One of the more intriguing sub-genres in filmmaking is transformation horror. It not only terrifies you with its visual prowess, but it also excites you with its mentally twisted demeanour. At first, the unknown beast is depicted in graphically revolting ways. Then, just as you’re about to recover, the fear of losing control of your body, a sense of losing your identity, throws your mind into a pit of terror..
These films deal with something more terrifying than death as the final assault: the terror of living as an undead or a monster. The works of David Cronenberg have demonstrated that the sub-genre is not for the faint of heart.
He made a succession of gruesome and gut-wrenching films, such as The Fly and Shiver, that were drenched in fear. If Cronenberg hadn’t introduced us to his classics that brought body change to the level of biological terror, we would have been a decade or two behind.
Yet, such topics were uncommon in fiction; Mary Shelley authored Frankenstein in the early nineteenth century, and then came H.P. Lovecraft, the pioneer of cosmic and body horror.
We won’t talk about obvious selections like The Fly or John Carpenter’s The Thing in this video because we’ve already covered them in prior episodes, and instead we’ll focus on films that need to be rewatched from the perspective of body-transformation-horror.
Bite (2015)
Casey’s bachelorette trip takes her to Costa Rica with her pals Jill and Kirsten. She is bitten by an out-of-this-world bug while swimming in a secluded area. Casey ignores the bite and returns home, only to discover that her body has undergone a series of transformations, including weaving webs, excreting a plethora of eggs from her vagina, and spewing chitinous fluids from her oral and other cavities.
It is a grose gooey galore. Bite is known to have made people nauseous at the screenings, and the makers of the film decided to distribute Barf-Bags. Throw-up bags were common for films like Wrong Turn and The Hills Have Eyes, but who would have expected an indie picture like this to reach the same levels of horrendous disturbance?
After the first ten minutes, viewers are taken on a gore ride. Casey transforms into a humanoid bug, and the gradual metamorphosis is filmed with explicit details. There’s no stopping the infectious insect from taking over Casey’s body and mind.
From developing puss-filled wounds to laying thousands of larvae from her vagina and coughing up mushy poisonous substances, there’s everything in here. The malicious bug doesn’t just change Casey- it also turns her entire house into a hive!
To generate crystal-clear pictures of the insect humanoid, top-notch practical effects and great work from cameraman Jeff Maher combine. Despite the disturbing sights, one cannot but sympathise with Casey, who was terrified of marrying, having children, and creating a family only to discover that she no longer has one. The makers left the possibility of a sequel open in the climax, and we’re guessing it’ll bite even harder if it hits theatres.
Splinter (2008)
Polly, an adventurer, insists on going camping with her scientific lover Seth to celebrate their anniversary. Seth reluctantly agrees, and they set out on their journey. When they proceed to pitch their tent, they are accosted by Dennis, a fugitive from prison, and Lacey, his drug-addicted lover.
They carjack Seth and Polly and hold them at gunpoint. Polly drives the car and collides with a dog-like animal on the road; Lacey and Seth see that the flattened bodyparts begin to move, exposing it to be a fungal parasite that infects the tranquil town’s animals and humans, turning them into zombies with splinters growing on their bodies.
They become blood-hungry zombies and kill anything that moves. The four of them must forget their differences and work as a unit to outsmart the thorny-virus and its victims.
Writers Ian Shorr and Kai Barry did not waste time beating around the origin and explanation of the viral parasite that infects its victims and takes control of their bodies, so much so that even when the bodyparts are mutilated, they ensemble and attack in their own capacity.
Splinter is not as exploitative as the other films featured on this list, but it is adorned with its own charm. With great acting and a well-written script, the film successfully gives an adequate number of screams and chills for all the gorehounds.
There’s a scene in which a character’s arms are mutilated with a knife no larger than a paper cutter. Another person’s upper torso is separated from her body, but it later joins together to become a kill-machine.
The characters are not obliged to do anything stupid and combat the creature with their intellect and guts in an appreciably short length of 82 minutes. As a result, Spliner is remarkably realistic, and Shea Whigham , Paulo Costanzo, and Jill Wagner, who play Dennis, Seth, and Polly, respectively, deserve special mention.
Contracted (2013)
BJ rapes a corpse with a ‘biohazard’ tag on its toe in a mortuary. After that, he goes to a house party and roofies and rapes a female named Samantha. Samantha wakes up the next morning with extensive vaginal flow and rashes.
She sees a doctor, who believes she has contracted a sexually transmitted infection. Samantha’s health continues to deteriorate, and her body begins to morph into something evil and horrible. She loses friends and tries to spread the disease to others.
In terms of the uncomfortable, Contracted begins high, goes low, and gradually reaches the same height in a sequence of gut-churning events. The assault on a biohazardous corpse is where the film begins, and sex continues to be the dominating theme.
