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Body Horror / Film

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    Animation 
  • Bio-Hunter wears Body Horror as its hat, dealing with a virus that mutates its victims into ravenous monsters. The first scene in the anime features a sex scene in which a woman's breast grows teeth and eats a man's hand. Vagina Dentata is thankfully averted.
  • The Boxtrolls: Snatcher's "Cheese Fits" cause him to swell up horribly. The first and more moderate one begins with moving yellowish bulges growing on his neck, followed by his lip growing large and protruding, the right side of his face swelling so badly that his eye becomes entirely shut, and his hands swelling to over twice their normal size. His more extreme one at the end, after he falls bodily into a large well of his cheese, has him so swollen and deformed that he looks more like some kind of ogre than a man, with all of his limbs swollen and enlarged and his face half covered by a huge cauliflower-like growth.
  • Coco: The longer Miguel stays in the Land of the Dead, the more his skeleton transformation takes effect. It's funny at first, but becomes rather disturbing when it spreads to his torso, as told by Ernesto's reaction. It's rather terrifying when it's nearly complete, just before Imelda and Héctor send him home with their blessing.
  • G.I. Joe: The Movie has a lot of this. We've got Cobra Commander being revealed as an already somewhat disfigured snake person with multiple eyes (bonus points to the cartoon for hinting at it when Destro was taken aback when walking in on the Commander eating in one episode) and mutated further, first bursting out of his uniform as his limbs start to bulge and fail, then into a large humanoid snake with vestigial arms, then into a human-sized snake, a hidden civilization based on particularly nasty organic technology, and spores that look to rather painfully mutate all of humanity. There's also "Onccccce... wasssss a man..."
  • I Lost My Body is about a cut hand that comes to life and seeks for its former owner. We learn through flashbacks about his life and how his right hand was cut off.
  • The Pagemaster: Dr. Jekyll's very painful transformation to Mr. Hyde traumatized many children who saw this film. If the creepy, dark visuals aren't enough to scare you out of your mind, we also hear Jekyll screaming in agony and gasping for breath during the change. And then there's his Mr. Hyde form, which is scarier than those all put together!
  • Played for Laughs in Persepolis. Marjane's description of the changes her body went through during puberty, and the associated images, have a a very Body Horror feel to them.
  • In Princess Mononoke, the two boar spirits Nago and Okkoto end up becoming demons, who grow worms out of their skin, and it would apparently have been the eventual fate of Ashitaka as well.
  • Sev Trek Pus In Boots spoofs the use of this trope on Star Trek: The Next Generation with an alien growing from a zit on Commander Riker's forehead. While the crew waste their time debating whether Riker's right to maintain his good looks overrules the PC Directive to respect all sentient life, the creature detaches and goes rampaging around the ship, murdering 47 expendable ensigns in the process.
  • In Turning Red, 4*Town is depicted as unnerving Plant People in Mei's nightmare.
  • Unico in the Island of Magic has a puppet-master villain with bug eyes and the ability to distort his shape at will, as well as plenty of terrifying transformations. The villain's castle is built out of people who have been transformed into blocks and there's a creepy dream sequence where Unico and his friends are turned into dolls.
  • Wreck-It Ralph: Every single time a Cy-Bug eats since they become what they eat. Especially after eating King Candy during the climax. Now he truly looks like a freakish monster.

    Live-Action 
Examples by creator:Examples by title:
  • 21 Jump Street: Mr. Walters gets his dick shot off by Schmidt. In the sequel, he gets a vagina transplant (not that he minds it). It becomes a home game.
  • After Earth: The slug-like creature that bites Kitai and causes a gruesome infection.
  • Alien:
    • Alien: The famous chestburster scene, where the infant creature tears its way out of its host human's ribcage. The original concept of the Alien lifecycle (which appears in the Director's Cut of Alien, but is non-canonical since it contradicts Aliens) involved capturing victims and turning them into new facehugger eggs.
    • Alien: Resurrection: Ripley's cloning process went wrong many times before, creating diseased and barely functioning human-alien hybrids. The opening title sequence shows some of them in extreme closeup.
    • Prometheus creates a whole new variety of body horror with Freudian symbolism: The "Space Jockeys" from the original film created a black substance that causes severe mutations when ingested. One character starts to physically decay, his skin turning charred-black. Before that can happen, he has sex with his (infertile) girlfriend, who gives birth to a squid monster the following day. In the end of the movie, the squid monster captures the last remaining Space Jockey alive and uses its body to spawn something that looks like a more primitive version of the series' iconic monster.
    • Alien: Covenant offers us a new horror: The Neomorph, an impish Xenomorph that is birthed not through the chest like the traditional chestburster, but instead through the back. And if it can't go through there, it'll go out the other way: Through the mouth. And to say nothing of the actions committed by David, in which he causes a full on Pompeii-esque apocalypse using the black goo on the Engineer colony or what he does to poor Shaw, whom he turns into what amounts to a Giger painting/Petri dish for his experiments.
