When I recommend the movie Mad God to my friends, I give them the heads up that it has a lot of “body horror.” They understand what I mean, no further context needed. When someone says they don’t really like Saw because they aren’t into body horror, we say “yeah fair enough.” We seem to have an unspoken understanding of exactly what body horror constitutes.

And yet, a cursory Google search for body horror reveals an endless list of top 10 articles, with such a wide range of movies that it seems impossible for them to all qualify as the same category. We have artsy darlings like Titane and Earwig, mass appeal slashers like Bodies, Bodies, Bodies and Hellraiser, social thrillers like Get Out, fantasy romance flicks like Edward Scissorhands, horror classics like The Thing, alien invasion movies like Alien, Kevin Smith disasters like whatever the hell Tusk is. You might come to wonder if body horror is even a helpful classification. If something can be this broad, is it even helpful to know about it beyond using it as a label for trigger warnings?

(Obviously, if I’m writing this article, I think the answer is yes.)

Narrowing down my research for this piece was a feat. Our other horror breakdown articles focus on more niche sub-genres, such as eco-horror, slow burn horror, and household horror. There’s simply less out there on the matter. But body horror is not only wide-spread, it’s also got a long history. You could argue that Frankenstein is body horror. You could argue that the Greek myth of the Minotaur is body horror. So, to better focus myself, I tried breaking down body horror into some of its most commonly recurring themes: disgust, shame, transformation, control, inhumanity, monstrosity, abjection, catharsis. I go into a broad definition of what body horror is and how different media (within and without horror) use it, what kinds of ideas it trades in, and what about it draws us in so very much. And if you’re looking for reading/watching recommendations in the genre, this is the article for you. There will be examples galore.

Stories with Body Horror Versus Stories About Body Horror

Off the bat, I’m going to defer to writer Xavier Aldana Reyes’ definition of body horror: “the inscription of horror onto the human body by virtue of a change.” I like this definition because it’s straightforward. Body horror is when scary things happen to a body. It’s what it says on the tin. I also like the focus on change, because I generally find body horror to be quite a dynamic genre. It’s all about transitions, transformations, and metamorphoses. A passage from one state to another. 

In general, I would argue that creators use body horror in one of two ways:

1. As a tool used in the storytelling (that is, stories with body horror)
2. As the primary element of the storytelling (that is, stories about body horror)

Stories with body horror use body horror the same way they use any other filmmaking or literary tool. It helps them strengthen their other themes, provoke an emotional reaction, or even simply raise the stakes. It’s in this type of usage that we often see body horror break the bounds of horror and leak into other genres. Biological survival film 127 Hours uses body horror to convey the character’s desperation, particularly during the amputation scene (that ringing sound gets me every time). Children’s movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, as well as the book it’s based on, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, use body horror as a punishment for the naughty children that don’t follow factory rules. The affected children’s bodies undergo irreversible transformations, serving as visual reminders of their transgressions.  Augustus Gloop is squished; Violet Beauregard is bloated; Mike Teavee is shrunk and stretched. 

Body horror’s ubiquitousness makes sense. After all, having a body is a fairly universal experience (even if the experience of a body is unique to the individual). Similarly, I would argue that horror is one of the core centers of human experience. Fear is a primal sensation, one we can reliably return to as something understandably human. As author Linda Badley puts it in Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic, “horror is an emotion and an element present throughout literature, film, and art.” So body horror is the perfect combination of relatable content. I have a body and I know what it means to be afraid.

But then, what about the stories where body horror is more than a passing moment? How does body horror operate when it is the actual genre of a piece? I think it kind of works the same way romance does. So many stories feature romantic subplots, but that doesn’t inherently make them romances. But the stories where romance is not a B plot but the plot do exist. By centering the romance, they provide an avenue to dive deeper into its core concepts, into what love is and how it manifests and our relationship to it. By creating body horror stories, creators give themselves a chance to explore our often-fraught relationship with our own bodies.