The film was shot with a very low budget but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise fordirectorEric England. He went ahead with practical and visual effects that only raise the ick factor.
As a body transformation horror due to infections, there is grim gore. The day after the assault, Samantha’s morning begins with her white bed and clothes drenched in vaginal blood. The decay continues with her eyes becoming animalistic, with unusually bright red pupils.
She loses chunks of hair, and her teeth fall off while brushing. She sheds maggots out of her crotch while making love. Throughout, she has been ejecting blood and other fluids from her mouth. Surprisingly, her body is deteriorating at the same rate as her mind. She begins to lose her mind and gets increasingly violent. She kills her pal by devouring her throat in one of the scenarios.
England combines this with social themes that young people may relate to, such as self-deception and denial. Samantha’s deterioration and eventual death are symptomatic of a larger issue.
Afflicted (2013)
Derek and Clif are best friends who resolve to tour the world and live each day as if it were their last. Derek has an arteriovenous malformation, which means he could die at any time.
The two pals make a pit stop in Barcelona, where Derek tells Audrey about his illness. Clif discovers Derek has been bitten and is drenched in blood after the two of them have a one-night encounter.
Derek then develops sunburns and grows superhuman strength and stamina over the course of the next three days. Derek beats someone only to lick their blood off his hands when the pals get into a quarrel. Clif is now sure that Derek was afflicted with vampirism by Audrey, and hewill have to find her as she is the only one who can cure his friend!
Afflicted is a found-footage horror film and does a great job at that. It keeps you hooked because you want to discover what will happen next. Derek Lee andClif Prowse, who star as Derek and Clif, have written and directed this POV horror.
It is typical of vampire films todelve on the protagonists’ attempts at killing the blood-consuming beats. By breaking that culture, the writers focus on how one becomes a vampire. If we think about it, changing from a human to a blood-sucking beast from the mythologies must be a reasonably excruciating process.
Derek and Clif have surpassed their own expectations by demonstrating the fine aspects of the procedure. They slaughter pigs and attack ambulances, but it appears like nothing is working.
Any further discussion would reveal plot details, but rest assured that this low-budget film has plenty of scares up its sleeve to keep you on the edge of your seat.
Tusk (2014)
Wallace and Teddy are noisy, energetic and witty co-hosts of a podcast called The Not-See Party who crack dark and humiliating jokes on bizarre viral videos. Wallace goes throughout the world on occasion to interview the people who appear in his films. His most recent endeavour is in Canada, where a young boy maimed his limb and died as a result. Before heading home, he pauses at a tavern and discovers a poster stating that a man is willing to relate the storey.
Inquisitive, he pays the man a visit, when he is offered a cup of tea laced with narcotics and knocked out. When Wallace wakes up the next morning, he discovers that his legs have been severed. The host intends to turn him into a human-walrus by carrying out medical procedures on him. Meanwhile, Teddy arrives in Canada and learns that this psycho is on the police’s wanted list.
Do you know what a worse fate than death is? If you don’t, this film is your answer. Wallace is forcefully transformed into a walrus: that is body, mind, and instincts. He is operated upon, mutilated, and given a walrus outfit sewn from human skin. If weirdness was an aircraft, this film is like a rocket that shoots into the sky and doesn’t know how to stop.
Robert Kurtzman, a well-known makeup artist, has created yet another masterpiece. What started out as a comic quest escalates into a last doomsday scenario, with no one getting the last laugh.
Even at its worst, Kevin Smith’s film will be remembered for a long time. We watched it before making the video and couldn’t stop talking about the damned tusks for days. If the film’s theme makes you uncomfortable, then watch it for the performances of Johnny Depp and Justin Long.
Thanatomorphose (2012)
Laura is a young woman who is in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend. She’s a failing artist, and her professional life is a mix of depressing and hopeless. She acquires bruises all over her body after a night of incredibly violent and unnatural sex, and this is only the beginning of an unlucky and surprising finale.
Laura’s personal life is deteriorating as she is forced to withdraw from her friends and colleagues. She begins to have dreams about death and the decomposition of the human body, as well as hallucinations about death and the decomposition of the human body.
Thanatomorphosse means the visible signs of an organism’s decomposition caused by death. The film’s title is the biggest spoiler and probably its biggest flaw, but what is attractive about this gruesome body horror odyssey is in the way she reaches that point.
If you have wondered what happens to a body buried six fathom deep, then this young girl’s slowly decomposing body will satisfy your curiosity and make you fear death a lot more than you already do.
The special effects are unbelievably realistic and supplement the stages of her transformation from a young woman full of life to a living-corpse full of maggots. As days pass, her wounds consume her flesh, and the horror that she feels consumes her mind and life. Director ÉricFalardeau and lead actress Kayden Rose work in such synergy that the film becomes extreme, even for those who get thrilled by fright and screams. It leaves you disgusted, but on a slightly positive side, lets you sympathize with Laura. The viewer gets immersed in her distraught state.
