by Kylie Aoibheann

Australian trans filmmaker Kylie Aoibheann (who helmed the highly accomplished shorts Asexy and See for Yourself) drew on her own experiences with gender-affirming surgery for the currently-in-production horror short The Dysphoria.  

It was in February last year, in a Bangkok hospital room, that the realisation suddenly hit me: I should have just contacted the Devil instead. For context, I’d just done the best thing in my life – get gender-affirming surgery – but it felt like I had to sell my soul just to do it.

For one, I had to “pass” a terrible array of increasingly-invasive tests performed by doctors, surgeons, pathologists, radiologists and psychiatrists. Then there were the years of savings I had to use up for the operation, and my career as a writer-director, which I had to temporarily put on hold to recover. Worse still, were all the friends, family and acquaintances who I had to sever from my life because they were unable to see me for the woman that I was. After everything, wouldn’t it have been easier to contact Satan and ask him for a vagina instead?

Kylie Aoibheann and producer Oliver Ellis

Inspired, I crawled over to my laptop and wrote my next short film The Dysphoria: a supernatural horror about a young trans woman who does just that. Featuring anamorphic lenses, daggy wallpaper, filthy 70’s moustaches and – of course – gory practical effects, it’s a very-classic and very-personal demonic horror which explores the sacrifices I had to make to be the woman that I am today. Through writing it, however, I was forced to confront my own pained relationship with the horror genre as a trans filmmaker.

Of course, one doesn’t have to look far for problematic representations of us. Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence Of The Lambs are synonymous with their Ed Gein-inspired villains: cross-dressing, serial-killing “men” who cannibalise womanhood and female bodies in their violent, skin-deep attempts to transition. It’s a plot-point which reappears time and time again from Dressed To Kill to Ghostwatch to Insidious: Chapter 2.

Kylie post gender-affirming surgery.

For trans people, it’s not uncommon for us to return to such films we once loved only to find monstrous depictions of our lives and bodies. Looking for some unholy inspiration after surgery, I reopened one of my favourite screenplays of recent years: Hereditary. As I turned through the pages, in awe of its icy, bitting dialogue and freakish story logic, I got the uneasy feeling that at the heart of Ari Aster’s unwholesome vision of familial demise was an irrational fear of transgender children.

After all, the conspiracy which the Grahams find themselves in – and for which they are mercilessly moved about like figurines in a dollhouse – has one sole purpose: forcefully change the sex of a child from “female” to “male”. It’s a transition which features an extraordinary act of bodily mutilation to a child, who then goes onto literally appropriate the body of her older brother.

A scene from The Dysphoria

I then went onto my favourite film of all time. In The Exorcist, the demon Pazuzu is a male entity which ruthlessly invades and then transitions the mind and body of a sweet, young girl: much to the grief of her single mother and the bewilderment of the doctors who subject her to increasingly invasive medical tests.

Wreaking havoc like testosterone, Pazuzu causes Reagan’s voice to drop, her skin to grow harsh and sunken, her hair to become greasy and coarse, and her eyes to shrink into her skull to such a point that she finally seems neither young nor female. Worse, Reagan’s wholesome mind deforms from that of a girl who kisses her mother on the cheek to that of a perverse man who yells obscenities, commits murder and mutilates their genitals with a crucifix. Through faith and sacrifice, though, Reagan is ultimately cured of her demonic transness and remembers nothing.

A scene from The Dysphoria

The truth is that I loved these films, but they never loved me back; they wanted me to hate one of the most beautiful parts of myself, but instead they’re what inspired me to become a writer-director, and make the films which I needed to see all those years ago.

My new film The Dysphoria (with all its creepy seances, demonic apparitions and blood sacrifices), lets me finally take that love back. Inspired by the spellbinding, uneasy dreams of Jane Schoenbrun and the shameless, revolutionary thrills of Australia’s-own Alice Maio Mackay, I believe that there’s nothing more special than reclaiming something which has historically been so unkind to us trans people and turning it into a celebration of our joy and our sacrifice. More to the point, nothing cuts deeper than fear: and horror poses a unique opportunity to make a story about trans identity – something too often pushed to the darkest, most fearful corners of society – accessible to a wider audience.

The Dysphoria Poster

I’ll be directing The Dysphoria in a distinctly vintage look with my long-time producer Oliver Ellis and our independent, trans-led production company Inner Pictures. Following the completion of our ongoing crowdfunding campaign, we’ll be launching into production this October and November, with a festival release set for early next year. While self-contained, the short is very much a spiritual predecessor to my debut feature Deadname: a supernatural horror about a trans woman haunted by the ghost of her younger “male” self. This project was accelerated in the Australians in Film (AiF) Untapped Lab and supported by Screen Australia.

You can learn more about these films and the horror which inspired them on Facebook and Instagram at @TheDysphoriaFilm. You can also support us in bringing them to life on Indiegogo. For more on Kylie Aoibheann, click here.

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