Since almost the inception of cinematic horror, the genre has known exactly what to do with trans people. It made them monsters. From Norman Bates to Buffalo Bill, the genre repeatedly collapsed transgressions of the gender binary into psychosis and abject bloody murder.
Although The Silence of the Lambs (1991) makes clear at multiple moments that Buffalo Bill isn’t actually trans, cultural memory is uninterested in the nuance, positioning the character as easy shorthand for the ‘trans’ killer played by male cisgender actors. Combined, these killers leave a long shadow, both over the cinematic horror canon and society at large, forever fixing the unstable body, the deceptive identity; the killer stitched together from stolen parts as a rotting presence in our collective subconscious.
The Right To Be Made a Monster
As public understanding of trans lives evolved, for better and for worse, mainstream horror appeared to retreat. The explicitly trans villain became increasingly untenable, but in its place wasn’t a renaissance of trans-authored horror or a groundswell of gender nonconforming directors behind the camera. Trans characters were sacrificed on the altar of respectability, rendered inert through sympathy, or they disappeared altogether.
For Ros Watt, a transmasculine actor, drag artist, and theatre maker, something valuable has been lost. “I’m constantly aware of the conversation around trans representation,” he tells Exquisite Terror before his debut full-length show, Trans People Are Awful, launches at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “Trans people that did exist in work were generally thought of as very strange, very weird; freaks, things to be scared of. Horror was kind of why that was put in, because it was this unknown thing we don’t get.”
But the disappearance of these figures isn’t the positive step it might at first appear, resulting instead in a vacuum. “It went from horrible trans people, to ‘actually we should pity them, and they’re all going to die’, to now, where are they? They don’t seem to be there. And if they are, they’re the hero very briefly.”
Watt’s solution is provocative, but no less essential. “If we’re going to achieve true nuanced representation, then we have to have horrible trans people,” he says. “What does that actually look like? How can we safely do that? How can we make a horrible trans person that transphobes and TERFs don’t look at and go, ‘See? We were right’?”
This tension sits at the blackened heart of Trans People Are Awful. The premise gleefully evokes exploitation cinema and the sorts of stories rarely seen outside of the growing trans literary canon. Isolated in a small Scottish town, a young trans man named Boy decides the only way to complete his transition is to murder a succession of cis men and harvest their body parts for himself. Alone in his garage and surrounded by blood, he records a confession for future true crime obsessives before carrying out one final act of violence.
At a glance, it sounds like the sort of premise that might actively harm the trans community. It was, after all, only in February 2026, that Buffalo Bill actor Ted Levine acknowledged the harm the character caused thirty-five years after the fact. But Watt’s show is an entirely different, and far more interesting, animal. He isn’t interested in exhuming tired stereotypes and, rather than being monstrous purely because he’s trans, Boy is a monster because of the dark well of loneliness within him.
“When people first heard the idea,” Watt laughs, “they assumed I was building another man, the sort of Frankenstein version of it. I was like, ‘Oh no. It’s on me.’” Trans People Are Awful draws a clear line between appropriation and the notion of playing God that concerned Mary Shelley’s gothic grand opus, and centres on Boy’s attempts to reconstruct and thus reconcile himself. Through this rubric, the violence itself becomes an impossible attempt at finding a way to belong. “My show touches a lot on loneliness,” Watt explains, adding it’s a “bigger conversation around lack of community, loneliness, and the extremes people go to when they don’t have any sense of belonging”.
Loneliness might well be the heartbeat of the show, but it could just as easily be defined as the fascia, the connecting tissue supporting everything else inside. Boy inhabits a facsimile of the small-town Scotland Watt grew up in where the character exists in solitude, an island apart from queer and trans community. “What I’ve tried to do is make it that he’s completely unaware of that fact,” Watt says. “He has to believe that the only way for him to exist wholly is to be a cis man.” The horror, then, shifts the focus away from transition and onto the collision of internal and external isolation, and the dissociation from community until monstrosity begins to resemble self-actualisation.
There’s a clear connection between Watt’s work and Julia Kristeva’s seminal theory of abjection: the unsettling collapse of boundaries between self and other, the body and identity. Horror has long exploited the anxiety of bodies refusing to remain fixed, especially on the feminist side of the spectrum where works helmed by women such as In My Skin (2002), Jennifer’s Body (2009), and Raw (2016), among many other examples, explore the horror of existing within a female body in a patriarchal society and the ‘terror’ of becoming an ‘abject woman’. Watt turns this tradition inward. His protagonist isn’t a threat to the social order; rather he threatens himself because he believes social order has no place for him as he currently exists. Boy’s actions are grotesque by design, but the emotional logic and intent underpinning them are recognisable.
“The majority of my life I spent in a small town in the northeast of Scotland until I was twenty-four,” says Watt. “I don’t hate my hometown, but it is very challenging to be queer and live there. I definitely felt the loneliness and isolation that my character feels.” Contrast that with where Watt is today. “I live in a queer house with queer friends. I have a community that I cannot even put into words how grateful I am for.” The journey from isolation to being cradled in the supportive embrace of community is the catalyst through which Trans People Are Awful exists. “I know a couple of trans people who are still living in my hometown who are under twenty years old. This is for them. This is for the small-town queers. This conversation needs to happen and I’m at a point where I’m so supported and so held by my community that I feel like I can do this.”
