Illustration by Kelsey Wroten for Bitch Media. The image is an illustration of a women with bobbed hair and a defiant expression holding up a hand as her arms and torso crumble away.
Body horror is my least favorite genre of horror films, but I love this article from Bitch Media (available online and in the “Blood and Guts” issue): “A New Wave of Body-Horror Films Focuses On Women” by Tammy Oler, who writes about eight films from the 2010s that use “the subgenre to explore harrowing relationships between women and their bodies, confronting us with the grim reality that our ideas of body image may be more fraught than ever.”
I’ve seen a number of body-horror films through my film classes (CALM DOWN DAVID CRONENBERG, NO ONE IS GOING TO STEAL YOUR MANLY FLY HAIRS OK), I don’t seek them out. That said, dissecting how the subgenre is shifting and changing and how the (often women) characters relate to their bodies as the genre experiences a boom is critical.
Unlike more conventional horror films, which generally offer a sense of thrill and catharsis when a heroic protagonist vanquishes some type of monster, body-horror films usually end with the protagonist being subsumed or destroyed (or becoming the monster). The power of body horror is that it dares to give expression to fears that we really don’t want to see and that we’re not sure we can actually overcome. There’s a sense of relief in seeing these images onscreen and a power in acknowledging their existence.
I’m not sure if I’ll end up watching any of these because of my body-horror squick, but if you’ve seen them, please comment! Read the full article here.
Note: article contains some spoilers for the films and description of a variety of body horror tropes.
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