10 best body horror movies, ranked
Ewwwww, this list is going to be gross. Like, looking under a rock in your backyard and looking at all the creepy crawlies beneath, except that rock is actually your ribcage and the creepy crawlies are your freaky guts, gross. Having a body is terrifying! Let the 10 best body horror movies of all time prove it.
10. Crimes of the Future (2022)
David Cronenberg is old hat at body horror, responsible for some of the ickiest, stickiest horror films ever smeared across the silver screen. Crimes of the Future 2022—not to be confused with Crimes of the Future 1970—proves that he’s still got it. In the not-so-distant future, humans will have kept right on evolving. One particular man is afflicted with a mutation that causes him to sprout auxiliary organs all across his body. What does he do with them? He has a lady friend surgically remove them in front of a live audience. Performance art at its absolute best, or worst, depending on your sensibilities.
9. I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow eschews the blood and guts the genre is known for to provide an emotional body horror story. What if there was something inexplicably wrong about your existence? What if you discovered that your family, your home, and your body weren’t yours at all? The true horror of the film? Not the discovery itself, but the discovery and then the refusal to do anything about it. I Saw the TV Glow is particularly powerful as a trans allegory, highlighting the discomfort that trans people often experience in their bodies, and the terror that comes with taking the steps towards transition.
8. The Exorcist (1973)
Hot take: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is totally a body horror film. While on its face it’s a freaky tale of demonic possession, the true terror comes from the “parent’s-worst-nightmare” it presents—a sick child. The poor, demon-haunted young Reagan is subjected to a slew of medical tests. She’s poked and prodded with needles, scanned with machines, and subject to a revolving door of utterly stumped physicians. The Exorcist is a metaphor for the terror that accompanies an illness that cannot be diagnosed, and a medical system that offers not hope, but utter despair.
7. Raw (2016)
Julia Ducournau’s Raw is the story of a young veterinary student who, after being hazed by her out-of-control classmates, begins to develop a taste for raw meat. The young woman seeks out fresher and fresher meat and is unable to control her urges for flesh of all sorts, including the human kind. In her quest to satiate her ravenous hunger, she uncovers a long-buried family secret that might explain her condition. However, an explanation and a cure are far from the same thing.
6. Alien (1979)
Ridley Scott’s Alien is a freaky psychosexual nightmare that would make Sigmund Freud himself clutch his pearls. Inspired by the man-banging-machine artworks of H.R. Geiger, Alien is essentially a film about the horrors of sexual violation. After a crew of astronauts accidentally brings an alien parasite aboard their ship, the nasty little bastard keeps trying to insert itself inside them. It’s essentially an hour and a half of watching a dick-shaped extraterrestrial chase human beings around a claustrophobia-inducing tin can. I can’t imagine anything more body-horrible than that.
5. The Thing (1982)
Blegh. Just thinking about John Carpenter’s The Thing makes me want to hurl. If you thought the xenomorph from Alien was bad, wait til you get a load of this monstrosity from beyond the stars. A stunning combination of body and cosmic horror, The Thing revolves around a group of scientists trapped in an antarctic base with a shapeshifting parasite. The Thing is capable of taking the shape of any organic lifeform, including humans. Paranoia rises when the crew begins to suspect that one of them is really an extraterrestrial masquerading as a man. The solution? Kill it with fire.
4. Annihilation (2018)
Inspired by a book of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, Alex Garland’s Annihilation is about a group of scientists sent to investigate a cosmic anomaly called The Shimmer, which is slowly enveloping the earth. Things get weird in the Shimmerverse; DNA breaks down and plants, animals, and fungi all begin to mutate into one another. The freakiness reaches fever pitch at the end of the film when a scientist does a nail-biting ballet with an alien lifeform attempting to wear her skin. I was planning on sleeping tonight, but I think I may have to cancel.
3. The Substance (2024)
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is a film about the horror of aging, and boy is it a doozy. After being fired from her aerobics TV show after her 50th birthday, a woman is offered a laboratory solution to a natural human problem. Taking the titular “substance” will allow her body to turn back its biological clock, transforming her into a younger, better self. A tongue-in-cheek satire, The Substance takes aim at the entertainment industry and the way it chews up those with youth and beauty, only to spit them out once those two qualities are gone.
2. Videodrome (1983)
David Cronenberg’s Videodrome is a Gold Standard body horror film. The story follows a cable station owner named Max, whose channel surfing leads him to discover a terrifying TV broadcast of torture and violence. Max slowly becomes obsessed with his macabre discovery, unable to look away from the nonstop horrors. As he does, his mind and body begin to change. It’s essentially a movie about the human response to car crashes and other such horrors: we simply can’t look away, even though we should.
1. The Fly (1986)
David Cronenberg’s The Fly is … oof. Don’t watch it on a full stomach, or you’ll hurl up your guts just like its unfortunate protagonist. Scientist David Brundle has built a teleportation machine set to revolutionize the world! Sadly, when experimenting on himself, he forgot to check the chamber for contaminants: i.e. a fly. After throwing the switch and teleporting along with the little insect, he and the fly’s genes are spliced together, and he spends the rest of the film slowly mutating into an insectoid horror. It’s shocking, gross, and profoundly tragic.
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