“[Body horror] finds its roots in our primal fear of the uncanny and from an internal, not external threat. This leads to an alienation of our own physical self, ensuing in tension and paranoia pitted against our own biological makeup. Bodies designed or moving in a recognizable but jarring way, the Uncanny Valley, often provoke this reaction and feed into our subconscious fear of the other. This is why body horror is so disturbing, the images stick in the memory and the source of fear is inescapable, coming from within ourselves.”

Freddie Van Der Velde, “Body Horror: Explaining the Controversial Subgenre”

Disgust: The Mortifying Ordeal of Having a Body

I sometimes wish I was a Barbie doll. Not because I want Barbie’s “idealized” features or for any self-esteem reasons but because I wish I was a lump of plastic. Nothing should ever spill from me. I wish that you could slice through my arm as easily as you could slice through a block of plasticine. I wish I was solid all the way through, that my body was one assembled piece. No organs, no blood. No bone and no pus. Just smooth plastic, easy to clean and impossible to infect. 

The reality of the human body is, frankly, off-putting. Many of the more embarrassing aspects are often ignored in our art. Bodies smell; they leak. They excrete. They are crawling with bacteria; they decay. They break down, they ache, they become infected. Infections stink. Infections froth. We are susceptible to parasites, fungi, viruses. We are flesh. We are meat.

Body horror understands that, sometimes, there is inherent horror to possessing a body. The body serves as an expression of you, but sometimes, it does things outside of your control. Mortifying things. You fart in front of your one-night stand; you throw up in the taxi home. A great example of this is Laura Hird’s “Nail” (maybe the best body horror short story ever written). 

In “Nail”, protagonist Charlotte wakes up to find a growth has appeared beneath her nail, one that she finds so disgusting she can’t bring herself to tell anyone about it. It grows and grows and she isn’t able to do anything about it  until it fundamentally takes over her life. “Nail” is an incredibly effective story because it is grounded in the reality of the body horrific. Who can’t relate to that moment when something embarrassing is happening to you and you know you should tell someone but that means acknowledging it? Though all parts of the body are equally natural, there are simply certain body parts that are seen as more inherently embarrassing than others. Nails, armpits, tongues, bowels, nostrils, feet. “Nail” doubles down by focusing on exactly these parts of the body causing Charlotte strife.

In “Nail,” Charlotte’s embarrassment about what is happening to her is the driving force behind her inability to get help. She tries to ignore the issue, to will it away. Her emotional pain at the mortification of having something “gross” happening to her supersedes her physical discomfort. Even when considering whether the thing in her nail might kill her, Charlotte’s focus is on how ashamed it makes her feel. In fact, she prefers death to the mortifying ordeal of having a body that’s sometimes gross:

“What is happening to me? Am I dying from some strange unworldly cancer? If my existence continues down this bleak path I almost hope that is so. Though I know I’m being extremely foolish, I still can’t bring myself to call the doctor, have my worst fears confirmed or exceeded, and the incredible embarrassment, I just can’t.”

Body horror speaks to a fear of something happening to us outside of our control. Movies like Tusk, An American Werewolf in London, and The Skin I Live In express the terror of one’s body being forced to undergo a change. The body is taken away from us, reshaped, and returned to us unrecognizable. There’s a reason why stories that center on puberty also heavily rely on body horror. 

“Now, consider how intense the experience of abjection is for adolescent girls. When a girl experiences her first period, she witnesses an organ shedding itself. She feels it rip to shreds inside her body before being expelled into a sticky, smelly, chunky mess. Her insides spill out of her body, an inner organ is seemingly now on the outside; she may gag at the scent or blush at the embarrassment of womanhood projected onto her still adolescent self.”

Livia Rappaport, “Eating Boys and Growing Tails: “Menstruosity” in Body Horror Films”

I’ll be real, I was pissed off the first time I got my period. It felt like my body had betrayed me. Menstruation  was this thing that I was going to have to deal with for the next 40-to-50 years; it was smelly, it was messy, it was gross, and people had the audacity to congratulate me on my “becoming a woman.” I was 12. I didn’t want to be a woman. In Daphne du Maurier’s “The Pool,” protagonist Deborah’s first period is symbolically tied with her losing touch with the world of magic. The sudden change comes as something traumatic and life-altering:  “What happened to her was personal. They had prepared her for it at school, but nevertheless it was a shock… The heaviness of knowledge lay upon her, a strange, deep sorrow.” Part of what makes the body horror of puberty films particularly poignant is that they represent something that’s  happening by design. Even the most natural process can feel like a perversion to the person to whom it is occurring. 

No Longer Human

The disgust expressed by body horror towards the human body is often dehumanizing. In the case of creature features like Ginger Snaps or An American Werewolf in London, this is literal- the human form is morphed into that of a wolf. But even in less supernatural stories, body horror reconfigures the human body into something “other” than human. The protagonist in “Nail” considers the possibility of her ailment being “otherworldly”, inhuman. Body horror holds a mirror up to the person, saying “this is you”; the person’s reaction is to reply, “it can’t be.”

A great example of this is in Frankenstein. Victor (who I won’t be calling Doctor Frankenstein because he dropped out of his course and he’s a pissbaby) creates his monster to be an idealized version of the human body.  But once the body is animated, Victor is immediately overcome with horror. Frankenstein’s monster is an impossibility that forces Victor to confront the reality of decay and death that exist in a corpse, all in a body that looks and moves like his. It is an exaggerated version of that corpse that Julia Kristeva describes as the perfect representation of abjection, “death infecting life. Abject.”  It holds up the mirror to Victor and the reader. It’s hard not to recoil. As explained in An Argument for Frankenstein as a Body Horror, “Frankenstein undermines the idealized human body with the grotesque. As a result, Shelley’s readers begin to see their own bodies, an intimate part of themselves they cannot escape, as something unfamiliar.”

Tiny Aside: Body Horror and Ableism

While I am on the topic of “bodies are gross”, I feel like it’s important to call out the relationship between body horror and disabled bodies. Basically, bad body horror can come off as saying “wow, that experience that actual people experience in their day-to-day really is the stuff of horror.” Or, as Caitlin Starling puts it in “Why Body Horror is Such an Evocative Tool in Storytelling”, “Body horror…runs a higher than usual risk of veering off into ableism, either intentionally or accidentally. See stories that position becoming disabled as a “fate worse than death”, antagonists with marked visible disabilities when compared with the “heroes.”

Now, I eventually want to write a full article about this, particularly exploring the intersection between body horror, chronic conditions, and personal experience. But that’s kind of its own article that needs its own space. For the time being, I recommend reading Billie Anderson’s “Body horror as a tool for re-imagining disability representation” to delve deeper into ways people positively use body horror to explore the disabled experience. Ultimately, I’d say it comes down to how much the piece humanizes or dehumanizes the person at the center of the horror. David Cronenberg, king of body horror, is really good at keeping the light on the experiences and humanity of his protagonists. As Kenneth Beiber explains in  “How David Cronenberg Uses The Body Horror Genre Intellectually,” “In films such as The Fly, we emphasize with Seth Brundle as his physical form deteriorates, and yet what could’ve been a gorefest turns into something surprisingly moving…”

Derealization: I Don’t Have a Body; I Am One

It is an easier affair to think of ourselves as possessing a body, as the body being the container for the soul. Clean separation: there is an essence, pure and celestial, that functions as our true self and then there is a body, which is our physical tether to this world. Body horror takes these neat little divisions and tears them apart. It takes away our comfortable illusion. It says, “no no; you are a body. There is no functional difference between you and meat.” There’s a reason the above quote posing this same question came from the creative mind that produced cannibal horror flick Raw. 

Derealization refers to a detachment. What does it mean when you realize your body is flesh? What does that do to your relationship with it? French body horror film In My Skin explores these exact questions (shout out shout out to antiheroines for their video “In My Skin: Female Body Horror”, which first turned me onto it). In In My Skin, protagonist Esther comes to reevaluate her relationship with her body after seriously injuring her leg and not realizing for hours. She turns to self-harm as a way of exploring her body, pushing the limits of what she can do to herself. It is a direct response to her feeling of distance within herself. In one scene, Esther is in a restaurant with some important clients when she notices her hand has become detached at the wrist. She stares at it as though it is something alien to her, something she doesn’t recognize. 

“The narrative told by body horror, again and again, is of a human subject dismantled and demolished: a human body whose integrity is violated, a human identity whose boundaries are breached from all sides.”

Kelly Hurley, “Reading Like an Alien: Posthuman Identity in Ridley Scott’s Alien and David Cronenberg’s Rabid”

One of the most prevalent themes in body horror is that of control, both its loss and its gain. Injury and illness happen to us. They remove our ability to decide what happens to our bodies. Body horror shameless mines that helplessness. In fact, it might be exactly what draws us to it. We need look no further than the popularity of horror manga artist Junji Ito, whose art features the human form repeatedly distorted and unraveled by all manner of curses. “[Junji Ito’s] Uzumaki was about two people trying to protect themselves, and each other, when they didn’t always know what they wanted or needed or what the rules were or what their bodies were going to do next.” explains Briar Ripley Page in “On body horror and growing up strange.” 

“Who is this person I’ve become? I don’t recognize myself. Perhaps the monster is taking over my entire being, growing inside me as well as out. In the short time since I awoke my life has completely collapsed around me. The real Charlotte has been abducted and replaced with something awful. I’m sure it was the old me in the dream last night but now I am gone.”

Laura Hird, “Nail”

I think there is an especially strong case for body horror serving as a great avenue to explore chronic conditions precisely because of its focus on the cross-section between identity and bodies. Around this time last year, the eczema on my hands was the worst it’s ever been. I was living through that perfect, skin-ruining combination of a January cold snap, a new apartment that had an overenthusiastic heater, and a terrible job that turned me into a puddle of stress. It started as several dry patches that vaguely itched but I could ignore them if I distracted myself. Before long, they had morphed into what can only be described as red scales that screamed to be torn off. I tried everything to combat it. Lotion bottles cropped up on every available surface. I treated water from the sink like it was acid, touching it only when absolutely necessary. My bedtime ritual consisted of me stuffing my throbbing hands into cotton gloves filled with hand cream so thick it was like spackle. But nothing worked. The itch persisted.

It was around this time that I wrote a short story about a woman who may or may not be slowly catching fire. I knew I shouldn’t scratch, but my fingers seem to have found a life of their own. I’d get absorbed into a spreadsheet and find my nails picking at a patch of skin. I’d go to bed with my silly little gloves and wake up to my arms dragging my hands against the mattress as though trying to peel the skin off through the cotton.

The itch began to take over my life. I woke up most nights scratching, which meant I woke up most mornings with the bleeding skin growing ever thicker. I couldn’t close my hands into fists anymore without the knuckles splitting open like sun-cracked leather. My skin was so agitated you could sometimes see it pulse red and white to the beat of my heart. In my short story, the woman on fire began to wonder if she’d be better off just jumping into a furnace. I wondered what it would be like to just not have hands. Or at least to have hands just without skin. 

Around the time my eczema finally started to clear up (new season meant no more heater and new job meant no more stress), I discovered Shirley Jackson’s “The Tooth.” In it, protagonist Clara heads into the city to have an impacted tooth removed by a dentist. While the premise sounds straightforward, the journey itself is fraught, made nightmarish by a combination of pain and painkillers. It was a short story that made my fingers twitch with a phantom itch. It was a short story that perfectly encapsulates the way that pain can make us feel like our identity has been entirely supplanted. It immediately jumped to the top of my “best short stories of all time” list. I fell in love with the way it explores how our humanity is often usurped by the symptoms of an ongoing illness:

“Her tooth, which had brought her here unerringly, seemed now the only part of her to have any identity. It seemed to have had its picture taken without her; it was the important creature which must be recorded and examined and gratified; she was only its unwilling vehicle, and only as such was she of interest to the dentist and the nurse, only as the bearer of her tooth was she worth their immediate and practiced attention.”

