10 great body horror films

“The term ‘biological horror,’” David Cronenberg once said, “really refers to the fact that my films are very body-conscious. They’re very conscious of physical existence as a living organism, rather than other horror films or science-fiction films which are very technologically oriented, or concerned with the supernatural, and in that sense are very disembodied.” 

As the Canadian maestro returns to the big screen with Crimes of the Future (2022), a film pitched in the press – if not by its director, who has long shied away from applying the term to his own work – as a return to the realms of ‘body’ or ‘biological’ horror, we’re taking a look back at some great films that deal in the treacheries of the flesh.

Referring to a distinct subgenre in horror cinema that variously trades in aberration, mutation, transformation and a loss of conscious control over the human body – often accompanied by generous volumes of squicky corporeal trauma – body horror usually requires a certain level of tolerance for on-screen yucks. 

The genesis of the term itself can be traced back to a 1983 essay by the Australian academic Philip Brophy – who would go on to practise what he preached by directing the 1993 feature Body Melt – but its conceptual tropes stretch all the way back into the realms of gothic literature.

While biological horror movies offer boundless opportunities for the greatest FX artists in the business to let their imaginations run wild, the subgenre has long proved fertile ground for its political potential, where questions of bodily integrity and autonomy are inherently foregrounded.

Here are 10 greats that you might not want to watch on a full stomach.

Director: Ken Russell

Body horror loves a mad scientist, showing a particular fondness for those that make themselves the subject of their own maniacal schemes. Frankenstein and his monster become one in this Jekyll and Hyde-riffing adaptation of the sole novel by Oscar-winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. It offered a first screen role for leading man William Hurt, playing a professor who begins to devolve to a primordial state after hours spent in an isolation tank on some potent tribal brew.

Chayefsky had intended a serious interrogation of the nature of the modern consciousness, diving deep into his research on genetics, biology, anthropology and the question of ‘self’. But he didn’t count on director Ken Russell. The two clashed almost immediately, with the writer finally taking his name off the film, despite a contractual stipulation that not a word of his screenplay could be changed. Stampeding over Chayefsky’s metaphysical hooey, it’s Russell’s visual imagination that brings the film to life. Hurt’s delirious stargate hallucinations, comprising religiously ecstatic visions of seven-eyed goats and the crucified Christ, are among the wildest images Russell put on screen. 

Director: David Cronenberg

However much David Cronenberg disavows his reputation as the ‘king of body horror’, the moniker isn’t going anywhere. “My films are sui generis,” he’s noted. “It’s the need to sell films that causes this kind of categorisation.” Whether he welcomes the terminology or not, no other film of Cronenberg’s has sold the concept of body horror to a mainstream audience quite like his 1986 adaptation of the sci-fi classic The Fly. It was the Canadian maestro’s first major Hollywood production – albeit made entirely in Toronto – and, until the release of A History of Violence in 2005, the biggest box office hit of his career.

At once operatic and intimate, this classical romantic tragedy sees Jeff Goldblum’s eccentric inventor genetically fused with a housefly during his experiments in teleportation. A gradual process of metamorphosis gets underway, leading to the most extravagant practical effects in the Cronenberg oeuvre. Although The Fly has often been seen as a metaphor for AIDS, its director has never countenanced such readings. “The AIDS connection is very superficial,” he’s said. “I see it as talking about mortality, about our vulnerability, and the tragedy of human loss.” However literally or metaphorically you take it, few films in the body horror canon charge their tales of transformation and disintegration with such heartrending emotional intensity.

Director: J. Michael Muro

There’s some bad firewater on the streets of Greenpoint, Brooklyn in this slime-punk monument to bad taste from director James Muro. Holding prime position on the Mount Rushmore of a body horror subgenre known as the ‘melt’ movie – exactly what you think it is – Street Trash is every bit the product of the tail-end of the Reagan administration. With New York City making headlines as a violent cesspool, what better playground for a gross-out exploitation satire centred on the city’s homeless community?

