Zefyr Lisowski’s Uncanny Valley Girls is an urgent, complex debut pulling at the threads of horror, trauma, care, and ultimately the endurance of trans women and queer people at large. Lisowski uses horror films as a prism through which to interrogate her own history and culture—both popular and underground—as well as the intersecting systems that create and crush us. Whether she is reconsidering her feelings about her hometown and its history through Scream and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, fleshing out our cultural appetite for torture porn as it pertains to the Iraq War, or thoughtfully arguing about why maybe trans women are more like werewolves than we think, Lisowski’s debut collection of autobiographical essays never shies away from the messiness of its subject matter or the complexities inherent in fleshing it out. 

Uncanny Valley Girls is deftly tuned to our cultural moment, never missing the opportunity to name the greater systems that shape and impose upon our lives. At every turn, she highlights the nuances of her analysis, looking at its limits and applications across identity, time, and location. That said, these essays are as emotionally-charged as they are astute. Lisowski makes a fervent argument for care, kindness, and understanding between every bloody, hard-to-look at moment of hurt and pain. Through her meticulousness comes a clear, resounding message reminiscent of the horror movies she pulls from: Stay alive.

In the month leading up to the publication of Uncanny Valley Girls, I had the opportunity to speak to Lisowski on Zoom about psych wards, the Southern United States, and “Crazy4Crazy” relationships. 

Christ: You do such a wonderful job putting your personal relationships in the context of the movies discussed in the book, and also in a grander socio-political context. Was that something that happened naturally? 

Zefyr Lisowski: I was interested in first tracking these movies socially and interpersonally, and of course the interpersonal is always framed within the context of the political. So, the politicality of these relationships, especially relationships across intersections of difference, class, ability, and saneism, were all pushed intuitively to the foreground. As the book is fundamentally oriented around themes of survival—our motivators in relationships, and in the movies that I chose to discuss—the ways those show up became more pushed to the surface as well. 

C: So many of these essays are viewed through your affinity for horror movies. Can you talk about your relationship to the genre? 

ZL: I had an interest and fear and anxiety around horror films from a very young age. These movies became [a] way to contextualize an oft-fractious childhood, tensions of grief, and self-actualization that I didn’t know how to articulate. [They] became a way for me to see reflections of parts of myself that I didn’t always know how to express. Like a lot of people who are interested in horror movies, I was an incredibly nervous and fear-ridden child, and they became a way to externalize and build a container for those fears, even as that container was a little bit intense or activating in its own way. 

C: One of my favorite essays in the collection is about Scream and the evolution of your ideas of home. Early in the essay, you bring up relating to films either by reflection or aspiration, and the inevitable disappointment of trying to run away from yourself. Could you talk about the emotional arc of that? 

ZL: So much of this book is centered around the fear and anticipation of finding these modes of salvation, this thing that will save or redeem us, and then realizing the self and these patterns of behavior are fundamentally inescapable. Being forced to reckon with these ideas of escape as someone who grew up white with some class mobility in the rural South is a very particular set of experiences. It was important to think of how I was fed this narrative of escape, of moving out of the South, which is a very common story for a lot of queer people in rural areas in particular. Throughout, I was interested in tracing these throughlines of what it means to want to leave a place. The flip side of that is: Who’s able to leave the place? What does it mean if you are being forced out of a place? What does it mean to assert your role there anyway?

C: The essay on Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows that essay really well, because it’s about the flip side of rediscovering the beauty of where you’re from. 

ZL: I really wanted to put those two things in conversation, and I’m glad that you picked up on that. There is a tremendous amount of beauty to the Southern United States, to North Carolina in particular, and while I really wanted to leave and have left—I’m speaking to you from New York City, where I’ve been the past decade—there still is a tremendous amount I miss about the South, a tremendous amount about the South that is really beautiful and commendable from a political, interpersonal, and geographic perspective as well. 

C: So much of the book is about home and family. How did that come to be? 

ZL: Like a lot of queer and trans people, I have a complex relationship with my family of origin and the idea of home. Moving a lot as a kid and then settling in this small rural town shaped my understanding of what could or couldn’t be a home. It became this place that was really marked by instability and violence, but also in the wake of that there was a tremendous amount of care and bonding that happened, whether in a more positive or negative valence. I was interested in talking about my own experience because of a simple question of representation. I haven’t read any writing by a trans woman from the rural South, certainly not with a major press, and that’s something that I don’t take lightly in terms of a responsibility. It is also something that reflects the stories that are told, right?

The majority of the trans perspectives that we see highlighted in mainstream publishing are white, typically from urban areas, adhere to these conventional beauty standards, and often have [a] middle to upper-middle class positionality or the ability to present that way. I, on paper, match all of those criteria, but I also have experience in a more rural area in having a Southern-grown childhood. It was important to me to think through those points of reflection where I align with the hegemonic norms of what publishing prioritizes, but also to push back and think about the ways in which my story, while adhering to these super-structural schemas, opens up the space hopefully for more counter-hegemonic narratives to come through as well, which connects back to home and family. All of these things are related to places of origin, how we relate to those places, and are the throughlines of an entire system of order. 

C: Films in the book are not only tools for the interrogation of history, but also relationships from your youth that are characterized by longing. Where do you think that sense of longing is born from? 

ZL: There are a couple of directions that longing comes from. One is this sense of isolation that you get growing up “other” in a community that doesn’t seem to welcome you. There is a long history of writers, especially queer writers from the South, who really engage with this otherness. Beyond the superstructural loneliness, I was interested in using horror movies to talk about hunger for connection. A lot of these movies are fundamentally social encounters. We typically watch horror movies with odd dates or with friends or in this myriad array of contexts, and it became this intuitive counterbalance for these questions of longing and connection. If we watch a scary movie with other people, what are the ways that already prefigure a desire for connection? What are the ways watching these movies together assumes a longing for that togetherness? 

C: It makes me think about how, as kids, before we have the opportunity to bond with people by experiencing hard things together, horror movies can be a facsimile for bonding through adversity.

ZL: Yeah, I love that framework: a kind of proto-trauma bonding through watching, like, Willem Dafoe’s dick get crushed by a millstone. 

C: You don’t shy away from offering complex depictions of trans women who not only endure harm but have perpetuated it themselves. What considerations did you make when writing that history? 

ZL: That’s something that I’ve thought about quite a bit as we’ve been emerging into this even more hostile environment for trans people and trans women in particular. We’ve seen time and time again [that] the political strategy of sanitizing one’s queerness and presenting oneself as a perfect being that is incapable of harm is fundamentally deleterious to larger social movements. This idea that queer people can’t hurt each other, or trans people can’t hurt each other is doing a disservice to the fact that we’re all human, and we have complex relationships with harm done and received. I was interested in laying out some of those complexities as a counterbalance to the impetus to present ourselves as unimpeachable. At the same time, that’s a risky proposition in these times, right? 

So much of this essay is grappling with the framework of the trans woman as a sexual assailant and the idea that trans women are going to hurt you. That’s counterbalanced by the fact that I did experience sexual violence from someone who later transitioned. I was interested in presenting that narrative to think about what if that does happen in a discreet instance. What are the ways we can still form community and assert the importance of our lives despite that harm? That’s really rooted in abolitionist politics. Having an understanding of harm done without ceding ground is incredibly important in this particular moment. Nevertheless, there are still existing ways that I tried to frame this: pushing back that this isn’t a universal narrative and having this emphasis on still forming community and sisterhood with these people who hurt me, even despite that hurt. 

C: In the book, you flesh out a similarity between transness and werewolves that grapples with the complexity of that comparison. How does the concept of a werewolf begin to reveal the complexity of trans people—the harms we endure and the harm we can commit? 

ZL: When I was six or seven, one of my favorite movies was The Wolf Man, and I dressed up as a werewolf for Halloween. I obsessively drew and thought about werewolves. The start of the essay was asking: Why was this so appealing to me? Werewolves have this ambiguous relationship to change. It’s not fully volitional, but something they can find themselves within. There’s a tremendous amount of strength, self-resolution, and self-autonomy that’s required to transition, but nevertheless there is a sense of yielding, of subsumption to something more extensive than you: either the long history of trans people existing against a society that is frequently hostile, or the disproportionate violences that trans people and especially trans women are exposed to, especially Black and Brown trans women. I was interested in using the werewolf as a way to tease out not only those violences but also the unexpected joys of transition. 

