Body Horror/Film

"Hehehhehe... propane!"
 * The Human Centipede. How else do you explain
 * David Cronenberg, Toronto's creepiest son, is an acknowledged master of this trope. This was parodied when he appeared in the Royal Canadian Air Farce Year 2000 special, selling a breakfast cereal called "Big Hairy Things."
 * His directorial debut, Shivers, is a cross between a Zombie Apocalypse, Puppeteer Parasite, and an STD pandemic. Cronenberg refers to this trope interchangeably as "Body Horror" and "Venereal Horror".
 * The Brood has a woman whose negative emotions are being expressed by giving virgin birth to extremely violent mutant children.
 * Crash is about people who are sexually aroused by car crashes. One female character has a scar on her leg that looks amazingly vaginal. No points for guessing what happens during one particular sex scene.
 * eXistenZ. Imagine having gooey ports in your spine that tap into your nervous system to enable you to play virtual reality Video Games. Now imagine that the device you port into is a living thing with a pulse and vaguely resembles a brain. (It's also edible, but that's another trope...)
 * And then imagine, on TOP of that, depending on which level of reality you're in at the moment (which is NEVER completely clear) you may be forced to do odd things to someone else's port. "Free will isn't a huge factor in this little world of ours." ("Game Urges" are the eXistenZ equivalent of cutscenes, because the character does stuff at certain parts of the story that don't require the player to do much, they simply move the story along. But instead of simply cutting to pre-recorded movies, your free will is directly removed by something that's actually directly attached to your nervous system and already messing with your brain.)
 * In a deleted scene from the remake of The Fly, Seth Brundle . Within the final cut, of course, we have the almost cancerous growth of the mutant parts, pieces of him coming off, all those gooey fluids... Then there's the maggot dream. And the sequel is even worse.
 * The duel from Scanners makes one realize that Psychic Powers have way scarier combat uses than choking people. Like ripping up their skin, exploding their eyes, and making their heads pop like stepped-on melons.
 * Videodrome presents a very bizarre, surreal, and often horrific use of Body Horror. This includes everything from a man with an organic video cassette slot in his stomach (which is a clear allusion to a vagina), to another man having countless tumors erupt from his stomach and head.
 * Long Live The New Flesh!!!.
 * Subverted in Eastern Promises by depicting a normal, human birth in the same lurid light (a birth is, by most accounts, a pretty unsettling sight, but at the same time is far too natural and mundane to be horrific).
 * Safe depicts a woman (Julianne Moore) suddenly develop an inexplicable illness.
 * Antichrist depicts themes of body/self hatred/fear, mutilation, and fear of human nature.
 * The Guinea Pig series, in particular: Mermaid in a Manhole, where a man finds an injured mermaid in a sewer, takes her home with him, only for her to become horribly ill.
 * Naked Lunch - After developing an addiction to the substance he uses to kill bugs, an exterminator accidentally murders his wife and becomes involved in a secret government plot being orchestrated by giant bugs in an Islamic port town in Africa.
 * May depicts a young socially isolated woman develop a morbid fascination with other people's body parts...
 * Alien with its famous chestburster scene. And it gets worse. The original concept of the Alien lifecycle (which appears in the Director's Cut of Alien, but is non-canonic since it contradicts Aliens) involved capturing victims and turning them into new facehugger eggs.
 * The 2012 prequel Prometheus creates a whole new variety of body horror with Freudian symbolism:
 * The chestburster scene in parodied in Spaceballs.
 * An American Werewolf in London may be one of the finest of all scary Painful Transformation sequences.
 * There's also poor Jack becoming more and more zombie-like in appearance each time he reappears.
 * It's an interesting fact that the transformation sequence is so influential that most werewolf stories include a similarly Painful Transformation, even when the werewolves aren't evil.
 * Referenced (arguably an Affectionate Parody, because the director is the same) in the beginning part of Thriller, where Michael Jackson turns into a cat monster.
 * Also referenced in good old Manimal. Come to think of it, Stan Winston and/or Rick Baker did the effects for all of these. They vary in scaryness.
 * For the most part only the panther and eagle transformations were seen on screen in Manimal; the bull and snake ones were done off screen. They didn't have enough stock footage for those two.
 * The Howling has another excellent werewolf transformation scene, with effects by The Thing's Rob Bottin.
 * Parodied in Howling III: Marsupials with the film It Came From Uranus which features a man turning into a werewolf (or some other kind of creature) in a hospital while the nurse stands there terrified. The creature could possibly be a thylacine of some kind.
 * Demoni has several people being invited to go watch a new horror movie... Only to have members of the audience start mirroring the events in the movie and turn into demons.
 * The creation of "Evil Ash" in Army of Darkness. It begins with an eye appearing on Ash's shoulder and progressing to an entire head, torso, and finally a separate body. That scene was scarier than most of the zombies!.
 * The Manster is the source for this transformation idea. A slower transformation with lots of creepy goodness as the victim copes with different stages.
 * In the comic Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, Ash has a nightmare echoing the events from Evil Dead 2 except his bad hand sprouts metal claws from the fingertips.
 * Not to mention his fingernails being forced out of the way by the claws being drawn with loving, gory detail.
 * The Basket Case films, particularly the second, played this for squicky laughs.
 * Also from the same director Brain Damage is full of body horor.
 * Black Sheep (not to be confused with the Chris Farley movie of the same name) pays homage to An American Werewolf in London when the farmer turns into a weresheep. The company behind this movie is also in talks to do an American Werewolf remake.
 * In Blessed, Heather Graham is impregnated with twin antichrists.
 * Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has Violet come out looking all floppy and blue-skinned (as a result of being turned into a giant blueberry and de-juiced).
 * Though she doesn't seem to mind that she's more flexible than before, so...
 * Bug and the stage play of the same name it is based on could be seen as a Deconstruction of body horror. The two leads become convinced they are playing host to billions upon billions of genetically engineered carnivorous aphids,
 * Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves had some fairly gruesome Werewolf transformations, though the end results weren't monstrous.
 * in Damnatus, after being Mind Raped by a daemon. The fact that his stammered prayers start manifesting Voice of the Legion is the first bad sign. He primes a grenade to commit suicide, but before it goes off there is a brief shot of him collapsing and starting to grow tentacles.
 * District 9: Wikus,, begins to experience increasingly disturbing kinds of this. First, he only , but that is immediately dwarfed by , and after , he awakens in a hospital, and doctors , and Wikus is absolutely terrified. To make it worse, in reaction to what's happening to him and going slowly insane, Wikus . Apparently, pain makes him come back to his senses.
 * A theme in Eraserhead. It starts with Bill complaining about problems in his knees and wrists, and then moves up to the creepy "manmade" chickens, and we end up with The Lady in the Radiator's horrifically distended cheekbones, the burnt skin of The Man in the Planet, and of course, The Baby.
 * About The Baby, there's also a certain Squick factor to realizing a human being was pregnant with that thing.
 * In the first Fantastic Four movie, Victor von Doom gets a shard of irradiated metal stuck in him, which causes his entire body to gradually turn into metal.
 * And gives him superpowers.
 * Kind of done with Ben Grimm becoming the Thing, too, as well as Johnny becoming the Human Torch while snowboarding. "Johnny! You're on fire! … No, you're ON FIRE!"
 * Bruce's transformation in the 2008 Hulk movie was horrific. Looking closely at the scene in the university lab with the it looks as if his bones start growing to Hulk-size before the rest of his tissues.
 * Evil Ed's death in Fright Night. After fleeing from a losing fight with vampire Jerry Dandridge, so-called "vampire-killer" Peter Vincent flees to main protagonist Charlie Brewster's house in hopes of finding a telephone, only to find that the phone line has been cut. He screams out for Mrs. Brewster to inform her of this fact, only to find a friend of Brewster's, "Evil" Ed Thompson, is in the house, and has turned into a vampire, complete with protruding fangs and a bloody Cross-mark in his forehead (received earlier when Vincent got a lucky hit in with a crucifix). Ed comes menacingly close to Vincent, who darts down the hallway. Ed turns into a wolf and pursues him but, luckily for Vincent, when Ed pounces he misses and crashes into the railings on the stairs, causing them to splinter and he falls from the banister to the floor, impaled on a railing-support. Still a wolf, Ed barely manages to crawl his way under the stairway, where he slowly turns from wolf into a half-wolf (in a scene that rivals the American Werewolf in London transformation sequence) to vampire, back to human. As he lies dying, the blistered cross-burn vanishes into nothing while Peter is forced to watch the gruesome process. There's also Jerry Dandridge's transformation into a bat.
