With the blockbuster season in the rearview, some moviegoers may find themselves in the unctuous embrace of "body horror fall." The corporeally fixated subgenre, known for its graphic depictions of flesh in exaggerated stages of decline, destruction or mutation, is enjoying a welcome renaissance (welcome, anyway, for the strong-stomached). Director David Cronenberg — body horror's eminent standard-bearer — proposes his own grandiose definition of the form, calling his grotesque onscreen explorations "The ultimate trans-substantiation. The Eucharist. The blood and body of humans made cinema."
When the indie thriller The Substance burst into multiplexes late last month, it became a lightning rod for online discourse, spurred in part by reports of audience walkouts at multiple showings. Aided by muscular word of mouth, the hard-R satire has proved to be a surprise box office success story, and it has lurid company in similarly minded cinematic provocations on offer this season.
This week, the biggest body horror film of 2024 hit video-on-demand: Fede Álvarez's Alien: Romulus, the seventh installment of the grisly franchise that helped kickstart the genre back in 1979 (its a film bioengineered to appeal to hardcore fans of the ooey-gooey ickiness of Ridley Scott's original). The black comedy A Different Man features a vivid stretch of body horror early, as Sebastian Stan's tumor swollen face (due to neurofibromatosis) begins to almost melt away and fall off thanks to a clinical drug trial. Next week, Tom Hardy invites viewers to the Last Dance for his popular body horror-adjacent symbiote super-antihero, Venom. Booger wrestles with grief via dark comedy and a flagrantly gross metamorphosis befitting of its title when its protagonist starts developing feline qualities after being bitten by her dead friend's titular pet (she becomes a very different kind of "childless cat lady," if you will). Lastly, the upcoming Amy Adams-led Nightbitch — which has an Oscars-qualifying December release date — melds body horror with a different kind of interspecies hybridism, using the tropes of lycanthropy to explore themes of maternal frustration in a suburban milieu.
Notably, The Substance, Romulus, Booger, and Nightbitch all share a specific preoccupation with female bodily autonomy. The four films arrive during a fraught election year in which discussions around government regulation of women's bodies have become key issues. Reproductive rights might be the deciding issue of the presidential race, one where self-identification and the worthiness of non-childbearing women have become attack points.
Writer/director Coralie Fargeat's The Substance stands apart from the aforementioned movies with a different feminist bent to its Tinseltown send-up (though it does feature a birth scene of sorts that's only slightly less gruesome than the one in Alien: Romulus), tackling showbiz superficiality and ageism. Set in a heightened reality, The Substance follows middle-aged actress-turned-aerobics-instructor Elisabeth Sparkle (a gutsy Demi Moore), who, in a desperate bid to keep her foundering career afloat, signs up for an underground mail-order service that promises to create a nubile duplicate of herself (Margaret Qualley) through which she can live vicariously while the original meatsack spends a week comatose, before the arrangement reverts and continues in a body-swapping tango ad infinitum.
The Substance is a movie that is absolutely immodest in its provocations. Don't bother trying to look for subtext, The Substance is all text. It rubs your face in its scopophilic leer, then tests your mettle by crescendoing into a go-for-broke, totally emetic fantasia of fused flesh that evokes the climax of Brian Yuzna's infamous 1989 parody Society. It lures the viewer in with fantastic production design and lascivious Carl's Jr.-ad-style lasciviousness, before goading you to look away with its necrotic visuals and hyper-violence.
Why is body horror having this moment in late 2024? One explanation can be found in the most obvious of places: the collective trauma our bodies endured in recent years.
"From the perspective of the virus, the human being is irrelevant."
"From the virus perspective, harming the host is not very costly..."
The former is a line of dialogue from the 2012 body horror film Antiviral, from writer/director Brandon Cronenberg (son of David). The latter is a quote from a 2021 article in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology by microbiologists Samuel Alizon and Mircea T. Sofonea. COVID-19 made phobias around the physical a universal concern, and what better vessel for filmmakers to manifest such moribund heebie-jeebies than body horror, the ultimate filmic expression of the body revolting against the soul (and repulsing the audience in the process)? The genre taps into our collective angst and uses our own anatomical vulnerabilities to realize our deepest fears and insecurities.
Unfortunately, despite our desire to collectively look away from its real-life horrors, the novel Coronavirus is still in circulation. The body horror resurgence may likewise prove resilient heading into 2025, as the elder Cronenberg's buzzy quasi-autobiographical Shrouds — which unsurprisingly traffics in themes of death and decay — is due next spring. It's ironic to think back on all of the dense prognosticators who forecast a post-pandemic, lockdown-fueled creative boom only for their hopes to be realized in such a visceral and pointedly disquieting form on the silver screen.♦