Shirley Jackson, “The Tooth”

If you’ve ever been hospitalized, you’ll probably relate to that sensation of being the “bearer of the tooth”. When we are subsumed with pain, with suffering, with a loss of control, it becomes the center of our life. Doctors, the authorities allegedly bestowed with the ability to free us of our condition,  see us only as our condition, as the body parts that aren’t working as expected. Every conversation in our life becomes about The Condition. It is the thing we have to mention when filling out forms, the thing that we have to think about when organizing a day out. It sets us apart from others while putting us at their mercy. Jackson highlights this sense of complete despair by contrasting Clara’s lack of control with the doctor’s absolute authority:  “Good-bye,” the dentist said. At the last minute, he smiled at her, showing her his full white teeth, all in perfect control.”

“The Tooth” showcases what happens when someone has been in extended distress, and how that can chip away at your identity. At one point, Clara literally loses her ability to recognize herself:

“It was when she stepped a little aside to let someone else get to the basin and stood up and glanced into the mirror that she realized with a slight stinging shock that she had no idea which face was hers! She looked in the mirror as though into a group of strangers, all staring at her or around her.”

Fear of Invasion

Going back to Hird’s “Nail” (because of course I am; it’s excellent), one of the reasons body horror is effective is it gets to our fear of invasion. In describing her ailment, Charlotte uses the language of infection, describing insects and roots, things branching off: “It looked like a tiny twig made out of blackened skin. The growth also continued under the nail where it had branched out into two roots both disappearing into the half-moon of my cuticle. It was as if some kind of bug or eel had burrowed under my skin.”

Not only is that description disgusting, it is also effective at conveying this sense of natural unreality. The problem with dirt is that it’s completely natural. That doesn’t mean you want it in your veins. Body horror can be about supernatural things happening to a body, distorting it beyond normalcy, but it can also be about the way “natural” things can feel supernatural. It’s puberty all over again. What disturbs Charlotte is the inhumanity of the thing that’s affixed itself to her humanity. It is the other within her: “Although it bled quite heavily I felt nothing, which reinforced my sense that this thing was not part of me but something separate which had made my body its home.” 

Movies like Alien and The Thing make literal the presence of an alien body. Their most iconic moments of body horror are those in which the human is destroyed by the alien, where the lack of humanity makes a sudden, violent appearance.  Split skin and cracking bone. “Like The Thing,” explain Judith Halberstam in Post-Human Bodies,  “the Alien constitutes a collapsing of multiple and incompatible morphic possibilities into one amorphous embodiment – a logic of “identity” that serves as an alternative, or possible ontological challenge, to a human one predicated on a body that’s a discrete, bounded, and stable unit.”

Catharsis: Taking Back Control

“He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. ‘He will lick the skin off me!’

And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.”

Angela Carter, “The Tiger’s Bride”

One of the primary themes we see in body horror is that of transformation. Yes, that transformation can be negative, brutal, or a disfiguration of our sense of self. But that fear of disfigurement is sometimes replaced by something else: desire. A desire to take back control, to force our will onto a body that’s attempting to rebel.  

Ultimately, movies like In My Skin are cathartic. Esther gives in to the pleasure of ripping her body to shreds, of knowing that what is happening to her is now fully in her control. Going back to the scene in the restaurant, shots of her slicing herself with a steak knife are interposed with shots of people eating meat using those the exact same implements. Esther is made of meat, the parallel is obvious, but what’s cathartic is that she is in on the joke. 

Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber features many transformation scenes, though some of the most rousing are in its two takes on the Beauty and the Beast tale: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride.” The former follows the standard format of the fairytale: the the beast is transformed into a man by the love of a beautiful woman. The latter, however, is the one that captivated me. In it, the transformation is the opposite: the beast stays a beast, and the beauty morphs to join him. It’s Fiona becoming an ogre rather than staying the fair princess. It’s alluring because it rejects the expected desire. And the tiger’s bride doesn’t find her transformation ghastly. She sees her newly begotten monstrousness as beautiful.

“The stories in The Bloody Chamber are fired by the conviction that human nature is not immutable, that human beings are capable of change. Some of their most brilliant passages are accounts of metamorphosis… the heroines of these stories are struggling out of the straitjacket of history and ideology and biological essentialism.” 

