His Saturday nights just got incredibly awkward.
"Arthur, my mustache is touching my brain..."
— The Tick, "That Mustache Feeling"
Welcome to the lovely land of Body Horror. Simply put, this is any form of Horror or squickiness involving body parts, parasitism, disfigurement, mutation, or unsettling bodily configuration, not induced by immediate violence.
For example: Being shot in the chest and having your organs exposed is Bloody Horror, not body horror. Turning into a monster is a Forced Transformation, but still not a body horror. Having your chest tear open of its own free will, exposing your organs as your ribcage is repurposed as a gaping maw full of bony teeth? That is Body Horror.
This trope is difficult to pin down, as it has a wide range of potential applications and invocations, but what they all hinge upon is the Primal Fear of deformity, parasites, contamination, the ravages of disease, and the aftermath of bodily injury. The mind knows on a deep instinctive level that faces should have eyes and hands should not. Organs and bones belong on the inside, and parasites and circuit boards do not. Bodies should be roughly symmetrical and have logical proportions. And nothing should ever look like this page's example image.
Slowly mutating in a sickeningly twisted and deformed manner after contracting The Virus, a close encounter of the squick kind leaving someone the incubator for a Chest Burster, a rotting zombie, an Eldritch Abomination resembling a tangle of organs, and a shapeshifter abandoning any attempt at aesthetics or imitation to become a writhing mass of random but recognizable parts are all examples of Body Horror.
Obviously, as a trope based on Primal Fear, body horror is Older Than Dirt. This is also often paired with Psychosexual Horror.
For a character or Mook who has this as their back story, see Was Once a Man and Tragic Monster, and/or The Grotesque. If Body Horror is played for sympathy, it can be used to explore the issue of What Measure Is a Non-Human?. It can result in And I Must Scream if the victim is aware of their condition but totally helpless. Using this trope can result in Our Monsters Are Weird of the most horrific kind. Often the result of the wacky experiments of an Evilutionary Biologist.
Sub-supertrope of Evil Is Visceral.
Subtopics
- Abnormal Dental Growth: Growing another set of pearly whites to replace the lost ones.
- Beauty to Beast: Making Casual Friday look very smart indeed.
- Belly Mouth: When your stomach not only growls, it bites.
- The Blank: When someone takes being The Faceless a bit too literally.
- Body of Bodies: When you can't decide on just one, wear them all.
- Brain in a Jar: The ultimate beauty in a bottle.
- Brain Monster: Just in case anyone questioned your intelligence.
- Creepily Long Arms: Perfect for long-sighted reading.
- Creepy Long Fingers: Permanent, personalized chopsticks.
- Cyborg: Comes with maintenance costs.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Sometimes, cybernetics control you!
- Demonic Head Shake: When a mere "no" just won't get across.
- Evil Hand: In body horror, transplant receives you!
- Extra Eyes: Giving the term "four-eyes" a whole new disturbing meaning.
- Eyeless Face: Eyes do belong here...
- Eye on a Stalk: One way of making it easier to see things.
- Eyes Do Not Belong There: Or there. Or there. And definitely not there.
- Facial Horror: You need makeup lessons.
- Flesh Golem: MacGyvering meets Necromancy.
- Flower Mouth: Flower shapes look less pretty when lined with teeth.
- Full-Conversion Cyborg: Proving that the body horror isn't lessened by a lack of meat.
- Fold-Spindle Mutilation: Fitting a person-shaped peg in a round hole.
- Hanahaki Disease: Spitting out flowers from a flowering plant growing in your innards? Ouch!
- Head Hat: Wearing someone else's head as a hat.
- Human Architecture Horror: Instead of being for people, the buildings are people.
- Lovecraftian Superpower: Body horror... weaponized!
- Malevolent Mutilation: Sometimes body horror is created intentionally...
- Man in the Machine: You are locked in a metal coffin, but at least you have internet access.
- Marionette Motion: When bodies are not allowed to move that way.
- Meatgrinder Surgery: Crude, but effective.
- Meat Moss: When body horror meets interior decorating.
- Meat-Sack Robot: When the person is only skin-deep.
- Monster Mouth: Giving your dentist nightmares in more than one way.
- More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Speaking of a dentist's nightmares...
- Mutants: Sometimes even the School for Gifted Youngsters has rejects.
- My Brain Is Big: Extensions with a difference.
