Blood, sweat and fears: Inside the rise of body horror
The genre invites us to look at the parts of ourselves that unsettle us most, confront contradictions and terrors. Do you see yourself in any of these?
The human body is a grotesque battlefield, or at least that’s one way to look at it.
In movies, the confounding vulnerability and powerlessness of being trapped in an aging, occasionally embarrassing, often-unpredictable sack of flesh, is reflected in the genre known as body horror.
Build the story around a female protagonist, and new seams open up: the scrutiny that attaches to being a woman; the wild quests to ward off the realities (and social consequences) of aging.
Though the plots vary, ranging from romances and comedies to dramas and psychological thrillers, they all engage with the same fundamental question: How do we navigate the experience of inhabiting a self that is susceptible to harm and transformation, and isn’t just a personal entity but also a social and political one?
In the movies, the strain causes bodies to literally burst with rage, confusion, repressed desire.
The idea of body horror can be traced at least as far back as the 19th-century Gothic novel, says Xavier Aldana Reyes, a scholar of Gothic horror in films and literature, at Manchester Metropolitan University. Think of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of Jekyll and Hyde (1886), and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).
The term can be traced to the 1980s, he adds. “Body horror” is believed to have been coined by the Australian filmmaker Philip Brophy, when describing a new wave of contemporary horror, in a 1983 article in Art & Text magazine.
The new wave he described was driven by advances in special effects, particularly animatronics and prosthetics. It took new forms amid a spike in “body consumerism / modification” in the real world, as cosmetic surgery gained popularity in the ’70s and ’80s.
“Alongside, there was a gradual lifting of moral codes on what could be shown on screen. This too led to more-visceral films,” Aldana Reyes says.
Notable in this period were films such as David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975; a tale of experiments involving parasites and, eventually, a sexual-assault epidemic) and The Fly (1986; a man and a fly merge in a teleportation machine).
The British film The Quatermass Xperiment (1955; about three astronauts in a rocket, one of whom mutates into an alien-like organism) is considered one of the earliest explorations in the genre. In recent years, explosive new tales have emerged from France, Malaysia and South Korea.
“What has changed, I think, is that horror is now more openly political than it was before, paving the way for personal stories about systemic injustice and social pressures,” Aldana Reyes says.
What do the narratives look like today? Take a look. (Most of the films below are streaming in India.)
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Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
Obsession, violent crime and close-ups of steroids being injected into glistening triceps come together in this campy queer thriller directed by the Englishwoman Rose Glass.
Lou (Kristen Stewart), a reclusive gym member, and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an ambitious body-builder, fall in love.
Their affair is intensified by the steroids Lou sets her new partner up with. Amid Jackie’s intensifying rage and lust, the two women descend into a spiral of toxicity, cruelty and crime, helped along by Lou’s rather shady family.
At one point, Jackie, performing at a body-building competition, is flexing her muscles for the judges one minute. And the next, she is hallucinating that the muscles are erupting, until out of them comes a person she loves.
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
The Pink Opaque is a TV show about teenagers fighting monsters. Teens Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) can’t get enough of it; the show feels so real.
Then Maddy goes missing. Years later, she reappears, tracks Owen down, and tells him she’s been living in the TV show. Watch it again and you’ll see, she says.
It’s a tale of fractured identity, anxiety, trauma.
Director Jane Schoenbrun has explained it as a metaphor for the “egg-crack moment”, the moment when a transgender person realises there’s a whole other world to their identity.
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The Substance (2024)
In this grisly tale directed by the Frenchwoman Coralie Fargeat, an illegal new drug allows humans to create a younger, enhanced version of themselves.
Elisabeth (Demi Moore), an ageing celebrity fitness star, signs up. But soon finds that her newer self, Sue, has tinkered with the elaborate intake system, in an effort to destroy her. At one point, Sue stashes Elisabeth in a cubbyhole in her bathroom, as if she never existed. To the world, it’s as if she never aged.
The film won Best Screenplay at Cannes.
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Tiger Stripes (2023)
A mischievous 11-year-old named Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) goes to a fairly conservative school for Muslim girls in Malaysia, but ignores some of the rules. She dances in the toilet, takes off her headscarf, loves posting videos of herself online.
As she begins to notice changes in her body, patriarchy, puberty, rebellion, and the many taboos that girls around the world must contend with, intersect.
Zaffan begins to feel rage and an out-of-control power coursing through her body. In echoes of from Malaysian myth, her eyes now light up; she often finds herself on all fours.
The film, directed by Amanda Nell Eu, was released in a censored version in its home country. It won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes in 2023.
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Titane (2021)
The monstrous feminine gets a heavy-metal twist in this French thriller directed by Julia Ducournau.
After a car accident in childhood, Alexia grows up with a titanium plate in her head. Perhaps because of the accident, perhaps not, she becomes a remorseless killer; a woman capable of posing as a missing boy to evade the police, and then moving in with the boy’s bereft father. At some point, there’s a sex scene involving a Cadillac; her belly begins to bulge and she begins to ooze oil.
The film takes ideas of trauma, identity and society’s quest for human-machine hybridity to their extremes and yet, incredibly, ends on a note of hope. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, in 2021.
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Beauty Water (2020)
In this animated South Korean film directed by Cho Kyung-hun, a makeup artiste is tired of looking in the mirror and seeing only sad eyes and a droopy body. She loathes her binge-eating self.
Then she discovers Beauty Water, which can cause one to almost-magically shed weight.
Han Yae-ji is reborn; she is now beautiful, admired and envied. But in the mirror, she still sees only the sad eyes of a girl stuffing food into her mouth.
She keeps dipping into the Beauty Water. Her view doesn’t change, but her flesh begins to disintegrate, her eyes begin to droop. Her body dysmorphia has caught up with her. She is unrecognisable now, except to herself.
(Click here to see a slideshow of stills from these and other movies.)
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