Scoffing at empathy or compassion for his depraved down and outs, Muro seems happy to include himself in the notion that everyone’s a degenerate on the film’s mean streets. Comeuppance mostly arrives in the form of a corrosive, explosive bootleg hooch being hawked at the local liquor store, but Street Trash throws in some necrophilia and a game of hot potato with a dismembered, um, member for good measure. That the first set-piece – in which one of the homeless characters gloriously dissolves into a luminous sludge of purples, blues and greens – takes place on a toilet says pretty much everything you need to know about this rowdy altar to slapstick and sleaze.

Director: Gregory Lamberson

If even the low-budget Street Trash looks a little polished for your tastes, this determinedly lo-fi melt movie could be just the ticket. Like Street Trash, alcohol serves as the accelerant to bodily disintegration, this time a potent liqueur served to a young artist by his neighbour. He’s just moved into a new apartment block, home to a Rosemary’s Baby-style cabal in thrall to a bloodbath that took place in the building centuries ago. 

Much like The Incredible Melting Man (1977), who picked up a dose of cosmic rot on a trip to Saturn, our tenant protagonist wakes up covered in slime, vomiting green gunk as the flesh begins to drip off his bones. With murderous bloodlust and a craving for Himalayan yoghurt among his extensive list of symptoms, buyer’s remorse on the lease he’s just signed is probably the least of his worries. It all builds to a killer climax that makes cheering use of practical effects. Like Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) before it, Slime City does a lot with a little. What director Gregory Lamberson lacks in Raimi’s formal showmanship, he certainly makes up for in goopy, kindred spirit.

Director: Frank Henenlotter

“This is the start of your new life, Brian. A life without worry or pain or loneliness. A life filled instead with colours and music and euphoria, a life of light and pleasure.” Meet Aylmer, the parasitic creature that has attached itself to Brian’s neck. He’s the naive youth’s personal Mephistopheles, an infernal Jiminy Cricket who introduces him to the pleasure principles of New York’s nightlife, injecting Brian with “juice” to ensure his host provides him with a steady diet of human brains.

It’s a high-concept set-up for a study in addiction as literal as it is metaphorical, albeit one quilted with a psychedelic, expressionist flair that switches from nightmarish melancholia to the knowingly goofy on a dime. The inevitability of Brian’s trajectory is apparent from the first rush of his alien dealer’s influence, as the young man trips out in bed, submerged in a blue pool of Aylmer’s dope. Brain Damage continues the punk tradition of Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer (1979), both fetishised artistic responses to the city’s social decay. Frank Henenlotter certainly knows how to throw together an FX-driven set-piece, disarming budgetary deficiencies with mordant humour. But for all Aylmer’s impish charisma, Brain Damage eschews the perverse positivity Cronenberg usually sees in the parasitic perspective, finding only hopelessness and despair in the drug-addled void.

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

If Shinya Tsukamoto’s chrome-blasted classic doesn’t fit the typical genre template of the horror film, that’s because it doesn’t really fit any genre template at all. Brazenly experimental, it appears to begin with the promise of transhumanism, as a character known only as the ‘Metal Fetishist’ slices open his thigh to insert a metal rod. To make him run faster? The immolated images of track athletes suggest that might be the case. Not that we find out, given he’s soon run over by a car carrying a salaryman and his girlfriend.

In a frenzied bombardment of black-and-white, 16mm images indebted to the industrial landscapes of David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), the Metal Fetishist takes his revenge from beyond the grave, transforming the salaryman into a hybrid of man and machine. But no synopsis can ever do justice to the sheer physicality of Tsukamoto’s direction: an aural and visual cyberpunk assault that includes penetration by power drill. It’s an unyielding nightmare of sexual repression and body dysmorphia taken to extremes of abrasion and putrefaction. Running just 67 minutes, it’s a surrealist masterpiece, and arguably cinema’s ultimate work of body horror.

Director: Philip Brophy

With a title like that, you certainly couldn’t accuse this enthusiastic slice of Ozploitation of false advertising, especially given its director’s academic skin in the body horror game. A shady pharmaceutical company is testing a new drug – “cognition enhancers, designed to take your mind into new intra-phenomenological dimensions” – on a sleepy community in the Melbourne suburbs, disguising it as a vitamin supplement that turns up in the post every day. What starts with a series of hallucinations soon takes a gloopier turn, exemplified by the bloke who dashes into a petrol station and downs a bottle of detergent, tentacles sprouting from his neck.

Body Melt takes a while to warm up, although the slow start includes said tentacular eruption and a Hills Have Eyes-riffing subplot featuring a family of inbred bogans. Not that it could ever have kept pace with the madcap splatterfest of its third act, which kicks off with Neighbours’ Harold Bishop (Ian Smith) as a nefarious doctor called out to deal with a murderous, anthropomorphic placenta rampaging through a pregnant woman’s home. Throw in the requisite melting faces, disembowelments and an exploding dick, and you’re halfway to getting the measure of Body Melt’s larks. Fans of Peter Jackson’s early, funny ones will dig.

Director: John Fawcett

“I get this ache. I thought it was for sex, but it’s to tear everything into fucking pieces.” As body horror metaphors go, equating the anxieties of puberty with creature-feature transformation is a doozy. Ginger Snaps isn’t the first film to associate the high-school experience with the lore of lycanthropy – I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and Teen Wolf (1985) being among the uninspired precedents – but it might just be the first to place a young woman at its centre, connecting the cycles of the moon to those of the female body.

A pair of death-obsessed teens in the Canadian town of Bailey Downs, the Fitzgerald sisters find themselves at the sharp end of a werewolf attack on the night of 16-year-old Ginger’s first period. Cue unwanted hairs, emergent fangs and the nub of a tail. “Comes with the territory!” their grinning guidance counsellor tells them, but younger sister Brigitte has a better idea. “Something’s going on, like more than you being just… female.” John Fawcett’s direction is agreeably efficient, but Karen Walton’s screenplay and Katharine Isabelle’s title performance prove the stars: the former deftly interweaving comedy, horror and tragedy while the latter embodies her coming-of-rage metamorphoses with ferocious physicality.

Director: Julia Ducournau

The most highly garlanded entry in the body horror canon, Julia Ducournau’s Titane was awarded the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. It’s another film that defies easy synopsis, its surprises – particularly when it comes to questions of body horror – best left unspoiled. Suffice to say that it walks a bold line between the visceral intensity of the New French Extremity movement, the sensuality of Claire Denis and the philosophical concerns of David Cronenberg (a fan, apparently).

There are some unforgettable images at play in Titane. On release, debate raged over whether the film’s surface transgressions were just that – surface – but there’s little disputing the control Ducournau exerts over her material. At heart it’s a tender story about loss, love, family and companionship, grounded by a mighty performance from Vincent Lindon, and with an incisive fascination for questions of gender identity and bodily autonomy. Led by a cyclonic Agathe Rousselle, it’s a high-concept horror movie that really swings for the fences.

Director: Jane Schoenbrun

Not every biological horror film features bodies being turned inside out. The only blood you’ll see in this deeply unsettling debut feature from American filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is at the end of teenage Casey’s finger, pricked as part of an internet ritual known as the World’s Fair Challenge. After saying “I want to go to the World’s Fair” three times, drawing blood and wiping it on the screen, Casey awaits her symptoms, which community videos suggest are singular to each individual. One boy grows a tingling fungus on his arm, while a girl posts a recording titled ‘I am turning to plastic’.

Not since Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001) has the digital realm been presented with such creeping dread. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a hyper-contemporary interrogation of the always-online age, told in the language of ASMR and creepypasta. What begins by channelling the aesthetics of the screen-based found footage movie, soon evolves into a disquieting examination of body dysphoria, one that positions the internet as a parasitic extension of our very selves.