- Nested Mouths: Mouths don't belong inside of other mouths.
- Nightmare Face: Not even a mother could love that.
- Odd Organ Up Top: Hey, butthead!
- Parasitic Horror: Parasitism being Played for Horror.
- Power-Upgrading Deformation: The good news is you can now run twice as fast... the bad news is that it's because you've got twice as many legs.
- Puppeteer Parasite: Like driving a car, except you are the car.
- Scary Teeth: Sometimes the dentist's headaches are your toothaches.
- Sculpted Physique: When your blind date turns out to be a literal brick house.
- Self-Surgery: What you do when there isn't a doctor in the house.
- Shapeshifter Mashup: Become all of the things!... at the same time.
- Shapeshifter Swan Song: Become all of the things!... one after another. In rapid succession.
- Spawn Broodling: Making allies out of your enemies in the most horrifying way possible.
- Symbolic Mutilation: And sometimes it's done to represent something.
- Too Many Mouths: In this case, any number higher than one is too many.
- Torso with a View: Goes right through you every time.
- Transformation Horror: Don't look at me while I'm changing.
- Transformation of the Possessed: When possession comes with visible side effects.
- Unwilling Roboticisation: That's a bit too heavy metal as far as makeovers go.
- Vagina Dentata: What a horrible phrase.
- Womb Horror: There's a reason nobody remembers that.
- Womb Level: Like a Battleship Raid, only squishier.
- Your Head A-Splode: When a revelation is truly mind-blowing.
Tropes that can involve, stem from, or result in Body Horror:
- Appendage Assimilation: Do-it-yourself transplants.
- Attack of the Monster Appendage: A monster which shows up as a separate limb, tentacle or body part, with the rest of the creature remaining unseen.
- Autocannibalism: When Horror Hunger isn't just limited to other people.
- The Assimilator: Resistance is futile. You will become body horror.
- Bio-Augmentation: Extreme botox as a hobby.
- Biomanipulation: Who needs tools to make body horror, you've got superpowers!
- Bloody Horror: Let's paint the town red! It's cheery!
- Body and Host: Keeping friends or enemies very close.
- Came Back Wrong: Please make sure your necromancers are highly trained professionals.
- Captured Super-Entity: Do you think this trope applies only to humans?
- Chest Burster: Exercise caution when implanting monsters in your body, as they have a tendency of escaping. Painfully.
- Creepy Asymmetry: Body horror disrupting the balance and symmetry of a character's body.
- Emergency Transformation: When saving the world, time is of essence.
- Fan Disservice: We all need excitement in our lives. Not generally this kind of excitement, though.
- Fantastic Drug: Narcotics IN SPACE!
- Fetus Terrible: Raising young to be just like your nightmarish self.
- Freak Lab Accident: While running experiments, you become the experiment.
- Garrulous Growth: It really does have a mind on its own!
- Humanoid Aliens: Because clearly our form is something that the universe itself finds enviable.
- I'm Melting!: Suffering a literal meltdown.
- Medical Horror: Again, make sure your doctors are highly trained professionals.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: Combine all the pets!
- Monster Organ Trafficking: Lending a helping hand...which you may have just liberated from a beastly abomination.
- Mutagenic Goo: Side effects may include...
- Nausea Fuel: We'd ask you to view this on an empty stomach, but let's be real, here - you're not going to have a choice.
- Nightmare Fuel: Sweet Dreams...
- Nightmare Sequence: (Are [Not] Made of This)
- Organ Autonomy: Why should your skin and eyes have exclusive rights to sunbathing?
- Organic Technology: 100% recyclable.
- Parasites Are Evil: They live in you, and they're objectively evil!
- Painful Transformation: Also make sure your anesthesiologists are highly trained professionals.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: It's just a poor boy... Nobody loves it...
- Personal Horror: "You are Body Horror." "I am what?"
- "Pop!" Goes the Human: "Where's Bob?" "Over there...and there...and there."
- Reforged into a Minion: We Have Reserves... From our enemies!
- Slow Transformation: Because slow and steady wins the race.
- Squick: Who said it couldn't be scary and disgusting?
- The Symbiote: Now you're eating for two!
- Tarnishing Their Own Beauty: When So Beautiful, It's a Curse reaches a whole new level.
- Toxic Waste Can Do Anything: Sometimes all you need is a little bath to wash off all the normal.
- Viral Transformation: A reminder to take your flu shots.