 * The Hellraiser Cenobites. Just because they get off on it, it doesn't mean it's any less body horror.
 * It's more!
 * Played for (dark) laughs in How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989), in which the titular Head grows out of a stress-related boil on the protagonist's shoulder.
 * In My Skin (2002). It's about a woman who develops a fascination with self-mutilation after an accidental injury - which, ultimately, leads to self-cannibalism.
 * There's an old folktale that has a similar premise. A starving woman burns herself on the kettle and sticks her finger in her mouth as a reflex. Turns out, she tastes pretty good. Cue cannibalism.
 * One devoted scene per ''Indiana Jones movie.
 * In Raiders of the Lost Ark
 * In Temple of Doom
 * The Last Crusade has
 * And finally in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
 * Junior. Arnold Schwarzenegger pregnant. By Danny DiVito.
 * Mum & Dad. Disturbing torture all over the place. To scratch the surface, . The Other Wiki sums it up pretty well.
 * The Matrix had a minor version of this, when Smith sealed Neo's mouth before implanting him with a living "bug". The second film upped the Body Horror by allowing Smith to infect someone's body so that they would become a duplicate of him.
 * The scene in the parlor. Where the mirror slithers out over Neo's hand covering him, then forcing its way down his throat?
 * Only to wake up in pink goo with a massive metal tube all the way down your throat. And plugs all over your body with seemingly nothing around to easily remove them (except for a handy hovering robot shortly after to assist you with this).
 * Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life probably counts. Swelling and bursting because of one last Wafer-Thin Mint, showering everything with the contents of the stomach and, because it was so explosive, having the entire front of his body blown off, leaving only a pair of lungs and a beating heart.
 * Michael Jackson's transformation into Mecha-Michael in Moonwalker.
 * The New Adventures Of Pinocchio had Pinocchio (then a real boy) turn back into a puppet after signing a contract - and Gepetto became a puppet as well. The end of the movie has The Showmaster turning into a sea monster.
 * In the original Pinocchio the scene where Pinocchio and Lampwick are transformed into donkeys is especially shocking for its day and age.
 * At least one analysis of Disney films revealed that Disney was specifically going for a horror film approach along the lines of Jekyll and Hyde.
 * Nightbreed featured a litany of Body Horrors among the "monster" community, extreme enough to make Boone's excruciating transformation seem mild. Not directed by David Cronenberg, but he played the perfectly normal yet perfectly creepy villain, fighting the relatively sympathetic monsters.
 * All this is hardly surprising, considering that the movie is based on a book by Clive Barker.
 * The '90s remake of The Nutty Professor has some surprisingly graphic transformation sequences.
 * In Dario Argento's movie Phenomena, the Serial Killer turns out to be.
 * Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and At World's End had the Flying Dutchman crew, who, after joining the crew started to turn into fish creatures and then actually become part of the ship.
 * A dead sailor Will finds in DMC whose face was literally sucked off by the Kraken's suction cups also counts.
 * Poltergeist had a scene where a guy is in the bathroom washing his hands and he suddenly starts bleeding and has a horrific vision of his face peeling off.
 * Parodied in Casper, when Bill Pullman's character is possessed by Casper's three kooky uncles and turns into Clint Eastwood, Rodney Dangerfield, Mel Gibson, and The Crypt Keeper.
 * Also parodied in the Family Guy episode "Petergeist", in which Peter peels off his face to become....
 * Also parodied in the Family Guy episode "Petergeist", in which Peter peels off his face to become....


 * The guy just cannot catch a break: in the sequel, there's a scene in which he downs an entire bottle of tequila; upon swallowing the worm, he becomes a Meat Puppet for the Big Bad. After he's been forced to abuse his family for a while, he then proceeds to vomit a large, tumorous worm-like THING that morphs into said big bad. Yeesh.
 * Silent Hill had more than its share; the nurse near the end, the barb-wire dildo finale, the white things that spat acid, and when Pyramid Head rips the skin from a woman's body...while she's still alive!
 * Slither loves this trope so much it wants to impregnate it with thousands of alien slugs causing it to swell up until it could fill a barn, and then instead of giving birth the traditional way, simply explode. The alien slug babies will then run off and crawl into the brains of anyone they can find to make them join the hive mind (probably a Shivers reference). The "queen" now resembles a cross between a squid, Michael Rooker, and a horrible skin disease, and is basically spread across an entire room. The alien slug baby people can then strip off and lie down on their ruler, and slowly get absorbed into him.
 * The ending of Society is a particularly bizarre example of this trope. Anybody who has seen the film will probably have the "shunting" scene burned into their brain, either because it is disgusting and disturbing, or unbelievably Narmy (in a ptptÌinducing sort of way). (You know Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights? Now imagine that was drawn from life.)
 * Splinter (2008) has some good malformy body horror in it.
 * In Star Trek First Contact, initiates one of the crew into the assimilation process. We see black veins showing up along half of his face as he begs Captain Picard for help. Picard
 * And way back in Star Trek the Motion Picture, an early scene sees the Enterprise's new science officer and another crewman caught in the transporter beam when it malfunctions, resulting in their twisted and deformed bodies appearing for a moment, screaming horribly and then vanishing -- apparently reappearing on the other end of the beam, where they (fortunately) didn't live long.
 * in Star Wars Revenge of the Sith there's both  and also
 * A very Squicky Japanese film Tetsuo the Iron Man and its sequel Tetsuo II: Body Hammer push this trope to its extremes.
 * John Carpenter's version of The Thing is famous for having some of the most gruesome and disturbing transformation scenes in cinematic history. Being a horror movie, this is it's general intention, but it sometimes worked a little too well. Also includes a healthy dose of Paranoia Fuel as well. Sleep tight.
 * The recent prequel had the creature behaving in a less cunning way, but took the Body Horror up to a comfortable 11 with computer graphics.
 * Thinner involves a very fat man rapidly losing weight due to a curse.
 * ...Not to mention a man who turns into a bipedal lizard (complete with scales and webbed fingers), and another who develops rotting pits on his face.
 * Tokyo Gore Police. Imagine the two Tetsuo movies with pink flesh instead of metal, then add a ridiculous amount of Gorn.
 * Underworld also pays homage to An American Werewolf in London. The werewolf transformation is a direct reference to that movie.
 * Some of Peter Jackson's earlier movies like Braindead, The Frighteners, Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles.
 * Batman and Robin featured a painful transformation scene of the villain Bane, who grows ungodly huge muscles by having "Gatorade" pumped directly into his skull. This was intended as a family-friendly film.
 * The demise of Captain Amazing in Mystery Men as well as the demise of millionaire supervillain Casanova Frankenstein.
 * The Hunger has David Bowie play a vampire who starts losing his immortality and starts aging during the middle of the film.
 * In The Shining, there is a scene where Jack Torrence walks into the bathroom of the hotel and finds
 * In Monkeybone, before the end credits there's an animated segment where various characters from the film appear in toon form and take off their skins and bodysuits to reveal monkey-like characters underneath. Considering the director, Henry Selick, also made The Nightmare Before Christmas, not that surprising.
 * In the first two X-Men movies, bits and pieces of Wolverine's surgery are shown.
 * The way it occurs in the Wolverine film isn't very scary (except if needles frighten you. There are a lot, injecting really deep). But compensates.
 * Hank McCoy gets his turn in X-men: First Class. His transformation involves him gasping and struggling with his limbs as they turn blue and furry and all mutated.
 * Jennifer Tilly giving birth in Seed Of Chucky.