  • Alien 2: On Earth: Just like the Xenomorphs, for whom they serve as expies, the rock creatures lay their eggs in host bodies and literally burst from them once they have outlived their purpose.
  • Alien Abduction (2014): The abductions of Jillian and Sean — the only two seen on-camera — are accompanied by the visible breaking of their spines and arms as they are levitated within a tractor beam.
  • Ame No Tori (The Vanished), based on a short story written by Hideyuki Kikuchi involving (undead?) children and a Town with a Dark Secret. A freelance writer for a lowbrow tabloid magazine visits a local town to investigate the mysterious case of a dead child whose internal organs are completely missing. While he is interviewing a doctor in the town morgue, the dead child suddenly jumps off the stretcher and runs away!
  • American Mary features a dark slasher vibe of surgery called body modification. The title character at one point uses this surgery to make a stripper into a human doll so she won't be sexualized and later, uses said surgery to get revenge on her rapist.
  • An American Werewolf in London Contains one of the finest of all scary Painful Transformation sequences. Referenced (arguably an Affectionate Parody, because the director is the same) in the beginning part of Thriller, where Michael Jackson turns into a cat monster. And poor Jack becomes more and more zombie-like in appearance each time he reappears.
  • Antichrist depicts themes of body/self hatred/fear, mutilation, and fear of human nature.
  • Army of Darkness:
    • The creation of "Evil Ash". It begins with an eye appearing on Ash's shoulder and progressing to a head, torso, and finally a separate body. That scene was scarier than most of the zombies! Bonus Nightmare Retardant when Evil Ash is knocked out and buried, although the beheading that ensues between those sequences are still scary.
    • In Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, Ash has a nightmare echoing the events from Evil Dead 2 except his bad hand sprouts metal claws from the fingertips, his fingernails being forced out of the way by the claws being drawn with loving, gory detail.
  • The Assignment (2016): Being made physically female serves as this for Frank, especially at first.
  • Attack of the Moon Zombies has people being transformed into zombies by alien plants.
  • Bang Bang Baby has elements of this, as a chemical leak in the small town setting is said to cause mutations in humans and wildlife: The protagonist, a secretly-pregnant teenager, finds her unborn baby is actively running around in her stomach and its outline can be seen in her skin as it does. Her would-be suitor has a mouth-shaped abscess on his neck that talks (and sings, since it's also a musical). Perhaps most disturbingly, her alcoholic father has a liquor bottle embedded in his chest, and attempts to cut his own stomach open to get it out until his daughter gets him to stop by convincing him he's imagining things.
  • Banshee Chapter: James's clothes are located at the transmission site, where Anne and Thomas were attacked by deformed monsters. This gives a big clue as to what happens to those possessed by the transmission.
  • Basket Case has its poster child, Belial Bradley, a deformed tumorous lump of flesh with a face and two small arms that his brother Duane carries around in a picnic basket. The sequel, Basket Case 2, introduces more characters with bizarre and extreme deformities, though the tone is more Played for Laughs.
  • Batman & Robin featured a painful transformation scene of the villain Bane, who grows ungodly huge muscles by having "Gatorade" pumped directly into his skull. This was intended as a family-friendly film.
  • Bite has a bride-to-be being bitten by a waterborne insect while vacationing in Costa Rica, infecting her with a mutagenic virus that slowly transforms her into a human-insect hybrid.
  • Black Friday (2021): Infection by the alien virus can start with things like the host breaking out in boils all over their body. In time, though, their teeth all grow sharper, their noses disappear, and they turn into feral monsters. And then there's the huge monster that forms when they all fuse together.
  • Black Sheep (2007) pays homage to An American Werewolf in London when the farmer turns into a weresheep. The company behind this movie is also in talks to do an American Werewolf remake.
  • Black Swan seems to be trying to rival Cronenberg in this aspect. Ballet is actually very physically demanding and can take its toll on the body.
  • In Blessed, Heather Graham is impregnated with twin antichrists.
  • In the nonsensically-titled Blue Monkey, a man pricks his finger on a mysterious plant from a recently-discovered island, causing a parasitic insect to begin growing inside of him, Alien-style. After developing a fever and collapsing, he is rushed to the hospital, whereupon he regurgitates a squirming insect larva which ends up becoming the main monster in the movie. As if this wasn't bad enough, the man survives, but with a highly-contagious disease which begins melting his skeleton, causing him to go into cardiac arrest as the liquefied bone matter floods his circulatory system. When doctors attempt to revive him using defibrillators, his chest explodes in a shower of blood, drenching the terrified physicians. Squick indeed.
  • Body Bags: The "Hair" segment features a balding man who gets a hair transplant. When the transplanted hair starts spreading out of control and he starts feeling a bit sickly, he goes back to the clinic to complain, only to find that the "hair" is actually the larva of an alien species that require living hosts to mature properly. The aliens, naturally, decided to play on human vanity to get volunteers.
  • Body Melt: The title is a pretty apt description - people's bodies melt, deform, mutate and such things as a mutant face-hugger placenta and living mucus are involved as people die gruesomely. The Black Comedy elements might only make things more jarring and bizarre.
  • Bug (2006) and the stage play it is based on could be seen as a Deconstruction of body horror. The two leads become convinced they are playing host to billions upon billions of genetically engineered carnivorous aphids, but who knows if it's actually happening or it's just a shared delusion?
  • The Brothers Grimm: The way how Sasha gets transformed into the Gingerbread Man, with her first loosing her face to some cursed mud then finally being fully covered in mud finishing her transformation, and to add the cherry on top she takes a bite out of her arm saying she's delicious.
  • Bruce Almighty: When Bruce meets God, he tries to have God guess the number of fingers behind his back. When God guesses "seven", Bruce only throws one of his hands out, changing as he brought them out. Shockingly, there are seven fingers on it for a split second.
  • Cabin Fever centers around a group of friends who go camping and contract necrotizing fasciitis... also known as flesh-eating bacteria. Bloodiness certainly ensues. Its sequel takes this several steps further into Happy Tree Friends territory.
  • Call of the Undead: When the Mob Boss finally succumbs to his infection, his arms swells up and gets covered in tumorous growths, and possibly large red blood cells hanging loose.
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has Violet come out looking all floppy and blue-skinned, as a result of being turned into a giant blueberry and de-juiced. She doesn't seem to mind that she's more flexible than before, though. The scene of her transformation is also presented more as a horror than in the previous film.
  • Class of Nuke 'Em High: Plenty, given who made the movie. In the prologue, we see a nerdy-looking student who drank from a contaminated drinking fountain start acting erratically, attack one of the other students, and then throw himself out of a second-story window before melting on the pavement.
  • Cloud Atlas: Ewing's parasite. Subverted. He's actually being poisoned, though the results of that aren't pretty either.
  • The Company of Wolves has some fairly gruesome Werewolf transformations, though the end results weren't monstrous.
  • Contracted: Both this film and its sequel, Contracted: Phase II, deal with a necrotizing STD that physically rots its host within days before turning them into zombies. This is a given. People bleed from their genitals profusely at first, then develop black veins showing through their skin, develop bloodshot eyes, lose fingernails, begin to visibly rot and finally have milky white eyes and then go full zombie after that.
  • Curse II: The Bite (an in-name-only sequel to The Curse, a movie loosely based on Lovecraft's The Colour out of Space) features a man bitten on the left hand by a snake, one implied to have been exposed to radioactive waste. At first, he just experiences some weakness and vomiting, but then his personality starts getting colder. When we see that his hand has mutated into a snake's head, and it kills two people (one by jamming itself down a police deputy's mouth & throat and tearing out his heart, the other by tearing a nurse's jaw off), he freaks out and chops it off. But it doesn't stop there — another snake grows out of the stump and strangles a man with its super-long tongue (frog-snake?), then as he chases his girlfriend snakes begin bursting out of him. His left eye pops out, and snakes wriggle out of it as if it were some sort of egg. His tongue elongates and detaches, and wriggles after her. He vomits up three or four large snakes, before his mouth opens so wide his head splits in half and a giant snake (which appears to have his spinal column for a body) pops out and chases after the girl. Earlier, we see hints of the transformation trauma to come, in the form of a dog which had been bitten and mutated into a snake-dog hybrid.
  • Dagon: The denizens of the town Imboca have overthrown Christianity in favour of the fish god Dagon, who has brought them wealth from the sea in the form of fish and gold. Since that time, they have mutated into fish-like forms and are obedient to the beautiful, mermaid-like Uxía.
  • Osmar in Damnatus, after being Mind Raped by a daemon. The fact that his stammered prayers start manifesting Voice of the Legion is the first bad sign. He primes a grenade to commit suicide, but before it goes off there is a brief shot of him collapsing and starting to grow tentacles.
  • Death Becomes Her: Played for (grim) laughs. Just imagine that you can live forever, but you're not breathing, your heart's not beating and all of your traumas remain until you fix them artificially. As well as skin color and eyes.
  • Death Ship: After consuming a piece of hard candy from one of the ship's cupboards, Ms. Morgan's skin suddenly blisters beyond recognition. Panicking, she heads for the bunk room, where the now-possessed Capt. Ashland strangles her to death.
  • Demons has several people being invited to go watch a new horror movie... Only to have members of the audience start mirroring the events in the movie and turn into demons.
  • District 9: After accidentally spraying himself with an alien substance, Wikus experiences increasingly disturbing kinds of this. First, he only experiences a nosebleed but of black blood, which is immediately dwarfed by his fingernails falling off. After vomiting black goo and passing out at a party, he goes to a hospital, where a doctor removes the bandages on his arm to discover that it has outright mutated into that of a prawn's, and Wikus is absolutely terrified. To make it worse, in reaction to what's happening to him and going slowly insane, Wikus decides to take matter in his own hands and chops off a finger of the new arm, presumably with the intention of eventually removing all of it. Apparently, the pain makes him come back to his senses.