- Weight Loss Horror: Skin removal surgery isn't going to cut it...
- What Have I Become?: Whatever the answer is, it isn't human...Or is it?
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: They don't look like us, but they certainly act like us...and that might not be a good thing.
Examples with their own subpages:
- Advertisement
- Anime & Manga
- Art
- Comic Books
- Fairy Tales
- Fan Works
- Film
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Music
- Podcasts
- Tabletop Games
- Video Games
- Webcomics
- Web Original
- Western Animation
Other examples:
open/close all folders
Asian Animation
- At the end of the Lamput episode "Animal X", Lamput traps the docs, a gorilla, and a banana in the docs' creature-merging machine and bait-and-switches them into thinking he's going to press the button to merge them all together. Then the docs' winged cat falls on the button, creating a two-headed doc gorilla wearing a banana peel skirt. The docs and the gorilla are not pleased.
Card Games
- Magic: The Gathering has several cards that evoke body horror
- Riot Spikes
, an aura that gives the enchanted creature extra power, but reduced toughness. The flavor text reads "Most auramancers would have let the spikes hover just above the skin. Having the spikes rip through the skin from beneath was a touch added by Rakdos himself."
- Everything Yawgmoth does. Flesh and metal were not meant to go together that way.
- The freakiest thing about Phyrexia is that since Yawgmoth's death, it's actually been getting worse. (Half of this is due to improved artwork over the years. The other half comes from good old-fashioned warped imaginations.)
- Maggot Therapy
- The original Mutilate is generally considered to be among the most horrifying card art of all time. Features include a woman's hands melding with her face and a man's neck elongating so far he begins to choke. When the card was rereleased, it was given completely new (And significantly less freakish) art. And then they pedaled back and showed us this.
- It would likely be a shorter list to mention the cards that do NOT invoke this trope in the New Phyrexia set...
- Exemplified by any non-artifact creature with the type "Horror". Just try and figure out what it was before the Phyrexians got their hands on it (or them). Then there are the ones who have types you'd recognise, but look nothing like what they're supposed to be (Good example is Blighted Agent. That thing is supposed to be Human!?)
- The Simic card Rapid Hybridization lets you turn a creature into a frog lizard hybrid monster that looks like this.
- Bile Blight, FNM version. Humans are not supposed to melt that way!!
- The Eldritch Moon set features the Eldrazi titan Emrakul inflicting all sorts of transformations like this on the denizens of Innistrad, like what it did to Bruna and Gisela, for example.
- Riot Spikes
- Several cards in Yu-Gi-Oh! fit this trope quite nicely.
- For example there is the equip spell Ekibyo Drakmord, which represents a disease that weakens its host and slowly kills it, before spreading to another one.
- And there is also the art for the trap card Ultimate Offering, which shows a green, troll-like demon. Only his head is blood-red. And spawning from it is another, more diabolical demon, trailing what appears to be blood behind him. And the green one is still grinning...
- In terms of monster cards, there is one archetype that stands out: Worms. Worms are all LIGHT-attribute Reptile monsters. All of them are hideous, unearthly abomination, but some take this just a step too far. For example, Worm Solid is a melted mass of flesh, eyes, and teeth, shoved into a glass prism barely larger than it is.
- Another monster card that stands out is Parasite Paracide. Its International artwork looks normal, but its original Japanese artwork features it growing out of a mans face.
- The Wicked Worm Beast is a humanoid monster with worms (or at least, worm-like tendrils) growing out of it, including from its eye.
- The Amorphage archetype consists of animals that are partially mutated into dragon monsters. Only the strongest monster in it, Amorphage Goliath, is fully a dragon, and even then, it still looks like it has eyes on various spots of its body.
- Infernity Doom Dragon doesn't seem like an example at first, but a closer look at the top of its head reveals that its horns are its skull having opened up, exposing its brain.
Mythology & Religion
- The abomination called the Nuckelavee from Scottish folklore. It can only be described as some sort of rider-fused-with-horse centaur with no skin that breathes disease. So even if you escape it, you've got the more common sort of Body Horror to contend with. Depending on the description, "rider's" arms reach down to the ground and its head can be as wide as three feet, rolling back and forth on it's too small neck. Alternately the "horse" head has a single burning eye that shines with a horrible light. Burning seaweed enrages it and it causes plagues, low rainfall, crop wilting, and other disasters and worst of all it kills horses with a deadly plague called Mortasheen.
