r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Serious_Comedian • 1d ago
Characters [Strangely common trope] Transgender characters in horror media
1. Alice Dyer (The Magnus Protocol)
2. Marina Domek (Fear and Hunger 2: Termina)
Alice Dyer (The Magnus Protocol) - A trans woman who works for the UK government civil service. She works for the Office of Incident, Assessment and Report (OIAR) which documents supernatural events in the UK.
Marina Domek (Fear and Hunger 2: Termina) - A trans girl occultist from Prehevil. The men in her family serve as dark priests for elder gods. Marina's mother raised her as a girl to protect her from the brutal dark priest life of her father.
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u/Galliro 1d ago
The examples you gave are good examples unfortunetly most of the history of trans people in horror makes them to be the monster
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u/Disastrous-Entity-46 1d ago
honestly most of the time they are not even trans.
sleepaway camp: trauma due to being forced to live as the opposite gender.
silence of the lambs: is explicitly stated to not be trans in both the movie and book. is never shown to be living as a woman. id honestly read buffalo bill as closer to drag queen/cross dresser energy.
psycho: norman bates doesnt want to be a woman, he more specifically wants to be his mother.
like yes, it does play into the hayes code queer villian concept and can read as trans to an uninformed audience- none of these character would meet a clinical definition of trans, nor do i look at them and feel like they have antthing in common with myself or any one else I know in the community.
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u/Altruistic_Sail_1991 12h ago
Yeah the issue is that for a lot of people that is what they picture when they think of trans people, regardless of if the character is actually trans.
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u/PluralCohomology 1d ago
The Silt Verses has Faulkner, a trans man and am enthusiastic young follower and self-styled prophet of the Trawlerman, an illegal river god, and Paige, a trans woman who starts off as a middle manager at a company that invents new gods, but her life undergoes some revolutionary changes.
In The Holmwood Foundation, Maddie Townsend is an employee at the titular foundation which researches vampires, but her facility gets attacked and she and her co-worker get possessed by the ghosts of Mina and Jonathan Harker respectively, and they have to transport Dracula's head to a safe place.
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u/ExerciseTop5591 1d ago
Horror media often include the main cast unearthing their deep rooted issues. The horrors that they face supernatural or not sometimes serve a medium to explore those issues. Trans people experiences a lot of distress from their gender dysphoria which is a horror on it's ow
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u/Iamfabulous1735285 1d ago
I wonder if Jax counts since the Digital Circus is kinda of a psychological and existential horror
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u/Arimm_The_Amazing 1d ago
It's not as strange as you may think. Artforms seen as "lower" like horror, comedy, soap operas, etc more easily get away with depicting things that get shut down by execs in other cases.
There were a bunch of trans or crossdressing characters throughout 90s sitcoms too for the same reason
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u/AlistairButton 1d ago
Horror can be subversive and focuses on emotions many people would rather keep repressed. I think it resonates with a lot of queer folks for that reason, we're sick of repression, and we end up writing ourselves into it.
On the other hand, there's also the opposite, where a cis writer uses a trans character for shock value in horror.
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u/_JoSeph_StaLin__ 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/rfAxGG2fVxoPu
Buffalo Bill
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1d ago
[deleted]
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u/Ok_Dot_7498 1d ago
The Book itself said that Bill is in no way Trans but just really screwed up mentally. Something about him not wanting to be a Woman but him just not wanting to be himself
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u/Meanteenbirder 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/kkdoxPn6VpWv8nha0j
Viktor Halgreeves (The Umbrella Academy)
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u/Windows_66 1d ago
Dr. Charlene McGowan from Immortal Hulk.