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, […]
Carrie Syme “Just because people eat the burger doesn’t mean they wanna meet the cow.” The Island (2005) Fans who cut their horror teeth around the turn of the millennium often share a very specific understanding of “body horror.” In some of the most infamous films of that era, from Audition (1999) to Hostel (2005) […]
Harry Gay Thermal imaging and infrared technology have been around since 1929, but have seen increased usage in the last 50 years as commercial and industrial applications have expanded. Used largely in the fields of security and medicine, thermographic cameras have been teasing their use in the cinematographers toolbox in the last decade, with filmmakers […]