- The Curupira has feet that are turned to face backwards, flaming hair, and green teeth.
- Classical Mythology:
- Mors is the Roman goddess of death (equivalent to the Greek Thanatos) and quite a terrifying sight to see; she has a female face, legs and arms, but no torso; to cover that up, she wears a human ribcage and pelvis.
- Not only do the Graeae sisters look horrifying with ghostly grey skin and hair (not to mention the fact they were born elderly), they also have a single eye and tooth, which they share among each other.
- In Celtic Mythology, Cuchulainn's "warp-spasm" was said to cause his legs to twist backwards, one of his eyes to swell to an enormous size and the other to be sucked into its socket, his mouth to stretch open down to his ribcage, his muscles to bulge up, and the skin of his throat and mouth to peel back forming a Glasgow Grin. People were terrified of Cuchulainn, and for good reason.
- The Imbunche is a deformed human with its head twisted backwards, along with having twisted arms, fingers, nose, mouth and ears. The creature walks on one foot or on three feet (actually one leg and two hands) because one of its legs is attached to the back of its neck.
- Japanese Mythology has Hiruko, the eldest son of creator gods Izanagi and Izanami, who was born without bones. Izanami had broken the mating ritual by greeting Izanagi first (women were supposed to greet after men), which resulted in their firstborn being cursed. For the next ritual, Izanagi greeted first, and the results were much more favorable. As for Hiruko, his parents decided to cast him to the sea, but he survived, and ended up becoming Ebisu, one of the Seven Lucky Gods.
Other
- The "Transfiguration" artistic performances, by French painter and performer Olivier de Sagazan, is focused on an artist altering himself his face, several times. The results are something reminescent to lovecraftian creatures, overlapping with Nightmare Face and including copious amount of Nightmare Fuel.
- Big Finish Doctor Who: One story has the Sixth Doctor go through a "Freaky Friday" Flip with Davros, intentionally on the Doctor's part. He explains that Davros' body is in constant, agonizing pain like he, a man who has gone through some horrific stuff in his several hundred years, has never felt, and if he could kill himself at that moment, he'd seriously take the chance. Davros, meanwhile, doesn't have as much of a problem. He finds it motivating.
- A member of the East Germany Womens' Gymnastics team goes to the doctor.
"Doctor, about those pills you've been giving us..."
"Yes? Have you noticed any side effects?"
"Two of them, actually. The first is that I've been growing hair in strange places."
"Hm. Not entirely unexpected, but where exactly?"
"On my balls, which is the other side effect I wanted to talk about."
Toys
- BIONICLE has its fair share of body horror stemming from the fact that the characters are bio-mechanical beings, not robots.
- The in-universe explanation for why the original toys came in canisters and have to be assembled is that the muscle tissue holding their bodies together rotted while they were asleep for thousands of years.
- Makuta Teridax's abandoned lair is littered with his experiments, the strangest of dying or dead animal hybrids.
- Makuta Icarax killed Botar by crushing his organs with his own armor using magnetism. Icarax later got a taste of his own medicine when Toa Ignika devolved him from an Energy Being in armor back into a bio-mechanical being. Since his armor wasn't designed with room for organs, this was agonizingly painful.
- Karzahni was supposed to heal injured workers. However, he was incompetent at this task and instead mutilated their bodies into weaker, twisted forms.
- Legends of Chima have the Ice Hunter Tribes. Having been frozen for millennia and resurrected with CHI, their LEGO minifigures are absolutely littered with gruesome details. Almost all of them have rotted in some capacity, exposing muscle fibers turned purple by the cold, and many of them have entire body parts that are simply replaced by ice, ranging from limbs to exposed ribs. The Mammoth Tribe in particular have trunks that have rotted to the bone and simply hang there exposed, and one of the Vulture Tribe, Vornon, has quite literally bolted his skull back together. Ironically, despite being left in the ice the longest, the Ice Bear Tribe seem to be in relatively better shape than their fellow Ice Hunters.
- New Testament SD Gundam Gaiden Gundam King Story: Both Skeleton Knight Xeku Eins and Skeleton Fighter Xeku Zwei have exposed human hearts that squirt green blood.
- From The Real Ghostbusters action figures by Kenner, there was the Haunted Humans line. They look like common people, until you press a button in them. You can check all of them in this video.