Laughing in the Maw of Murder
The twin disciplines of horror and humour have always shared a nervous system. Both rely on precise timing and surprise, and both beg audiences to surrender emotional control. Psychological studies show that laughter born from fear, in response to extreme violence or discomfort, is simply the body’s way of diffusing the discomfort. A kind of Lewton Bus for the brain.
It’s a relationship Watt understands intimately. “I’m not very good at not writing comedy,” he says. “I quite like amusing ideas, and I like to follow ridiculous logic.” Then a ghoulish twinkle comes into his eye. “I think murder is quite comedic in that it’s the most extreme thing. If we look at what these people are doing, it’s ridiculous. It’s hilarious.” He cites Scottish serial killer and necrophile Dennis Nilsen matter-of-factly describing bodies in freezers and blocked drains after he was discovered by police. “That’s funny,” Watt says, “the way their brains have normalised this obscenity.” In light of the peculiar relationship horror audiences enjoy with gruesome excess, Watt’s statements feel perfectly at home. The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, splatterpunk cinema and The Evil Dead franchise, drag performances, and the macabre camp of John Waters all understand that revulsion eventually folds back into laughter.
Watt’s theatrical instincts for Trans People Are Awful emerge from queer performance spaces as much as classical theatre. “Horror innately lives in drag,” he says. “I think it’s very rare you’ll go to a drag show and there not be a horror act in there. Drag is about how can we make the audience scream. Is that screaming with laughter? Screaming because it’s the hottest thing you’ve ever seen? Screaming with disgust? I love sitting in queer basements and watching horrific things, and my work is entirely influenced by that.”
The relationship between horror and drag has always been much more intimate than is often acknowledged, especially beneath the surface of the more sanitised side of drag that’s risen into mainstream status. But both delight in realms of exaggeration and manipulating the body into something simultaneously familiar and strange, and both expose the space between the unpredictable and the performed aspects of liberation. If horror begs the question what happens when the body becomes other, drag asks whether the body and its corresponding identity was ever stable to begin with.
It’s hardly surprising that Watt sees the two forms as drawing from the same source. His work is shaped by years of performing drag alongside a career in more traditional theatre. The result is less interested in choosing between these two worlds, or drawing a distinction between them, than allowing them to contaminate and consume one another.
Marginalisation Breeds Monsters
Although by no means exclusive to the horror genre, it’s perhaps the artistic arena where marginalised characters are most expected to stand in for entire communities. Whether of colour, disabled, trans, et al. — or any possible intersection — failure and sins become shared and every spoken line is a mouthpiece for the collective. The script is literally flipped when marginalised people are the ones who get to tell those stories and inhabit the roles. In this context, monstrosity itself becomes a form of artistic expression.
This freedom liberates the fictional character as much as the person pulling their strings. Watt describes the experience of working with a trans sensitivity reader during the development of the script. “I’d cut something because I thought it was too far,” he recalls, “but her response was to ‘Do it. Push it. Push it as far as you can.’” From one trans person to another, the mandate to not soften the work to make it more palatable rang like a clarion call. “It’s affected my entire life and the way I interact with everybody,” he says. “It’s just being the weirdest version of myself and asking the weird questions.”
The process of creating Trans People Are Awful, following a “really tough year” for Watt, has altered the way he takes up space in the world. It’s ironic, as horror fundamentally understands this idea better than almost any other genre. The monster is often the only character on the page or screen who refuses assimilation, often dying rather than being compromised or subsumed. Whether that’s Frankenstein’s monster, Carrie White, or Jennifer Check, horror circles hellishly back to figures whose refusal — or inability — to conform exposes the latent violence within the notion of normalcy itself. Their monstrosity is horrifying precisely because it reveals the rules that society accepts without question, rules built on exploitation and control.
Boy belongs to that same lineage. He’s not intended to be a role model or a warning but represents a deeper and more uncomfortable truth. The audience is invited to understand Boy’s emotional logic without endorsing his actions but, by being present and bearing witness to it, they are complicit, drawing a clear line to our consumption of true crime content.
Finding Tenderness and the Future of Horror
For all the blood and gore, Watt speaks less about violence when discussing his show and more about connection and community. Much contemporary discourse around representation focuses on ideas of protection from harmful stereotypes, from caricature and, most potently, protecting marginalised individuals from exploitation. Of course, these concerns remain vital, and it’s work horror continues to reconcile with, but protection can easily become restriction; less a gilded cage and more one made of tendon, gut, and blood vessel. If trans characters are only permitted to be virtuous, tragic, or inspirational, they cease to be people, yet they aren’t allowed to be monsters either. They’re simply PR exercises and reinforce pernicious misconceptions. Watt’s show argues that true equality also means the freedom to be abject and grotesque.
For decades, trans people have been distorted into cautionary tales by horror made largely without them. Trans People Are Awful points to a much more interesting and creatively liberated future, one in which the monsters still very much exist, only this time, they’re the ones writing the scripts and taking centre stage.
Images: Josie Underwood
TRANS PEOPLE ARE AWFUL RUNS AT EDINBURGH FRINGE UNTIL 31 AUGUST