Interestingly, Thanatomorphose is said to have inspired the 2013 film Contracted.
Society (1989)
Bill Whitney is a wealthy young man who lives with his sister and parents in a house in Beverly Hills, California. He’s always felt different from his family because they mix with the upper crust while he is more down to earth. His sister’s ex-boyfriend Blanchard gives him a tape one day.
The tape shows his family and their wealthy friends participating in a brutal deadly orgy. Bill informs Dr. Cleveland of this, but the tape appears to have been replaced. His family gets him sedated with the help of Dr. Cleveland, only for him to wake up at a formal party where the guests try to do heinous and dastardly things to Bill.
Society won the1990 Silver Raven award for “Best Make-Up” at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film. It contains some really dark themes under the body-horror subgenre. Society, as a film, talks about the horrid creatures that humans are under the garb of manners and etiquette.
On a deeper look, director Brian Yuzna has sought to show his viewer the demise of humanity in the everyday people we see around us, and he does so in the cruelest of fashions. Elements of humor have been spread like breadcrumbs to attract the unsuspecting audience into its horrid last half hour, and once you’re there, you just can’t walk away from all the ghastly yet attractive special effects.
Some reviews praised the picture for being groundbreaking and memorable, while others dismissed it as arrogant and irritating. When a film elicits such diametrically opposed reactions, it becomes both terrifying and fascinating. Further discussion of the transformations would reveal narrative aspects, and we don’t want to deface and disfigure this lovely grose for you.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
A metal fetishist arrives at his run-down home, slashes open his thigh, and inserts a metal rod. He realises later that the wound is rotting and infested with maggots. He sprints down the street in a fit of frenzy, only to be hit by a car. A guy and a woman whose flesh is slowly changing into metal are introduced in another scenario. Is there a connection between these three? What will it lead to?
Those who have even a passing knowledge of transformation horror and writer-director Shinya Tsukamoto would know that this is no Iron Man flying up in the sky. It is a way darker and frightful rendition of being an iron man.
Japanese cinema and auteurs experimented with body horror in the 80s, and Tetsuo seems like the Frankenstein of Japanese horror, the only difference being it’s ultimately a cyberpunk nightmare.
Tsukamoto doesn’t waste any time at building up the heat and suspense, starting with a gory scene of a man slitting open his thigh to slip in a metal rod. The genre follows soon, with the private parts turning into a drill or a metal hose, all of this is wrapped around sex and paranormal horror. The mind-boggling special effects make it an enriching horror experience.
The alterations are explicit and nauseating on a visceral level, while the viewer experiences what it’s like to lose control of their body or their identity as a whole on an emotional and psychological level. Isn’t this, after all, what we horror lovers crave in a film?
Virus (1999)
An oceangoing ship discovers a highly intelligent extraterrestrial life form a week after it murders crew of a Russian research vessel. The small tug has been disabled by a storm, and it floats into the eye.
Captain Everton and Crusty want to recover the abandoned ship, which might be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. While the majority of the crew is ecstatic at the prospect of earning money, Kit, the navigator, is the only one who is against it.
Soon after, they come upon Nadia, the Russian ship’s lone survivor, who tells them that “lightning that can think — a new life form” is approaching. They quickly discover that this life-form is transforming into cyborgs and regards humans as a virus. The tables soon turn from Captain Everton wanting to sell the ship’s spare parts to the alien-infested ship using his members as spare parts.
Virus is based on the comic book of the same name by Chuck Pfarrer, and is often compared with Deep Rising that released in the same year. You can check out our review on Deep Rising in our video titled 13 Deranged Tentacle Monster Movies That Are Extremely Good!
As a film, Virus has many flaws concerning direction and screenplay, but it is a decent effort as a body-horror. The titular infection uses bodyparts of humans and combines them with the ship’s metal scrapes to form cyborgs that then go on a hunting spree.
Dennis Feldman and Jonathan Hensleighscribed the film, having written gems like Species and Con Air, but it wasn’t very pleasant to see these master writers produce something so mediocre it had the potential of killing their careers.
Nevertheless, Virus fares decently in terms of the transformation and icky factors.
District 9 (2009)
As the residents of prawn-like aliens’ home planet perish, they seek sanctuary on Earth. In 1982, they land on Johannesburg (https://www.howtopronounce.com/johannesburg) in a large space ship. These prawns don’t want to take over the world or harm people; all they want is a safe place to call home.
Humans meet them warmly at first, but they are eventually tortured and experimented on in District 9, a militarised ghetto facility. Multi-National United confines and exploits the extremely advanced extraterrestrials for their technology.