  • Played for Laughs in one scene of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Simon casts an illusion spell of Edgin playing the lute to distract some guards, but his concentration begins to break when his foot gets stuck in the road. As the real Edgin and Holga try to free his foot, the illusory Edgin begins to glitch out, going from repeating itself like a broken record to unnervingly morphing: eyes bulging and going off-center, jaw jutting out to the side, head shrinking back into the torso, and the lute handle sagging like a deflating balloon.
    Scared Guard: What madness is this?
  • In the short movie Eleven, by Makopictures, the main character attempts to con a futuristic adults-only hotel by skipping out without paying his bills. The company Pleasure Island, Inc. secretly infect him with nanodrones that cause him to transform into a woman. Unlike a lot of gender-based transformations, there are several exterior and interior shots of the body during the transformation, showing mass alterations, cellular mutations, biological breakdowns, including a shot of his heart pumping faster and faster as it attempts to deliver adrenaline and blood to counteract what's happening to the host. When the body horror aspect finishes, the film switches to mental horror as the host tries to fight off what's happening mentally, but eventually his male psyche dies leaving a female personality behind.
  • Elysium:
    • Max's Powered Armor is grafted directly onto his bones and tied into his into his nervous system and brain, which means the pain is probably a lot worse than it might seem at first.
    • Kruger after he gets over half his face blown off by a grenade on arrival at Elysium. And he lives! We even get a real nice look at the results, too, before he gets fixed up.
    • Then we get a brief, quick glance of Kruger getting the back of the skull interface for his Exosuit, forcibly ripped out by Max, and still going. OWWWWWW.
  • A theme in Eraserhead. It starts with Bill complaining about problems in his knees and wrists, and then moves up to the creepy "manmade" chickens, and we end up with The Lady in the Radiator's horrifically distended cheekbones, the burnt skin of The Man in the Planet, and The Baby. There's also a certain Squick factor to realizing a human being was pregnant with that thing.
  • Freaks concludes with a character getting mutilated to look like a chicken as a Karmic Transformation, becoming The Freakshow's newest member in the process. Unlike something like The Human Centipede or Tusk (2014), the mutilation itself happens offscreen, but it's nightmarish even without the gore. The unreleased original cut, which was deemed too disturbing and subsequently destroyed, included another character getting castrated and joining the sideshow as a soprano singer.note  On the other hand, the movie goes out of its way to humanise the sideshow performers who are deformed to begin with, even though viewers may regard their bodies as horrific, with the message that the real "freaks" were in fact the aforementioned ones, as they're ugly on the inside.
  • Friday the 13th has Jason Voorhees, who has always been hideous-looking due to his cranial deformities. The body horror gets worse for him once he is brought back from the dead in Part VI, when he is shown as a maggot-infested revenant. It gets even worse in Part VII: due to being trapped at the bottom of a lake at the end of the previous movie, Jason's body has decomposed to the point where parts of his skeleton can be seen. By The Final Friday and Jason X, he has been wearing his iconic hockey mask for so long that his skin has started to grow around it, essentially fusing it to his face (and that's before becoming the cybernetic abomination that is "Uber Jason").
  • In Friend of the World, zombie-like creatures merge with the living.
  • In From Beyond, one of the main characters gets his head bitten off by fourth-dimensional eels and later shows up as a mass of pink goo with a face and tentacles. The other has his pineal gland extend through his forehead (the pineal gland is located near the back of the brain) and later bitten off. The two merge during the final battle.
  • Ginger Snaps tells a lycanthropy-as-a-metaphor-for-puberty story of a teenaged girl who is bitten by a werewolf, and subsequently begins a slow transformation into a wolf. In one memorable scene, she attempts to cut off her own tail (which, at that point, is hairless and half-developed) with a kitchen knife.
  • Godzilla:
    • Burning Godzilla in the film Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. His body is overheating from going into a meltdown from nuclear overload to the point where his flesh is now melting off of his body. Even worse when he dies. He actually cries in agony because he's in so much pain.
    • The Heisei incarnation of King Ghidorah falls under this. Imagine being three cute little pets◊ created to be friendly companions being mutated and fused-together into a single three-headed dragon◊. What's worse is he survives having his head ripped off and gets transformed into Mecha-King Ghidorah◊
    • Godzilla himself. Sure, we don't actually see the mutation happen itself. But, compare what he used to look like◊ to what he◊mutates into◊, and it's evident it was not a pleasant experience for him.
    • The Shin Godzilla version of Godzilla is in pain from just existing, given the visable keloid scars; glowing, open wounds; shiveled, short arms; jagged, crooked teeth growing out of his mouth; a variety of skeletons merged at the end of his tail; and barely able to open his mouth far wider than it should. Additionally, there's its "Kamata-kun" and "Shinagawa-kun" form, the former spilling blood everywhere and no arms, the latter having budding arms, and both having dead eyes and a scaleless appearance.