There’s a tremendous beauty in the figure of the werewolf: this figure that’s covered in hair, like us but not like us, loping across a field. I had seen this quite lazy formulation, a viral tweet that became this folk-saying: “Trans women are vampires, trans men are werewolves.” What if we complicate that more? So much of werewolves are rooted in this fear of masculinity, of becoming haired, violent. At the same time, it has the counterbalance: It’s not becoming a man, not becoming a woman, but becoming something else. So if we become something else, how can that mirror or challenge existing transition narratives as well?

C: Despite the book’s subject matter, how is there always a turn toward hope and care at every turn in these essays?

ZL: As Mariame Kaba said famously, “hope is a discipline,” right? It’s really important for me to think towards these moments of connection throughout the work because of the larger argument. It’s a book about intimacy, relationships, and horror movies. Most fundamentally, the biggest takeaway of the book is an argument against suicide. It starts at this nadir that I experienced entering the psych ward, feeling this intense overwhelm of suicidality. What follows is an effort to claw out of that space and assert the meaningfulness of our lives as trans people, in community with other queer people. It would be deeply irresponsible for me not to loop towards hope. I also don’t want to sanitize the complexities of that: The ways in which we are hurt and the ways we hurt others isn’t mutually exclusive with the importance of continuing to stay alive.

C: Typically when an author enters a psych ward, it is characterized as a low point. In Uncanny Valley Girls, it’s a moment of love and ultimately freedom. Can you talk about how that section of the book is incorporated thematically and structurally? 

ZL: I had a very particular experience in the psych ward. Understanding it as a site of pain, violence, carcerality, was palliative for me. I wanted to capture that tension. The psych ward itself wasn’t this site of healing, but the people I met there, the ways in which I delved into what I was reading, the relationship I built with myself, and the way that experience necessitated redefining my relationship to care was profoundly transformative. I wanted to respond to and play with the larger tropes of psych wards that you see in horror movies, which is this place of intense violence, abject psychic states, and profound terror. There was a sadness and a loneliness to the ward, but there was also this sense that I had to find ways of changing. While I wanted to highlight the ward itself as this place that facilitated the change, it’s significant that the book doesn’t end in a psych ward. It ends at a writing residency, which is this place of community. Having that counterbalance hopefully mirrors a larger structure the book makes from a place of confinement to a place of expansiveness. 

C: You also talk about what you call “crazy for crazy” relationships in that essay. Why are those important? 

ZL: It ties into what we were talking about earlier around refusing to sanitize these dynamics within the queer community. Finding places of connection with others who have been pathologized and have experiences of trauma and instability is actually a site of profound social and political power, even as it can also be a place where harms are perpetuated. I’m drawing on concepts from the disability justice movement, from the Mad Pride movement, but I also am interested in thinking through connections forged in similarity and solidarity. Finding connection with those like you, especially those whose lives have been deemed less livable—whether that’s because of ableism, because of saneism, because of transphobia or trans misogyny—can be a pretty profound space of change and reflection. I wanted to assert a counter argument to this larger history of someone entering a more normative relationship and becoming saved. That’s something that I reject with every fiber of my being. 

C: In the essay about the artist Greer Lankton, you talk about how often trans women’s art is pigeonholed into the genre of autobiography. In your own words, what is the aim of Uncanny Valley Girls beyond self-explanation? 

ZL: In a lot of ways, the history of trans women’s memoirs, which this book broadly is, is a complex history of disavowal, of market forces, and of subversion. There are a number of collections—Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness is foremost among those—that are responding to market pressures, but also asserting the importance of lives lived and the complexity of those lives in ways that I find fascinating and complex. I was interested in this book fitting into that tradition. An essay collection by a trans woman, a series of autobiographical writing, is perhaps a little bit easier to sell or promote than these more complex or heterodox forms. If we are working within that framework, what spots of subversion are there? What ways can this personal narrative hopefully serve as a larger microcosm that argues not just to a cis audience about the importance of our lives lived, which many of these books do and is an important thing to do, but also what are the ways in which this can speak to subcultural, inter-community readers? In that way, while this is a book about horror movies and about love, the throughline of the anti-suicide message is aimed directly at other trans women and is trying to make the text, and the texts within the text, readable to a more particular audience. Hopefully this is a form of solace or community building for that audience as well.