 * The Saw films not only expose the viewer to considerable machine-assisted Body Horror, but Jigsaw's captives are forced to overcome their own dread of bodily mutilation in order to survive.
 * The French-Japanese-Korean film Tokyo! features a young woman slowly turning into, of all things, a chair. It starts with a huge gaping hole in her abdomen, then later she is shown struggling to walk with her legs turned into wooden chair legs and her pelvis into a wooden seat. Finally, her hands also become chair legs and her head DISAPPEARS. The kicker? In the original comic book the movie is based on, the transformation is played for laughs.
 * The climactic battle in the 1988 film Willow lingers on the main characters undergoing a slow, painful transformation into pigs, while the evil queen taunts them.
 * The scene where the Troll falls to the ground, rolls into a ball, has tentacles tear its pelt off, revealing brown slimy pulsating muscle, and then two little dragon heads emerge is rather... gruesome.
 * The live-action Guyver movie had a couple. The first transformation sequence for sure, but even worse was right before the big bad showed up when the guy they were trying to rescue... well, it didn't turn out so well for him. Painful Transformation doesn't even begin to describe it.
 * What happened to one of the Zoanoids, who accidentally swallowed the Guyver after the heroes Disney Death. The other villains were planning to cut him open and get it back, before it went Chest Burster instead.
 * Ginger Snaps tells a lycanthropy-as-a-metaphor-for-puberty story of a teenaged girl who is bitten by a werewolf, and subsequently begins a slow transformation into a wolf. In one memorable scene, she attempts to cut off her own tail (which, at that point, is hairless and half-developed) with a kitchen knife.
 * Poultrygeist and its demon chicken egg breasts. There was a man with eggs where his nipples should be with demon chickens hatching from them. This is on top of normal zombie movie body horrors (only with chicken human zombie hybrids).
 * Dr. Jekyll´s very painful transformation to Mr. Hyde in The Pagemaster traumatized many children who saw this film. If the creepy, dark visuals aren't enough to scare you out of your mind, we also hear Jekyll screaming in agony and gasping for breath during the change. And then there's his Mr. Hyde form, which is more scaring than those all put together!
 * The A Nightmare on Elm Street films have this quite frequently, but mainly in dream sequences. In the third movie, Freddy has the souls of his victims all in his chest. In Nightmare On Elm Street: Freddy's Revenge, there's the scene where Freddy comes out of the main character.
 * The part in the fourth one where Freddy slowly turns a tough girl who hates insects into a giant cockroach.
 * In the 90's classic Little Monsters, you can go to the "monster world" by use of portals under the bed. If you stay there long enough, you become a monster. Apparently, if you piss off Boy (the boss), his minion invokes a punishment that RIPS YOUR HEAD OFF AND PUTS IT IN A BASKET. He'll replace your headless corpse with a fake head, though. And apparently this does not kill you.
 * In Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright's discovery that he is a cyborg by looking down and finding his chest cavity ripped open and filled with metal bits is pretty disturbing.
 * Ame No Tori (The Vanished) - based on a short story written by Hideyuki Kikuchi involving (undead?) children and a Town with a Dark Secret. A freelance writer for a lowbrow tabloid magazine visits a local town to investigate the mysterious case of a dead child whose internal organs are completely missing. While he is interviewing a doctor in the town morgue, the dead child suddenly jumps off the stretcher and runs away!
 * Curse II: The Bite (an in-name-only sequel to The Curse, a movie loosely based on Lovecraft's The Colour out of Space) features a man bitten on the left hand by a snake, one implied to have been exposed to radioactive waste. At first, he just experiences some weakness and vomiting, but then his personality starts getting colder. When we see that his hand has mutated into a snake's head, and it kills two people (one by jamming itself down a police deputy's mouth & throat and tearing out his heart, the other by tearing a nurse's jaw off), he freaks out and chops it off. But it doesn't stop there -- another snake grows out of the stump and strangles a man with its super-long tongue (frog-snake?), then as he chases his girlfriend snakes begin bursting out of him. His left eye pops out, and snakes wriggle out of it as if it were some sort of egg. His tongue elongates and detaches, and wriggles after her. He vomits up three or four large snakes, before his mouth opens so wide his head splits in half and a giant snake (which appears to have his spinal column for a body) pops out and chases after the girl. Earlier, we see hints of the transformation trauma to come, in the form of a dog which had been bitten and mutated into a snake-dog hybrid.
 * Makeup effects were done by Screaming Mad George, who also did the makeup effects for The Guyver, Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Re-Animator II/Bride of Re-Animator, Society, and Wishmaster. They know Body Horror.
 * In The Sword and the Sorcerer, when Xusia.
 * Italian horror is fond of this. A particularly notable instance from Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead involves a girl who begins bleeding from the eyes. Followed by her intestines and stomach being ejected from her mouth. The effect is...disturbingly realistic.
 * In The Machinist, Christian Bale plays an anorexic insomniac who works heavy machinery. The Body Horror starts with Bale's unrecognizably skeletal body. Then, working at the factory, he accidentally makes a machine rip somebody's arm off. And then, he.
 * Aronofsky's Black Swan seems to be trying to rival Cronenberg in this aspect.
 * Ballet is actually VERY physically demanding, and can take its toll on the body.
 * In The Secret of the Ooze, the Shredder attempts a One-Winged Angel by drinking an entire cannister of "ooze." When he reemerges a few minutes later, he's at least a foot taller and has added about a hundred pounds of muscle. We don't see the transformation, but the fact that his Shoulder Pads Of Doom/Spikes of Villainy have also grown exponentially and his black cloth outfit now appears hard and leathery implies that his costume is now a part of him.
 * Dagon (2001): The denizens of the town Imboca have overthrown Christianity in favour of the fish god Dagon, who has brought them wealth from the sea in the form of fish and gold. Since that time, they have mutated into fish-like forms and are obedient to the beautiful, mermaid-like Uxía.
 * Sssssss have a man slowly turning into a snake.
 * Burning Godzilla in the film Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. His body is overheating from going into a meltdown from nuclear overload to the point where his flesh is now melting off of his body.
 * Even worse when he dies. He actually cries in agony because he's in so much pain.
 * The Heisei incarnation of King Ghidorah falls under this. Imagine being three cute little pets created to be friendly companions being mutated and fused-together into a single three-headed dragon.
 * Godzilla himself. Sure, we don't actually see the mutation happen itself. But, compare what he used to look like to what he mutates into, and it's evident it was not a pleasant experience for him.
 * In L: Change the World, Maki's dad injects himself with a large amount of a lethal virus that causes him to break out in boils and bleed from just about everywhere, and is simultaneously fried to death by K.
 * Played for Laughs in Persepolis. Marjane's description of the changes her body went through during puberty, and the associated images, have a a very Body Horror feel to them.
 * What happens to two Senators Mc Comb's from different time periods in Timecop,.
 * Death Becomes Her. If it wasn't so funny it could be Un Example. Just imagine that you can
 * The Last Circus has one character mutilate his face with caustic soda and an iron to mimic a clown's makeup.
 * Cabin Fever centers around a group of friends who go camping and contract necrotizing fasciitis... also known as flesh-eating bacteria. Bloodiness certainly ensues. Its sequel, of course, takes this several steps further into Happy Tree Friends territory.
 * Iron Man: For your consideration: Imagine being blown up by your own missile on the other side of the world. You wake up in an unfamiliar place, with a tube shoved up your nose. You reach over to get some water, when suddenly, you feel something pull on your chest. That something is a pair of battery cords. With growing terror, you realize that a freakin' electromagnet has been installed in your chest. Permanently. The kicker? It's the only thing keeping you from dying a slow, painful death due to the METAL SHARDS SLOWLY WORKING THEIR WAY INTO YOUR HEART. Have fun trying to live with that. As if that wasn't enough, you later find out the Mini Arc Reactor you employed as a replacement is burning Palladium into your FLESH and BLOODSTREAM. The very thing keeping you alive is also killing you. (And people wonder why Tony Stark has a drinking problem)
 * The film Freaks, especially the ending.
 * The film Freaks, especially the ending.