Rebecca L. Willoughby Mother Earth has been pillaged, / Stripped of her life’s blood. / A violation that has awakened / The malevolent spirit. / Seeking the lost, the frail, / And the depraved… (Antlers, 2021) While contemporary audiences are often aware of the wendigo legend as a result of recent films and video games, it is important to […]
James Rose It is the pivotal scene in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1981): moving into their new house, husband Larry (Andrew Robinson) helps the removal men carry the marital mattress up the stairwell while his wife, Julia (Clare Higgins), waits pensively in the bedroom. Barker elegantly cuts back and forth between these two characters and spaces, […]
Brianna M. Anderson On January 7, 2022, David Bennett Sr. became the first living human to receive a genetically modified animal heart. In an experimental procedure, doctors replaced Bennett’s failing heart with one taken from a genetically modified pig engineered by the biotechnology company Revivicor, Inc. Bennett died two months later—potentially from a latent porcine […]
Xavier Aldana Reyes It is a familiar story by now. The same month I delivered the manuscript for Contemporary Body Horror (2024) to my publisher, two films premiered that I wish I had had the opportunity to include in the book: Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024), a co-production between the UK and the US, […]
Kelly Gredner We are no stranger to the violence inflicted upon human bodies when watching horror films. As the story progresses, bodies pile up, bloodied and marred, with the audience watching with trepidation while munching on salty popcorn. We watch people die at the hands of otherworldly creatures such as ghosts, demons, and aliens, entertained […]
Sarah Thompson Few films capture the tensions between scientific ambition and the fragility of the human body quite like The Fly. Released in 1958 and remade by David Cronenberg in 1986, both versions of The Fly are tales of transformation. Each film tells the story of a scientist whose teleportation experiment goes horribly wrong, leading […]
Morgan Pinder “I’m nauseous… It’s progressing… Oh God, it feels awful but it proves that I’m chosen. Don’t you see? How they writhe, writhe inside my head. It’s rather rapturous.” These are the bizarre cries of the imposter Iosefka after being impregnated by eldritch deities known as the Great Ones in FromSoftware Inc.’s 2015 gothic […]
Poulomi Choudhury “Carcass. Cut in half. Stunner. Slaughter line. Spray wash.” With these staccato words and unrelenting images of splicing and splatter, Agustina Bazterrica in Tender is the Flesh (2020, translated from the Spanish, Cadáver Exquisito by Sarah Moses) begins a narrative in which institutionalised cannibalism has become the norm. The novel depicts a dystopian […]
Kelly Ferguson Readers of Carmen Maria Machado’s 2017 short story “Real Women Have Bodies” (of Her Body and Other Parties) would most likely not categorize it as pertaining to the body horror subgenre. Keeping in mind that the body horror subgenre often conjures images of Frankenstein-like monsters, writhing human bodies contaminated by alien forces, and, […]