Body Horror - Television Tropes & Idioms

There have been two PSP ads that show people's faces distorting. The first one featured a guy talking about the benefits of the PSP. Fingers come out of his face. His faces distorts into his head. His mouth transforms into a PSP screen. He grows long gray eyebrows and a mustache. When he pulls them out, pointing hands come out of his face.The second one featured a boyfriend and girlfriend arguing. The guy's head inflates and the girl pops it. It grows back, then the girl stretches and twists his face. Then she stretches his ear and pulls it over his head. Then the girl talks about nosing around on the internet, and her nose grows really big until her boyfriend stretches it. When he releases it, her ears increase in size. Yup, this definitely shows the capabilities of the console.
An Australian PS 3 ad has a man with no pants on, with a thumb for a penis. Does that count???
One banned Xbox ad starts with a lady giving birth. She pushes too hard, resulting in the baby flying out a window, and aging very quickly— from a baby, to a toddler, to a kid, to a teen, to an adult, and then to a senior citizen— heading for a graveyard, and then crash-landing in a grave.
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.
- Concept directly related to the Futakuchi-Onna, a woman who sprouts a mouth from the back of her head, and whose hair becomes tentacles to feed the starving maw should the woman not eat enough.
The Sci Fi Channel commercial Date Required. In it two guys go to a club, but the bouncers say that all gentlemen must be escorted by a lady. The guy becomes an ugly woman, He ties his dress shirt into a half shirt and then begins rearranging his body. For example, the guy strains as he literally pushes the "fat" (complete with sound effects) from his stomach to his chest - at which point you see his breasts pop out. When he rearranges his hips, you hear the cracking of his hip bones. When he pulls his hair, you hear the hair stretching. And the bouncers let him and his friend in.
The commericals for Hulu deserve special mention here for the artful combination of Squick, Nightmare Fuel, and Body Horror. Seth McFarlane's features an alien head coming out of his navel at the end, and Dennis Leary is creepy enough even without the alien effects.
- Given that in the past, Alec Baldwin has had a reputation as a bad guy, the alien effects make just him even more evil and imtimidating.
- Dushku's tongue on the other hand...
  - The alien head coming out of Seth's navel has the voice of Roger from American Dad. One of the voices he demonstrates in the commercial, he also does Peter, Quagmire and Stewie. Brian is what his normal voice sounds like.
This◊ advertisement for Nip Tuck.

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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. This scene is very much the epitome of this trope.
- The less known original manga makes it worse by giving much greater detail. And it's only a small part of the Nightmare Fuel the manga contains.
- The Akira transformation scene is satirised in an episode of Robot Chicken with Mrs Claus turning into a big octopus-like blob monster. Even the Gainax Ending is parodied by Santa shouting "My wife! What the Hell just happened to my wife?!"
In Blood Plus the entire Chiropteran out-break is basically the epitome of this trope.
In Bleach, Kurotsuchi Mayuri's first introduction has him sever his arm and then regrow it. Thankfully it does end in a normal arm but the images are disturbing enough to quality. This was downplayed in the anime.
- The anime, in turn has a scene in the second episode of Bleach where Orihime's dead brother Sora gets captured, then transformed into a Hollow.
- Then Mayuri fights Szayel Apporo Granz, who tentacle rapes Mayuri's Opposite Sex Clone daughter, impregnating her with himself, and births himself through her mouth, leaving her a withered husk. Then Mayuri kills Szayel with a chemical that speeds up perception faster than the body can react, so death feels like it takes an eternity. Then Mayuri rapes his daughter's corpse back to life.
- Let's just say everything Mayuri does eventually devolves into this trope.
- The effect of the Arrancar Barragan's power: age. Unreleased,merely touching him can weaken bones enough to make them snap like a twig. When he releases,well... his attack ages the flesh right off your bones and keeps spreading.
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 shape shifting 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 shape shifting entity controlling his right arm...
Everything by manga artist Junji Ito. He is especially well-known for Uzumaki, a three-volume manga about a town that is "infested by the spiral," which manifests itself in various horrific ways. You will never look at a cinnamon roll the same way again.
- His manga Gyo might be a better example, since in Gyo, the characters themselves remain conscious enough to realize what is happening to them. Also a classic example of It Got Worse.
The manga Franken Fran exists solely for this trope. In an early example, 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... 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 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.
An anime series called Strait Jacket seems built entirely around this trope.
G Gundam has the DG Cells, which completely corrupt your body and your mecha and have a disturbing level of control over your whole self. Almost every single person contaminated with them ends up dying messily. Only Allenby, the Shuffle Alliance and Saette survive. And in the case of the Shuffles, it took an Heroic Sacrifice to de-brainwash them
The various humanoid corpses in Shikabane Hime: Aka also take on rather delicious monster mutations when their true nature is revealed — as seen from the intro, showing a large (and growing) mess of flesh and appendixes.
Gatekeepers eventually reveals that the Invaders the titular characters are actually normal citizens transformed into evil alien clones. Initially, it had not been made clear whether the Invaders took over ordinary people, or the ordinary people had been sleeper Invaders all along. Either way, the transformation was pretty horrifying for someone undergoing it.
- Invaders are sleeper agents in the main series and The Virus in 21. This trope is far more in effect in 21.
Neon Genesis Evangelion: When Armisael invades Unit 00 and Rei, and all the clones of Rei, and the impaled body of Lilith complete with many many little legs growing out of it.
- Arguably the situation for the human souls attached to the Evas, indeed bordering on And I Must Scream.
In Jigoku Shoujo's third season, Mitsuganae, Enma Ai has no body. So what does she do whenever she needs one? She grows it out of a giant cocoon that emerges from the back of Mikage, her Demonic Possession victim. Poor Mikage screams like hell every time.
- It's supposed to resemble the chrysalis of a butterfly.
- Possibly even worse is at the end, when Kikuri temporarily grows a third eye, and then her head falls off and turns into a spider with three functioning eyes on its abdomen. Said spider then crawls out from under someone else's eyelid in the same episode.
Several enemies from Getter Robo, with the most popular being Armageddon's Invaders, a race of Nigh Invulnerable amorphous black blobs covered in eyes and bony protrusions, that make the lovely sound of snapping bones while moving.
- The manga Getter Robo Go has Shin Getter Robo absorbing it's pilots, the Big Bad, the Big Bad's fortress, and a good chunk of the north pole to become a moon sized robot before flying off to Mars. The last page of the manga shows a fozzilized Shin Getter with Go's face sticking out the side. Later stories reveal that Shin Getter eventually absorbs Mars, becoming the Getter Emperor, out grows our galaxy, and defeats what is alluded to be God.
Unico in the Island of Magic, had 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.
Vash's Angel Arms transformation from Trigun were horrifying the first time, if for nothing else, because he has no control. Vash is literally screaming his head off in a combination of terror and panicked memory, just trying desperately to get the thing pointed skyward so that he won't do any more damage to the city. It doesn't work.
In Digimon Adventure's the Big Bad Myotismon proves to be Not Quite Dead, and to complete his resurrection, his bats devoured his minions for their data and formed a new body for him, a massive and creepy-looking demon. Worse still, when the heroes use their strongest attacks against him they release what he calls his true form: a small, impish creature that emerges from his crotch.
- The latter is in reference to some depictions of Satan. Still... do not want.
- Skull Greymon. Nuff said.
With all the transformations going on in Dragonball Z, some were bound to be nasty. Notable examples are Cell's reverse transformation where he vomits up Number 18. First-time Super Saiyan transformations aren't too pleasant either. Goku and Vegeta in particular seem to really suffer.
Full Metal Alchemist has a few instances. Notably, the Tear Jerker episode where Tucker turns his daughter and her dog into a Chimera.
- The resurrection of Mrs. Elric at the beginning is a Came Back Wrong example of this trope, and is Nightmare Fuel enough for an entire series. And let's not forget the return of Gluttony in Conqueror of Shamballa.
In Saikano, Chise's transformations into the battle-mode of the Ultimate Weapon cause her to sprout metal wings on her back, which appears to be extremely painful. As the series progresses, her transformations become more and more intrusive and nightmarish — including mentally. In the end she is only human in outer appearance.
- The anime doesn't make it seem painful until the second half of the series.
Naruto's four tail Kyuubi transformation involves most of his skin being ripped off like paper and has huge gobs of blood come out of him, then all of it suddenly turns into ash to form an aura in the shape of a wailing beast with glowing eyes and mouth, and a teenager's head. This is especially creepy in how directly they translated the visuals of the manga into animation for an effect that borders on surreal—which is reanimated in one of openings◊ and looks even worse; now it looks like his body isn't just being burned up, it looks like it's exploding.
- And then the six-tailed form take this and adds a goddamn skeleton forming around (with the implication that the fox is literally consuming him and building a new body over Naruto's).
  - And the eight-tailed look like THIS.
- Let's not forget the Kimimaro battle. Anyone who pulls out his own bones to fight is a shoo-in for this trope.
- Three words Casualty Puppet Jutsu.
- Let's not forget Orochimaru's true form. A white snake with snakes for scales who steals people's bodies? That's not terrifying or disgusting at all.
  - Speaking of Orochimaru—or should I say Kabuchimaru? As in Kabuto taking bits of Orochimaru's DNA and fusing it with his own to find out if he's capable of resisting its growth. So far, he's losing.
Princess Kraehe's transformation sequence in Princess Tutu, true to her role as the Dark Magical Girl, is incredibly painful, involving thorny vines wrapping around her to form her costume as her mouth is open in a silent scream. And then there's the second season, where Mytho is slowly transformed over several episodes into a giant crow. The transformation includes his shadow changing into that of his crow form, scenes implying that feathers are growing in under his skin (the episodes leading up to his transformation show him constantly scratching his arm) and him slowly taking on more and more inhuman mannerisms. As disturbing as the physical transformation is, though, it's nothing compared to the mental transformation he goes through, as he becomes selfish, obsessed with gaining others' love, and both emotionally and physically abusive, culminating in madness.
Urotsukidoji is absolutely MAD on this kind of Shapeshifting Squick. So bad that we need to put these in spoilervision. In the first film alone, a teacher turns into a demon with one big eye, a creepy looking tongue with another eye on it and rapes the lead girl. Nagumo goes through 3 transformations, each more horrific than the last, culminating when he is having sex with Akemi, turns into a demon while doing it, much to Akemi's obvious but silent chagrin, then growing to hundreds of times his own size. Nikki cuts of his own penis and replaces it with a demonic one, then later becoming something reminiscing Man-Spider.
- The second film isn't too bad, though.
- The third has a few but the worst of them all is when Ceasar reveals his robotic body for the first time, sprouting extra limbs and losing an eye which is replaced by a robotic one. Go figure.
Of course, Hell Teacher Nube is rife with these. Just a few examples from the vast gallery of the grotesque:
- Nube's Red Right Hand (actually, his left) which threatens to consume the rest of him if he loses control over it.
- Another time, exorcising a demon that was taking over a child's body caused it to leap onto Nube, transforming him into horrific shapes.
- Miki, who became a Rokurokubi (Long-Necked Woman) very early on because of some unscrupulous spiritual experimentation. Her neck can now extend for hundreds of feet, even across town.
- Kyoko, who was once possessed by the spirit of a dead infant and suddenly grew a ravenous, insatiable mouth on the back of her head.
- Ai, the poster child for Eye Scream and Eyes Do Not Belong There.
Soul Eater brings us Chrona, who has a living being named Ragnarok mixed in with his/her blood who usually appears by making the top half of his body sprout out of Chrona's back. Ragnarok takes many forms over the course of the series, starting out as a musclebound humanoid figure and later becoming a dragon, a chibi version of his first form, and currently a form which has at lea.xKXhree arms.
- There's also Asura, who has three eyes and "skin scarves" which are areas of his skin that he stretched out to ridiculous lengths so that they not only function as clothing, but also as prehensile tentacles which he shoots out of his back.
  - Asura's human form is actually pretty Bishounen. But before that, when he was reborn...
Uzumaki is not only a Nightmare Fuel Processing Plant but could also be seen as one big tribute to the joy of Body Horror.
Don't forget some of the baddies in Burst Angel. People explode into monsters after going insane.
Naraku. He's a half-demon created by a swarm of demons merging with a single human soul. As a result, during his "night of humanity", he reverts back into a swarm of demons clustered around his human components. By the first time we see this, he has been heavily damaged by a holy arrow and forced to assimilate more demons into his body to replace the lost ones. Couple this with his experiments in fusing, separating and refusing demons in order to find a way to increase the powers of his specimens, a process that he has been refining for use on himself in order to someday expel the fragment of him that's human, and the result... his "night of humanity" sees him as a severed head attached by slimy... strings... of sinew and flesh to a massive pile of random pulsating, twitching, demonic bodyparts. In the early seasons of the anime, once he's actually confronted in the flesh, a favored form sees him as a human upper torso with myriad withered limbs sprouting from his back and a writhing cluster of misshapen tentacles and tails replacing his lower body. His "puppets" also display elements of this, in that they physically attack by taking the form of giant knots of tentacles protruding from the ragged remnants of a white baboon skin.
In Fruits Basket, we have Kyo's transformation into The Cat's "true form", complete with it possessing an overpowering odor of rotting meat.
In One Piece, Luffy at the end of his fight with Magellan. Watching him lying there, melting is VERY disturbing.
Pumpkin Scissors has the 908 High Temperature Troopers unit of the "Invisible 9" program. Rather than scaling back the overly powerful flamethrowers they wield, or making the cooling systems in their suits work, the higher ups simply fill the suits with a special chemical that is one part artificial skin to one part anesthesia to one part burn lotion. Because of how well it works, the One-Eyed Cremators (to give them their Japanese Name) have no idea that the weapons they're using are burning the flesh from their bones. A veteran member of the 908 is implicitly nothing but organs within a shell of charred muscles and scorched bones, kept alive and unaware of what's underneath by their suits.
In Princess Mononoke the two boar spirits Nago and Okkoto end up like this, and it would apparently have been the eventual fate of Ashitaka as well.
In D.Gray-Man, when an Akuma disguised as an human shows its true form...
- Don't forget Suman Dark, or Allen pushing his arm too far, or the Akuma virus, or Level 0 Akuma forcing themselves down their hosts throats, or... well, let's just say there's more than that.
- A lot more: The Akuma blood bullets make you break out in a pentacle-shaped rash. Then you explode into toxic dust.
- Don't forget when Road stabbed Allen in the eye, then we get to see his partially regrown-but-still-not-there eye-socket!
- And remember when Allen's arm was all flaked and looked like it was about to fall off? Then Tyki ripped it off and then had his Teez eat a hole in Allen's heart?
- And Tyki phasing his hands through people's bodies, grabbing their hearts and literally ripping them out.
- Almost payback for Tyki's Body Horror infliction on Allen: He transforms rather gruesomely into a demonic knight thing that turned the Black Knight scary again. He now uses weird energy circle things to basically trounce his enemies left and right. It also seems to have a taste for blood.
Guyver has a number of examples, but perhaps the best two are Sho's initial bonding to the Guyver unit before it develops its "exoskeleton", and Aptom. Thanks to the experiments conducted on him, he can physically fuse with other living creatures, absorbing them into his body to acquire their powers and repair his own injuries.
When the Jabberwock takes over Ryo's body in Project ARMS, the nanites across Ryo's body spread out and cover his entire body as a normal teenager is turned into a hulking engine of rage and destruction. The Body Horror can clearly be seen in Ryo's first full transformation, where his face is absorbed into the Jabberwock's chest.
Mon Colle Knights had two once the moodwhiplash sets in. The first involves an angel in the process of falling, depicting horns growing out of his head and his back swelling up into a twitching fleshy clutter till his wings pop up and skin layers are flying around and then his new biomechanic wings tear out. Then the Terror Dragon already looked disturbed before, then it has a pandimensional creature incarnated into itself causing it to convulse, boil, new wings ripping through the melting skin, the head falling off and ultimately two new heads tearing through the back with blood spraying everywhere, all in high detail. Furthermore, once the transformation is over, if it needs to grow new limbs in self defense, it will also bloodily rip through its own skin. The only reason this got to air on Fox Kids was that the blood was colored fleshy and not red.
Yu Yu Hakusho features Elder Toguro, one of the longer running villians of the anime. Easily one of the most monstrous characters in the series, he can morph his body into any grotesque and disgusting shape he wishes, reforms his entire body in a gruesome manner on a number of occasions, and at one point, painfully takes over a man's body from the inside and forces him to smash his head into a mirror, killing him.
The virus from the manga Emerging causes your body to bloat tremendously during your last few hours, to the point of ripping your clothes. This is likely due to the all the High Pressure Blood building up, which soon begins to exit from any orifice it can. Then your eyes melt, and your body rots from the inside... all before you die, of course!
Copious examples in King Of Thorn. Infection by Medusa causes the body to slowly petrify and eventually shatter. If you're lucky, you might instead get a very nasty Lovecraftian Superpower. And then there's Alice, who has been reduced to a head, heart, one lung, and one arm, and kept alive inside a life support chamber for eight years.

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In the X-Men comics, this is how the evil alien Brood reproduce. They were pretty obviously, ah, inspired by Alien.
- Oddly enough, the Brood had a Hive Mind first.
- The X-men comics in general feature many cases of Body Horror. Prime examples are the Morlocks, a large group of mutants whose powers often make them ugly and deformed, unable to live among normal humans, forcing them to live in the sewers and abandoned subway tunnels under New York.
  - One famous Morlock is the former X-men Marrow, whose powers let bones grow out of her body, which she can detach to use as knives and clubs. Comics where she is prettier also make her less effective.
  - Another Morlock example is Masque, a heavily disfigured mutant who can rearrange faces as if they were clay. Tragically the one face she can't do it to is her own.
The alien symbiotes from Spiderman.
The Chester Brown underground comic Yummy Fur has such delights as the author eating his own snot (which he has admitted to doing), a man's hand spontaneously falling off, Ed the Happy Clown's penis growing a miniature talking, thinking Ronald Reagan head at its tip, a man who shits so much that he suffocates himself and many others, graphic scenes of penis surgery and so much more. Chester Brown himself, by all accounts has a very amiable, mild personality.
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 inoculation, 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 anesthesia while their fully sentient victim, attempting to stop them, can only grunt "Ma urrs! Ma urrs!"
In Marvel's District X, one mutant can't sit anywhere for too long because his feet grow roots that break through his shoes and lash him to the ground. After being cut away from the pavement in an early issue, he later grows into the wall of a sewer channel and essentially becomes an underground tree.
Charles Burns' Black Hole. The entire graphic novel centers around teenagers who are tragically mutated and disfigured by a fictional sexually-transmitted disease.
In Ultimate X-Men, Beast is captured by Weapon X, and they are shown giving him a horrifying operation to turn him into a blue monster.
Played for laughs in several Simpsons Treehouse of Horror comics. Most notable example is Sideshow Blob where criminal Sideshow Bob (who has a bad cold) is injected with the wrong vaccine by Dr Nick Rivera and turns into a rampaging blob monster.
If you think about it, Swarm the Nazi-Made-Of-Bees. He was a Nazi scientist studying bees who exposed them to radiation, only for them to mutate and devour him down to his bones. These bees apparently had a Hive Mind, which he became, and lived on as a man made of bees, sometimes wrapped around his human skeleton, sometimes not. This has never really been explored, perhaps because of the absurdity of a colony of telepathic bees with Nazi sympathies, but being devoured and becoming a colony of bees sounds like it would be pretty damn traumatic.
And let's not forget one of the most iconic examples: Swamp Thing. Though later retconned into "a plant who thought it was Alec Holland" (surprisingly similar to the Nazi Bee Swarm thanks to a certain infamous memory experiment involving flatworms that wasn't debunked till much later) the original story was a man turning into a strange plant monster, incapable of even speech, and having to try and cope with it.
- His Marvel (sort of) equivalent Man-Thing is potentially even worse.
  - Well, there is virtually nothing left of Ted Sallis's mind left in Man-Thing; Man-Thing doesn't need to cope, because most of the time, he's not even sapient. Of course the fact that all those who know fear are horrifically burned more than makes up for that in terms of Body Horror.
Stone Island. Harry's transformation into one of the creatures, which starts with him literally puking his guts out and doesn't stop until he's a seven-foot-tall monstrosity with no eyelids, a permanent grin in a distorted face, and hideously lengthened skull.
Global Frequency kicks off with a story about a man who has been engineered into a killing machine. Literally. His body is half gone. His cock has been connected with the parts of his brain that spark up when he kills things. He's still sentient... but just barely.

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Many versions of the Cinderella story inflict Body Horror on the cruel sisters/stepsisters. In the Grimms' version, their eyes are pecked out by birds. In some Spanish-American tellings, they grow horns and donkey ears. In one version the selfish sister has snakes come out of her mouth whenever she tries to speak.
On a lighter note, in one of Grimm's fairy tales there's a story about a man who gets turned into a black, fire-breathing poodle.
- Since he was the bad guy of the story, after he's turned back they have him drawn and quartered. Yeah, that's better.
The Grimms have quite a bit of Body Horror in their stories. The original version of "Little Red Riding Hood" had the woodsman cut the wolf open so that the grandmother could escape, and then sew it back together. Nasty.
- Thu Hungarian version takes a level further: together, they pack the Wolf's stomach full of rocks, then kick him in the river when he goes to drink, feeling thirsty. You could say he deserved it, but still, to tell this to children...

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David Cronenberg, Toronto's creepiest son, 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."
- His directorial debut, Shivers, is a cross between a Zombie Apocalypse, The Puppet Masters, and an STD pandemic. Cronenberg refers to this trope interchangeably as "Body Horror" and "Venereal Horror".
- The Brood has a woman whose negative emotions are being expressed by giving virgin birth to extremely violent mutant children.
- Cronenberg's Crash is about people who are sexually aroused by car crashes. One female character has a scar on her leg that looks amazingly vaginal. No points for guessing what happens during one particular sex scene.
- eXistenZ. Imagine having gooey ports in your spine that tap into your nervous system to enable you to play virtual reality Video Games. Now imagine that the device you port into is a living thing with a pulse and vaguely resembles a brain. (It's also edible, but that's another trope...)
  - And then imagine, on TOP of that, depending on which level of reality you're in at the moment which is NEVER completely clear ) you may be forced to do odd things to someone else's port. "Free will isn't a huge factor in this little world of ours." ("Game Urges" are the eXistenZ equivalent of Cut Scenes, because the character does stuff at certain parts of the story that don't require the player to do much, they simply move the story along. But instead of simply cutting to pre-recorded movies, your free will is directly removed by something that's actually directly attached to your nervous system and already messing with your brain.)
- In a deleted scene from the remake of The Fly, 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 (!!!). The severed limb then twitches for several minutes, clearly still "alive" (!!!!) Within the final cut, of course, we have the almost cancerous growth of the mutant parts, pieces of him coming off, all those gooey fluids... Then there's the maggot dream. And the sequel is even worse.
  - In every respect.
- The duel from Scanners makes one realize that Psychic Powers have way scarier combat uses than choking people. Like ripping up their skin, exploding their eyes, and making their heads pop like stepped-on melons.
- Videodrome 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.
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 Pepto Bismol!") 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, holds up a cane and starts singing Hello My Baby like Michigan J. Frog from Looney Tunes (even the voice).
- "Check Please!"
An American Werewolf In London may be one of the finest of all scary Painful Transformation sequences.
- There's also poor Jack becoming more and more zombie-like in appearance each time he reappears.
- It's an interesting fact that the transformation sequence is so influential that most werewolf stories include a similarly Painful Transformation, even when the werewolves aren't evil
- 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.
- Also referenced in good old Manimal. Come to think of it, Stan Winston and/or Rick Baker did the effects for all of these. They vary in scaryness.
- For the most part only the panther and eagle transformations were seen on screen in Manimal, the bull and snake ones were done off screen. They didn't have enough stock footage for those two.
The Howling has another excellent werewolf transformation scene, with effects by The Thing's Rob Bottin.
- Parodied in Howling III: Marsupials with the film It Came From Uranus which features a man turning into a werewolf (or some other kind of creature) in hospital while the nurse stands there terrified. The creature could possibly be a thylacine of some kind.
Demoni... Just Demoni.
The creation of "Evil Ash" in Army of Darkness. It begins with an eye appearing on Ash's shoulder and progressing to an entire head, torso, and finally a separate body. That scene was scarier than most of the zombies!
- In the comic 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.
The Basket Case films, particularly the second, played this for squicky laughs.
Also from the same director Brain Damage is full of body horor.
In Big Trouble In Little China, The Dragon could inflate himself. He ends up grotesquely swollen, spurting steam from his nostrils before exploding from fury.
- There was a similar character in The Mask cartoon series, the wonderfully named supervillain Kablamous the exploding man.
Black Sheep (not to be confused with the Chris Farley movie of the same name) 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.
In Blessed, Heather Graham is impregnated with twin antichrists.
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory has Violet come out looking all floppy.
Cloverfield: "H-H-Hud... I don't feel so good..."
- If you can't imagine that scene 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.
  - I would think with an event like that, shock would knock her out pretty immediately even if it took a while for her to actually die.
Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves had some fairly gruesome Werewolf transformations, though the end results weren't monstrous.
District9.
- To elaborate: Wikus, after accidentally spraying himself with an alien substance, begins to experience increasingly disturbing kinds of this. First, he only experiences a nosebleed- but of black blood, but that is immediately dwarfed by Wikus' fingernails falling off, and after vomiting black blood and passing out at a party, he awakens in a hospital, and doctors peel back the bandages over his arm to discover that it has outright mutated into that of a prawn's, and Wikus is absolutely terrified. And it doesn't stop there...
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 of course, The Baby.
- About The Baby, there's also a certain Squick factor to realizing a human being was pregnant with that thing.
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.
Freaks, directed by Tod Browning. No special effects: that's really what the actors looked like.
Evil Ed's death in Fright Night. After fleeing from a losing fight with vampire Jerry Dandridge, so-called "vampire-killer" Peter Vincent flees to main protagonist Charlie Brewster's house in hopes of finding a telephone, only to find that the phone line has been cut. He screams out for Mrs. Brewster to inform her of this fact, only to find a friend of Brewster's, "Evil" Ed Thompson, is in the house, and has turned into a vampire, complete with protruding fangs and a bloody Cross-mark in his forehead (received earlier when Vincent got a lucky hit in with a crucifix). Ed comes menacingly close to Vincent, who darts down the hallway. Ed turns into a wolf and pursues him but, luckily for Vincent, when Ed pounces he misses and crashes into the railings on the stairs, causing them to splinter and he falls from the banister to the floor, impaled on a railing-support. Still a wolf, Ed barely manages to crawl his way under the stairway, where he slowly turns from wolf into a half-wolf (in a scene that rivals the American Werewolf in London transformation sequence) to vampire, back to human. As he lies dying, the blistered cross-burn vanishes into nothing while Peter is forced to watch the gruesome process. There's also Jerry Dandridge's transformation into a bat.
The Hellraiser Cenobites. Just because they get off on it, doesn't mean it's any less body horror.
Played for (dark) laughs How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989), in which the titular Head grows out of a stress-related boil on the protagonist's shoulder.
In My Skin (2002). It's about a woman who develops a fascination with self-mutilation after an accidental injury - which, ultimately, leads to self-cannibalism.
Junior directed by Ivan Reitman. Arnold Schwarzenegger pregnant. Do I need to go further?
- Yes, yes you do. Arnold Schwarzenegger impregnated by Danny Di Vito. That one sentence requires at least a decade of therapy...
The Matrix had a minor version of this, when Smith sealed Neo's mouth before implanting him with a living "bug". The second film upped the Body Horror by allowing Smith to infect someone's body so that they would become a duplicate of him.
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 scarab beetles from The Mummy were Nightmare Fuel for this reason.
The New Adventures Of Pinocchio had 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.
Nightbreed featured 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 played 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 '90s remake of The Nutty Professor has some surprisingly graphic transformation sequences; Nightmare Fuel for some viewers.
- The sequel is worse. In every conceivable way.
In Dario Argento's movie 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 dead sailor Will finds in DMC whose face was literally sucked off by the Kraken's suction cups also counts.
Poltergeist had 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.
- Parodied in Casper, when Bill Pullman's character is possessed by Casper's three kooky uncles and turns into Clint Eastwood, Rodney Dangerfield, Mel Gibson, and The Crypt Keeper.
- Parodied in the Family Guy episode "Petergeist", in which Peter peels off his face to become...Hank Hill from King Of The Hill
Silent Hill had more than its share; the nurse near the end, the barb-wire dildo finale, the white things that spat acid, but my favorite is probably 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 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.
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 ptptÌinducing sort of way). (You know Hieronymous Bosch's ''The Garden of Earthly Delights?'' Now imagine that was drawn from life.)
Splinter (2008) has some good malformy body horror in it.
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.
A very Squicky Japanese film Tetsuo The Iron Man and its sequel Tetsuo II: Body Hammer push this trope to its extremes.
John Carpenter's version of The Thing is famous for having some of the most gruesome and disturbing transformation scenes in cinematic history. Being a horror movie this is its general intention, but it sometimes worked a little too well. Bonus: Paranoia Fuel.
Thinner involves a very fat man rapidly losing weight due to a curse.
- ...Not to mention a man who turns into a bipedal lizard (complete with scales and webbed fingers), and another who develops rotting pits on his face.
Tokyo Gore Police. Imagine the two Tetsuo movies with pink flesh instead of metal, then add a ridiculous amount of Gorn.
Underworld also pays homage to An American Werewolf In London. The werewolf transformation is a direct reference to that movie. Curiously, since they're Conspicuous CGI, they're not nearly as Traumatic. Kind of boring, really.
Some of Peter Jackson's earlier movies like Braindead, The Frighteners, Bad Taste and Meet The Feebles.
The demise of Captain Amazing in Mystery Men as well as the demise of millionaire supervillain Casanova Frankenstein.
The Hunger has David Bowie play a vampire who starts losing his immortality and starts ageing during the middle of the film.
- Oh, it's even better than that: 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 OlderThanDirt 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.
In The Shining there is a scene where Jack Nicholson's character 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.
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 first two X-Men movies bits and pieces of Wolverine's surgery are shown.
- The way it occurs in the Wolverine film isn't very scary (except if needles frighten you. There are a lot, injecting really deep). But Weapon XI's mouthless face compensates.
Jennifer Tilly giving birth in Seed Of Chucky.
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.
The French-Japanese-Korean film Tokyo! features a young woman slowly turning into, of all things, 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.
The climactic battle in the 1988 film Willow lingers on the main characters undergoing a slow, painful transformation into pigs, while the evil queen taunts them.
The live-action Guyver movie had a couple. The first transformation sequence for sure, but even worse was right before the big bad showed up when the guy they were trying to rescue...well, it didn't turn out so well for him. Painful Transformation doesn't even begin to describe it.
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.
Poultrygeist (NSFW) and it's demon chicken egg breasts. Having only seen that trailer I can't give any real context but there was a man with egg 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).
Dr. Jekyll´s very painfull transformation to Mr. Hyde in The Pagemaster 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 what is more scaring than those all put together!
The A Nightmare On Elm Street films have this quite frequently, but mainly in dream sequences. Most notable is Debbie's one in the Dream Master where she turns into a cockroach.

Close Film

In Jerome Bixby's It's a Good Life, little Anthony (a Creepy Child of the first order) transforms obstreperous party guest Dan Hollis into... something-or-other unspeakably horrific, then wishes him "into the cornfield."
The main character in Treason by Orson Scott Card, Lanik Mueller, is a radical regenative who grows extra genetalia, arms, heads, everything. He winds up growing a clone of himself and freaks out.
The Witches by Roald Dahl: In the chapter "Metamorphosis," the witches hold down the boy protagonist and feed him Mouse-Maker, which transforms him into a mouse permanently and painfully. The transformation isn't permanent in The Film Of The Book, but the visuals make it even more disturbing.
- They did the same thing to his friend, at least in the film, which he gets to watch in horror.
In Harlan Ellison's 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 (formerly handsome) 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.
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.
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
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 (see), 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 story Gray Matter is about a son watching his father slowly turns into a vaguely humanoid fungus creature due to drinking too much tainted beer. The concept might sound a little silly, but the descriptions of his gradual transformation certainly aren't.
HP Lovecraft dabbles in this one.
- The Shadow Over Innsmouth 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.
  - Keeping in mind they were actually described as looking more◊ like◊ this◊.
  - You don't want to see the ones that were kept locked in the basement.
- In The Colour Out of Space, a meteorite with a Cosmic Horror in it causes people to crumble into dust — while alive.
- InCool Air, the learned doctor melts. He's actually been dead for years.
- In the story he revised, Two Black Bottles: A man disintegrates after his soul is released. It's described very graphically.
  - The forerunner to this was Edgar Allen Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.
- At the end of The Thing on the Doorstep, the protagonist's friend appears on the titular doorstep with his mind trapped in the decomposing body of his dead wife... Who happens to be from Innsmouth.
Perdido Street Station: "I am tired here in the dark and I am full of pus."
- Mr. Motley is made of this trope.
- Not to mention the Remade, criminals who are punished by having their bodies altered in horrific ways. There's also a Remade brothel.
Breaking Dawn, Book II. It'll make you miss the sparkly teenage romance.
In Discworld, Angua's breed of werewolf can look like either a normal human or a normal wolf, but the few seconds of transition between the two is so horrific that she never lets anyone see it if she can help it. (This being a novel series, we have to Take Their Word For It, and we're glad to do so.)
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?
Scott Smith's novel The Ruins has Nightmare Fuel Unleaded to begin with, but one of the worst parts was when a character thinks that the man-eating vines are growing underneath his skin and begins obsessively cutting himself open to try and get rid of the tendrils. The worst part? HE'S NOT HALLUCINATING.
Discord in Scarlet, a short story by AE Van Vogt that was incorporated into the novel Voyage of the Space Beagle, which was the inspiration for Alien.
In one Animorphs book, when the Animorphs start demorphing just as the two hour time-limit is reached, there's a very real possibility of them being trapped halfway through and being human/animal hybrids forever.
- 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.
- Morphing explicitly doesn't work "logically" or consistently — thus Cassie, with her talent for it, is able to mimic a centaur at the half-way point between horse and human, despite neither form having six limbs.
A series by the same author, Remnants, has a character who has his skin removed and replaced in small squares with a clear substance. While his father is forced to watch.
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.
Goosebumps naturally has this in droves.
- But no other Goosebumps book was more pornographic about Body Horror than Chicken Chicken (number 53 of the original series), about two farm kids, Crystal and Cole, who get cursed into turning into chickens after knocking over a strange woman in black. Almost every chapter of the book detailed how the feathers were growing on the kids' skins, how their mouths turned to beaks, how they clucked every time they spoke and no one seemed to care about their transformation. See this blog review for details.
- Goosebumps loves this sort of story, and another such book was adapted as a television episode. It's about a boy slowly changing into a dog while nobody around him seems to care ( the twist is that he was always a dog, and an experiment to turn him human is simply wearing off). It's all fun and games until you watch it unfolding as a grotesque metaphor for puberty, with the boy shaving off the bizarre hair sprouting all over his body and trying to hold onto his dwindling humanity.
Pretty much the entire basic plot of The Island of Doctor Moreau, where animals are surgically altered in rather horrific ways to make them more like humans.
Kim Newman (writing as Jack Yeovil) has lots of fun with this in Orgy Of The Blood Parasites.
The short story Diamond Dogs has the main character being slowly, voluntarily being turned from a human into a cybernetic dog like creature. Unfortunately the doctor who did this took himself apart so he wouldn't have to undo his 'greatest work'.
Dean Koontz's novel The Bad Place features a main character who initially teleports involuntarily. However, the more he jumps, the more he loses focus, with parts of his clothes being patchworked and actually ending up in his skin. It's when he finds half a cockroach has been melded into his shoe that the horror goes into overdrive, ruminating on whether parts of the roach have ended up in his brain or organs. And the big finale cranks it up a little more with the hero grabbing the villain and forcing as many teleports as possible, purposefully meshing the two with garbage, roaches and detritus until they're just a huge mutant blob. With roaches sticking out of them. Augh.
- Another Koontz novel Midnight features (among other horrors), people who alter their own bodies to merge with their computers - and try to assimilate others into their networks. At one point one of them is shot in the head. His body dies, but immediately the computer screen starts printing out "Where is the rest of me? Nonononono!
I Did It by M. John Harrison concerns... well... Google the title and author. You'll find it online. Let's just say that the story very much belongs in this listing.
- A bunch of people shoving axes into their own faces to no apparent harm? Or were you referring to the feelings the prose is causing?
Ray Bradbury's Fever Dream is the story of a little boy who discovers that every cell in his body is slowly being replaced by...something, but nobody believes him because they think he's just delirious with sickness. The story ends with the boy having been completely replaced by the virus, with the parents none the wiser, and he's now a vector for the disease.
- Another Ray Bradbury short story Skeleton features a protagonist who develops a strange phobic disgust of his own teeth, but then discovers to his horror that his own skeleton has developed a dislike of the squishy body that it is carrying around...
Although not neccessarily horror, Ray Bradbury's The Naming of Names features humans that travel to Mars. They find that there at once was a Martian civilization but it has long since died. Slowly but surely (but not neccessarily painfully) the humans start becoming the Martians, physically, and mentally they start becoming the Martians as well. At the end a group of soldiers arrive from Earth and find that there is an abandoned human settlement but Martians are living in the nearby monastary. Although not neccessarily horror, this troper was unsettled by the notion of becoming a different species against your will and then slowly but surely forgetting what you once where. The main character is horrified at the fact this his family is slowly but surely turning into Martians and despite his best attempts, his efforts prove fruitless as he becomes one himself.
Jean-Paul Sartre's existential novel Nausea gruesomely delves into imaginary body horror when the protagonist narrates his daydream of what might happen if reality suddenly began to defy people's expectations of it. A bloody lump of half-rotted meat dragging itself across the street, a child's cheek splitting open to reveal scattered eyes growing out of his face, and people waking up to find their tongues partly changed into wriggling centipedes are just the beginning of his imagined apocalypse. Even then, he realizes people would still find a way to categorize the world around them, coming up with new names and meanings for these horrors like "stone-eye, great three-cornered arm, toe-crutch, spider-jaw."
The natural creation of Whampyri in Necroscope is pure body horror. A Whampyri is a result of a human being infected by a parasitic leach, which changes their body structure and heightens their lust and power over remorse. To create offspring, the vampire leeches of the Wamphyri create a single egg, which is then put into a potential host, called an egg son or egg daughter. The egg children usually lose consciousness during the transformation due to the pain of the egg merging with their bodies. Should a Whampyri die, the leech will try to abandon its host and search for a new one. An exception to the single egg laying Whampyri, are the "mothers" whom all Whamypri fear due to their ability to lay countless leech eggs (but not before being drained into a lifeless husk).
In The Seed from the Sepulchre by Clark Ashton Smith, there is a horrific man-to-plant transformation.
R. A. Lafferty's Dream is a nice Christmassy story where everyone suddenly starts to dream that they are hideous ogres, crawled over by bugs the whole time, whose digestive system consists of rats that run in and out of their mouths to bring food into their stomachs. But there's an uplifting ending: humanity realizes that their own fate is in their hands, and all they have to do to stop the hideous dreams is to decide, once and for all, that they want to wake up in the real world.
The mad dream disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. The world came back to normal with an embarrassed laugh. It was all over. It had lasted from its inception six weeks.
The mad dream that vanished, however, is the dream that people weren't hideous ogres..
In the Cordwainer Smith story A Planet Named Shayol, criminals are exiled to a prison planet inhabited by an alien parasite that keeps the prisoners alive but causes their bodies to grow extra parts - which the planet's single guard harvests when he visits the prisoners, and sends off-world to be used in organ transplants.

Close Literature

The Big Bad Beetleborgs episode "Buggin Out" is a satire of David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly. Flabber brings a picture of a teleportation device to life, tests it, and a bug gets in the machine (a gnat-like monster named Kombat Gnat who has More Teeth Than The Osmond Family and the ability to shrink). Flabber slowly changes into the bug thing just like Jeff Goldblum in the movie. First he starts off with Cute Little Fangs, then develops antennae, then a whole row of razor sharp teeth followed by a more bug-like torso and lobster-like claws for hands. He then bursts to reveal the gnat-like monster he's become. What's worse is that the kids have to fight him in order to turn him back to his normal happy phasm self.
In an episode of Big Wolf On Campus, Merton gives birth to an alien baby.
Doctor Who is one of the progenitors of this trope, but always finds new ways to put an interesting spin on it.
- In the Series 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''.
- "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances" gave us a painful transformation into a mindless zombie with a gas mask, with the air-filter forcing its way up through your throat and out your mouth, and your eyes turning into goggles. Ouch.
- The disembodied head-statue-things in "Silence in the Library".
- The Abzorbaloff's process of absorbing people in the Doctor Who episode Love & Monsters is both scary and disgusting. There's also a Harlan Ellison-esque pavement-person. Interestingly, the Abzorbaloff was designed by a 9 year old who won a contest. Watching that episode makes one wonder if the 9 year old was allowed to watch it.
- The Toclafane, blade-wielding metallic spheres from "Last of the Time Lords", were revealed to be mutilated humans from the year 100 trillion. After attempting to find the fabled "Utopia" (a supposed oasis in the dying universe) and finding only darkness, they went insane and slowly cannibalized their own bodies.
- Hell, anything written by Philip Martin requires the Doctor's female companion to be slowly, grotesquely, apparently irreversibly transformed into something else. And then the stories all tend to be filled with skin-crawling, glorpy creatures, in case the audience is not barfing heavily enough.
- The third series finale involves the Doctor being aged up tremendously, twice. The first time the cruelty and the nature of the transformation leave a sour taste in the mouth. But then the second instance is deliberately framed like a snuff film. And yikes.
- In the fourth series episode "Planet of The Ood", the bad guy turns into an Ood. The sequence has him peeling off his skin shortly followed by him spewing up a piece of his own brain! Talk about trauma. On top of that it was a Karmic Transformation. Made worse yet by the fact that it's Percy.
- The creationist vicar in Ghostlight slowly turned into an ape.
- "The Ark In Space", it's not the gigantic bugs; those look silly. It's what seems to be a man in a sleeping bag covered in green goo, and before that, the person turning into said bag of slop by melting bodyparts is worse than the alien creature it turns into. "The Ark in Space" also 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?
- "Revelation of the Daleks", has one character reduced to a living disembodied head with part of his brain exposed, inside a transparent Dalek and pleading for death. He has done absolutely nothing to deserve this.
- In The Lazarus Experiment this is how Professor Lazarus discovers his experiment wasn't 100% successful.
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.
- "Sleeper": the sleeper agents' right arm has a sort of implant in it which can turn into a huge blade. This happens to one of the sleepers while she's in her boyfriend's arms. The result is pretty horrifying.
- "Exit Wounds": Owen's fiancée appears to have (very)-early onset Alzheimer's. Then it's supposed a brain tumour. It turns out to be an alien in her brain.
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...
- In the season four episode "Natural Election", a space-travelling plant infests Moya, and by extension, her symbiotic pilot. Pilot is found unconscious, with black creepers spilling out of his mouth, wrapping around his arms and over his console. And then he wakes up... and starts screaming!
- Another episode set aside to test how loud Lani Tupu can scream- "Green-Eyed Monster," in which Crais is tortured by Talyn through their cybernetic link: as a result, horrible lesions and wounds open on Crais' body. And judging by the fact that he spent a full minute screaming for someone to kill him, it hurt.
- The Plokavian judges◊ in "The Ugly Truth" appear to be suffering from a extremely painful-looking disease that involves open sores, sagging flesh, and oozing bodily fluids. It gets worse when you look at the materials produced on it in the Farscape RPG:
  Movement is impossible on your own, period. Your body is on the verge of turning into nothing but pus and liquefied bone. Your lungs are filling with fluid constantly, and you live in your own filth most of the time. You'd beg someone to shoot you if you could speak. Death occurs at +5 wounds, but the truth is you'd probably die if you were able to stub your toe.
- "Twice Shy" introduces an Emotion Eater with a feeding process that leaves unpleasantly necrotic wounds◊ that eventually kill◊ the victim.◊ A few background examples appear to actually erase the victim's face.
- Over the course of Scorpius' wormhole project, several test pilots are melted after flying through an unstable wormhole: in most example, we don't see the process actually occur. However, in the episode "Incubator," one researcher manages to bring her ship safely through the wormhole, only to discover that the shields she used only delayed tissue liquefaction. Before and After shots readily available.
Fringe seems to be overly fond of this.
- In the first scene of the pilot episode, an airplane full of people falls victim to a flesh-eating synthetic virus. The scene ends with someone running into the cockpit and the pilot turning in horror just in time to see his jaw rot right off his face.
- Later in the pilot, Agent John Scott gets exposed to the component ingredients that made up said virus, which ends up slowly turning his skin translucent... and mushy.
- Next episode? A woman is impregnated with a rapidly aging embryo, which ends up growing too large and kills her after putting her in great pain.
- Some time later, a woman's radiological treatment turns her into a walking dirty bomb, causing blood to pour out of people's eyes and her own head to explode.
- A FBI agent ends up with a custom-made parasite wrapped around his heart like a crawling piece of barbed wire.
- Scientists get infected with a cold virus that grows to the size of a small rat and tears up their throat as it climbs out.
- A computer signal reduces people's brains to liquid.
- People get infected with a bioweapon that turns them into spiny rampaging monsters.
- A news vendor gets exposed to a protein that causes the skin over his eyes, nose and mouth to grow over and seal shut.
- An FBI agent gets attacked by a transgenic creature, and it turns out the "bite" actually gave him a Face Full Of Alien Wing Wong and he has the creature's larval young rapidly developing in his stomach.
- The wife of a scientist is infected with a biological agent that gives her a vampiric hunger for spinal fluid.
- And in the new season, ex-soldiers are injected with a compound that, when activated by radio frequency, painfully crystalizes their tissue and turns them into bombs.
Heroes, in one of his trademark genius moves, Mohinder injects himself with a serum that he believes will give him super powers without testing it. It does, in fact give him super powers, but the cost is that he begins to turn into a half-insect monster. At the end of Volume 3, a reversal serum washes over him curing the mutations but leaving the superstrength.
- The character of Mohinder is kind of a Captain Ersatz of Jeff Goldblum's character in The Fly.
- In Volume Four, Sylar steals the power of voluntary shapeshifting, but finds out he got more than he bargained for when this latest powers combines with another superpower he picked up earlier: psychometry or the ability to read psychic imprints of people (like their memories) from objects they have touched. He finds himself involuntarily shapeshifting in his sleep or under stress, even turning into the likeness of his own, dead mother and holding a whole split personality dialogue with himself.
Kamen Rider Decade has begun to pull this once every two weeks, as each world Decade travels to results in him teaming up with the nominal Kamen Rider there, and him using a Final Form Ride card that turns his own ally into some sort of weapon. This is mainly a result of the transformable action figure line, but the problem comes in as said transformations are kept frame for frame from the toys. So super neat panel flipping on the toys results in limbs bending in disgusting directions on TV.
Played for laughs in a Kids in the Hall sketch in which Kevin McDonald'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.
- And then there was the plastic surgeon who was secretly transforming his assistant into a rat. It also doesn't help that he was giving his client such bizarre suggestions for surgery like "one giant eye in your forehead".
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.
- This exact same story was also featured in John Carpenter's horror anthology Body Bags.
- Another episode involved a young female POW in an intergalactic conflict, who is subjected to painful and horrifying surgery with the intent to transform her into an alien. She is *already* an alien, and is in fact used as a spy to gather information from her human cell mate.
  - Both this and the hair episode are from the 1995 revival, but the original series had "The Architects of Fear", in which a man is surgically turned into a nasty-looking alien to give the superpowers of Earth a common enemy in the form of a faked invasion.
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.
Star Trek The Next Generation
- In "Genesis" everyone in the Enterprise was devolving into some variety of lower life form.
- In "Identity Crisis", Geordi turns into an alien creature.
- "Conspiracy" was full of body horror-related Nightmare Fuel.
- And, of course, The Borg, who do this to everyone they meet.
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.
- And in "Threshold", Paris and Captain Janeway end up devolving into salamanders after breaching Warp 10.
Supernatural is quite fond of this one, episodes such as "Skin" and "Metamorphosis" springing to mind.
- In "Skin" and "Nightshifter," we see that shapeshifters have literally shed their skin (by ripping it off) in order to change shape, which includes teeth, hair, and other fun things. But the shapeshifters get Played For Laughs (until the end) in "Monster Movie".
Not surprisingly, Tales From The Crypt utilizes this trope in many of its episodes. In "Ear Today, Gone Tommorow," a partially-deaf criminal gains the auditory system of an owl through a surgical transplant— only to then develop other owlish features, including an Exorcist-style swiveling head, feathers, and a beak. When he grows the beak, his face cracks open like porcelain and the beak literally bursts out of his skin. It's as unpleasant as it sounds.
- In the comic this episode is based on the man gets the auditory system of a bat instead of an owl. Now imagine what would have happened to him if they went with that one instead of the owl. It really depends on the type of bat though.
Wolf's change into his more feral form in The Tenth Kingdom certainly looks like it is incredibly painful and horrible—though that may only be due to Wolf trying to resist it so mightily. If the creators had had the proper budget, we would have been treated to a transformation into a true Dire Wolf...which would likely have been both traumatic and nightmare-inducing. (The miniseries wasn't intended for children, after all—rather like the original Grimm fairytales which inspired it.)
The X Files did this at least once every season plus it was at the centre of The Movie's plot.
- One episode involved a man who could control the cancer that he had in all his organs and tissues (by eating other people's tumours). He used the cancer cells to generate a new body when his old one became too diseased to function.
One of the main characters in Being Human is a werewolf, and his transformation is lovingly described in the opening narration of Episode 2: during the process, he actually has a heart attack, and liver and kidney failure, as his internal organs change; and he eventually becomes unable to even scream as his vocal cords tear. As the narrator points out, while any other human would quickly die of shock, the werewolf is somehow kept alive and conscious for the whole thing.
- For this troper the transformation in Being Human is possibly the most frightning and disturbing transformation ever. Not that the actual footage is all that bad, but becouse of the high-pitched and realisitic screams from George.

Close Live Action TV

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service has plenty. Mostly from dead people,but sometimes the living too,such as when a snail parasite crosses over to humans. Said parasite makes the victim's eyes stand out on stalks - exactly like a snail's,in fact. Much worse than it sounds.
- Or when they come across a company that is 'harvesting' an idol singer by growing ears on her - lots of ears. They're alerted by ghosts that grew a face on said ears. It's that kind of series.

Close Manga

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", "Hookworm" (Oh, God, "Hookworm"), and "The Innsmouth Look".
There is no end to the mayhem in Michael Jackson's mini movie Ghosts. Michael (as "The Maestro") pulls a few funny faces and then pulls his face off as if it were a mask. Later on he pulls his entire skin off and does a song and dance number as a skeleton, and then he turns into a ghoul. He turns into water and possesses the mayor (by having the mayor drink him - um, Squick). Then his arm bursts out of the mayor's chest and causes the mayor to turn into a ghoul. He turns back to normal (for Michael) and crumbles into dust - then he appears as a giant ghoul face which scares the "Mayor" into leaping to his doom.
- 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.
The video for Rubber Johnny by Aphex Twin is this trope distilled to its' essence. It's all from a night vision camera viewpoint as these unseen characters watch as this freakish, vaguely human thing with bulbous eyes and a twitchy disposition slowly goes from content to a body spasmy berserk rage, interspersed with scenes of a dog that happens to share the same traits. And that's only the beginning — I love it.
Then there's the end of Radiohead's There There video....

Close Music

White Wolf RPG Vampire: The Masquerade has the Tzimisce clan, vampires with the Discipline of Vicissitude, otherwise known as... "Fleshcrafting." As you can imagine, this led to horrible, horrible things. How horrible? Their Antediluvian (the oldest known vampire of the clan) was a cathedral of flesh. And he didn't make the whole thing himself...
- Further, in the Vampire Apocalypse "Gehenna" campaign, the Tzimisce clan ends up winning. Because their Antediluvian begins to absorb every living being on the planet into one writhing mass of purified flesh and bone. Unless one of the major characters enough true faith to call down the hand of God himself at this late point, that's how the world ends.
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.
- Then one has Space Hulk, a boardgame variant of the "Marines vs. Aliens" type, later adopted into an RTS/FPS video game. The information on how Genestealers reproduce is Nightmare Fuel, made all the worse by certain groups.
- No Obliterators in here? Allow me...
  - —-> [RECORD BEGINS]
The process of absorption fascinates… [unclear] ones body might somehow swallow the item, like unto a serpent or the surface of some [viscous?] fluid. Yet it doth seem a mutual [process]. For not only doth the body absorb the [weapon] but also [doth the] weapon, in some strange way, seem to [absorb] the body…[RECORD CORRUPT] as the weapon becomes like unto my flesh, so doth mine flesh… [unclear] like unto the weapon. Indeed, I trace this [stylus] upon mine arm, and the shape and form of the weapon appears under [my touch?]. It doth not appear in mine hand so much as mine hand doth arrange itself so as to become the weapon… [BREAK IN RECORD] capakhity of mine new form to abkhorb weaponsh ish akhtonishing… [unclear] a whole lakhgun! But I do shtart to lokhe zhe shenshation in mine shkin. Mine jawkh are [hardening?] and mine ribkh are protruding from mine [chest]. Zhey are of a dull, metallic sheen and tekhts show zhey are a mix of [bone?] and shome metal I cannot identify… [BREAK IN RECORD] thsi wil be mmmylsat [RECORD CORRUPT] cannnnnnnnnnnot useth esse febel mahcinsse aaaaany log;ner [RECORD CORRUPT] tothe eyeof the larybinht the hearto fthe maichnettttto the pppplaceo f… metalll… [RECORD ENDS]
Cthulhu Tech has Tagers, people with inderdimesional Powered Armor...Which happen to look like Eldritch Abominations. At least they have it better than their enemies, the Dhohanoids, who frequently aren't even humanoid...Although they can still shapeshift back into a human form at will.
Most 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.
- There are a whole bunch of "Body Control" spells that produce body horror effects.
Unknown Armies has the magical school of Epideromancy. Epideromancers gain charges through self-hurt, and use magic to mold flesh like putty. Their minor blast can cause small changes, such as muscular spasms, and does damage. A modified version, Greater Warping, does no damage, but allows you to, in the words of the book, " seal someone's mouth and nose shut, or cause their eyelids to grow together, or melt their arm to their side, or stick their feet together" (censored to protect sensitive stomachs). And their significant blast is called Body Melting. No explanation required.
- Fun fact; the school's name literally translates as "Skin Magic".
  - Skin divination. Relating to the outer layer of skin, to be precise. See Whatevermancy.
Mind Flayer reproduction in Dungeons And Dragons. They stick a tadpole in your head, which eats out your brain and fuses with the nervous system to take the whole body as its own. And it has tentacles.
- Also to mention are the Aboleths, who secrete a musk into the surrounding water that transforms the skin of everyone who touches it into a thin membrane that quickly dies up outside of water, and makes the person to breath water instead of air. For permanent enslvement, they transform their mostly helpless captives into fish people.
- And there's also an ancient powerful entity, Ragnorra, which is the opposite of your average undead creating monster, but actually even worse. It's comming is heralded by widespread mutations and upon its arrival causes endless body horror for every living being in the whole world.
  - The same sourcebook has one who does this with The Virus. Let's just say that turning into a horrific multi-eyed ice-bug monster does not sound like very much fun, and leave it at that.
- We also get Vargouilles, vampiric outsiders resembling disembodied human heads with tentacles and wings. Should one kiss you, you'll grow tentacles on your chin, your ears will turn into wings, and your head will tear free from your body. Congratulations, you've become a vargouille.
- And the Tsochar, composite beings composed of about a dozen lamprey-like creatures twisted around each other. A Tsochar colony can burrow into another creature and connect to its nervous system as a parasite, or just hollow out its brain and wear it like a suit.
The Nightmares from Dont Rest Your Head. A fusion of Victorian-era societal roles and Dali-esque mutations.
Anyone who uses arcanowave gear on a regular basis in Feng Shui runs the risk of mutation due to the way that arcanotech sends bent magic into your system like a virus whenever you use it. Use it too much, and you risk becoming an abomination, one of those altered demon things that the government of 2056 uses to fight its wars.

Close Tabletop Games

Thought seeing the chestburster explode out of John Hurt's chest was bad enough? The second level of the Alien campaign in Alien Vs Predator 2 starts out in the host's torso, with you as the chestburster. No prizes for guessing what you have to do.
A trailer for Bioshock features the first-person protagonist in hand-to-hand combat with some kind of armored figure (probably a Big Daddy). He injects himself with an EVE plasmid 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*
- In addition to your hand becoming a living beehive, switching to other plasmids cause icy spikes to burst out of your hand (yes, with traces of blood) or your hand to be covered with horrific burns.
- Overuse of the miraculous gene tonics and "plasmids" that grant these special abilities leads to a different kind of body horror — many of the Splicers encountered in Rapture are visibly deformed, in some cases featuring huge tumors growing out of their misshapen and twisted faces.
  - Just so we're clear- the only part of YOU that you ever see is your hand. By the last stages of the game, you're "so spliced up" you can't think straight anymore. Considering that the most you ever see other splicers use is a couple fireballs, a bit of teleportation, some toughness and a bit of superhuman strength, you, with your beehive-hand and your ice fist, armor-plated skin, partial invisibility and Wrench-based combat tonics- and, by the end, Big Daddy voice, which is implanted directly into your vocal cords via your neck- well, let's say, it's a good thing there are no mirrors.
  - It seems unlikely you are that disfigured as in the good ending the PC lives out a happy life and his old normal looking hand is grasped by the many little sisters he saved. It seems unlikely the PC could of functioned in the US from the 50s onwards if he looked like a monster
One enemy type in Bullet Witch is 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.
Clock Tower: The First Fear: has a severely deformed ten-year-old named Bobby, a mummified corpse you find in the trophy room, and a huge, deformed, purple infant-looking thing who is the twin brother of Bobby.
In Silent Hill 3, Heather turns out to be "pregnant" with a freakish demon which she is supposed to give birth to.
- Many of the monsters, especially in 3 and Homecoming, are, of course, quite body-horrific, e.g., the Bubble Head Nurses, the Abstract Daddy, the Pendulums, the Siamese twin monster(the Homecoming one), and the centipede made of human torsoes.
- The scene where the demon is exorcised from Alessa in the good ending of 1.
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 Keeper's Journal in the first Resident Evil is a long, detailed description of the transformation of a normal person into a zombie. It runs from the initial outbreak at the Umbrella Arkley Lab, to the Keeper noticing strange sores appearing all over his body, to him scratching off a chunk of rotting flesh from his own arm and finding himself mysteriously hungry.
- "Itchy. Tasty."
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 was hired to exterminate 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).
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 are 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. The description of a device called alien implanter reads: "...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.
- Some of the critters from the UFO After Blank series look equally unpleasant, like Cudgels and Dangleflies. Car Crabs, on the other hand, are awesome.
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. Matthew Kane 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 Kane's bloody leg-stumps quivering after his legs have been amputated. The scene (not for the faint of heart) is here if you want to see it. ...Oy.
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...
- There's also the guy who's turning into a Gibdo in Majora's Mask.
- Link's first transformation into a wolf in Twilight Princess is kinda nasty, as the wolf seems to burst out of him.
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.
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. If played backwards, the moans of the 'Headcrab Zombies' can clearly be heard to say "Help God Help! Help me!"
- I believe that this was origially the case, but somewhere along the lines Valve fixed it so you don't have to edit anything to hear the headcrab zombies screaming for help.
The worms zombies from System Shock 2.
Halo: The Flood.
- In Halo 3, the Flood Infection Forms can jump onto a human, Elite, or Brute, burrow into their chest (or mouth, in the case of the Brutes), and mutate them into a combat form within a few seconds, complete with horrified screaming from the victim (the cries of the Marines are particularly jarring), sensory tentacles popping out from the point of penetration, horrific gray flesh sprouting across the victim's body, seeing the actual head of the victim. Perhaps the most disturbing part is that when an Infection Form jumps on a character, the NPC will grapple with it for a few seconds to give the player the chance to shoot it off. This means that if any allies are infected, it's all your fault.
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.
Don't forget the Chimera from Resistance, they'll happily mutate anyone into becoming one of them, wrap in cocoons and becoming freaks of nature. And don't forget Deadulus and that he was once a human...ick.
Clive Barker's Jericho is utterly rife with this. All of the monsters in this game were once human: upon becoming trapped in The Box/The Pyxis and succumbing to death, they are "assimilated" by the Firstborn. Upon returning to life, they have transformed into grotesque parodies of their former selves. Some of the more extreme examples include Arnold Leach, who has transformed into a winged creature with his eyes being forcefully held open by what appears to be thick leather straps punching through his eyelids and scalp; the Crusaders, who have replaced several of their limbs with assorted weaponry and nailed their own armour to their flesh, and the Corpses Behomoths, who are essentially a mass of human corpses held together by a collective mind, formed into the shape of huge, crawling creatures, with a metal mask held onto their "faces" via strips of skin, through which they spit toxic corpse chunks.
Siren is rife with examples of this.
The Splatterhouse series holds two examples, both using the same character: Jennifer, Rick's girlfriend. In the first game in the series, Jennifer turns into a monster when you least expect it — right after you believe you've saved her. In the third game, Jennifer is infected by a Boreworm, and your performance in the first couple of levels determines whether you save her or whether she becomes another monster you have to kill.
- "Rick, I'M DYING!"/"Help...me..."
The aforementioned Tzimisce get their share of creeps in Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. First, you find a snuff film in which a woman is torn to pieces by what look like demonic heads with arms for legs. Then you find the house where it was filmed, only to find out the thing is wall-papered in flesh. Then you go into the basement, only to fight the Tzimisce responsible, who summons more of the head things and turn into blood. Then, you have to fight your way through the sewers, where an even worse Tzimisce experiment awaits — giant spider-like things made from the torsos of three women. Enjoy.
- Not mentioning Ming Xiao, the head of Los Angeles Kuei-Jin, who turns into a huge red blob with tentacles and then proceeds to beat the shit out of you.
The true form of Mimi from Super Paper Mario deserves an honorable mention — if she weren't done in a cartoony art-style loosely inspired by NES games, the appearance of a little girl with a bizarrely-warped, upside-down head with spider legs coming out of it, and her now limp and useless body dangling below her in a parody of The Thing would be Grade-A Nightmare Fuel, and it still manages to be creepy even with that art style.
- Her Exorcist-esque transformation sequence, in which she breaks her own neck (with an audible CRACK), doesn't help much.
In the Nintendo 64 game Sin And Punishment, the main character Saki is transformed into an enormous, mindless bioweapon looking like something out of Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's apparently caused by a cascade of blood that inexplicably washes over Tokyo.
In Persona 3, pretty much the entirety of the main character's first Persona summoning. When he pulls the trigger on the Evoker to summon his Persona, he has a really creepy smile on his face, complete with glowing eyes. To top it off, shortly after summoning his Persona, it gets ripped apart from the inside by another, far more brutal and powerful Persona, all while the main character is screaming and clutching his head. Turns out later in the game that the Persona that clawed its way out of Orpheus is Thanatos, aka Death, who was sealed inside the main character ten years prior by Aigis. Considering that the main character's first Persona summoning is against one of the 12 major Shadows used to form the Appriser when destroyed, which also includes Death, this makes a lot of sense.
Every game in the Trauma Center series has an infection/virus/whatever ripping people's organs, draining them, digging through hearts, creating reproducing tumors that put bunnies in heat to shame, etc.
In Dawn Of Mana, the unleashing of the Echoes from the Mana Tree turns everyone into "Grimslies", and in addition to getting some really weird-looking face-vine...things, they're Drunk On The Dark Side and quite bloodthirsty.
Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. Creeping Derangea causes flowers to grow under the skin and then break out. Painful, but it only infects people under 20. Initially.
The Suffering, has quite a bit of this going on, especially as the enemies are all personifications of different methods of execution: The Festers, for example, represent those left to die aboard a beached slave ship, and are constantly being eaten from within by rats. Occasionally, these bloated corpses will open their bellies and let a swarm of live rats pour out to attack anyone in the area.
- Mainliners (representing lethal injection) are in constant pain due to all the lethal chemicals in their veins- as if the stunted limbs and syringed eyeballs weren't bad enough.
- Torque's transformation into his monster form in which his head appears to briefly turn inside out and his eyes vanish behind skin.
  - In the sequel, the transformations are more intense, depending on how far down the Karma Meter Torque is. The worst involves Torque's skin hardening into bony plates covered in sharp spines.
- At one point in the sequel, a guard is briefly heard screaming over the radio about being sliced in the stomach and that something is "pulling itself inside" him.
- The Creeper's weapons of choice, namely the bodies of his prostitute victims, bonded to his stomach and made into Combat Tentacles. Oh, and apparently, being absorbed by this guy is the fate of any woman in the game he doesn't decide to gut immediately.
Villains and protagonist alike of Prototype fall into this. The protagonist also has the same "charming" feeding habits as Aptom.
Rakghouls; here's the Wookieepedia article. In their first appearance, they're somewhere between zombies and werewolves; bitten humans have a chance of being infected and transforming if not cured. They shamble on all fours and balance on their hind legs like nonhuman apes, their eyes have been moved to the sides and squeezed shut, their skins are either a shiny off white or a rough red; altogether they're just monstrous. Rakghouls are essentially ravenous animals.
True Assassin in Fate Stay Night enters the world by eating his way out of Assassin. Who is still conscious and chatting with it. There's a little too much detail about said event, plus the implication that however inhuman True Assassin looks later he is much less so when he first shows up. Couple other examples: Shinji being attached to a faulty Grail and becoming a mutant lump of expanding flesh and Shirou's body turning into swords. No, it is not nearly as cool as it sounds, that's why it's on this page. ...Well, okay, it's cool, but it's definitely not a good thing at all and if they had illustrated it it would have been rather creepy.
- Finally Zouken rebuilds his form each time his old body breaks down by infecting and fleshcrafting some new victim with his worms.
The Unclean Beast of Demigod. Grotesque as it looks, you also have to remember that this... thing... grew inside a human womb. An ordinary woman had to carry and give birth to this, completely ignorant as to what was growing inside of her.
Some of the bosses of Survival Crisis Z are this, including a giant zombie covered in mutant maggots and an Infected with spider limbs for a head.
Captain Blood is too old a videogame to evoke actual feelings of body horror, but the novella included in the manual, explaining the premise of the game, more than makes up for it. The main character of the game is a game programmer named Bob Morlock, who proceeds to create a space exploration game so realistic, it becomes real. Bob is teleported aboard the organic spaceship he created, where he is accidendally cloned 30 times after a hyperspace jump. The book then explains in detail how Bob's organs start shutting down because of the "vital fluid" he lost when he was cloned, and he needs to replace them by mechanical substitutes, gradually turning into a robot. But that is only a temporary remedy, because the goal of the game (stopping Bob's body degeneration) can only be achieved by killing all the other clones and absorbing their vital fluid.
Though the ordinary Infecteds, Hunters, and (for the most part) Witches in Left 4 Dead probably don't experience much body horror, it's pretty Squicky to imagine what it must be like to watch the formation of a Smoker, Boomer, or Tank.
In Clive Barkers Undying, Bethany got her final revenge on her brother Aaron by chaining him inside her private dungeon and letting rats eat him alive, removing his jawbone so he can't scream.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has the horribly disfiguring disease known as Corprus. Take a look at these things, and bear in mind that all of them used to be human.
In the Fallout series of games the ghouls are humans that got lethal doses of radiation but didn't have the good fortune to die. also the supermutants were all once human but were exposed to a forced evolution virus. The big bad of the first game The Master was fell into a vat of the stuff and by the time the vault dweller meets him he is merged into a computer
Mass Effect has Husks - organics captured by the Geth are put onto devices that impale them, replaces their organs with cybernetics and they are effectively turned into cyber-zombies. Also, during the final boss fight Saren's corpse is re-animated into an avatar of Sovereign in gruesome detail.
The Affliction in Guild Wars: Factions, a plague which initially makes those afflicted go mad and attack anybody who themselves is not afflicted, and shortly after rather violently turn into a body horror. The affliction is later revealed to be the work of Shiro Tagachi (A spirit of incredible strength who 200 years prior had killed the Emperor of Cantha, whom he was the Bodyguard of.) who was abusing the powers granted him in the afterlife, creating the afflicted instead of guiding newly dead souls to the underworld. All in the name of coming back to life, of which he ends up doing just that, leading to one of the series toughest fights if you are not prepared to counter him.
In Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh the main character has hallucinations of a purple clawed hand emerging from his stomach. in one of the possible endings his hand is also shown mutating, having earlier discovered a Tomato In The Mirror.
In Star Fox Assault, Pigma undergoes a horrific transformation at the hands of the Aparoids, in which he is assimilated into a spacecraft, turning his whole body into a giant, mutilated, vaguely cybernetic (but mostly organic-looking) pig's face, kept safe in a metallic cube which can open and close, hiding or revealing said face. He then later shows up in Command in essentially the same form.
Dragon Age features something like this with the abominations. While the player isn't given a chance to witness the transformation due to a glow effect, the way demons take over mages in the game universe results in a rather gruesome version of a human (or elf).
- Worse yet is the Broodmother boss fight later, which lets the player know before fighting it that the gigantic Nightmare Fuel boss was once a dwarf woman. This transformation is given as the explicit purpose for which the darkspawn even abduct mortal women rather than killing every last of them..

Close Videogames

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.
In the Order Of The Stick prequel volume Start Of Darkness, Xykon rips away his own flesh as he is transformed into a lich.
The Crax from The Dragon Doctors is basically magical cancer. With tentacles.
Dominic Deegan shows how hazardous chaos can be to your body.
MSF High: The Legion, at least to unwilling targets (read: genocidal Knight Templars).

Close Webcomics

Tech Infantry, as a spinoff of the World Of Darkness (see above under Tabletop RPG), also has the Tszimisce clan, but their Viscissitude abilities are weaponized for soldiers of the Black Hand. These abilities are also retconned into being partial but progressive possession by the Soul Eater aliens from the planet Fieras VI, who eventually totally transform their victims into new Soul Eaters and completely take over their minds.
The SCP Foundation has so very much that trying to list them all would involve recreating half the site here. Reading random articles for any length of time is bound to make your skin crawl.
Parodied in Homestar Runner: An Easter Egg in one of the Halloween specials shows the character Stinkoman (a character who is a walking anime parody) dressed up as Speed Racer for Halloween, and he comes up to 'your house' to get candy. One of the treats you can give him is a can with the word "Akira" printed on it. Guess what happens when you give that "Treat" to Stinkoman?
- "Waaaaaaagh!! ....It tickles!"
Gaia Online's Timmy experienced this trope in an Ugly Cute way after his legal guardian sealed him in a barrel of toxic waste just to see what would happen.
- It says something that even Timmy is grossed out by the Penanggalan from the Nightmare evolving item. "It even has a cute female companion— eeeeeugh never mind I think I have to go lie down..."

Close Web Original

Aqua Teen Hunger Force uses this trope all the time. People get their skin ripped off, cosmetic surgery goes horribly, horribly wrong, a guy gets a body made out of eye-balls, the list goes on and on.
Kirk Lanston turning into Man-Bat in the Batman episode "On Leather Wings".
- And not to mention what happened to the villain in that Splicers episode.
- You can't forget what happened in Clayface's introductory episode. Near the end,confronted with images of his acting roles,he starts morphing involuntarily in a Superpower Meltdown scene which can only be described as a cross between Tetsuo's final mutation and T1000-in-the-smelter.
  - And before that,he'd been suffocating Batman with an attack that ~~could have been~~ was lifted frame-for-frame from Akira.
- Then there's Poison Ivy, who made a habit of creating plant creatures that could pass for human. Of course, these often revealed themselves to be horrifying monsters. The best example of a horrific transformation is where Ivy rips the skin off of the upper torso of one of these creatures like it was a shirt, revealing the green flesh underneath. This is enough to cause onlooker Robin to start to heave (he's saved from actual puking by Batgirl).
- Batman Beyond has Inque, a shapeshifting mutant who provides plenty of canon Fetish Fuel for the technician who releases her from a cryogenics facility. She dupes him in the nastiest way imaginable. She also likes to engage in Orifice Invasion and at one point tries to suffocate the protagonist by engulfing him.
- Know what's fun about Justice League? Watching Brainiac morph Lex Luthor's body into some bizarre hybrid of biology and technology. Oh, wait, that's not fun at all.
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.
- The mutations inflicted by Corrodium in the Ben 10 episode "Under Wraps" were particularly unnerving; monstrous, twisted, black shadows with glowing purple lines gouged across them. Later on, in "Be Afraid Of The Dark", when we actually see the mutations taking place as the entire populace of Earth is subjected to them, it's even more disturbing.
- Kevin's transformation from emo preteen to giant Biological Mash Up, complete with lots of screaming.
- Perhaps this is why the Alien Force transformations are ~~more boring~~ less graphic...
- Let's not forget the final part of Ben's intial transformation into Benwolf, in "BenWolf". Sure, it only lasted for a few seconds, but....
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 has 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.
Cow And Chicken tried to play this for humor. An episode of I.M Weasel had Weasel as a doctor who specialises in curing diseases; we see him with a guy who's got a case of Athlete's face (a foot sticking out of his forehead). I.R Baboon is stuck having to study parameciums (amoebas). Weasel takes a break for a while and I.R decides it is his time to shine - so he invents a so called "cure" for Athlete's face and uses it on the guy - it turns the guy into an amoeba-like form, he uses it to "cure" everyone else's problems and they get turned into amoeba-like things too. Weasel makes the real cure for the first time and tests it out on the Athlete's face guy but the athlete's face guy turns into something with only a head and a foot, so he tries again and it's successful. Thankfully, he shows up with the real cure and everyone returns to normal at the end.
One episode of Danny Phantom has the main character trying to duplicate himself, only to horribly, horribly mutate himself into an unholy concoction of body Nightmare Fuel: Little heads on individual fingers, mouths for eyes, eyeballs sticking out and so forth. Brrrrr.
Dexters Lab has a direct American Werewolf parody called "The Laughing" (a reference to the werewolf movie The Howling) where Dexter becomes a "were-clown" after being bitten by a pair of dentures belonging to a clown performing at Deedee's birthday.
Parodied in an episode of Futurama titled "The Honking," which had Bender turning into a psycho werecar in one scene. But after a while he kind of gets used to it and it begins to actually feel quite nice.
The Grim Adventures Of Billyand 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.
- No. Billy is a king at this trope. Like the time he got his face ripped off. And in the intros, when the characters are brought from skeleton to muscle to skin.
- Then there's the episode with the zipper and he uses the zipper to remove his left arm and replace it with the cat's head.
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.
- In the episode "Parkerina", Parker eats too much Ms Meaty burgers and undergoes an American Werewolf In London style transformation into a girl.
An episode of The Real Ghostbusters had Egon turn into a werechicken, while another episode had the whole team undergoing a number of bizarre and sudden transformations after becoming "allergic to ghosts". An episode of Extreme Ghostbusters had one of the lead characters becoming an evil clown-like creature. Then there's the episode "Crawlers" where people were turned into mutant bug creatures and another episode featured a group of monsters who used surgery to turn people into more monsters.
- This was no chicken. This was evil manifest.
In Re Boot, anyone caught in a lost game is transformed into a slug-like "null".
- What's worse is that it's implied Nulls are still somewhat aware, and apparently some residents use them to make balloon animals - complete with painful Null noises.
The The Secret Saturdays episode "Ghost in the Machine" features a villain that creates a DNA reactor that merges living tissue. He places Zak, Fiskerton and Komodo into the machine, and....it isn't pretty.
Sev Trek: Puss 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.
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.
- And also in the episode where everyone becomes what they're dressed as for Halloween. Homer becomes a headless horseman type character.
- Don't worry. That was just a dream. Everything is perfectly fine. Well, except for that fog that turns people inside out.
The "Trapper Keeper" episode of South Park pays homage to the Akira transformation scene (complete with soundtrack); it involves Cartman's Trapper Keeper absorbing all of his school supplies, then his computer, then Cartman himself, turning him into a hideously gigantic bio-mechanical blob monster that threatens to destroy the world via the absorption of NORAD.
Poor Spider-Man underwent quite an unpleasant transformation into ManSpider in an episode of Spider Man the Animated Series. Another episode had Morbius turn into a bat thing.
- The Spectacular Spider Man has Connors' transformation into The Lizard, especially the part where instead of compressing slowly, his head partially implodes to form his new lizard head.
In an episode of Static Shock, the attention-seeking son of wealthy Edwin Alva uses gas from the Big Bang to grant himself various super powers so that he will gain attention from his dad as a supervillain. At the end of the episode, all of the containers for the gas pop at once, which causes him to transform unpredictably- the final form he takes is some sort of horrible, one-eyed, tentacley thing, but shortly afterwards reverts to normal and turns to stone.
In an episode of Teen Titans, Beastboy is infected with a virus that turns him into a werewolf like monster. When he transforms for the first time he reacts like it's very painful.
The Tick episode "That Mustache Feeling". As quoted above.
In the original Transformers, this happens when Scourge tries to use the Matrix. His body develops grotesque bulges and warts and he falls to his knees screaming in pain as tears stream from his optical sensors.
- Just...this.
Cheetor's transformation in Feral Scream part 2. It's slow, it explodes from pieces on his body, it's crazy, he has a nightmare about it...and he gains enough power to beat the crap out of EVERYONE when he's feral.
Blackarachnia's unnerving mutation from a promising young Autobot into a techno-organic freak in Transformers Animated
- How she found it in herself to subject Wasp... Make that Waspinator... to a similar transformation is beyond me, but the results are equally horrible.
  - The whole thing kind of is a homage to the 1986 remake of The Fly.
  - She was trying to figure out exactly how she got changed so she could then work out how to change herself back. That, or she'd gone quite mad and decided to make her own army/family of technorganic beings.
Turbo Teen. The main character's face stretches out to become the grill of the car, his hands and feet become wheels, etc.
One of the reasons why The Marvelous Misadventures Of Flapjack is such a profoundly disturbing series is because of the abundance of this trope.
The focus of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode "Insane in the Membrane". After four seasons of losing body parts, Baxter Stockman finally obtains a new body via cloning. Soon enough, however, he discovers that it's unstable, as his limbs start deteriorating and melting off. Worse still, his mind is going with it...
In the world of Codename: Kids Next Door, chicken pox works a little differently than it does in the real world. The victim does indeed get raised sores all over her face and body... except the sores are tiny, living chicken heads bursting through the skin to wriggle and cluck wildly. It's intended as a Visual Pun, but plays out as pure Nightmare Fuel.
In Buzz Light Year Of Star Command, Ty Parsec is bitten by "energy vampire" NAS-4-A2, and the radioactive moon on the planet he's stationed on causes him to transform into a "wirewolf", which is basically a werewolf cyborg. The very first time Ty transforms, wires starts streaming out of the wound on his arm, and attach themselves to his neck. His eyes then grow to large, glowing red orbs, his jaw is stretched into a metal muzzle, and he grows a tail. It doesn't help matters that, from all his groaning and screaming, it looks and sounds exceptionally painful. As the episode progresses, his transformations get less and less creepy, but that first one always sticks out in your mind as pretty bone-chilling.

Close Western Animation

Artist Alan M. Clark embodies this trope very well in his series of medical horror paintings. Try this painting◊, as well as this one◊.
There is a well circulated picture called Lotus Boob which I will not link to here. Suffice it to say, the image of a lotus superimposed over a human areola and its implications of burrowed parasites is more than enough Nightmare Fuel for This Tropers lifetime.
In the same vein as the above example, there's a email on Snopes with a .jpg attached of human fingers with lamprey mouths Photoshopped onto the pads. It's meant to be a joke: too much typing and mousing will wear holes in your fingers, har har!
Hell, the infamous Goatse while we're at it. How is that physically possible.
Spengbab. Dear Lord.
Magic: The Gathering has several cards that evoke body horror, but one that immediately comes to mind is 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."

Close Other

In general, it's worth noting that between this trope, Uncanny Valley, and What Measure Is A Non Human, the deformed, the differently able, and transhumanists have had one hell of an uphill battle gaining acceptance over the years. Fortunately, there are also those who think Freaky Is Cool.
There is a genetic disease called trisomy 13, AKA Patau Syndrome. There is a very good reason the Wikipedia page doesn't have any pictures on it. Do. Not. Google. Image. Search. For. This.
- More birth defects to avoid GISing: 'harlequin baby' and 'Treacher Collins syndrome'.
- Anencephaly isn't so great either.
- Holoprosencephaly, cyclopia, otocephaly, agnathia, etc. Often associated with Trisomy 13. I suggest you refrain from googling these either.
- You may also want to avoid searching for "kitten" in Google Image Search. The first result shows a very unfortunate kitteh that never should have been born.
  - Do you mean this one◊?
- Some cases of Down's Syndrome can be horrific too.
The infamous 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 wrote the short story Bloodchild - which went on to become her first popular work of fiction, interestingly enough.
- A professor of Entomology at This Troper's college actually INFECTED HIMSELF with a botfly larva to study its growth. Our Biology teacher brought the live larva into class to show us one day. My college is an odd one.
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. It involves acid.
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 fte wskin papules to loss of skin elasticity or blindness. This troper does not intend to visit Africa or South America anytime soon, no sir.
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...
- Stan Jones, Libertarian Party candidate for the US Senate from Montana, 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 being blue 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.
Pick up any dermatological atlas. Cornua Cutanea and Epithelioma are this troper's favorites. (Old dude with scary mouth will inhale your soul!)
- Enjoy the sad, sad tale of Tree man.
  - And Bubble Boy(not the "boy in the plastic bubble"), Nose Man, and the Melting Face Lady.
A strain of Echinophyces mirabilis can infect sea urchins, making them grow genitals on their heads.
- Sea urchins have HEADS?
- They don't already have genitals on their heads?
A baby recently had a perfectly-formed foot surgically removed from inside their brain. Repeat: A foot. Inside their brain.
- Sounds like teratoma.
Chyna. That video will haunt you and wake you screaming at night for the rest of your days.
Cancer. We have no real effective treatments for it, short of cutting, burning, or poisining it out, and all of them have some rather unfortunate side effects.
- This troper distinctly remembers hearing about a form of stem cell cancer. Because stem cells can form any part of the body, this results in tumours with teeth, noses, or even rudimentary nervous systems that make them twitch when you touch them.
- It's called teratoma. Not necessarily cancerous. And it can actually result in Vagina Dentata...
A baby born with two faces. It's not all bad for her though. She's completely healthy and is regarded in India as a reincarnated god.
- A similar example would be the girl born with eight limbs, who was also regarded as a goddess. She's actually a conjoined twin, but the other 'twin' has no head.
- Craniopagus Parasiticus. Basically, conjoined twins where one twin only consists of a head. Search at your own risk.
The metamorphosis a caterpillar goes through into a butterfly is probably plenty interesting on its own. But sometimes the caterpillar has been infected by some parasitic wasp, which consumes the host inside its crysalis resulting in an adult wasp hatching out instead. A real life example of Face Full Of Alien Wing Wong.
Echinoderms undergo a radical alien-style metamorphosis as well, for one, changing from bilateral to pentaradial symmetry.
Nadia Suleiman's pregnancy pictures made more than one woman drop her jaw, cross her legs and whimper in pure unadulterated horror. Please, for the love of puppies, nobody mention Fetish Fuel.
Brown recluse spider bite lesions. I suggest you not google image this.
BME Pain Olympics.
- For that matter, plenty of stuff on BMEZine. All the weird stuff is in the ModBlog, but you can just pick out the most horrifying by reading their "extreme" tag. It seems that some people just don't have a built-in sense of body horror.
Proteus Syndrome, aka Elephant Man's Disease.
- It is likely that he also suffered from neurofibromatosis type I. Not "instead of" Proteus syndrome, also.
- Speaking of The "Elephant Man", as a little kid, I saw a documentary on China's (more recent) "Elephant Man", whom had a 20KG lot of extra tissue added to his face from a tumour, really messing up his facial features. It wasn't This one, as it's too recent , but it gave This Troper nightmares when she saw whatever documentary it was at about nine or ten years of age (Might've been Ripley's Believe It Or Not, now I think about it...)
- Also try "Face Eating Tumor" and "The Man With No Face"(he didn't have the tumor removed because he was a Jehovah's Witness and couldn't take blood transfusions).
One of a girl's/woman's worst nightmares: Endometriosis. Occurs when uterine lining is present where it shouldn't be. Like a cancer or alien growth, it can spread throughout the pelvic cavity, rendering one infertile or worse. This troper saw an episode of Mystery Diagnosis where someone had this and it went unchecked for years. They had to sacrifice her reproductive organs to stop it (she probably was already sterile anyway).
- It should be noted that Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, while not precisely this bad, is not exactly a cakewalk. Basically, the follicles in your ovaries do not release the ovum, but rather form a small, impenetrable cyst. It, too, can lead to infertility or worse. Fortunately, it isn't quite as painful as Endometriosis, at least not at first.
  - The only advantage of having PCOS is the possible absence of menstrual periods.
  - Except that the lack of periods leads to a higher incidence of uterine cancer.
Sex reassignment surgery.
- Should be noted that this applies during and immediately after surgery, the end results looks normal.
  - That's debateable, especially below the belt.
- It should also be noted that, from the internal perspective, you could argue transsexuals suffer from this by default. Things growing where they shouldn't/not growing where they should? Of course, this gets seriously subjective
There's currently a pandemic occurring with the world's frogs where their bodies do not develop properly out of the tadpole stage. Biologists have found frogs with missing limbs or even extra limbs, sometimes growing out of their legs. This Troper skipped that page in his high school biology textbook because he was too disturbed by the frog's appearance.
- It gets worse. Those extra limbs are caused by a parasite that burrows into the tadpole. The parasites can only reproduce in the stomachs of predatory birds (like herons) so it messes with the leg development which makes the frogs more likely to be eaten.
Morgellons. At any time, you can start growing wires out of your skin. Rashes and lesions that don't heal, the feeling of bugs under the skin, and cognitive dysfunction, including difficulty with short-term memory caused by cognitive dysfunction.
- After years of investigation by the medical community, Morgellon's has been determined to be a catch-all name for several psychiatric disorders, typically delusional parasitosis, Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen by Proxy. There have been no independently verified cases of physical symptoms recorded. "Wires" embedded in the skin have invariably been determined to have been implanted there by the patient, the result of either a Munchausen-like behaviour, or through an attempt by the patient to "dig out" or kill the non-existent parasites. Rashes and lesions are typically the result of excessive scratching, or dermatitis resulting from attempts by the sufferer to self-medicate the crawling sensation with household cleaners and similar chemicals; although in a few cases, Lyme Disease has been diagnosed. While not manifesting any physical symptoms detectable by an observer, the sensations caused by the delusion can still be quite horrific to the sufferer. The fact that many claiming to suffer from Morgellon's also tend to exhibit strong belief in conspiracy theories surrounding it lends further support to psychiatric diagnoses.
Two words: Sacculina carcini. The female of this "parasitic barnacle" implants herself into a crab, discarding her exoskeleton and growing Flood-style tendrils throughout the crab's body. The sacculinized crab is sterilized and no longer able to molt or regrow limbs, and now serves only to nurture the parasite's larvae. The parasites also alter male crabs to look and act like females.
The Man whose Arms Exploded.
Ever heard of Cymothoa exigua? It is a parasitic, aquatic crustacean that attaches itself at the base of the tongue of the Spotted Rose Snapper, entering the fish's mouth through its gills. It then proceeds to extract blood through the claws on its front three pairs of legs. As the parasite grows, less and less blood reaches the tongue, and eventually the organ disintegrates from lack of blood. The parasite then replaces the fish's tongue by attaching its own body to the muscles of the tongue stub! What's creepier? - The fish is able to use the parasite just like a normal tongue. This is the only known case of a parasite functionally replacing a host organ. Here's a flash animation clip to better illustrate this point. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/496606
There was a story featured on T.V about a boy who's own twin was growing inside his body. The twin was surgically removed and was shown to be nothing but a fleshy mass with a few internal organs, some teeth, a hand, and fingers, and some toes. Funnily enough, The host boy looked normal on the outside.
- This sounds like an adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Half. Though This Troper didn't actually finish the novel, he did read the forward in which King explained how he Did Do The Research on reported conditions in which a twin had been absorbed by the surviving twin within the womb, verifying that is Truth In Television.
- Wasn't this basically the origin of Pinoko in Tezuka's Black Jack? Only Pinoko had more complete organs and a fully-developed, psychically empowered brain (Jack built her an artifical body to put her parts in after removing her from her twin sister).
Unlike other wasps, which only eat other insects, yellowjackets are carrion eaters. And while larget meat eating animals have an aversion to humans, due to us being too boney, yellowjackets are too small for this to be an issue. So, if someone dies or has their body dumped in the woods during the late summer, guess what comes along at some point to consume that person's flesh! Pleasant dreams!
Pregnancy may be considered a form of body horror/transformation trauma.
Elephantiasis. Nematodes take up residence in your lymphatic system, causing your skin to thicken and parts of your body (most commonly the arms and breasts in women, and the legs and scrota in men) to swell to grotesque proportions.

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