  • The Guinea Pig series, in particular Mermaid in a Manhole, in which a man finds an injured mermaid in a sewer, takes her home with him, only for her to become horribly ill. The third film in the series, Shiver! The Man Who Never Dies, deserves a mention too — it takes everything up another notch, thanks to the protagonist finding out he can’t feel pain, then using his newfound ability to cut himself to pieces to get back at an old flame who abandoned him.
  • Guyver: The first transformation sequence. Right before the big bad shows up when the guy they are trying to rescue... well, it doesn't turn out so well for him. Painful Transformation doesn't even begin to describe it. What happens to one of the Zoanoids, who accidentally swallowed the Guyver after the heroes Disney Death. The other villains were planning to cut him open and get it back, before it went Chest Burster instead.
  • The Hellraiser Cenobites. Every last one of them is utterly mutilated in a unique way, often still bearing the implements needed to both mangle them and keep them mangled; the transformation being unfathomably painful is a fundamental part of the process. Just because they get off on it, it doesn't mean it's any less body horror.
  • Horrorvision: The Cyborg overseeing the original computers of Horrorvision is missing the lower half of his body, has multiple large diodes in his head, and has pale white skin with black vein lines all over him.
  • The Howling (1981) has an excellent werewolf transformation scene, with effects by The Thing's Rob Bottin. The full transformation is quite horrifying to look at, with bubbling skin, snapping bones, contorting facial features etc. No wonder Karen got PTSD after witnessing Eddie turning into a werewolf.
  • Played for (dark) laughs in How to Get Ahead in Advertising, in which the titular Head grows out of a stress-related boil on the protagonist's shoulder.
  • The Human Centipede: How else do you explain a Mad Scientist mutilating you and sewing your mouth to someone else's asshole, and sewing someone else to your own anus?
  • The Hunger has David Bowie play a vampire who starts losing his immortality and starts aging during the middle of the film. He doesn't lose his immortality, just his youth. Catherine Deneuve has a dozen former vampire lovers tucked away in coffins in one room of her apartment, all of them extremely old and doomed to live as withered ancients forever. And a flashback suggests at least one of them has been that way since ancient Egypt. Gulp.
  • Once the tracker jackers are done with Glimmer in The Hunger Games, her grotesquely bloated and nigh-unrecognizable face is horrific to look at.
  • Indiana Jones:
  • In My Skin (2002) is about a woman who develops a fascination with self-mutilation after an accidental injury, which ultimately leads to autocannibalism.
  • The mutant cow in Isolation is barely even recognizable as a cow at all, save for its head resembling a deformed calf skull. Most of its body is a jumbled exoskeletal mess, and it appears to walk on its external ribs like some kind of bovine centipede.
  • Killer/saurus: The Sargeant, after getting trapped in the printing room with the dinosaur, forcefully has dinosaur DNA zapped into him by the laser bioprinter. When he comes out, he has claw hands, reptilian skin, and sharp teeth.
  • The Last Circus has one character mutilate his face with caustic soda and an iron to mimic a clown's makeup.
  • In The Last Witch Hunter:
    • Kaulder breaks his hand by ripping it through handcuffs that should be too small for it and we get to watch as all those little bones reset themselves with skin moving in manner reminescent of something crawling underneath it. All with those sickening sounds.
    • When Chloe's breaks Danique's youth charm, the older sorceress literally sheds her skin. It comes off in huge patches, revealing an ugly old crone underneath, part by part.
  • In L: change the WorLd, Maki's dad injects himself with a large amount of a lethal virus that causes him to break out in boils and bleed from everywhere, and is simultaneously fried to death by K.
  • In Little Monsters, you can go to the "monster world" by use of portals under the bed. If you stay there long enough, you become a monster. Apparently, if you piss off Boy (the boss), his minion invokes a punishment that RIPS YOUR HEAD OFF AND PUTS IT IN A BASKET. He'll replace your headless corpse with a fake head, though. And apparently this does not kill you.
  • Future Seth Richards in Looper tries to make his escape until parts of him start to disappear, because the men holding his past self captive have started to mutilate him. It starts with his fingers... then his nose... then his legs...
  • Malignant has its villain, a vestigial twin of the protagonist, albeit a very fully-formed one, coming out of his sister's back, complete with a face and arms. It goes further even after most of his physical body is destroyed, as he grotesquely contorts his sibling's limbs whenever he's using them. His face itself is merely a snarling, misshapen mouth and eyes that are set at haphazard angles.
  • The Manster is the source for Army of Darkness's Evil Ash transformation idea. A slower transformation with lots of creepy goodness as the victim copes with different stages.
  • In Mary Reilly, John Malkovich undergoes one of the most gruesome and spectacular Jekyll/Hyde transformations ever committed to screen, with Jekyll appearing inside Hyde's body and growing outwards.
  • Matango is about a crew who eat mushrooms that cause them to turn into giant mushroom creatures.
  • The Matrix:
    • Smith seals Neo's mouth before implanting him with a living "bug".
    • The second film ups the Body Horror by allowing Smith to infect someone's body so that they will become a duplicate of him.
  • May depicts a young socially isolated woman develop a morbid fascination with other people's body parts...
  • The effects of the Flare Virus in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials are garish; whatever part of your body got infected first starts to fester and turn black as your respiratory functions start to cease, followed by a degeneration of your mind to a feral zombie-like state. Advanced cases have horribly twisted limbs, skin marred by black tendril-like growths, a twitching and jerky gait likely caused by some form of palsy, and most Cranks have gouged their eyes out to stop the hallucinations they're plagued by.
  • In Monkeybone, before the end credits there's an animated segment where various characters from the film appear in toon form and take off their skins and bodysuits to reveal monkey-like characters underneath. Considering the director, Henry Selick, also made The Nightmare Before Christmas, not that surprising.
  • In The Monster Maker, the acromegaly inflicted on Lawrence by Dr. Markoff twists and distorts Lawrence's body, transforming him into a grotesque monster and stripping him of his musical talent.
  • Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life probably counts. Swelling and bursting because of one last wafer thin mint, showering everything with the contents of the stomach and, because it was so explosive, having the entire front of his body blown off, leaving only a pair of lungs and a beating heart.
  • Michael Jackson's transformation into Mecha-Michael in Moonwalker.
  • The demise of Captain Amazing in Mystery Men as well as the demise of millionaire supervillain Casanova Frankenstein.
  • The New Adventures Of Pinocchio has Pinocchio (then a real boy) turn back into a puppet after signing a contract — and Gepetto became a puppet as well. The end of the movie has The Showmaster turning into a sea monster.
  • Nightbooks: During her prolonged period asleep, the original witch began fusing with the candy in her gingerbread house.
  • Nightbreed features a litany of Body Horrors among the "monster" community, extreme enough to make Boone's excruciating transformation seem mild. Not directed by David Cronenberg, but he plays the perfectly normal yet perfectly creepy villain, fighting the relatively sympathetic monsters. All this is hardly surprising, considering that the movie is based on a book by Clive Barker.
  • The A Nightmare on Elm Street films have this quite frequently, but mainly in dream sequences.
  • Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight: The killer twins have boils covering their bodies. This is likely a result of the twins being host to a black alien slime that took control of them from the space rock that they hid under their bed.
    • In the sequel, the same happens to Zosia. We also see the transformation in action when Zosia infects Adas.
  • The Nutty Professor (1996) has some surprisingly graphic transformation sequences.
  • Pacific Rim:
  • In Phenomena, the Serial Killer turns out to be a little boy (the son of the school's headmistress) with a hideously deformed face, who apparently likes to take out his anger at the world by killing people.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and At World's End had the Flying Dutchman crew, who, after joining the crew, started to turn into fish creatures and then actually become part of the ship. A still-living sailor Will finds in DMC whose face was sucked off by the Kraken's suction cups also counts.
  • Poltergeist (1982) has a scene where a guy is in the bathroom washing his hands and he suddenly starts bleeding and has a horrific vision of his face peeling off. In the sequel, there's a sequence where another guy downs a bottle of tequila; upon swallowing the worm, he becomes a Meat Puppet for the Big Bad. After he's been forced to abuse his family for a while, he then proceeds to vomit a large, tumorous worm-like THING that morphs into said big bad. Yeesh.
  • Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead and its demon chicken egg breasts. There was a man with eggs where his nipples should be with demon chickens hatching from them. This is on top of normal zombie movie body horrors (only with chicken human zombie hybrids).
  • The Ruins: Stacy thinks that the man-eating vines are growing underneath her skin and begins obsessing about cutting herself open to try and get rid of the tendrils. She's not hallucinating.
  • RoboCop:
    • RoboCop (1987):
      • Murphy's barbaric death at the hands of the gangers that necessitates his Emergency Transformation into RoboCop. They use shotguns to blow his right hand off, then blast away the entire arm at the shoulder, leaving a shredded joint. Then they riddle him with buck, mutilating his body beyond any hope of normal recovery (and he survives this). Then Boddicker finally finishes him off with a shot to the forehead that blows a huge chunk out of the back of his head, averting Pretty Little Headshots.
      • One of Clarence Boddicker's mooks, Emil, tries to run Murphy over with a truck and accidentally drives straight into a huge vat of Toxic Waste. He emerges from the deluge horribly melted and deformed, and is so biologically and chemically unstable that getting hit by a car pops him like a zit.
    • Robo himself, under his cool visor, is actually a human face (or tauntingly realistic replica of one) stretched over and nailed onto the metal shell of his head.
    • And again to Officer Murphy in the remake. In one of the most effective scenes in the movie, Murphy gets to see just how much of his original body is left: his head, one hand, his lungs, and his heart. What he sees makes him want to kill himself, and only the wishes of wife and child get him to reconsider.
  • The Saw films not only expose the viewer to considerable machine-assisted Body Horror, but Jigsaw's captives are forced to overcome their own dread of bodily mutilation in order to survive.
  • In The Shining, there is a scene where Jack Torrence walks into the bathroom of the hotel and finds a rather attractive looking naked woman in the tub, the woman comes out of the tub and she and Jack embrace — but as he's kissing her, the woman slowly turns into the rotting corpse of the much older woman who died in the tub. Then she starts laughing, taking it to higher levels of creepiness.
  • Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue defines creepy when it comes to Kamen Rider. Shin's transformation includes a third eye emerging from his forehead and his lower jaw splitting in half.
  • In Shocking Dark, those attacked by the monsters lurking in the bunker are forcibly mutated into biomechanical beings just like them.
  • Silent Hill has more than its share; the nurse near the end, the barb-wire dildo finale, the white things that spat acid, and when Pyramid Head rips the skin from a woman's body...while she's still alive!
  • Slither loves this trope so much it wants to impregnate it with thousands of alien slugs causing it to swell up until it could fill a barn, and then instead of giving birth the traditional way, simply explode. The alien slug babies will then run off and crawl into the brains of anyone they can find to make them join the hive mind (probably a Shivers reference). The "queen" now resembles a cross between a squid, Michael Rooker, and a horrible skin disease, and is spread across a room. The alien slug baby people can then strip off and lie down on their ruler, and slowly get absorbed into him.
  • The ending of Society is a particularly bizarre example of this trope. Anybody who has seen the film will probably have the "shunting" scene burned into their brain, either because it is disgusting and disturbing, or unbelievably Narmy (in a squirm-inducing sort of way). (You know Hieronymous Bosch's ''The Garden of Earthly Delights?'' Now imagine that was drawn from life.)
  • Splinter has some good malformy body horror in it. The main menace has the ability to infect hosts and twist them into rotting, flailing monsters with spikes sticking out their flesh.
  • Sssssss has a man slowly turning into a snake, which is not a pretty process. We also see what happens when the transformation is incomplete.
  • Star Trek:
    • In Star Trek: First Contact one of the Borg drones that infiltrated the Enterprise initiates one of the crew into the assimilation process. We see black veins showing up along half of his face as he begs Captain Picard for help. Picard puts him out of his misery. Early in the film, Picard has a nightmare that involves a Borg prosthesis bursting out of his face.
    • Way back in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, an early scene sees the Enterprise's new science officer and another crewman caught in the transporter beam when it malfunctions, resulting in their twisted and deformed bodies appearing for a moment, screaming horribly and then vanishing — apparently reappearing on the other end of the beam, where they (fortunately) didn't live long.
  • Star Wars:
    • In Revenge of the Sith, there's both Obi-Wan ripping open Grievous' chestplate, exposing all his organs, then shooting them with a blaster and making his insides explode and also Vader, after being burnt alive and losing most of his limbs, climbing up the embankment with his robot arm.
    • Things don't get any better for Vader throughout the rest of the saga, as he is rescued, only to be operated on for days without anesthetic, and is encased in an incredibly uncomfortable suit of armor/iron lung that he must wear for the rest of his life, aside from brief respites in pressurized chambers, so he does not suffocate due to his damaged lungs. Oh, and when he was able to spend a few moments outside the suit, it was often to scrub necrotic flesh off his body! Rogue One does a great job of showing, if just for a moment, how freakishly horrific his private life is.
  • Strange Nature: Plenty. At first, it's limited to some extra-limbed frogs that some kids find by the riverside. However, when Nikki and Jodie give birth to their children, it's revealed that the cause is spreading to other species as well. Nikki's puppy has a cleft lip, and Jodie's daughter has a cleft lip, a smooth surface with nostril holes in place of her nose, and an extra arm. Plus, at least one of the wolves who's been attacking people has two faces.
  • At one point in Sunspring, H vomits up an eyeball.
  • Sweet Home (1989) has some prominent examples: Taguchi, whose lower torso is melted off by Lady Mamiya's shadows; Yamamura, whose flesh melts off of his body after saving Emi from Mamiya's furnace before his skeleton crumbles into a pile; and Lady Mamiya, herself, whose body twists and mutates into a horrifically monstrous form during the climax.
  • In The Sword and the Sorcerer, when Xusia sheds his Machelli disguise, quite literally.
  • Tales from the Darkside: The Movie features this in at least two of the stories.
    • "Cat From Hell" is about a hitman hired to kill a cat. The cat is responsible for several deaths, and yes, does take out the hitman. It does an Attack the Mouth by leaping into the hitman's mouth. When the hitman chokes to death, the cat keeps going, for a full Orifice Invasion. And it's still not done. It gives its last victim a heart attack by letting that person see the cat leaving through the hitman's mouth.
    • "Lover's Vow" involves a human turning into a monstrous gargoyle, starting with her claws tearing through the human skin.
  • The entire premise of Thanatomorphose is about a woman who begins to rot alive, starting as a few minor bruises, then slowly escalating to maggot-ridden brownish-red skin and her extremities breaking off. The entire movie is set in her apartment, which becomes just as diseased and filthy as she does. At the very end of the movie, her body completely rots and melts away into a skeleton with bits of red flesh still clinging onto the bone, killing her.
  • In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, the Shredder attempts a One-Winged Angel by drinking a cannister of "ooze." When he reemerges a few minutes later, he's at least a foot taller and has added about a hundred pounds of muscle. We don't see the transformation, but the fact that his Shoulders of Doom/Spikes of Villainy have also grown exponentially, and his black cloth outfit now appears hard and leathery implies that his costume is now a part of him.
  • In Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright's discovery that he is a cyborg by looking down and finding his chest cavity ripped open and filled with metal bits is pretty disturbing.
  • Several instances in Argentine horror film Terrified, including a character being killed by having her neck broken, and then reappearing as an apparently-still-conscious abomination, completely bent over backwards but still capable of running.
  • Tetsuo: The Iron Man and its sequels push this trope to its extremes. The first film (which set the idea for the future films) is based around a man known as the "Metal Fetishist" (he has a fetish for sticking scrap metal into his body) getting hit by a car and killed by a salaryman who then gets punished by having his flesh slowly turn into metal.
  • The title creature in The Thing (1982) embodies this trope. To describe it best, the Thing is a formless (at least in the films) monster that is capable of disguising itself as anything it consumes. The real body horror comes in when its cover is blown and it must defend itself/escape. And revealing itself ain't pretty, often with insect like limbs forcing themselves out, blood spewing everywhere, and bones and teeth created on the spot to chomp the nearest threat.
  • Thinner involves a very fat man rapidly losing weight due to a curse. Also contains a man who turns into a bipedal lizard (complete with scales and webbed fingers), and another who develops rotting pits on his face.
  • What happens twice to Senator McComb in different time periods in Time Cop, when they're in the same place at the same time. They're merging into one creature before turning into living liquid which disappears out of space.
  • The French-Japanese-Korean film Tokyo! features a young woman slowly turning into a chair. It starts with a huge gaping hole in her abdomen, then later she is shown struggling to walk with her legs turned into wooden chair legs and her pelvis into a wooden seat. Finally, her hands also become chair legs and her head disappears. The kicker? In the original comic book the movie is based on, the transformation is played for laughs.
  • Tokyo Gore Police: Imagine the two Tetsuo movies with pink flesh instead of metal, then add a ridiculous amount of Gorn.
  • For something similar to The Human Centipede but slightly less squicky in that it doesn't involve assholes, see Tusk (2014), about a madman sewing and mutilating somebody to turn them into a human walrus.
  • Underworld (2003) also pays homage to An American Werewolf in London. The werewolf transformation is a direct reference to that movie.
  • Vagabond (1985): Actually a very creepy version, since it's overtly realistic: a woman has fallen into depression and this appears to have physical ramifications on her body. Equally, she is unable to take complete care of herself and her physical deterioration has negative effects on her mindset. Eventually, she crumples into sleep in the woods... the final product was actually the film's opening scene, starting a "how we got here" plot, and it's a mangled, wasted, frozen and to some extent disturbed body.
  • Viral: When a person is fully infected, the parasitic worms are seen gruesomely protruding from their ears, clicking while they sense uninfected nearby to attack.
  • Virus Shark: Infection by SHVID-1 causes discoloration of the skin, and lesions to appear on the host body. Prolonged infection causes the host to mutate into a Marauder.
  • This may or may not happen to Pink in The Wall. During the guitar solo on "Comfortably Numb," Bob Geldof gets a creeping, fleshy, pinkish growth slowly spreading over his face, arms and chest. It gets to the point where he's fully covered and looks like the life-sized "Pink Doll" from the tour. As the solo comes to an end, the mummified creature tears its flesh off... and Dark Lord Pink emerges from underneath, fully dressed and ready.
  • In We Were Soldiers, based on the battle of Ia Drang valley in 1965, napalm is accidentally sent to land on American soldiers. Besides the men running while on fire, a young soldier named Jimmy Nakayama had his legs burned by the napalm. The horror comes from when one man grabs his ankles to carry him to the rescue chopper and the skin slides off like the burned outside of a marshmallow. Not creative liberty on the film's part, Jimmy Nakayama was a real soldier in the battle who did have that happen to him; he died two days later in an aid station and became a father just that week.
  • Willow:
    • The scene where Bavmorda pulls a Forced Transformation to transform Airc's entire army into pigs is incredibly disturbing, especially because the visual effects and makeup used still hold up.
    • The climactic battle lingers on the main characters undergoing a slow, painful transformation into pigs, while the evil queen taunts them. The scene where the Troll falls to the ground, rolls into a ball, has tentacles tear its pelt off, revealing brown slimy pulsating muscle, and then two little dragon heads emerge is rather... gruesome. Willow's repeated attempts to return Razel to human form are implied to not be pleasant experiences for her, either.
  • All the transformation sequences in The Wolfman (2010), in all their bone-cracking, blood vomiting horror.
  • In The Wraith, the body of every person the titular character kills shows up with their corpse relatively intact, but deathly pale, cold and without their eyes. Sheriff Loomis and his deputy Murphy are more freaked out by the fact that these bodies are like that even though they were the result of a car falling over a cliff and exploding.

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