Plague of Strength

This was intended to be the first of the lighter, less formal, and less-relatable-to-training and dieting fare I’ll be putting out for the people supporting the Patreon, but at the repeated requests of someone in the horror film industry to get this the fuck from behind a paywall, I did so and replaced it with a review of the slasher-flick-masquerading-as-an-action-flick Rambo: Last Blood.

This wasn’t intended to be the type of heady stuff I put out as a general rule, but I ended up overdoing it like I overdo everything and it ended up being far more awesome than expected. And should you think body horror has nothing to do with lifting, you’re dead wrong. Enjoy.

To the uninitiated, damn near anything could be called body horror, since most horror involves someone getting fucked up somehow. That, however, is not what body horror is- body horror is generally much, much more disgusting, squishy, slimy, sound-effect-laden, and grotesque than your typical horror fare. It’s the type of depraved shit that makes your mouth pre-puke-water as you squirm in your seat while watching it- the type of shit of which real nightmares are made.

To be a bit more precise, body horror is a subgenre of horror that focuses on highly graphic violations of or transformations in the human body. We’re not talking about simply shit like having your fingernails ripped off- we’re talking about the worst fears you could possibly have writ large on the page or screen in great and extremely gory detail. The changes can occur in a variety of ways, ranging from sex (and graphic sex generally plays a role in body horror anyway), to mutations, mutilation, zombification, wild-eyed and brutal violence, and disease. Though the genre title was coined in 1983 in reference to David Cronenberg’s films, the genre’s existed since the 19th century in fiction- Frankenstein is considered to be the first example of body horror in fiction, though Kafka’s The Metamorphosis likely had the most influence on the modern incarnation.

“By focusing on the body as a locus of fear, Shelley’s novel suggests that it is people (or at least bodies) who terrify people… the landscape of fear is replaced by sutured skin.”

I first started reading hardcore horror, which was at that point called “splatterpunk,” in the late 1990s. At that point, I was deep into the Japanese body horror flicks that were popular at the time, but none of the films hit me like the fiction did. Though I haven’t been able to find the story since, I read a story about a chick obsessed with mermaids, who believed they lived in the sewers of New York City. She’d descend into the sewers looking for her kindred spirits, then would slice up her legs with razors and pack the slits with fish scales. At one point she went so far as to sew her legs together (which the Soska Sisters’ body horror gem American Mary reminded me of) and try to graft the fish skin onto her legs herself, and the story ended (as I recall) with her hallucinating about living as a happy mermaid, swimming in sewage among her fellow fish people as she died of sepsis. That story actually disturbed me to the point I put it down a number of times, because profoundly mentally ill people make me intensely uncomfortable, but eventually I accepted it for the literal fish out of water story it was and was duly impressed with the writer’s skill in describing the grotesque.

If you’re familiar with Japanese horror, you likely note the similarities between that story and Mermaid in the Manhole, the fourth film in that shit-dog Japanese Guinea Pig series. I might enjoy gross shit, but I can’t say I am a fan of the casual, lackadaisical cruelty that makes up all of Japanese history and much of their horror cinema. I’ll get into the Japanese shit I like in a minute, but as a general rule the Japanese people themselves typically don’t fall within that category.

In any event ,I have run the gamut over the years from a stepped-up version of Anne Rice in the form of Poppy Z. Brite (who I was just surprised to discover was born a man but is gender fluid as a motherfucker) to Clive Barker to Edward Lee to the unparalleled Jeremy Robert Johnson, much of whose work is the absolute pinnacle of body horror fiction. I’ve read short stories, the fairly crappy novella that kicked off the splatterpunk genre to badass alien invasion science fiction and everything in between. The list that follows are some of the highlights I can recall- I read at least 20 novels a year in addition to the non-fiction I’m constantly ripping through, and in college I read a novel a week, at least. As such, I’ve forgotten the names of far more books than I can possibly recall over the course of the last 25 years.

My fascination with the genre is likely one we all share, being that we are avid body modification artists- make no mistake that the desire to transform your body from a fatass to a jacked-ass or a skinny bitch into a bulky bitch is nothing but body modification, maybe with a bit of battling against aging thrown in. Our desire to transform our bodies could be labelled anything from an outgrowth of self-loathing to a realization of self worth- I am not a psychologist and don’t pretend to be. What I do know is that what we do is an corollary of an innate desire to effect profound physical, emotional, and mental changes on ourselves.

The opposite side of the coin, then, is body horror. In an interview with Dazed, David Cronenberg said the following about The Fly:

“In the movie I co-wrote and directed of George Langelaan’s short story “The Fly”, I have our hero, Seth Brundle, played by Jeff Goldblum, say while deep in the throes of transformation into a hideous fly/human hybrid, “I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake.” He is warning his former lover that he is now a danger to her, a creature with no compassion and no empathy. He has shed his humanity like the shell of a cicade nymph, and what has emerged is no longer human. He is also suggesting that to be a human, a self-aware consciousness, is a dream that cannot last, an illusion. Gregor also has trouble clinging to what is left of his humanity, and as his family begins to feel that this thing in Gregor’s room is no longer Gregor, he begins to feel the same way. But unlike Brundle’s fly self, Gregor’s beetle is no threat to anyone but himself, and starves and fades away like an afterthought as his family revels in their freedom from the shameful, embarrassing burden that he has become.

When The Fly was released in 1986, there was much conjecture that the disease that Brundle had brought on himself was a metaphor for Aids. Certainly I understood this – Aids was on everybody’s mind as the vast scope of the disease was gradually being revealed. But for me, Brundle’s disease was more fundamental: in an artificially accelerated manner, he was aging. He was a consciousness that was aware that is was a body that was mortal, and with acute awareness and humour participated in that inevitable transformation that all of us face, if only we live long enough” (Lack).

For people with the sort of pathological control issues that hard trainers have about their appearance and performance, having that control suddenly wrest from us and making us the unwilling passenger in a body that is no longer our own is doubly or triply horrifying. Not only in form, but in function, we could become the total opposite of what we’ve aspired to be, through no fault of our own. That is truly horrifying, in my opinion.

Books

Although literary scholars maintain that Frankenstein and Herbert West- Reanimator were really the progenitors of the genre, I don’t think true body horror began until Kafka dropped The Metamorphosis. That was the first true body horror in my opinion, and In the Penal Colony is probably the progenitor of the torture porn genre that’s become popular with shit like Saw and Hostel. Now that I think of it, Kafka might actually be the most important early horror author of whom I can think, although he is rarely credited as such.

Infected by Scott Siglar

This is a series of three books, though the only one I remember at all was the first. Infected chronicles the opening stages of a sort of rage virus/zombie pandemic set off by a bioengineered parasite. The metamorphosis the people infect undergo is pretty gnarly, though if I’m honest the thing that stands out most is that they have a tremendously un-gross or -scary triangular iris. In any event, it blows Robin Cook’s descriptions of people cracking and bleeding out out of the fucking water (though I swore Outbreak was written by Michael Crichton), and it’s a really easy into to the genre if you’re not ready to get elbows deep into the guts of your own squishy, sloppy, psychological disgust. Plus, Siglar’s grasp on the feelings of being disaffected definitely spoke to me, and likely will to you.

“Despair filled his skull even more tightly than his own brain. All around him cars filled with normal people perfectly unaware of the disease turning Perry’s body inside out. Fucking normal people.” 

“I Am the Doorway” by Stephen King (Night Shift)

This was probably the first body horror I ever read, and it’s one of Stephen King’s first short stories. This badass body horror is about the physical transformations of a disabled astronaut after he’s infected with an alien mutagen after a Venus flyby. I distinctly recall reading this in my middle school’s library and then rereading it over and over at home listening to Geto Boys, NWA, and Motley Crue. Not the wettest or the gnarliest body horror, it is still a sick transformation sequence that had to have inspired Cronenberg’s films a few years later, which means this story is absolutely critical to the genre.

“His head .. it exploded. As if someone had scooped out his brains and put a hand grenade in his skull.” 

