Body horror

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.