The surprise success of Terrifier 3 in cinemas this month – with stories of underage viewers buying tickets to family fare and sneaking into the low-budget gorefest instead – underlines a constant in the mutable horror genre: people will never lose their morbid fascination with the worst possible things that can happen to our bodies. Or the worst impossible things, which is where body horror cinema comes in: the terror of our natural anatomical order becoming, well, unnaturally disordered.
French film-maker Coralie Fargeat, meanwhile, plays on our fear of natural and unnatural bodily deterioration in her swaggering, supersized horror-comedy The Substance (Mubi), a satire on Hollywood ageism that is as broad as a dual carriageway but has enough blunt-force impact to have kept divided audiences talking since its cinema release last month. It cannily makes its streaming debuton 31 October, conveniently sorting out many a Halloween movie night. I found the film overlong and conceptually thin, but there’s gusto in Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s dual performances as chemically warring inhabitants of one has-been star’s body, and in its extravagantly disgusting vision of just how far the ageing process can be simultaneously reversed, accelerated and contorted.
Fargeat’s compatriot Julia Ducournau, meanwhile, introduced a sleek, chic new strain of arthouse body horror with her 2016 debut Raw, a coolly poised, grimly funny tale of a vegetarian student acquiring a taste for human flesh. She doubled down on it five years later with her Palme d’Or-winning provocation Titane, a less disciplined but enthralling collision of mechanophilia, gender confusion and steroid abuse, fusing skin and steel to unsettling effect.
Fargeat and Ducournau are bringing a welcome injection of female perspective to a genre that has hitherto been heavily male-dominated, with David Cronenberg, of course, still the reigning king of body horror cinema. A whole column could be devoted to his visceral innovations in this department – indeed, I did just that a couple of years back – so I’ll single out Videodrome (1983) for its stomach-churning physical allegory for media mind control, and his dazzling B-movie remake The Fly for its more accessibly populist vision of bodily mutation in the name of science, with some of the most exquisitely repulsive creature effects ever put on screen. Cronenberg’s son, Brandon, has inherited the freaky gene: his gorgeous, vicious 2020 film Possessor, featuring an astonishing performance by Christopher Abbott as a man fighting his corporeal invasion by Andrea Riseborough’s shapeshifting assassin, surely made the old man proud.
For many fans of the genre, however, the true soul of body horror lies in grimier, scrappier films that gained their cults in the grainy days of VHS. Stuart Gordon’s gleefully gross Re-Animator (1985; Apple), in which a medical student revives dead bodies to increasingly anarchic effect, or the lurid class satire Society, directed by Re-Animator’s producer Brian Yuzna, in which a teenager begins to suspect that his wealthy family is not entirely of his kind.
Society’s persecution of the poor also comes in for scrutiny in J Michael Muro’s Street Trash (BFI Player), a grisly tale of a grotesque method of eliminating homeless people that remains a touchstone of the self-explanatory “melt movie” subgenre. Frank Henenlotter made a name for himself as the mad lord of blackly comic body horror in the early 80s with his cheerfully twisted conjoined-twin saga Basket Case and his genuinely gnarly talking-parasite nightmare Brain Damage (Arrow), before his career turned more towards film preservation, saving the works of demented visionaries such as him.
Ken Russell, already established across other genres as a true artist of bad taste, made rather an elegant stab at the genre with Altered States (1980), an expensive pseudoscience head trip in which a psychopathologist’s experiments with sensory deprivation take a transformative turn. As body horror, it’s on the restrained end of the scale; as an audiovisual explosion, there’s nothing quite like it. But for sheer, concentrated extremity, Shinya Tsukamoto’s coruscating, technically ingenious Tetsuo: The Iron Man can’t be beaten. The story of two men who find themselves metallically mutating, and sexually fascinated by their transformation, it runs to just 67 minutes, and your eyes wouldn’t want it any longer.
All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified.
Also new on streaming and DVD
In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon Alex Gibney’s three-and-a-half-hour exploration of Paul Simon’s career is as expansive as its subject demands and its running time promises. No great innovations or revelations here, but fans will be held rapt by the detailed investigation of the singer-songwriter’s artistry.
It Ends With Us Colleen Hoover’s novel about a love triangle buffeted by abuse and childhood trauma has a huge and ardent following, and Justin Baldoni’s earnest film version makes no attempt to persuade the uninitiated. Blake Lively’s protagonist is a florist called Lily Bloom, and if that alone makes you smirk, this one’s not for you.
Late Night With the Devil Another timely Halloween release, this resourceful indie horror from Australian brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes cleverly riffs on found-footage tropes in its depiction of demonic possession on a late-night talkshow episode from the 1970s. It’s more canny and creepy than fully terrifying, but it’s a worthy selection for a fright-night marathon.
Sky Peals (BFI) Sombre social realism edges into dreamy, lo-fi science fiction in Moin Hussain’s atmospheric debut feature, in which a young, depressive Pakistani-British service station worker begins to suspect that he might not be entirely of this world. A pointed allegory for mixed-race alienation in modern Britain.