The Cannibal Within by Mark Mirabello

This novella is one of the single most disturbing pieces of horror fiction I’ve ever read- it’s rivaled only by JF Gonzalez’s Survivor and some of JRJ’s short stories for gnarliness and lingering feelings of unease. Like the other two, you genuinely feel badly for rubbing one out to elements of this story, because the crux of it is that a clan of humans retreated underground to create this biological factory of demons, essentially through torture, inbreeding, scat, mutilation, forced impregnation, and every other horrible keyword you could find in my search history for erotica on ASSTR. Body horror isn’t really central to the story, but it’s a persistent feature in this splatterpunk gem.

“Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness.”

Entropy in Bloom by Jeremy Robert Johnson

The stories in Jeremy Robert Johnson’s books We Live Inside You and Angel Dust Apocalypse range in quality from weird essays on his love of party drugs to the most brutal, gut-wrenching body horror you have ever read, and he piled all of those into Entropy in Bloom (which was cool because trade paperbacks are fucking expensive). A couple of them was inspired by a series of gnarly, sloppy, hyper-vivid depictions of the world gone bad, and the best of them is set in a metal hospital in a dystopic future. A heroin-addicted nurse is paid in drugs to “reform” a serial killer with a serious infantilism fetish, which she does by making him live as the “baby” he always wanted to be. She nurses him from her own poison-filled, saggy tits and then stuffs him into an incubator over and over. He’s continually reborn, told by his mommy nurse to think hard about being the perfect boy for her, and becomes progressively more grotesque, but never enough that she thinks she’ll win the favor of the hospital’s administrators. It’s messy as a backwoods truck stop bathroom, bloody as a 19th century abattoir, and nastier than an overflowing Portapotty.

If that isn’t enough to get your dick or ladydick throbbing, there’s another great body horror story that is literally a world in which people with the most insane body modifications are the most famous people on the planet. We’re talking a chick with no lips trying to drink coffee in a coffee shop, liquid spilling down her chest without a care in the world, is the “hot” chick in the coffee bar, but nothing spectacular in the grand scheme of things- she’s a coffee bar 10 but an LA 6, as it were. It gets far, far nastier from there. You need this fucking book.

“Instead I saw a fresh colostomy bag hanging from the side of his belly, “SHIT HAPPENS” written on the plastic in black felt-tip.”

Movies

I’ve no idea how deep Cronenberg’s roots go with most people, because he turned his back on horror years ago and just started making weird thrillers like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Though he’s known known for naked fistfights and borderline rape (but hot-as-fuck) sex scenes, David Cronenberg is considered to be the father of cinematic body horror because of his films Shivers (which is currently on Shudder), Rabid, The Brood, and his remake of Vincent Price’s The Fly. Of those four, I think the Fly is the only one worth watching, but feel free to check them all out if you want to be thorough and enjoy late 70s films with that weird orange-red blood

He went on to make weird shit like Videodrome, which was filled with psychotropic body horror, and Scanners, which I wouldn’t quite classify as body horror but some do, but all of these films placed an earbug in the directors to come after him, and body horror definitely became a common theme. Body horror in films seems to come in a few basic varieties- Japanese biomech, parasitism, decay, and mutations.

Japanese Biomech

I’ve no idea if this genre is still terribly active, but it was a big deal in the 90s. There were prostitutes with saw-toothed vaginas, dudes with drill dicks, and every sort of grotesque amalgam of human and machine you can imagine. The Japanese have always been supremely fucked up when it comes to their sexual peccadilloes (when they had them, that is- now they’re a nation of eunuchs), but the machine sex thing is especially weird. I’ve seen a shitload of these things, ranging from Battlefield Baseball to Robogeisha to Tokyo Gore Police, Yakuza Weapon, hell, even Vampire Girl vs Frankengirl Vs. Frankenstein Girl, and they’ll hold your attention for sure.

If I’m honest, they’re little more than gory versions of the Power Rangers, and are good only in a “holy fuck I am too hungover to operate a remote so I’ll watch this” sort of way, but for that, they’re highly entertaining.

Tetsuo I, II, III

Although I don’t know that I would call these good, these movies are seminal in the field of Japanese metal fetishists and techno-organic mutants body horror. The first is about a metal fetishist and his girlfriend just ramming metal into their bodies until they fused with the metal and became weird cyborg things, then died of infection as maggots writhed in their flesh. The second one was a guy whose daughter was killed by metal fetishists, so he becomes one to avenge her, and I honestly don’t recall the third’s premise beyond it getting into the TGP gundam biomech thing. They’re weird enough to watch if you’ve eaten a bunch of edibles and your ass has grown roots, I suppose.

Tokyo Gore Police

This ridiculous nonsense involves a Japanese schoolgirl with a samurai sword (because that’s a trope in Japan for some reason), a snake arm, and a cybernetic eye battling techno-organic monsters called Engineers in a futuristic Tokyo filled with self-mutilating lunatics, casual cruelty, and general kiddy-fucking weirdness that makes Japan such a terrible fucking place. It’s gory, campy, and weirdly hypersexual for a movie that focuses on a chick who was ostensibly a teenager (though she was in fact over thirty, oddly enough). If you want bizarre eye candy to play in the background at a party you’re hosting that might end in some sort of group sex, this is a decent film for that.

Parasitism

The Ruins

One of my all-time favorite horror movies, this is a gem few enough people have seen, but everyone should. A group of college kids go to an off-the-map temple in Mexico and get trapped there as the natives won’t let them leave, because the ruins are home to some seriously evil fucking plants- they infect the people in the ruins, and grow inside them. There is a scene in which a chick is using a knife to dig in her leg for vines growing in it, shown above, that is one of the most gnarly self-mutilation scenes you’ll ever see on film.

Rabid (2019)

Having seen the original, I wasn’t super excited about this one, but I threw it on while eating breakfast one day on a lark. I had to turn it off to finish eating. It’s better in every possible way, being the brainchild of the super-twisted and generally amazing Soska Sisters (who were behind American Mary, another awesome body horror film). Their spin on Cronenberg’s original is brutal, squishy, filled with hot chicks, psychologically disturbing, and ultimately incredible, even including a serious nod to HR Giger. You’d be doing yourself a serious disservice not to watch this flick.

The streaming version isn’t available on Amazon until Feb, which is why I linked the UK Amazon, where it is inexplicably available now.

Decay

When one thinks of decay films, the Contracted films likely spring to mind, which I frankly found dull and uninspired. Decay films can get far nastier than those flicks, and here are some of my favorites.

Whether or not you like gore, the idea of hyper-accelerated rot prior to actual death has to be terrifying for anyone who trains. To the Cheetos-munching couchslug, it’s likely how they expect to go- the sores festering under their panniculus will eventually turn necrotic, and unless mom and dad come down and force wash their fat, Fortnite playing asses with a powerwasher and Comet, they’re likely just going to die of sepsis after posting their coup de grace of right wing redpill trash on Reddit and 4chan. That would actually make for the least sympathetic protagonist in a decay movie ever filmed, should anyone care to make that- it’d be the first time people in a theater actually wanted the protagonist to suffer more before death finally took them into its cold embrace.

Cabin Fever

If you haven’t seen the original Cabin Fever, you’re missing a true gem. This was Eli Roth’s breakout film, about kids who catch some kind of hemorrhagic fever while vacationing in a cabin in the woods. It’s got sick practical gore effects, amazing sound effects, seriously impressive acting performances out of bit actors, and a decent amount of black comedy. Knowing you’re likely going to start sloughing off your own skin and waiting for help that never comes as you watch for the first sores to appear is a fucking brutal concept.

Thanatomorphose

This is the Godzilla of decay films. Forget those bullshit Contracted flicks- they’re PG-13 garbage compared to this stomach-churning masterpiece of disgust. The disease mechanism and source is unclear, but a shut-in in a crazy abusive relationship somehow starts rotting. Instead of seeking medical attention, she just locks herself in her house and decays slowly. Her bf comes over for one last fuck (which goes poorly for him) and the movie wraps up with her dissolving. That’s not a spoiler- there is literally no other way that thing was going to go.

It’s depressing and seriously fucking gross. Is it a must watch? Absolutely not- watching someone rot for 90 minutes is sort of dull and thoroughly depressing, but the effects are amazing, both sound and practical.

I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain

This is another you will hear about nowhere else- a VHS “gem” of dubious quality, but without question the most depressing shit I’ve seen not named The Elephant Man or Johnny’s Got a Gun. It chronicles a guy who gets bitten by a zombie and then cloisters himself in a boarding house, hiding from his girlfriend, whom he misses terribly as he decays and changes slowly. He tries to jerk off to her picture and ends up just ripping his dick off and weeping a lot, and eats some people and buries their remains in the home’s garden.

Like that aforementioned flick, this is soul-crushing and gross, but not really a must watch unless you’re in the mood for soul crushing and gross. Seriously, this is a movie I almost regret watching because it was that unpleasant from an emotional standpoint, which is an odd admission for me to make. That said, I saw this movie twenty years ago and I still have a viscerally unpleasant reaction to the preview, so it was far from forgettable.

Mutations

Frankly, thee are all sorts of movies I could include in here, but I wanted to clue you into two flicks that never get mentioned and are fucking amazing. They’re both sexually driven, since mutated sex organs seem to terrify the shit out of people, and they’re a fun watch with or without your pants on. You won’t see these movies recommended anywhere else, because I doubt anyone is sick enough to watch both of them in the same week besides myself.

Pervert!

Cheesier than your local cheesemonger’s diet and sporting enough ridiculous bloodsprays to rival Kill Bill, this movie about a detachable killer dick almost couldn’t get better, until you see it stars former California gubernatorial candidate and gorgeous throwback porn star Mary Carey. This film is an absolute masterpiece, and it should be required viewing for anyone with a pulse, a sense of humor, and an appreciation for awesome tits.

Additionally, it has the single greatest movie poster of all time, which adorned my walls for a decade until I lost it in a flooded storage unit during a move.

Bad Biology

Take a twenty-something couple. Make them serial killers. The dude has a dick-turned-weapon on steroids and GH, and his girl is a hot-as-fuck chick with a lot of hypersensistive clits who conceives and births a mutant baby whenever she cums (then throws them in a dumpster). Then add in Jedi Mind Tricks, a ton of gore, and Gen X nihilism and you get the masterpiece that is Bad Biology. This flick and I are two of the greatest sex-filled horror comedies in the history of cinema. Fuck watching Teeth– you need these flicks in your life.

A Couple Suggestions from People in the Industry

Peter Warren, writer and producer (Ghost Team): It was a bitch to get him to just stop naming every fucking body horror film ever filmed, because the man is an encyclopedia of horror films. He finally narrowed it down to Basket Case, Tusk (which incidentally starred Justin Long, who was also the star of Ghost Town), and Rabid (1977). The former is a Frank Hennenlotter classic (his films were the inspiration for my last two suggestions, along with Russ Meier) about a dude and his murderous formerly conjoined twin, who he carries around in a wicker basket. Tusk is a truly disturbing Kevin Smith flick about a podcaster who gets tortured and maimed by a guy he is trying to interview as the guy transforms him into a fucking walrus. The latter is one of the OG body horror films and the inspiration for the Soska Sisters remake, though the premise is somewhat different- a woman played by real life porn star Marilyn Chambers gets a blood transplant that turns her into a vampire with stinger tentacles coming out of her armpits.

Cara Brennan, lightweight strongwoman and creater of Asher the Series (who I recently interviewed here): “I definitely love oldschool stuff like Alien (chest burster) and one of my faves is the Thing – what amazing use of great practical FX amplified by genius psychological drama. While Prometheus wasn’t great overall, the alien pregnancy was one of the scariest things ever, especially as a chick. That was absolutely brilliant in its terror.

So there you have it- a shitload of suggestions for shit that will make your skin crawl and drive your family screaming out of the house so you can get some goddamned peace and quiet this holiday season. Being the people we are, facing the fact we’re going to get old is bad enough, never mind getting crippled, or fat. But having our bodies turn into a literal nightmarescape from which there is no escape is a horror that will truly haunt us forever… which is why it’s such a dope genre for us. You’ve gotta face your fears in order to overcome them, right? So grab a barf bag and get elbows-deep into the rancid guts of body horror, because anything less would be lame as fuck.

Sources:

Lack, Hannah.  David Cronenberg on The Metamorphosis.  Dazed.  19 Feb 2014.  Web.  29 Nov 2019.  https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/18932/1/david-cronenberg-on-metamorphosis

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!