Videodrome
1983 · Canada/USA · 89m
Obscurity: canon. watchable legallyLong live the new flesh. Cronenberg's prophecy about media, the body, and a chest that opens.
Body horror
1975–1992 · 15 films catalogued
The flesh betrays itself. Mostly early Cronenberg, and mostly disgusting on purpose.
Horror in which the threat is the body itself: mutation, infection, transformation, the collapse of the boundary between organism and disease, or organism and machine. Distinct from splatter, which is gore for spectacle. Body horror is gore with a thesis, and the thesis is that you are meat.
The one name
David Cronenberg is the genre, at least at the start. Shivers (1975) fills an apartment tower with a sexually transmitted parasite; Rabid (1977) gives Marilyn Chambers a blood-feeding stinger; The Brood (1979) externalises rage as physical offspring; Videodrome (1983) and Scanners (1981) push the flesh-and-media obsession further. His clinical, unhysterical tone is what separates body horror from a gross-out.
The others
Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and From Beyond bring a Lovecraftian version. Brian Yuzna's Society (1989) turns the class metaphor literal in a finale of melting rich people. Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Brain Damage) does the grimy New York strain. Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo is the Japanese industrial version.
Why it is its own thing
Splatter wants to make you flinch; body horror wants to make you uneasy about being alive in a body at all. The best of it is closer to Kafka than to Friday the 13th.
Where to start
Videodrome for the ideas, Society for the finale, The Brood for the dread.
Body horror films on file
All 15 Body horror films →
Scanners
1981 · Canada · 103m
Obscurity: known. watchable legally. banned somewhereThe exploding head made Cronenberg bankable. The film around it is smarter than that scene.
Shivers
1975 · Canada · 87m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyCronenberg's debut. A phallic parasite turns a luxury apartment tower into an orgy of the infected.
The Brood
1979 · Canada · 92m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyCronenberg turns a divorce into monsters. Rage made flesh, and it is about his own custody battle.
From Beyond
1986 · USA/Italy · 85m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyStuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs do Lovecraft again. A machine that lets you see what should stay unseen.
Basket Case
1982 · USA · 91m
Obscurity: known. watchable legally$35,000, shot on 42nd Street, and completely charming. The best kind of cheap.
Rabid
1977 · Canada/USA · 87m
Obscurity: known. watchable legally. banned somewhereCronenberg gives Marilyn Chambers a blood-feeding stinger. Montreal falls apart around her.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man
1989 · Japan · 67m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallySixty-seven minutes of industrial nightmare. Nothing else looks like it.
Society
1989 · USA/Japan · 99m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyA teen suspects his rich family are not human. The finale proves it, wetly.
Cemetery Man
1994 · France/Italy · 92m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyA cemetery caretaker shoots the returning dead and falls in love repeatedly. Beautiful and deranged.
Frankenhooker
1990 · USA · 85m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyA man rebuilds his dead girlfriend from the parts of exploded sex workers. Exactly that stupid, and great.
Tokyo Gore Police
2008 · Japan · 109m
Obscurity: cult. watchable legallyThe Japanese splatter movement at full arterial pressure, from the man who built it.
Brain Damage
1988 · USA · 84m
Obscurity: cult. watchable legallyA parasite gives a young man euphoric highs in exchange for feeding it brains. Addiction as horror.
The Boxer's Omen
1983 · Hong Kong · 105m
Obscurity: obscure. watchable legallyThe most deranged thing Shaw Brothers ever paid for, and it never slows down to explain itself.
The Twilight People
1972 · Philippines · 81m
Obscurity: deep cut. watchable legallyThe cheapest Island of Doctor Moreau ever committed to film, and one of the most watchable.