The first major way crossdressing is used in horror media is as a sign of significant trauma or mental unrest. Villains who crossdress are meant to be seen as unstable and with a severe inability to exist in normal society. It’s even debatable whether these examples are intentional critiques of transfemme people, as they’re typically undergoing psychotic breaks or impersonating a female within their life. Nevertheless, their existence contributes to persisting negative stereotypes surrounding GNC people, trans women, and those who have mental illnesses.

One of the biggest examples of this trope is seen within the 1983 film Sleepaway Camp and its protagonist, Angela. The film opens with Angela, her brother Peter, and their two fathers getting into a boating accident that leaves the entirety of Angela’s immediate family dead. Cut to 10-15 years later and Angela is now leaving to go to the titular summer sleepaway camp. Campers begin showing up dead, and thus begins a mystery of who the killer may be. At the end of the movie it’s revealed in a shocking turn of events that Angela is not only the killer, but is actually Peter and had been dressing as his dead sister for the past decade since her death. It’s heavily implied that the reason for both his murder and crossdressing is not only due to the trauma of seeing his family die, but due to the fact that he had two fathers. The movie ends with a fully nude shot of Angela-turned-Peter covered in blood, his genitalia in view. 

​

Another well-known example of the trope is seen with Norman Bates, the villain of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho. Similarly to Peter, Norman dresses up as a dead family member when killing, but it's his mother (whom he killed) rather than his sister. Furthermore Norman still exists in the world mainly as a man, and throughout the movie is observed by the main characters talking and responding to himself as if he's having a conversation with his mother. The movie is shot to hide the one-sided nature of these conversations and therefore the twist. His impersonation of his dead mother is only revealed at the end of the movie when  protagonists Lila & Sam find her mummified body in the fruit cellar. Norman, in a fit of rage, appears behind them wearing a dress and wielding a knife. A scene or two later, a psychiatrist within the movie explains his motivations. Norman is explained as being so distraught over killing his mother that he had a psychiatric break and began unknowingly acting as her. 

​

Films that use this trope almost always end up relying on stereotypes affiliated with trans individuals. For decades queerness in any form was treated within medical spaces as a mental illness [1] and something to be cured. Both homosexuality and transness were part of the the American Psychiatric Association's official list of mental disorders throughout parts of the 1990s [2] [3], which partially created the harmful stigma perpetuated within Sleepaway Camp and Psycho. Furthermore, both of these works treat transness/crossdressing similarly to older and offensive depictions of dissociative identity disorder (DID), which both Peter and Norman are implied to have. While DID is typically understood as manifesting as a result of trauma [4], the films deviate from actual understandings of the disorder by making the alternate personalities inherently violent and linking them to transness. While both of these films may be fun or well-made, they contribute heavily to negative stereotypes surrounding both transness and mental illness.