Body Horror - Television Tropes & Idioms

Isn't she just the cutest freak of nature you've ever seen?

"Arthur, my mustache is touching my brain..."

- The Tick, That Mustache Feeling

"I....I didn't have any choice. The El-Tee, the sergeant, they were ALL infected! I could see it, SLIDING AROUND BENEATH THEIR SKIN! And then they stood up, and started to talk....oh, God, THEIR VOICES! Oh God...."

- Anonymous traumatized Marine, Halo 3

Someone is about to turn into an alien, or has something growing inside them that is definitely not supposed to be there. Sometimes similar to The Puppet Masters, but in that case, the suspense comes from the implanted alien slowly taking over.

Sometimes, this implies getting your Face Full Of Alien Wing Wong. Alternatively, this is any form of Horror that is based primarily on the body developing in out-of-control, hideous ways. Parasites are usually involved.

Made most famous by the Alien quadrilogy, but done before that in the Doctor Who story "The Ark in Space".

Naturally, there's quite a bit of crossover with both Painful Transformation, Emergency Transformation, Came Back Wrong, and Transformation Trauma. See also Your Head Asplode, Squick, and The Virus.

For a character or Mook who has this as their backstory, see Was Once A Man and/or Tragic Monster.

Examples

Anime

Akira's most horrific scene involves Tetsuo losing control of his considerable psychic powers and mutating out of control into an amorphous monster that consumes anything it touches. Only the resurrection of Akira and the creation of a new universe is enough to stop him.
- The less known original manga makes it all the worse, by putting much greater detail in it. And it's only a small part of the Nightmare Fuel Unleaded the manga contains.
The manga Parasyte could be considered Seinen Body Horror. Alien parasites fall to Earth and infiltrate the brains of humans, effectively killing the host and turning the head into a shapeshifting monstrosity. A teenager spots one of the parasites entering through his arm, and ties it off before the parasite can reach the brain. Problem is, now he's got a carnivorous shapeshifting entity controlling his right arm...
Everything by manga artist Junji Ito.
When the titular power of the Political-Thriller Code Geass gains a mind of its own, the horror of it controlling your life rather than the other way round is no less disturbing than having an Alien rip its way out of your rib-cage.
The manga Franken Fran exists solely for this trope. An early example comes when Fran is asked by a cop to look into a rash of severed limbs. She finds they're all from the same person, which seems impossible given there are far more than two arms and two legs in the pile... and then she tracks them to the source. It's a young woman whose body has a massive oversupply of stem cells, causing her to continuously grow limbs and organs - she is quite literally trapped in a gigantic, ever-growing tumor. Her parents took to hacking off the spare limbs in order to keep it under control. Oddly enough, that's one of the few chapters with a happy ending.
Geno Cyber. The title creature is two psychic girls literally fused together, which makes them into a Person Of Mass Destruction. It's also the hero(ine?) of the story.
The transformation sequences in Xam'd: Lost Memories can be quite gruesome if you're not prepared, including a scene where the protagonist is enveloped by what looks like white paint sprouting from his oversized arm, and ends up turning into this◊. The storyboards for this sequence are even more offputting.

Comic Books

In the X-Men comics, this is how the evil alien Brood reproduce. They were pretty obviously, ah, inspired by Alien.
In the two-parter Ruins, Warren Ellis writes about a Marvel Universe where everything goes wrong. Gamma radiation turns Bruce Banner into a green pile of tumors, Peter Parker develops a deadly viral rash from his spider bite, and Johnny Storm incinerates himself.
In Grant Morrison's first story arc for Animal Man, the super-powered (and temporarily insane) Nature Hero B'wana Beast, in a series of failed attempts to rescue his kidnapped ape friend Djuba, uses his telekinetic helmet to fuse various animals together (including a homeless man and a rat). When Djuba dies from laboratory smallpox innoculation, B'wana Beast avenges her by fusing her body with that of Dr. Myers, the scientist responsible. The lab technicians, not recognizing their supervisor, prepare to do ape surgery without anaesthesia while their fully sentient victim, attempting to stop them, can only grunt "Ma urrs! Ma urrs!"

Film

A staple of numerous horror films, most notably The Fly. In a deleted scene from the 1986 remake, Seth Brundle falls from the roof of his apartment building, and proceeds to grow a fifth limb, which he then proceeds to break and chew off (!!!). Of course, this has nothing on the final metamorphosis.
- David Cronenberg, who directed the remake of The Fly, is an acknowledged master of this trope. This was parodied when he appeared in the Royal Canadian Air Farce Year 2000 special, selling a breakfast cereal called "Big Hairy Things."
Blessed, where Heather Graham gets impregnated with twin antichrists.
The horror movie Thinner is full of this brand of body horror.
One of the themes 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 of course, The Baby.
- About The Baby, there's also a certain Squick factor to realizing a human being was pregnant with that thing.
The ending of the film 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 puke inducing sort of way).
The Thing (the John Carpenter's version) makes full use of this trope, having some of the most horrific mutations ever put on film.
Videodrome (also by David Cronenberg) presents a very bizarre, surreal, and often horrific use of Body Horror. This includes everything from a man with an organic video cassette slot in his stomach (which is a clear allusion to a vagina), to another man having countless tumors erupt from his stomach and head (one of the squickiest scenes this troper has ever seen).
- Another Cronenberg film The Brood has a woman whose negative emotions are being expressed by giving virgin birth to extremely violent mutant children.
- And another: eXistenZ. Imagine having gooey ports in your spine that tap into your nervous system to enable you to play virtual reality videogames. Not squicky enough? Now imagine that the device you port into is a living thing with a pulse and vaguely resembles a brain.
- While we're on the subject of Toronto's creepiest son, the Psychic Duel from Scanners, which makes one realize that Psychic Powers have way scarier combat uses than choking people.
Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and At World's End had this in the form of the Dutchman crew, who, after joining the crew started to turn into fish creatures and then actually become part of the ship.
- A dead sailor Will finds in DMC that has no face also serves.
The 90's remake of The Nutty Professor has some surprisingly graphic transformation sequences; a bit much for some viewers.
- The sequel is worse. In every conceivable way.
"H-H-Hud... I don't feel so good..."
- If you can't imagine that seen being any nastier, consider this: unless something happened to short out her nervous system, Marlena would have been conscious for at least a minute after blowing up — it would still take some time to bleed out after she exploded.
As already mentioned in the Transformation Trauma section, what happens to Mr Creosote in Monty Python's Meaning Of Life. One word: Kaboom!
Alien with its famous chestburster scene. And it gets worse. The original concept of the Alien lifecycle involved capturing victims and turning them into new facehugger eggs.
- It's also parodied in Spaceballs (which has John Hurt making an appearance as his character from Alien in it) in the scene at the diner where Lonestar and his chubby half human half canine best pal/sidekick Barf are, Kane from Alien and some buddies are joking around when Kane suddenly feels ill ("Somebody give this guy some water! Water my ass, give him some peptobismol!") and the same alien from the movie bursts out of his chest, but unlike in the movie Alien, the chestburster alien puts on a straw hat, is holding a cane and starts singing Hello Ma Baby like Michigan J. Frog from Looney Tunes (even the voice).
- "Check Please!"
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory has Violet come out looking all floppy.
Junior directed by Ivan Reitman. Arnold Schwarzenegger pregnant. Do I need to go further?
Freaks, directed by Tod Browning. No special effects: that's really what the actors looked like.
In the first Fantastic Four movie, Doom gets a shard of metal stuck in him, which causes his entire body to eventually turn into metal.
A very squicky Japanese film Tetsuo: The Iron Man and its sequel Tetsuo II: Body Hammer push this trope to its extremes.
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. The "queen," now resembles a cross between a squid, Michael Rooker, and a horrible skin disease, and is basically spread across an entire room. The alien slug baby people can then strip off and lie down on their ruler, and slowly get absorbed into him. I Am Not Making This Up.
Tokyo Gore Police. Imagine the two Tetsuo movies above with pink flesh instead of metal, then add a ridiculous amount of Gorn.

Literature

HP Lovecraft dabbles in this one with "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," which features a town of people who are gradually turning into... fish-things. In the end, it turns out that the protagonist is one of them too.
- Not so scary as presented◊ here◊. Awwwwww.
- And then there's "The Colour Out of Space", in which a meteorite with something horrifying in it causes people to crumble into dust—while alive.
- And in "Cool Air", the learned doctor melts. He's actually been dead for years.
- And then there's the story he revised, "Two Black Bottles": A man disintegrates after his soul is released. It's described very graphically.
Thinner by Stephen King had this as its general theme.
- The Tommyknockers had some teeth-losing, skin transparent...ing, genital morphing hideousness. It was inspired by The Colour Out Of Space, as King is a huge Lovecraft fan.
- And let us not forget the "shit-weasels" (sorry, but that's what characters call them!) in Dreamcatcher.
The Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson includes some of this; the process of Hemalurgy, specifically, involves killing a person in order to transfer his or her powers (and/or soul) to another person by piercing them with a piece of metal, usually a large spike. This results in Steel Inquisitors, whose creation involves having gigantic metal spikes shoved into their eyes, among other places, and who are easily controlled by a dark god and Koloss, who the Hemalurgy mutates into monstrous, inhuman war machines whose skin is replaced by that of a different Koloss and which never grows larger (thus a newly-created Koloss will have baggy skin that would fall off if it weren't fastened on with spikes, and the oldest and largest Koloss have skin that has stretched so far that it's torn off of them. Did I mention that all of this can be done to pretty much any innocent human being?
In I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, the horrific supercomputer AM captures five humans to torture for his own pleasure, and chooses to torture one by mutating his body into an ape-thing beyond recognition, complete with dulled mental capacities.
- In addition, there's the Involuntary Shapeshifting that leads to the title and the trope it inspires.
Breaking Dawn, Book II. It'll make you miss the sparkly teenage romance.
"Discord in Scarlet", a short story by A. E. Van Vogt that was incorporated into the novel Voyage of the Space Beagle was the inspiration for Alien
In one Animorphs book, when the Animorphs start demorphing just as the two hour time-limit is reached, the possibility of them being trapped halfway through and being human/animal hybrids forever is raised.
- Actually, pretty much every demorphing sequence features a mild case of this as the process can range from mildly bizarre to downright sickening. Well, except for Cassie, who makes it look good.
- The fact that they occasionally Did Not Do The Research (notably, characters' knees reverse themselves when transforming into dogs, which isn't how a dog's leg works at all) just makes it worse.
The Matter Manipulator, resident Mad Artist of The Pilo Family Circus, uses body horror and Involuntary Shapeshifting as a form of torture against disobedient employees:
Without speaking Winston lifted his shirt, and Jamie had to hold back a scream. A burst of glowing light poured out like blood, and it looked as though the middle of his chest had been dug out and replaced with hot coals. The skin around it was smoking and blackened; there was a smell of cooking meat...
- Another of the Matter Manipulator's subjects is Tallow of the Freakshow, so named for the fact that his flesh is constantly melting like candlewax, and every so often, he has to reabsorb the pieces back into himself. The sign beneath his tank reads "This is Tallow: his every living movement is hellish," and how true.
The War Against The Chtorr. In "A Rage for Revenge" the leader of a cult that worships the alien invaders removes his clothes to reveal that his body is covered in 'worm fur', the neural symbionts that act as sense organs for the Chtorran worms. And in "A Season for Slaughter" an expedition discovers that Chtorran cities are somehow capable of transforming the lifeforms within them – including captive humans.

Live Action TV

Star Trek The Next Generation had an episode called "Genesis" where everyone in the Enterprise was devolving into some variety of lower life form.
- Similarly in "Identity Crisis", Geordi turns into an alien creature.
- And, of course, The Borg, who do this to everyone they meet.
The X Files did this one at least once every season, plus it was at the centre of The Movie's plot.
In the Farscape episode "DNA Mad Scientist", Aeryn Sun was slowly transformed into some weird human/Pilot mix. And that's just in the first season...
The Torchwood episode "Something Borrowed" centred around Gwen's pregnancy with an alien "baby" and her attempts to hide this from her wedding guests, while escaping from the alien mother who wanted to tear her apart to reclaim the child.
Sheppard from Stargate Atlantis was slowly turning into something akin to the Iratus bug in the episode 'Conversion'. Eventually had to be sedated as he was getting increasingly dangerous.
As mentioned above, Doctor Who is one of the progenitors of this trope, but always finds new ways to put an interesting spin on it. In the Season 4 premiere, "Partners in Crime", the monsters are the Adipose, creatures born from human fat that, in times of emergency, convert all matter in a human's body to achieve birth, effectively killing them. And they're adorable.
- And the horrific gas-mask mutation sequence in "The Empty Child". And the equally horrific Oodification sequence, complete with the horking up of a second brain in "Planet of the Ood". And the disembodied head-statue-things in "Silence in the Library". And the Harlan Ellison-esque pavement-person in "Love and Monsters". And many others.
In an episode of Big Wolf On Campus, Merton gives birth to an alien baby.
One episode of The Outer Limits 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.
Played for laughs in a Kids in the Hall sketch in which Kevin Mac Donald's character grows a beard, then gets very attached to his new facial hair. The beard ends up taking over his body and forcing him to do all kinds of nefarious things.
The new series Fringe seems to be overly fond of this.
Star Trek Voyager: In "Scorpion" Harry Kim gets bitch-slapped by an alien from Species 8472. Alien cells in the wound begin to infest and transform Harry's body, covering his face in strange tendrils. Fortunately the Doctor is able to cure the infection...except for a solitary tendril up Harry's nose. Or so B'Elanna claims.
The above-mentioned The Ark in Space has one of Doctor Who's most famous cliffhangers, with Noah slowly removing his hand from his pocket to reveal he's being taken over by...green bubblewrap?

Music

Frequently played for laughs in the music of The Darkest of The Hillside Thickets, most notably in the appropriately-titled "Burrow Your Way to my Heart" and "The Innsmouth Look".
Michael Jackson's short film Ghosts is just balls-out insane, but the scenes where Jackson and his minions do their best to scare the hell out of people by graphically changing into the scariest things they can think of stand out.
- It just gets weird when his nose starts crumbling.
A music video by Weird Al Yankovic titled "Fat" (a parody of "Bad") has Al becoming a fat man. It's much creepier than that description alone would indicate.
The full version of the "Rock DJ" music video by Robbie Williams, which involves Robbie stripping to get the attention of a female DJ. When he gets down to bare skin, he decides that isn't enough, so he begins to peel all of his flesh off, layer by layer, until he's left as an animated dancing skeleton. Naturally, this gets the DJ's attention.

Tabletop Games

White Wolf RPG Vampire: The Masquerade has a clan of Tzimisce, vampires with Vissitude, the core power of which was to create Body Horror in many different and disturbing ways.
Daemonhosts in Warhammer 40000 reshape the bodies of their victims into a more inhuman state.
- Meanwhile, those who displease the Chaos Gods are doomed to become Chaos Spawn. The transformation process is described thusly: "The body collapses under the unbearable weight of corruption and is infused with the raw power of Chaos, forcing all manner of strange and disturbing transformations. Chaos Spawn lose what little remained of their original forms, becoming a shifting mass of tentacles and eyes." Yeeeeeeeeeeeuuuuuukkk.
Almost all monsters in the GURPS sourcebook GURPS Fantasy II: Adventures in the Mad Lands are former people who have been transformed into hideous monsters either by the land's insane gods or by their own evil natures.

Toys

More than a few toys have this including Boglins , Nutcrackers, Wuvluvs and Egg Flips.
Russian nesting dolls have this- each one has another one inside them. Each time you open them there is another one inside. One can assume that one of them ate the other one or wears it as a second skin. The Higglytown Heroes characters are made to be like this too.
Mr Potato Head. Consider that toy a lovable version of the One Winged Angel.

Video Games

In Silent Hill 3, it turns out that Heather is "pregnant" with a freakish demon growing inside of her which she is supposed to give birth to.
Resident Evil 4 plays this with Las Plagas (literally, "The Pests" in Spanish), some sort of strange being that takes over the host's body, and submits his will and mind to Saddler's own purposes. As you play the game, you can see how Las Plagas are slowly taking over the bodies of Leon and Ashley.
The X Parasites in Metroid Fusion take over sapient beings, consume their bodies and then mimic their DNA, becoming perfect physical copies and gaining their intelligence... but without any of their higher emotions, living only to feed and reproduce. The Metroids were created to hunt and destroy them, confining them to SR-388, but Samus exterminated the Metroids. Oops.
- In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Samus is infected by The Corruption and is slowly transforming into her Evil Twin, Dark Samus.
  - In the other two Prime games, there is also Body Horror in the mutations caused by said Corruption, and Enemy Scans of some dead creatures (mutants in the first, victims of the Ing in Prime 2: Echoes).
One of the enemy types in Bullet Witch are misleadingly called grubs. They're actually what happens when the ghosts Screamers spew possess a person — a grotesquely distorted human with a bizarre, bloated head, that moves in a freakish way, and attacks you by biting you with its ribs and spewing fire.
A trailer for Bioshock features the first-person protagonist in hand-to-hand combat with some kind of armored figure. He injects some kind of green serum into his arm, which causes the limb to apparently rot, whereupon a swarm of bees flies out of his arm while he screams bloody murder. *shudder*
X-Com: UFO Defense had the infamous Chrysalids, insect-like humanoid aliens who could turn any X-Com soldier or civilian into a bulging, misshapen zombie with a single egg-injecting melee attack. The zombies are essentially still-living meat-suits for the juvenile Chrysalids, who erupt out of the zombies like someone popping out of a too-small shirt after the zombie takes too much damage.
- X-Com: Terror from the Deep had the Tentaculats, who did essentially the same thing.
- Not to mention the things the Aliens are implied to visit upon captured humans. The lucky ones get turned into alien food or dissected, while the unlucky ones... Well, the Bio-Drone from Terror from the Deep is a brain in a vat with an anti-gravity base and a sonic weapon, controlled by implanted alien electronics. TftD also features a creature called the "Deep One", which is essentially a living human-turned-alien-incubator. For this troper the real Squick, however, was the description of a device called alien implanter: "...this [removal/addition of organs and electronics] was thought to be done to unconscious subjects, but research suggests that the subject is conscious and painfully aware. The human physiology fits this device unfortunately well."
  - Let's also not forget that the Bio-Drone's sonic weapon was built out of the original human's vocal chords. It literally screams its victims to death.
Quake 4 is positively rife with body horror, from apparently living human chests with computers for heads attached to walls and the Strogg medical facility level, where the player has to watch helplessly - from first-person perspective, no less - as Cpl. Cain gets a painful-looking injection of steroids, has his legs cut off with a buzzsaw and new cybernetic legs attached as well as a neural implant stabbed into his brain. The fact that you see all of this happen to another prisoner before you (and hear his screams) does not make it any less horrifying, either. Perhaps the most unsettling sight is that of Cain's bloody leg-stumps quivering after his legs have been amputated. The scene (not for the faint of heart) is featured on You Tube under "Quake 4 medical facility"
The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The vital mask transformations have some of the most painful Transformation Sequences ever put to cartridge.
- Let's not forget the House of Skulltula in Ocarina of Time... that father and his 5 sons used to be human...
In Yume Nikki, Madotsuki can stumble upon a little girl named Monoko wandering in a tunnel in the White Desert. Seems relatively normal, right? If Madotsuki flashes the Stoplight ability at her, however, Monoko instantly turns into a five-armed freak of nature (one of those arms is coming out of her head!) with what appears to be a melting eye and some sort of vortex in her stomach. Yikes.
Eternal Darkness, a game rife with Nightmare Fuel, has the Bonethieves. Bonethieves are insectoid creatures with scythes for arms that rip into a victim's neck and enter the body, taking it over and killing the person. The body is then used to attack anyone who isn't infected.
In the Half Life series, parasitic creatures called headcrabs latch onto the skulls of humans, taking over their body and causing gross mutations. These include growing elongated claws, a gaping maw in the chest, and rotting. During all of this, the host is still at least partially conscious.
Two words: The Flood.
This trope is the whole premise of Parasite Eve.
The Necromorphs of Dead Space are alien parasites that infect dead bodies. The infected corpses reanimate and start growing all sorts of disgusting appendages to kill the player with, such as bone claws and tentacles.

Webcomics

Gnoph has a lot of this. When it begins, Abbey is being slowly eaten alive from the inside by her Bond Creature, Scut. Things get progressively worse from there.

Western Animation

Subverted slightly in Jimmy Neutron when Carl develops a motherly attachment to his alien baby.
Spoofed in several Treehouse of Horror episodes of The Simpsons, such as the one where Homer gets a hair transplant from Snake resulting in Snake's hair taking over Homer's body.
Some of Ben10's alien transformations involve this. He grows an extra set of arms when turning into Fourarms, eyes pop out of his temple when he turns into Stinkfly, and so on. This is probably an Affectionate Parody of the scary alien transformation scenes so typical of horror films.
A few episodes of Mr Meaty have dealt with this. Often it's due to the poor quality of the fast-food restaurant's entrees. In one episode, Parker mooches off most of the other characters and then gets infected with a tapeworm, "the ultimate moocher". Which is later eaten(!!!) by a scientist who collects internal parasites.
Cow And Chicken has had a few cases of this.
The Tick episode That Mustache Feeling. As quoted above.
The Grim Adventures Of Billy and Mandy has had more than a few episodes in which this has happened. One episode being the one where Billy suddenly gets a pimple on his back which turns into a creature that acts like him who is dubbed Yupp Yupp.
Catscratch has dealt with this in a few episodes- one being Major Pepperidge where Mr Blik grows a second head (one that looks like him, but talks like a Jazz musician) and Lovesick where Gordon gets an allergic reaction to broccoli where he puffs up really bad, gets a huge blood shot eye, a rash all over his body, razor sharp teeth and a drooling tongue in his mouth and a huge arm with razor sharp claws on his paws...This happens again at the end after Kimberly gives him chocolates which he also is allergic to.
Bret's transformation into a car in Turbo Teen had this.
Blackarachnia's unnerving mutation from a promising young Autobot into a techno-organic freak in Transformers Animated
An episode of Extreme Ghostbusters featured a group of monsters who used surgery to turn people into monsters. This troper had nightmares for weeks after that one.

Other

Artist Alan M. Clark embodies this trope very well in his series of medical horror paintings. Try this painting◊, as well as this one◊.
The "hunger gets what hunger wants" TV ad campaign for Ball Park Franks. The message seems to be that if you don't eat enough franks, a large arm with a mind of its own will sprout from your stomach and force-feed you.

Real Life

The human bot fly lays its eggs on mosquitoes, which fall off when the mosquito sucks your blood. The egg hatches, the larva burrows into your skin, and remains there for eight weeks before maturing, erupting, and flying off. Medical intervention can get it removed during its larval stage, but the best remedy for this is to avoid tropical vacations.
- Noted sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler learned about this charming critter shortly before heading off to a place where they live. She was so Squicked that such a thing was real, she wound up writing the short story Bloodchild - which went on to become her first popular work of fiction, interestingly enough.
Then there's the candirú, a tiny fish that can be found in the Amazon River. Normally it swims into the gills of larger fish to drink their blood, but it sometimes mistakenly attacks humans. If you use that river as a toilet and are unlucky enough, it can jump into your urethra ((it finds a host by scent, and human urine just happens to smell close enough), get stuck due to its back-facing spines, and die. Removal is, as you might guess, horrific.
The tropical region is home to a funny little nematode called Onchocerca volvulus that infects people via a fly bite and causes all kinds of interesting effects from skin papules to loss of skin elasticity or blindness. This troper does not intend to visit Africa or South America anytime soon, no sir.
Some people love body art, some people sometimes do it to look like animals or other things- this troper has seen a man who's made himself look like a lizard by painting scales all over him, making his teeth sharp and his tongue forked.
- The Catman would be another example.
A condition called argyria, which can come from eating or inhaling enough of any type of silver, causes... interesting symptoms:
- For example, there's the case of Paul Karason, a guy who drank a snake-oil health tonic called colloidal silver for several years until the silver particles in the solution embedded themselves into his flesh and turned his entire body blue. This is amusing on its own, until you realise that this must mean that the man's brain has been thoroughly infused with silver particles too, at which point the concept turns icky pretty quick.
- A candidate for the US Senate was actually wholly into the use of colloidal silver as a magic cure-all, and consumed it heartily in preparation for when everything collapsed in the year 2000. In his Senate race afterwards, he...kinda stood out. And lost. Oh, and prolonged consumption of silver can cause brain damage too, if the blue thing isn't bad enough.
- A lady used a prescribed colloidal silver nasal spray for many years and turned slate grey. Use a strong enough microscope and you can see silver crystals in her skin.
- Something similar happens when Ben turns into Diamondhead in Ben 10.
Tree man.
Pick up any dermatological atlas. Cornua Cutanea and Epithelioma are this troper's favorites. (Old dude with scary mouth will inhale your soul!)

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