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The subgenre of body horror, associated with directors such as David Cronenberg and Coralie Fargeat, depicts the human body’s susceptibility to disease and change. Preoccupied with anatomy, pathology, and corporeality, it portrays contagion, mutilation, mutation, and metamorphosis. As organs, growths, and pustules proliferate, so do questions about the consequences of technology, the effects of trauma, and ultimately what it means to be human. Since emerging in the 1970s, the subgenre has not only bridged grindhouse and arthouse but also increasingly taken on ageism, sexism, racism, and ableism.
Xavier Aldana Reyes provides an engaging introduction to the inner workings of body horror, tracing its evolution from foundational works such as The Fly (1986) and Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) to recent films like Raw (2016) and The Substance (2024). He argues that the subgenre’s concern with the body as both anatomical reality and cultural construction links it to the interdisciplinary field of body studies, which examines the relationship between embodiment and culture. Surveying a wide range of films, Aldana Reyes shows how the transformation of the body opens paths to resist dominant understandings of identity and to imagine alternatives. Compelling and accessible, this book offers new insights for both film studies courses and general readers interested in the role the body plays in horror cinema.
— Adam Lowenstein, founding director of the Horror Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh, and author of Horror Film and Otherness
Xavier Aldana Reyes is the undisputed expert on body horror. In Body Horror he offers a comprehensive summary of the genre's canon along with a compelling argument about its revolutionary politics. He emphasizes the shifting—and often progressive—politics of body horror while also always returning to the essential existential questions it asks about who in fact we are. Body Horror is a deeply informative and inspiring argument for the enduring relevance of the genre.
— Dawn Keetley, author of Folk Gothic
Summoning an exciting array of movies, this book provides a clear and accessible mapping of body horror’s origins, evolutions, and increasingly gory contemporary expressions. Aldana Reyes makes a compelling case that body horror, in its shocking (and sometimes humorous) excesses, powerfully affirms all the ways our bodies and minds feel under siege and out of control—while imagining a transformed humanity that embraces nonconforming and noncompliant bodies.
— Angela M. Smith, author of Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema