In the Introduction, which discusses the relationship of disability and eugenics to early horror cinema (i.e. films made before 1945), Smith also provides a brief but thorough primer on leading disability studies scholars (such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard Davis, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, and Ato Quayson). Each of the subsequent chapters focuses on specific classic horror films and on a dominant horror image or trope: chimeras, freaks, facial deformities, mad doctors, and spectatorship.
In her Introduction, after moving easily from an accessible breakdown of disability studies, Smith narrows her discussion of the "unusual" (i.e. disabled) human body through the lens of eugenics (3), sketching out the movement's history (starting from nineteenth-century Darwinism) and bringing attention to the ways that its precepts of genetic purity are reflected in the classic horror films of the early twentieth century. Smith makes a careful effort to highlight the eugenic framing of deviance that was "'revealed' in bone, facial features, and personality traits" (8) and, later on, in the gene. The eugenics movement, of course, sought to limit and erase disability, racial, and ethnic otherness, and Smith sets out to trace and interrogate its influence on classic horror cinema. She clearly articulates the main thesis of her book: "Hideous Progeny is interested in eugenic representations that might reveal the 'produced' status of disability, both as historical documents that re-view eugenics as an unstable and incoherent discourse and as cultural texts that remind contemporary audiences of our continuing investments in and constructions of disability" (16).
Smith finishes her Introduction by using the little-known film, The Black Stork...