Wikusvan der Merwe, an operative of the corporation, gets exposed to a foreign chemical that is altering his DNA and making him go through body transformations. If he is not helped, he will soon mutate into a Prawn, depending on them for survival.
Neill Blomkamp’sDistrict 9 deals with various social issues that plague humanity while revolving around vulgar looking aliens and body transformations. It’s a visually satisfying film that evokes attention and interest in a powerfully-irresistible way.
Wikus accidentally gets sprayed with a suspicious canister ofalien fluid that slowly turns him into one of the aliens, lest he get help. The mutation begins with his left arm, and his body gradually becomes a spectacle of body horror as it transforms.
The prawns were given human emotions and psychological qualities, which was unusual. Wikus begins as a violent thug, but as the story progresses, he grows more compassionate and sensitive with the aliens. Weta Workshop created the designs, which Image Engine put into action.
Antiviral (2012)
Syd March works for Lucas Clinic, a corporation that harvests infections from world-famous celebrities and sells them to followers who believe that getting afflicted with the same diseases will bring them closer to their idols. In addition, these diseases are in high demand on the illegal market. Syd snatches them and injects them into himself, transforming himself into an incubator and carrier.
He injects Hannah Geist’s disease and it turns out that it is far deadlier, and hence, valuable in the black market. Hannah dies, and that increases the black market exponentially. There is also a celebrity meat market, where meat is grown from the cells of stars for human consumption. Have you seen a more organized form of cannibalism?
There are some really nasty and gut-wrenching ideas in Antiviral. Who could imagine a celebrity butcher shop or a business that thrives on making people fall sick with celebutanteillnesses? Well, Brandon Cronenberg can, son of the body horror Elder God, David Cronenberg, who gave the sub-genre its real position and made it grotesque and disturbing.
Yes, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and after seeing the movie, we pondered if genius and creativity might be passed down through the generations! Cronenberg’s level of inventive thinking is both overpowering and ominous.
Yes, there are horrific changes and character decay—one of them drinks blood from a living arm! When you witness a cell-garden where body parts are produced and harvested for people to consume, none of that is even the enjoyable part.
Apart from the horror element, Cronenberg sends a deeper message and throws light on the ills of celebrity culture prevalent in the entertainment industry; it also focuses upon the stark differences between celebrities and the commoner.
Taxidermia (2006)
It’s a surrealist comedy-drama and horror film that retells Hungary’s postwar history through the eyes of three generations of Hungarian men. The first is about Vendel, a sexually dissatisfied army soldier who indulges in severe self-indulgence while glancing at his superior’s wife and daughters.
hen we meet Kálmán, a morbidly obese speed-eater who not only harms himself but also makes his country proud. Finally, there’s Lajos, Kalman and Vendel’s heir. Lajos is a desperate taxidermist who has dedicated his life to the preservation of dead animals.
Taxidermia does regrettably honest justice to the meaning of the word BIZARRE. It doesn’t feature a lot of body horror scenes but the few that you see will remain with you till eternity. There’s all kinds of nasty things happening. A character sodomizes a slaughtered pig, while another is ravaged and dismembered by hungry pet cats. You should wait for the part where human taxidermy is shown!
It’s an ode to human nature. It grimly speaks loudly about our desires and fetishes while being a fantastic horror-comedy. In a reasonable runtime of 94 minutes, Director GyörgyPálfi shows a beautifully crafted film that is both compelling and immersive. Critics and fans worldwide have given largely positive reviews about Taxidermia, which mirrors the artistic and technical genius employed in its making.
Although, without a question, this picture is not for the faint of heart, or perhaps even the weak-stomached.
Victim (2010)
A mad doctor kidnaps a young man with the intention of transforming him into a lady. He’s imprisoned in a place that looks like a cross between a dungeon and a laboratory. Various physical and psychological tortures are inflicted on the poor individual.
While the film progresses, hints are dropped as to why the psychopathic scientist wants this man to undergo such a drastic identity transformation, but the solution is not revealed until the very end. The true causes for your screams and goosebumps are the whys and hows of the plot.
It is complicated to talk about Victim without giving spoilers, but we will try to convey a fair idea about the transformation of the titular character. It is scary to be forced into living life with a new identity, an identity that we can never relate to. Directors Matt Eskandari and Michael A. Piercereveal the intent or the shocking secret only at the end of the movie but achieve something much greater in the process.
The film is not a typical gory transformation horror, and it impacts your psyche to the extent that the viewer stares at the screen even as the end credits roll. One is left so traumatized and immersed in the experience that they will naturally think of the various possibilities of the Young Man’s new life.
As previously stated, Victims solves several of the questions it presents, yet one stays unanswered and is left to the viewer’s discretion. Who is the true victim here?