Introduction - About the Filmmaker

Hi! I’m Lars Olsen, a filmmaker, drag artist, and currently a candidate in the Master of Arts in Film Studies program at the University of Malta. I am in the process of producing my first film, a transgender body horror short titled "Glimpses". This film is a discomforting study in perception and transmogrification - of the body, of sex, of self and of other - both consensual and otherwise. "Glimpses" will serve as the cumulation of academic research, artistic practice, and personal transformation, as well as the thesis for my degree.

I have lined up a wonderfully talented cast and crew, but I need your help paying them for all their hard work.

What is "Glimpses?" (The Elevator Pitch)

Theo is transitioning. Finally gaining access to the means of gender affirming care, he finds himself navigating the contradictory feelings of euphoria, fear, and awkwardness brought on by this second puberty. Further complicating the situation is the very means by which he is funding his transition. Theo is an online sex worker, making his body an ever-changing commodity he must learn how to sell in all its stages. When he begins to experience grotesque side effects of his medication, he is confronted with a horrifying question: Is testosterone making him a monster?

Blending elements of body horror, psychological thriller, coming of rage, monster flick, and trash-drag, this project is inspired by a wide-bearth of films which use the body as a site of horror, fear, and perhaps liberation. Glimpses grasps for agency after every part of you has been consumed and commodified, twisted and transmogrified.

Why This Matters

The transgender body is over-represented in horror films - but the transgender interior is not. Trans bodies exist on our screens to be projected upon; mirrors of our own insecurities, desires and fears manifest in physical (or perhaps digital) form. The trans body does not carry an individual - it is merely a product to be consumed, derided, ogled, or pitied.

The most obviously treacherous examples use the transgendered body itself as a site of fear and disgust for their audiences. The Norman Bates’ and Buffalo Bills’ of cinema reveal to their viewers that the perversity and insidiousness of these characters is linked directly with their gender conformity. Their transness is the root of their evil.

Inversely, when we are rarely shown “positive” examples of transness in media, they tend to fall into one of three categories: victimized, overly sexualized, or sanitized. We pity the Rayons of "Dallas Buyers Club" (2013) and Brandon Teenas of "Boys Don’t Cry" (1999), the endless, nameless murder victims of "CSI" and "SVU". These victims of circumstances, real or concocted by a cisgender writer’s room, call upon our sympathy as passive prey to a regressive society that cannot accept them.

It would also seem some well-intentioned filmmakers mistake agency for sexualization and/or sterilization. They show us long, lingering shots on the body of a thin, beautiful, white trans woman and sell it to us as liberation because they treat her to the same objectification they do cisgender women. Or, perhaps most disappointingly, we are fed sanitized "representation" of passing, long-since transitioned, gainfully employed, palatable caricatures on a PR-approved platter from those too scared - perhaps reasonably so - that any display of contradiction, moral ambiguity, or ongoing gender disorientation may fuel the flames of anti-trans sentiment or, more devastatingly, scare away cis audiences.

Whether we are demonized, sexualized, pitied, or scrubbed of our idiosyncrasies, the screen has, with few exceptions, proven to be a site where transgender agency goes to die.

"Glimpses" seeks to add to the small, but growing number of films in which the transgender body exists not as a site of projection, but as an agent of transformation. This film does not ask for your objectification, your pity, your disgust, or your comfortable approval. As the filmmaker, I seek to put forth a raw and uncompromising portrayal of transition from one mode of being to another - with all the fear, euphoria, confusion, discomfort, and liberation it entails.

But I can’t pay my crew in transgender ambition alone. Please, if you can, help me reclaim the monstrous.

Where does the money go?

I am asking for €4500 to pay the people whose labor makes this film possible:

Camera crew (€3000): I am very lucky to have a very skilled team of Maltese filmmakers shoot this film for me. This covers their time, expertise, and the dignity of being paid for their craft.

Editor (€430): I have commissioned a talented editor to bring the piece together.

Composer (€270): A wonderful musician has agreed to compose an original score to backdrop the film.

Makeup Artist (€150): I will cimmission a local artist to help bring the "monster" to life.

Cast & Crew meals (€400): Food on set for everyone. No one works well hungry, and no one should have to!

Props and Set Design (€150)

Thank you!

— Lars Olsen

For more information on the Methods of Execution and Ethics, Research Process, and other Practical Stuff - see below.

Methods of Execution:

"Glimpses" employs a “less is more” approach, relying more on what is unseen to create a sense of dread and horror. All aspects of “body horror” will be done practically, utilizing liquid latex, fake blood, and strategically framed shots. The “monsterous” side of Theo remains mostly in shadows until the final scene of the film when both protagonist and audience see it clearly for the first time. This monster itself serves as a symbol of our main character’s fear of masculinity and transformation - both as a victim of it as someone who was raised as a girl under a patriarchal society, and now also as a possible perpetrator of it as he enters manhood.

