Walk This Way: Frankenstein’s Monster, Disability Performance, and Zombie Ambulation

In Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, when hunchbacked Igor invites Frankenstein to “walk this way,” and the latter obliges with an awkward stooping imitation, the movie signals the dependence of Frankenstein movies on simulations of impaired or non-normative motion. This paper reads the atypical walk of screen Frankenstein monsters as both a stereotyped disability simulation that appeals to nondisabled viewers and a mode through which disabled people have expressed experiences of medicalization, pathologization, and ableist oppression. The paper traces the spread of the monster-walk into popular song and dance and on into contemporary zombie performances, including those of disabled protestors who both channel and resist the living-dead status thrust on them by health and economic deprivations. The Frankenstein walk, reborn as the zombie protest, thus emerges from ableist scripts for disenfranchised bodies but is reinvented as an invitation to variant embodiment in public and political spaces.