Helen Simpson, intro to The Bloody Chamber

The Transformative Power of Pain

“An intense need to be cleansed overwhelms me and I pull off my nightdress and step under the shower. It scalds into my body like a tattoo but I stand there defiantly, bearing it, hoping the high temperature will burn whatever it is away. There is reassurance in pain because at least it has a rationale.”

Nail, Laura Hird

Do you ever press on a bruise? Or push against a sore gum? Clench your teeth so hard your ears ring? Stay up late reading about terrible disasters that tore human bodies to shreds. Chernobyl. The Goiânia accident. Flesh-eating bacteria in the brackish waters of Florida. 

There is a part of us that is drawn to darkness. It’s the side that understands that pain is meant to be a warning sign but wants to know what happens when we ignore it. Horror in general is very good at tapping into this side of us. Body horror in particular focuses on our desire to push our bodies to their limits. It says “this is what happens when you reach the other side of a little too far.”

No movie captures this better than BDSM masterpiece Hellraiser. Not only does Hellraiser feature some incredibly effective body horror with practical effects that have stood up well to the test of time, but it actually explores the transformative power of pain as a theme. It’s a movie all about BDSM, where characters go beyond the borders of their own desire. They search for an experience that transcends the body while being firmly rooted in it. The very design of all the Cenobites, patron saints of the BDSM puzzle box, is body horror manifest: pins stabbed through craniums, throats permanently slashed, lips torn back to expose wet gums. This is the pinnacle of form for these creatures. This is not their hell; it is their heaven. Pleasure. Pain. Two sides of the same coin.

Why Do People Like Body Horror?

“Body horror is, in some ways, the easy option. It hurts. It disgusts, by definition. We all have bodies, and the entry fee of being embodied is the certainty—not the risk, the certainty—that eventually, something will go wrong with it. We will lose control of it, we will suffer indignities large and small, we will at some point (at multiple points) have to redefine what it is to be ourselves as our bodies change in ways we can’t predict. And even when everything is working “normally”, there are still little horrors that we’ve all learned to welcome: pregnancies, painful growth spurts, aging.”

Caitlin Starling, Why Body Horror is Such an Evocative Tool in Storytelling

This isn’t really a single answer as to why we as a species are so drawn to body horror. Different people like it for different reasons. For some, it’ll be the simple voyeuristic pleasure of following a nasty train of thought, “What if this horrible thing happened to me for some reason oh gosh that’s gross and horrible.” It’s about engaging with a terrifying concept in a safe environment. 

But what I think is unique to body horror, what draws people to it again and again, is its universality. Body horror transforms the human condition into a coherent narrative. It examines experiences that are deeply personal while still remaining relatable. “As a trans woman who has struggled with gender dysphoria my whole life, [body horror] may be the only genre of film as concerned with flesh as I am,” explains writer Nadine Smith, “By condensing all the physical changes we undergo over the course of a lifetime into a few hours, Shyamalan[‘s Old] shows how disturbing it is to feel your body becoming foreign to you.”

Personally speaking, I sometimes feel limited by the body I’ve been granted. I wish I could fly. I wish bones wouldn’t break so easily. I wish my breath didn’t leave my lungs when I try to run a mile. I wish my hands didn’t sometimes turn into scaly claws. This is a social truth, as well as a physical one. I wish I didn’t bleed on a regular cadence. I wish I could move through spaces ignored. I wish my body wasn’t inherently political. Body horror gives me a space where I can shed my body. Where I can feel the weight of expectation and truth and thrust it off. Where I can acknowledge that I don’t have a body, I am a body, and that body is mine to do with as I please.

“In the ongoing crisis of identity in which the gendered, binary subject of Eurocentric bourgeois patriarchy (in particular, the Freudian psychoanalytical model of the self) is undergoing deconstruction, horror joined with other discourses of the body to provide a language for imagining the self in transformation, re-gendered, ungendered, and regenerated, or even as an absence or a lack.”

Linda Badley, Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic