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Body Horror / Anime & Manga

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Examples by author:
  • Everything by manga artist Junji Ito (well, almost everything):
    • 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.
    • The Enigma of Amigara Fault has people finding holes in a fault that are shaped just like them. People enter their holes, which warp and distort as the passages go on... and the people in the holes are warped in the shape of their holes. And are implied to still be alive despite their nauseating new shape by the time they reach the other side.
    • Gyo might be a better example, since in Gyo, the characters themselves remain conscious enough to realize what is happening to them, swelling up ghoulishly, spewing out toxic gases to spread the condition, and hooked up to spider-like machines.
    • There's also the short story "The Hell of the Doll Funeral" from Junji Ito Kyoufu Manga Collection. It starts out with telling that the world has been struck by a disease that kills children by mutating their bodies so they look like porcelain dolls. That is horrifying enough, especially if one is not too fond of dolls. But then it is revealed that a much more horrifying and unexplainable body horror of the dead doll children happens if they are not buried...
    • Likewise, his manga Tomie is about a girl who can regenerate From a Single Cell. This regularly results in things like her growing extra heads from her wounds, or her severed limbs regrowing bodies of their own.
    • Dissolving Classroom is packed to the gills with people's brains melting and running out of their noses and eyes, people completely liquefying, and one chapter features girls whose faces become horrifyingly distorted.
Examples by work:
  • Crops up a whole lot in 3×3 Eyes, maybe most horrifyingly when it comes to the Hyouma Tribe and pregnancy...
  • In the Dream Land of After School Nightmare, Midori does not have a face. There's a giant hole where her facial features should be.
  • In Agni's Philosophy, we get to watch the titular character convulse as she heals herself, and we even see a bullet forcefully expel itself from her body.
  • AKIRA's most horrific scene involves Tetsuo losing control of his considerable psychic powers and mutating out of control into a Blob Monster resembling a liquefied fetus, consuming anything he touches — including his girlfriend, while he screams for somebody to save her. (And due to his psychic powers being completely out of control, not only does his body crush her, he's also psychically linked with her at the time, so he feels her pain at the same time that he inadvertently kills her.) Only the intervention of Akira and the apparent creation of a new universe is enough to stop him.
  • Attack on Titan loves this trope.
    • Titans employ this through their deformed, sexless naked bodies that vary in size from 3 meters to 15 meters. Their bodies are fragile, but their Healing Factor means very little can kill them and allows for nightmarish imagery as humanity tries to kill them with swords, guns, explosives, cannonballs, and spears.
    • Humans suffer this at the hands of the Titans, when they're Eaten Alive. The lucky ones die quickly, the one unfortunate ones get maimed or slowly torn to pieces.
    • The Titan Shifters provide even greater examples of Body Horror, with their unique and horrifying appearances. The Colossal Titan is massively deformed and completely skinless, with an enormous mouth that makes it look like it's got a constant Slasher Smile. The Female Titan has an incredible figure, with large portions of exposed muscle and bone. The Rogue Titan has a skull-like face, and regularly mangles its own limbs when attacking. The Armored Titan is covered in hardened plates of skin, with exposed muscle peeking out between the plates. The Jaw Titan is slightly ape-like in appearance, with Creepily Long Arms, a hunched-over posture, and an enormous mouth filled with shark-like teeth. The Beast Titan takes the ape-appearance up a notch possessing disturbingly longer arms. The Cart Titan has a larger head than most. And the War-Hammer Titan is skinless with the ability to manipulate its bone structure in terrifying ways. Then add onto this that their transformation involves encasing themselves in a giant meat suit, attached to their bodies by strips of flesh. They tend to emerge with Tainted Veins on their faces and possess a Healing Factor in human form. This provides several incidents of them slowly regrowing limbs, which resemble smoking, twisted lumps of flesh that slowly become a completed limb.
  • As shown in the picture above with a very unfortunate young mother and her baby, the infamous atomic bomb scene in Barefoot Gen has people being so badly burned that their skin melts into a blackish slag as their eyeballs liquefy out of their sockets. What's worse, the event in question — the bombing of Hiroshima — was a real-life event, here rendered in anime form.
  • Berserk: Where to begin? Each Apostle tends to be body horror, and their transformation between shapes is body horror as well. When they are killed and dragged down to Hell, they are pulled in by a melted chain of corpses that pulls their body in on itself. There is no end to the body horror.
  • Black Clover: Dante's Body Magic allows him to alter the structure of his own body by manipulating his tissues or growing more flesh. Usually he uses it to heal physical damage, up to and including having his entire torso disintegrated. When he gets fighty, he uses it to grow larger and creates extra arms to pummel his opponents with. During his fight with Asta, Dante grows massive tendrils of formless flesh to deprive him of his swords and grimoire.
  • Bleach:
    • When ghosts have been unable to move on for a number of years, they are eventually overcome by the instincts and emotions binding themselves to living people or places. Their Soul Chain disintegrates over time until it eventually cannibalises the soul itself. The ghost appears to break apart before reforming as a monster with the "heart" of their being now transformed into a white mask that hides their faces. Arrancar are hollows that have had this mask ripped off.
    • Aizen is transformed by the Hougyoku into progressively stranger forms until his face tears open to reveal a blackened skull with a third eye in the forehead, the remains of his face hanging from the sides of the skull. Three holes appear in his torso and, sprouting from his back, are six malformed, eyeless bodies and tentacles. His right arm is replaced with a long, thin blade which is his own Zanpakutou fused to his body. The anime includes the jewel in his forehead exploding violently into a third eye, his neck snapping with an audible crack and his face folding by his eyes abruptly focus. The energy pillar generated from the transformation explodes from an excess of blood just after the wings violently emerge from his back.
    • As Nodt Vollstandig transformation forces his body into a strange form; his chest looks like it has an autopsy scar and the skin flows into the form of a robe that covers the lower half of his body. His face looks like it's weeping blood and his entire appearance is emaciated. He believes it's the ultimate expression of 'fear'.
  • In Blood+, the Chiropteran outbreak has people unwillingly and violently transformed into nigh-indestructible bat-like monsters that rampage around.
  • Blue Exorcist has a very nasty version in episode two, is which we get to see the effects of possession. Fortunately, they opted to make it slightly less horrifying than the manga. Urgh, his fingers...
  • Baddies in Burst Angel. People explode into monsters after going insane.
  • In Case Closed, there's the part where Shinichi is shrunk into the body of a child. Smoke (more likely steam, though that's no improvement) comes out of his body.
    Shinichi: [clearly freaked out] My body... it's hot!! Like my bones... like they're melting... no... no good...
  • In A Certain Magical Index, one of the members of GREMLIN, Marian Slingeneyer, is able to reshape anyone who comes into contact with her gold tools into whatever shape she wants and keep them alive. Anyone who crosses her risks either a Cruel and Unusual Death or becoming the latest addition to her furniture collection.
    • Accelerator does this when he's feeling particularly vengeful. His preferred method of messily ending someone's life? Stick a finger into a wound, and reverse the vectors of their blood flow, causing all the blood in a person's body to rip itself out of their skin.
  • Claymore thrives on this trope. If a Claymore overuses her powers, her body undergoes increasingly grotesque mutations until she finally loses control and becomes an "Awakened One", a monstrously powerful demon. Add to that the fact that every Awakened One is unique (Outside of identical twins) and you have a whole cesspool of this trope. Just add the violence levels and the abilities some Claymores have developed just from coming close to awakening and you've got about as much as a series can handle.
    • That doesn't add the fact that the halter tops they wear apparently conceal something so horrifying that it has yet to be shown in any format (And with all the gore that the series is fond of, not showing something is Serious Business). In fact, Claymores are the only women ever who can stop themselves getting raped by showing off their nude bodies. Some would have you believe the space between their breasts is a mass of open sores, others think it's a youma's head grafted there.
    • It's neither. Claymores all have a clean cut from their necks to their genitals that NEVER heals. It can only be crudely stitched together to keep ALL OF THEIR ORGANS FROM FALLING OUT. We see this nearly happen with Clare. While she's NAKED.
    • The final chapters of the Manga have the design of the Awakened Ones. Cassandra's awakened form looks like a giant female human body who's lying on its back and is sustained by many small tentacles and instead of a normal head has a seemingly endlessly regenerating series of giant tentacles with Cassandra's monstrous face at the end of each, and between the breasts of the giant torso lies the upper half of Cassandra's human body who's controlling the whole crazy structure. Later on another Awakened One, this time temporarily allied with the Claymores to fight both Cassandra and Priscilla, takes the form of a normal looking human lady who suddenly splits in two, tentacles coming out of her body and a huge Vagina Dentata growing at her bottom. And how can we forget Priscilla's final form? In the final fight she loses control of her regenerating abilities and thus random masses of limbs, legs, arms and torsos all start bursting out of her body and her open wounds. By this point she's far too obsessed by destroying Teresa to care though.
  • The various humanoid corpses in Corpse Princess 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.
  • In Chrono Crusade, a young human boy named Joshua takes the horns of a demon from the Big Bad and takes him as his own. The scene when the horns grow on his head is incredibly painful, showing the horns breaking through his skull with enough force that blood splatters the walls. Years later it shows that the horns not only cause him physical pain but deteriorates his mind, to the point where he can barely remember who he is. The manga version also has the demons who still have horns on their heads becoming corrupted and turning into mindless mutants at the finale. It's implied Joshua would have had a similarly gruesome fate if he hadn't had the horns removed soon after the corruption started.
  • The Curse of Kazuo Umezu has pretty much of it in both of the OVA's stories, "What Will the Video Camera Reveal?" and "The Haunted Mansion".
  • In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, for his bout against one of the spider family demons, Zenitsu gets inflicted with a demonic art meant to mutate his body into a demonic spider creature. Zenitsu's arm begins to mutate, but in desperation, he finds strength to defeat the demon. He then gets rescued and put under intense care to heal his arm which by then has shrunk, starting to mutate into spider claws; in the aftermath, however, Zenitsu is fully healed.
  • Devilman: Any creature you can find in the series counts, including the main character. Amorphous slimes full of eyes, fangs and tentacles and oozing vile fluids are the less nightmarish thing you will find.
  • In D.Gray-Man, when an Akuma disguised as an human shows its true form...
    • Suman Dark, or Allen pushing his arm too far, or the Akuma virus, or Level 0 Akuma forcing themselves down their hosts throats.
    • The Akuma blood bullets make you break out in a pentacle-shaped rash. Then you explode into toxic dust.
    • When Road stabbed Allen in the eye, we get to see his partially regrown-but-still-not-there eye-socket!
    • 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 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 trounce his enemies left and right. It also seems to have a taste for blood.
  • Digimon:
    • Digimon Adventure:
      • The villianous 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.
      • Then there's SkullGreymon, who, according to its official bio, focused so hard on fighting that it fought until its flesh wore away and it was nothing but bones. Imagine what it looked like mid-transformation. Yikes.
    • The Rookie-to-Champion digivolution sequences in Tamers, which all involve the Digimon's skin peeling off, their wireframe morphing into that of their new, more powerful form, and then their skin coming back and reattaching itself.
    • Digimon Ghost Game has a hard-on for these. There are many Digimon capable of causing horrible mutations on the bodies of people, including a Calamaramon who can twist the body parts of living beings into spirals through sound waves, an Eyesmon who outright grows red eyes on top of other people's bodies by possessing them and Chamblemon that can grow mushrooms on people's bodies. It's not just random passerby who get hit, either; even the protagonists can be routinely hit with a horrific transformation and there's no Plot Armor and no restraints in making one or two of them yet another victim.
  • Dorohedoro
    • One early magic user turns people into bugs incompletely, so the victims have withered, outsized insect limbs on human bodies
    • Shin's magic lets him cut people up without them dying. The first victim we see has been reduced to a head and spine.
  • In Dr. Ramune: Mysterious Disease Specialist, the titular "mysterious disease" manifest by engendering various unpleasant changes to the patients' bodies, such as causing them to cry condiments, turning their ears into gyoza, etc. One particularly disgusting case has a guy's penis turn into fishcake due to his philandering ways.
  • With all the transformations going on in Dragon Ball, some were bound to be nasty.
    • Cell's reverse transformation where he vomits up Android 18.
    • First-time Super Saiyan transformations aren't too pleasant. Goku and Vegeta in particular seem to really suffer.
    • Majin Buu's ability to pour himself down his victims' throats, then expand inside their bodies until they explode.
    • If you pay attention, Frieza's transformations weren't exactly comfortable. First his body gets swollen to ridiculous sizes at random intervals, then he has the spikes jutting out of his back and his skull elongating, then finally all of his skin shatters from his body like glass with long audible cracking.
    • When you see Cell absorb somebody. He's devouring your body through a syringe in slow motion while you're alive, bones and all until finally your skin's the last thing sucked up.
    • Broly, full stop. His Legendary transformation erupts from underneath his skin. And don't even get us started on Bio-Broly.
  • In Eden: It's an Endless World!, the Closure virus causes the immune system to over-react, leading to the eventual hardening of the skin as the cells refuse endocytosis and exocytosis, covering the body in a solid ceramic shell while the internal organs undergo necrosis and pour out through cracks and holes in the hardened skin. The Disclosure virus is a mutated strain that causes hardening of internal organs as they pour out, turning the entire victim into a vaguely humanoid crystal. Feyman's virus is mild in comparison, but manages to look like it was taken straight out of AKIRA.
  • 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!
  • In Endride, Ibelda gets spat out of the malfunctioning Babel device after being de- and re-constituted with some new additions: large black liquid-y patches that can form limitless independently-moving wraith monsters.
  • In Fate/Zero, this happens to pretty much all of Ryuunosuke's victims and the children Caster uses as weapons. This is made even worse when they team up, as Caster ensures the victims will survive things they really, really shouldn't, letting Ryuunosuke get even more... creative.
  • 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 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.
    • A similar thing happens in a later chapter to a woman who hires Fran to give her immortality, and Fran does exactly that, converting her into the one type of cell that isn't pre-programmed to die: cancer cells. It was a potential side effect Fran was attempting to fix, but she tried to kill Fran, then stole and used the treatment before Fran could fix this problem. The series is big on Laser-Guided Karma.
    • A common aesop to each chapter is why exactly we don't do certain things, like trying to be more anatomically similar to anime characters (you need your skull redesigned and have to use silicon baths to keep your face from falling apart), resurrection (the person who died might not want to be revived), immortality (above) and superpowers (human bodies are not designed to maintain superman-level powers).
  • Fullmetal Alchemist has a few instances. Notably the Tear Jerker episode where Tucker turns his daughter and her dog into a chimera.
    • The resurrection of Trisha Elric at the beginning is a Came Back Wrong example of this trope, and would be horror enough for any other series.
    • In one of the openings, if you look closely, Envy comes out of Gluttony's mouth. And Lust comes out of Envy's mouth.
    • Envy's true form: Most of his body is made up of human faces. His transformation into his true form at least looks incredibly painful.
    • The scene in Brotherhood where Lan Fan grabs Greed/Ling's hand when he's about to fall over a cliff. This is in the manga too, except that it doesn't show blood running down her arm from where her automail arm was pulling out of her flesh. Ow.
    • A sentence that results in pure horror: "What If I were to give birth to humans?" Father gives birth to humans, alright. More accurately, horrible, human-like shells housing the souls of Hohenheim's Xerxes friends, including several of his slave friends, his master and the king. And they are visibly melting by the end.
    • How about Father battling all the alchemists with Greed's hand literally stuck in his face?
    • Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) adds in Tucker accidentally turning himself himself a freakish humanoid chimera in an attempt to revive Nina and the return of Gluttony in the movie.
    • The homunculi regenerating from injuries is nothing to sneeze at, either. Greed introduces the concept by casually having Roa smash the top half of his head off with a hammer and it's displayed growing back in gruesome detail.
    • Envy's defeat to Dr. Marcoh is awful to watch. Their true form falls apart, with the wailing human bodies making up the tongue slithering and coming out of each other until partially manifesting Envy's preferred form, still fused to mess of flesh, which then keels over with a worm popping out of their skull and landing in a puddle of pus.
  • Gantz had this since the nearly the beginning, but aliens seem to be getting worse as the manga goes on, especially in the second and third parts.
    • The Nurarihyon alien starts out looking like a small old man with elongated ear lobes, then he's attacked and mutates into: A girl that grows into a woman in seconds, a giant, an amputated, laser firing giant head that later grows legs, a tall woman, 4 tiny old men, a golem made of human bodies that dissolves the body of a rapist Gantzer, a deer-headed beast, a mixture of the previous, a mimic of Oka's Gantz Suit, Samara Morgan and a demon-like, skinless creature full of spikes; plus, the last few forms he assumes after being mostly destroyed, regenerating in a very graphic manner from detailed piles of flesh, blood and organs.
    • Monsters in Katastrophe are an embodiment of this trope, some being barely human.
      • Reika's team ends up fighting a seemingly endless array of monsters that seem to be random amalgamations of human body parts, most of which transform rather grossly. Before a chicken-like being exploded in a room full of refugees, freeing shiny bubbles that cause humans mutate into monsters at an alarming rate. The mutations force vicious heads that look the same as that of the infected person to sprout from bloody holes opened from the inside of the body by hands. It doesn't help that the heads come in various sizes and can swallow or munch a human whole.
  • 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.
  • Genocyber. The title creature is two psychic girls fused together, which makes them into a Person of Mass Destruction. It's also the hero(ine?) of the story.
  • 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 its 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 fossilized 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.
  • Gundam:
    • Mobile Fighter 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.
    • Assimilation by the ELS in Gundam 00 Awakening Of The Trailblazer. Consists of your body turning into metal from the inside out, with metallic crystals growing out through your skin as it happens. Everyone it happens to is screaming in pain as they die. Worse, some ELS didn't have enough raw material to fully convert a human, leaving at least one girl only halfway assimilated: half her body human, half metallic spikes. Once the ELS have a better understanding of humans, they refine the process so that it is both nonlethal and voluntary: said girl is shown in the epilogue to still have a half-ELS body, but now shaped fully human and living a normal life.
  • 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.
    • And because Aptom is kind of a bastard, he tends to do this while the Zoanoids he's absorbing are still alive.
    • Zoanoids disintegrate when they die. All of the zoanoids he absorbs are alive when he does it.
  • Hell Girl: In season 3, The Cauldron of Three, 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 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.
  • 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.
  • Higurashi: When They Cry: Despite being imaginary, Rena's maggots. And the squishy sounds they were making...
  • Hunter × Hunter: Gon, having reach the height of his emotional breakdown uses a tremendous amount of aura to brutally kill Pitou, but the resulting after-effects severely destroyed his entire body. While his whole body was wrapped in bandages, his left arm is shown extremely shriveled up, completely dried of blood, many veins popping out, and his bones decayed in size. It takes the sole effort of Killua's younger sister Alluka to fully heal him.
  • Infection by Oikawa Tooru sets its bar in its Zombie Apocalypse with the "Carriers", who have their eyes replaced with squirming worms in addition to being utterly stuffed with the things... and then the Body Horror bar gets only higher from there.
  • Naraku from Inuyasha. 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..
  • Jagaaaaaan and its "Fractured Humans" are body horror tuned up to surreal proportions when they appear, examples include a man with a tower of mouths and teeth growing from his throat, armed with a razor-sharp tongue in chapter one, setting the bar for the series.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
    • Part 2: The Pillar Men are Body Horror incarnate, able to twist and contort their bodies in impossible ways.
      • Santana is able to climb through a tiny air shaft by crushing his skeleton until he fits, use ribs, arteries, etc. as weapons, and even climb inside people's bodies.
      • Wamuu spins his arms to perform Holy Sandstorm and rips his eyes out to calm himself in a fight.
      • Esidisi uses his boiling blood and veins to attack.
      • Kars, with the Red Stone of Aja and the Stone Mask, gains the ability to change any part of his body into other species', or into full separate beings.
    • In Part 3, the Stand Empress is a boil made from its user's blood that kills the host and takes their body.
    • Part 4:
      • NFP, Okuyasu and Keicho's father, had previously been implanted with Dio's flesh bud. When Dio died, the flesh bud took over his body and turned him into a grotesque monster with a Healing Factor.
      • Pearl Jam is a Stand that hides in food. When somebody eats said food, one disease or injury they had is healed in an incredibly unpleasant way, the prime example being when it cures Okuyasu's diarrhea by making his intestines burst out of his stomach. On the bright side, Tonio, the Stand's owner, is such a Supreme Chef that you'll be too busy drowning in culinary ecstasy to notice or care about what's happening to you, and once the horror ends the eater is completely safe and healthy. It says a lot that trips to his restaurant become a semi-regular treat for our heroes in subsequent chapters.
      • Cinderella can alter people's faces by swapping parts with tiles, but deforms the face if special lipstick isn't applied regularly.
      • Ratt fires barbs that melt anything or anyone it hits, allowing it to fuse multiple creatures into one giant, still-conscious flesh blob... which the stand user proceeds to eat.
      • Cheap Trick attaches to someone's back, and when it leaves it sucks away all of their life force, leaving the shriveled, fetus-like corpse of its previous host behind.
      • Rohan's Stand, Heaven's Door allows him to read information about people and insert or remove traits from them. The way it's rendered is that layers of their skin are literally turned into paper, which he opens up like the pages of a book that he can read or edit, giving unpleasant visuals like this.
    • Part 5:
      • Purple Haze is an extremely violent stand with a Hair-Trigger Temper that can melt people with flesh eating bacteria from the boils on its knuckles.
      • Green Day is a mold that can be transmitted through corpses, and consumes the flesh of its victims whenever their altitude lowers.
      • Metallica manipulates iron via magnetism, allowing its user to attack by forcing anemia in his target or killing them from the inside by creating iron pins or razor blades from their blood.
      • Chariot Requiem will begin to transform the souls of beings affected by its ability into the souls of unidentifiable, otherworldly beings, causing an accelerated body transformation. Polnareff comes to the conclusion that the true ability of Requiem is to switch the entirety of the people, animals, and plants of Earth with "something else". That gives us a terrible image of new life forms coming from under someone's skin.
    • Part 6:
      • Diver Down can enter people's bodies and rearrange their bones and tendons into simple machines. For example, he can turn someone's ribcage into a functioning beartrap, while he's still alive.
      • Father Pucci was having a rather off episode as a result of fusing with the bone Dio entrusted to him. He is walking through a supermarket, and inadvertently and randomly affects the internal clocks of different stuff in his vicinity. Eggs start hatching into misshapen chicks. A portion of an infant's face (head?) ages to adulthood. It being unintentional really makes it that much worse. What was that all about anyway? He still had his same old powers, and it never happened again... Although later on Pucci does safely implode his head momentarily with his new stand.
    • In Part 8, Vitamin C can make humans melt into puddles, still alive and conscious, but unable to move.
  • Kanon 2006, when Mai shows Yuichi the state of her skin as she slew more and more demons that plagued the school.
  • 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.
  • Kite Liberator has the main character's astronaut dad transforming into a twelve-foot monster made of solid bone.
  • The 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.
  • Lyrical Nanoha
  • Mazinger Z has a lot of this. The Iron Masks and the Iron Cross are corpses turned into cyborgs, and if you remove their helmets, you can see their brains, with tubes and circuits sticking into and out of the brain matter; Baron Ashura is a half-male, half-female cyborg, since Big Bad Dr. Hell stuck together two halves of two different mummified corpses (and he is a shape-shifter, too); Viscount Pygman has another person sticking out of his neck instead of a head...
    • Great Mazinger: The Kedora were brains of Mykene soldiers grafted into a... kind of freakish creature (it is a kind of amorphous, dak blob full with jaws, eyes, tendrils and wings) capable of eating metal and fusing with a machine to give the soldier's brain complete control of it (so giving birth a new Mykene Monster Warrior); Hadias, General of the Mykene army of Evil Spirits, is a giant skeleton with an upside-down, flaming skull for head, another head replacing his left hand, another upside-down skull replacing his groin, and his true head sticking out of his chest.
    • UFO Robo Grendizer: Gandal was a being with split personality. One of his split personalities inhabited a tiny female body was inside Gandal's head. Every time that personality wanted voicing out her opinion, Gandal's face split in two halves bent outwards, and she emerged out.
  • Me and the Devil Blues: As if poor RJ didn't have enough to deal with, what with his only friends being Ike and Clyde, his hand starts developing extra fingers and later an extra hand.
  • Played for laughs in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. When Ilulu is tasked to look more humanlike by changing her dragon claws into hands, the most she can get are two little balls with no fingers at the ends of her arms.
    Tohru: At least you can hold some stuff with those hands...
    Ilulu: It's a ball of tiny hands! Look! *quick closeup of just that*
  • Mon Colle Knights had two once the Mood Whiplash 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.
  • Mount Head: A man eating cherries eats the pits as well as the fruit. He then has a cherry tree grow out of the top of his head.
  • Infections by parasitic mushi in Mushishi tend to result in relatively mild symptoms compared to other works. Like real parasites, symptoms develop over months or years and only extend to the affected organs. However, this means their behavior and also removal tends to be treated more realistically, which can make the whole thing actually more uncomfortable.
    • One type of mushi that is highly vulnerable to light lives inside the eyes of its victim, resulting in a severe aversion of any bright lights. When allowed to grow in total darkness, it eventually destroys the eyes completely and grows to a length of about 30 cm.
    • Another type of mushi resembles a snail that feeds on sound. It can settle inside a persons ear and killing it makes it run out of the skull as a green liquid.
  • A number of Quirks from My Hero Academia can cause disturbing shifts in either their user or their targets' bodies, such as one fellow who uses his own flesh to compress people into balls of meat with random bits of clothing, hair, and eyes sticking out.
    • All for One's injuries from his previous fight with All Might; all that's left of his face is his mouth and a mass of scar tissue where his eyes, ears, nose, and scalp used to be (for reference).
    • The Nomus are Flesh Golems made out of corpes that are barely recognisable as formerly human, and their brains are exposed. We are treated to sights such as Jon-chan having a row of teeth that extends out of his mouth to wear them around its neck like a scarf.
    • Dabi. He mostly reselbles a revenant than a living person, to the point that his introduction is a Shout-Out to Frankenstein (1931). Most of his skin is burned to the point it's purple and stapled on to his healthy skin. He has scars underneath his eyes that bleed blood when he's upset because his tear-ducts were burned shut. He has another massive scar on his face that gives him a Glasgow Grin and extends down to his colarbones and his entire right arm. His left is also burned. He also has a long strip of scar around his torso that would have wiped one of his nipples if not for the manga's Barbie Doll Anatomy. His Beta Outfit also reveals that he has similar scars on his legs that go down to his ankles. It's also revealed that he's missing a part of his jawbone due to the incident that resulted in those scars, the majority of his nerves are burned so he has no sense of touch or pain, and when he pushes himself his body starts smoking and smells like burned flesh. It's heavily implied that his skin is grafted on him. A sketch of Horikoshi shows that even his tongue is stitched together. And that's how he starts...
    • Shigaraki Tomura, when possessed by All For One, starts spontaneously growing an absolute ton of hands a la AKIRA.
  • Naruto has a lot:
    • Orochimaru is more or less this trope personified. From tongue and neck that can function as tentacles, vomitting snakes and swords, reattaching his sliced-in-half body with snakes...and this is all not even his true form.
    • Shino and the rest of the Aburame clan are all human insect hives, and to make it worse in Shino's first fight he beats Zaku by having them crawl up the air tubes in his arm (which themselves may be an example).
      • One anime omake implies that beneath his sunglasses, Shino doesn't have any eyes.
    • Sakon and Ukon have the power to merge with the body of anyone they touch, which took the form of having their head stick out of Kiba's shoulder like a tumor. It can also slowly eat the cells of his enemies in this state...since when is cancer weaponized?
    • Kimimaro. Anyone who pulls out his own bones to fight is a shoo-in for this trope. The fact that his bones seem to regrow and the things he pulls out of himself are horribly misshapen makes it worse. Your spine should not be used as a whip.
    • Sasuke's second-stage of the curse mark has bat wings which also looks like webbed hands growing out of his back.
    • Naruto himself has one in his Jinchuriki forms: growing one through three tails create a chakra shroud around him (which is controlled by the fox and not him). Four and five turns the chakra a reddish black, and Jiraiya reveals this is caused by his skin ripping away like paper while huge globs blood come out of him and his skin turns to ash. The six-tailed form adds a giant skeleton around him, and the eight-tailed form creates muscle tissue around the skeleton and recreates the fox's face. What's worse is that while this is going on Naruto's Healing Factor means that he is in such constant agony that his mind shuts down and the Fox takes over completely. We never find out what happens if he hits the full nine tails aside from he will die an agonizing death and will be sealed inside the Fox. Now not an issue since Naruto has tamed Kurama.
    • Itachi's genjutsu causes Naruto, among some other things, to see Sakura's head growing from his stomach, Kakashi's from his shoulder, half of his face and body turned into Second State Sasuke, and Gaara's eye and tattoo on his hand. It is an illusion but still..
    • Most of the Akatsuki seem to have done some kind of body-altering jutsu to themselves, often resulting in this. The best example is Kakuzu, whose body separates into segments and is held together by stringy, black, seemingly endless Combat Tentacles. It's powered by him stealing hearts from people. It says a lot that his Glasgow Grin is one of his most human features.
      • If Deidara's mouth-hands (including tongue) weren't weird enough, he has a third, bigger mouth on his chest.
    • Orochimaru's true form: A white snake with snakes for scales who steals people's bodies.
    • Kabuto takes bits of Orochimaru's DNA and fuses it with his own to find out if he's capable of resisting its growth. It was bad enough in the beginning, but now he even has a snake growing out from his stomach. And now he can use Sakon and Ukon's Kekkei Genkai to grow a mindless clone of everyone's DNA he has out of his stomach, from all the members of the Sound Four to Orochimaru himself!
    • Danzo's arm has ten Sharingan eyes embedded inside of it.
      • It gets worse when Danzo's chakra gets exhausted. The Senju cells in his shoulder go out of control and start to grow rapidly into a gigantic tree-tumor on his body. Danzo has to ditch the whole arm to escape it safely.
    • Obito. Half his body was crushed so badly by the boulder he had to be permanently fused to a Zetsu to survive...
    • This one is a bit lesser, but Guy's aura with the Eighth Gate (the aptly-named Gate of Death) isn't actually chakra... it's his blood burning through his skin.
  • 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.
    • After Gendou implants ADAM in his own hand.
      • In the manga, Gendo eats Adam.
  • In the manga Oishinbo: Sushi and Sashimi there are lovely and horrifying illustrations of the possible parasites one can get from eating fresh water fish uncooked.
  • In One Piece, Luffy at the end of his fight with Magellan. Watching him lying there, melting is VERY disturbing.
    • During his poison treatment behind closed doors, it takes only one quick peek for Bon Clay to conclude that this is perhaps a Fate Worse than Death. And it's been going on for 10 hours, and according to Ivankov it takes 2 more days.
    • Perhaps not as disturbing but also qualifying as Body Horror is the draining of the moisture from his arm during his fight with Crocodile, resulting in a skeletal, useless limb with skin stretched over it.
    • The effects of artificial Zoan Devil Fruits, the SMILE. Even when they work there's a chance that it "working" involves growing independent animal parts on the body, like one unfortunate man who has an entire hippo's head growing around his torso. As in, his torso and head is basically perpetually inside the mouth of half a hippo. As mentioned these parts are independent, so if you grow a head you might have body parts that try fighting you, unfortunately only prevented by the fact they also share your pain.
  • Pandemonium Wizard Village: Not all the variants are as lucky as Kayoh. Kobolgarde has the unfortunate distinction of having a horn growing out of her eye, no lips, spikes throughout her body, and tentacles for fingers and legs.
  • Parasyte could be considered Seinen Body Horror. Alien parasites fall to Earth and infiltrate the brains of humans, effectively killing the host and turning the head into a shapeshifting monstrosity with a hunger for human flesh and enough intelligence to pass for human. 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 an amoral shapeshifting entity where his right arm used to be...
  • Many of the Asura avatars in Popcorn Avatar have this as their schtick when they transform into their "strengthened" form.
  • 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. She screams in pain throughout the process. 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.
  • 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.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica:
    • This happens to Madoka when she steps into H.N. Elly's witch barrier and said witch has her familiars stretch her body to her limit as she pulls her inside. Complete with Mind Rape as she also mentally tortures Madoka via replaying Mami's Cruel and Unusual Death in nearby monitors.
    • Many of the Witches seem to have a thing for bodily mutilation. For instance, Izabel (the Artist Witch)'s familiars incorporate pieces of their victims in her artwork, and in just the first episode, Gertrud's familiars discuss (in distorted German) tearing up Madoka and Sayaka and presenting the pieces to their mistress. In the spinoff mangas, Arzt Kochen (literally German for "doctor cook") is a surgeon who removes organs from her victims while they're still alive, then cooks them.
  • 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 anesthetic 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. The first inkling the troops had that something was wrong was when they climbed out of the suit, laughing, joking and contemplating going back home — then noses, ears and skin started dropping off.
  • In Roll Over and Die, bodies are mutilated and literally twisted in all sorts of horrific ways by the power of Origin, god of creation. For example, having extra limbs manifest all over the body, including extra heads. Flum, the protagonist, can also do this with her unique magic, [Reversal], once giving a recurring antagonist who has tried to sadistically murder her and everyone she cares about just for his own sick giggles a Fate Worse than Death by literally turning him inside out!
  • 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 (in the second half of the series, at least). 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.
  • Saike Matashitemo has Hirayasu whose oracle causes him to transform into a giant monster that wreaks havoc out of his control. We're treated to the much-needed imagery of his flesh bulging out starting from his arms until the rest of his body mutates into a large dinosaur thing except for his face, which can still be seen on the dinosaur's head with veins connecting it.
  • Sands of Destruction features a couple instances:
    • After Morte blows up a human town, Kyrie spots a bomb survivor stumbling out from the wreckage with burns all over his body, moaning and staggering like a zombie. It's likely that man wasn't a "survivor" much longer. A random, severed arm also lands near Kyrie's feet, complete with a good look at the bone and charred flesh.
    • A bit of an inferred horror, but considering how Kyrie's powers work, when Rajiv ended up a Bandage Mummy, it was because his skin turned to sand and fell off his body (or into its own freshly-made wound). Ouch.
  • The first episode of selector infected WIXOSS, during a nightmare, shows the girl inside the main character's trading card impaled and decaying, complete with Nightmare Face.
  • Sengoku Youko sees Ax-Crazy Resshin being modified countless times until he becomes in Yazen's words, "nothing more than a heap of trash glued together" and Senya, a young eight year old boy with a thousand demons living in his body.
  • Shakugan no Shana: Yuuji finds out that he has the silver Tomogara, a giant knight, within him... by having it slowly crawl out of his body, while he's hovering in mid-air. The process is eventually stopped and reverted, but he suffers a Heroic BSoD after it.
  • 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 least three 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...
    • Soul's repeated dreams of bursting out of his partner Maka's body. No wonder he woke up screaming the first time...
  • Played for Laughs in the H-manga Sproingy Stick.
  • Strait Jacket is set in an Alternate History where the Industrial Revolution was powered by sorcery; unfortunately, sorcery has some horrifying side effects in the form of the Malediction, which transforms Sorcerists into insane, screaming monstrosities bent on killing everything in sight. Sorcerists can stave off the effects of the Malediction by suiting up in Powered Armor called Molds, but even these aren't foolproof, and using sorcery with a damaged Mold is guaranteed to turn the wielder into a nightmarish demon.
  • In episode 14 of Thriller Restaurant, Anko's wart takes control of her body and mind. It also manages to swap faces with the real Anko.
  • Toriko gives us Bogey Woods, a man with 4,000 bones and 4,600 joints, allowing him to twist and contort himself in inhuman ways. And a favored technique of his is to enter the body of another person and wear them like a 'shell', controlling the lifeless corpse like a puppet through use of his inhuman skeletal system.
  • Tokyo Ghoul has plenty of this, thanks to the titular creatures.
    • Kagune are essentially a weaponized, retractable limb used by Ghouls for combat and hunting. They primarily resemble Combat Tentacles, Razor Wings, Blades attached to the shoulders, or tails. This means an absolutely normal-looking person can suddenly, explosively sprout tentacles from their back. This goes even further with the rare Kakuja mutation, which involves a fleshy armor sprouting over the body of the user.
    • A Ghoul's Healing Factor involves tiny strands of flesh knitting the wound back together. Particularly powerful Ghouls are even capable of Pulling Themselves Together, with tentacles sprouting from severed halves or wriggling horribly while a head knits itself back together.
    • The Arata Armor, body armor created from a Kakuja. It resembles an exoskeleton, wrapping itself around the user and hardening into a default form. Anyone using it must be suitably Made of Iron, because it functions by consuming the user slowly.
    • The One-Eyed Owl takes things up a notch, becoming near Lovecraftian compared to normal ghouls. It can sprout tentacles that not only possess tiny, childlike hands that grasp randomly at things......but gaping mouths that carry on conversations with each other. It explains to another Ghoul that a kagune is limited only by the user's imagination and intelligence, so truly brilliant individuals are capable of intricate and horrifying creations. The Owl is one of the most intelligent and creative characters in the series, allowing for all manner of nightmares spawned from its body.
    • Noro, a towering and silent Ghoul considered a monster by other Ghouls. His kagune is a writhing mass of tentacles with a Lamprey Mouth at the end, that devour prey alive. He's regularly torn to pieces in battle, and simply knits himself back together. When sufficiently damaged, he becomes an enormous mass of tentacles sprouting from a twitching lower body and tries to eat everything around him. But then it gets worse, with the revelation that he's a rotting, mummified body kept animated by Eto's powers.
  • Vash's Angel Arms transformation from Trigun were horrifying the first time, if for nothing else because he has no control. Vash is 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.
    • More specifically: what begins with his revolver spinning a small cylinder of white matter continues with said cylinder apparently morphing with the revolver and the arm, and finishes with his arm splitting down the middle with a glowy Orb of Death thingy suspended in it. Then again, Knives appears to do it casually, so it's conceivable that the process itself is painless — Vash only screams because he is being forced to do it to hurt/kill people against his will.
  • Vampire Knight: Zero has a rather disturbing incident before going off to face Rido. Kaname could also count in the flashback that shows his rather decayed body at the moment he's awoken by Rido after a millennium's long slumber.
  • An in-universe version, and only to the two protagonists of Wandering Son. There's nothing wrong with their bodies, but being transgender they think of puberty as this.
  • 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 off-putting.
  • YuYu Hakusho features Elder Toguro, one of the longer running villains 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 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.
    • Younger Toguro's transformation into his 100% Form isn't pretty. In fact, it even looks painful.
    • Kurama's powers can edge into this as well. Plants growing out from inside people is never pretty.


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