The film will be shot here in Malta using Maltese crew and actors. All actors and crew will be legal adults of at least 18 years of age and will be provided with information sheets. All actors will sign a consent release form which explains in detail how their recorded likenesses will be used before participating in shooting. All participants will be provided with a Letter of Information and a copy of the Data Management Plan, and all actors who wish to participate will sign an Actor Consent Form, ensuring all involved are given the information necessary to give informed consent.

Research Process

In preparation of creating this film, I have examined literature and films which work toward the deconstruction of societally (re)enforced narratives about marginalized persons.

I work from the philosophical basis of fear as a universal human experience that has been shared with one another since we could conceptualize the self, the other and death. I also work from the understanding that the manifestations of these fears, however, remain divided. The objects of fear, and those who fear them, are situational, cultural, anthropological, and therefore, uneven. I understand that the causes and effects of fear can be studied, even measured, under certain frameworks. It is within these frameworks that I have delved for answers.

I also understand that the body, like fear, is a shared and fundamental condition. Across time and culture, humans have felt the weight of existence in a body that is finite, and we have felt the weight that is inherent in the observation upon this body. Despite this universal material reality, however, our experiences of living in a body, similar to our experiences of fear, are far from universal. In her pivotal work, The Second Sex, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir delineates how the “gendered” [the feminine, the “transgendered”] body, is distinguished from the “ungendered/default” [male, the “cisgendered”] body (Beauvoir 25). For some, the weight of their body and its observation is heavier than others. Some are gendered, disabled, racialized, and pathologized, while others remain “default.”

When used by hegemonic forces, fear is a tool by which bodies are systemized, and these systems collapsed into a single “universal truth,” disguised as “common sense” or “human nature.” The gatekeepers of this “truth” rely on the assertion that, since fear is real and universal, the fears of certain groups must also be real, ultimately reinforcing the ”naturalization” of the categories themselves. But when we understand these categorizations themselves as violent, and their attempts to reify themselves through a violent material distribution of power and resources even moreso, we must also conclude that they are not real, are not natural.

Fear, therefore, can not only be a powerful tool to build and reinforce these systems, but also to pry them open and expose them for what they are: constructed, forcibly maintained, and entirely unnatural. It is through this lens then, of fear subjected upon the body via the genre of body horror, that I have sought to break through these categorizations so that an audience can observe them from an external point-of-view.

I also work from the recognition of horror, as Laura Westengard in her essay Queer Horror puts it, “as well as its tropes, aesthetics, and metaphors that make their way into horror texts – is inherently queer” and has historically been used as an expression of a “queer” or othered experience (Westengard 122). Its use of the body as a site of horror can be understood as an allegory for the oppressive systems under which most queer people live. While all bodies are placed into categorizations, the queer body is affected acutely by these categorizations it often does not fit neatly into.

With this knowledge, I have focused my research on a number of varying interrelated topics: deconstructionist theory in relation to the body, fear and its affects, representation of queered bodies in media and how these can reify or disrupt societal biases, and body horror as a representation of queer, or “othered” existence. I have interacted with a variety of theoretical sources, as well as study films which explore these theories.

"The Transgender Studies Reader", edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, "Female Masculinity" by Jack Halberstram, "Gender Trouble" by Judith Butler, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" by Laura Mulvey, as well as the 2025 dissertation "Trans-Monstrous: How Do Horror Films of the 2010s Represent the Feelings of Dysphoria and Other Aspects of Transgender Culture, Through the Metaphors of Possession and Transformation and Lead in Creating the New Monstrous Trans Reading?" by Ty Fox Attis Williamson have served as useful theoretical guidelines as I move towards the scriptwriting-process of the project. Along with these, the works of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Jasbir K. Puar, Sara Ahmed, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, on the relation to the politicization of certain bodies and the maintenance of these systems of hierarchy have served as theoretical frameworks upon which I built "Glimpses."

Queer body horror films "I Saw the TV Glow" (2024) , "Ginger Snaps" (2000), "Crash" (1996), "Titane" (2021), "Otto: or Up With Death People" (2008) , and "Jennifer’s Body" (2009), have served as guidelines for deconstructionist narratives of gender through a filmic lens. And the films "It Lives Inside" (2024), "Candyman" (2021), "Teeth" (2007), "Possum" (2018), "The Fly" (1986), "It Follows" (2014), "Prevenge" (2016), "Revenge" (2017), "The Substance" (2024), "Sorry to Bother You" (2018), "Anora" (2024), "The Skin I Live In" (2011), "Rosemary’s Baby" (1968), "Cam" (2018), "Swallow" (2019), "Raw" (2016), "The Shape of Water" (2017), and "Possession" (1981), while not inherently “queer,” serve as successes examples of horror being used as a tool for sublimation.

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