Marvel Universe
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Comic Books
Comic Books
- Captain America:
- In Captain America 1968 #361–364, during the U.S. Agent side-story, in the latter part features the Power Broker goes through the same superpower-granting process that he provides for others only for it to go wrong, leaving him paralyzed due to his muscles expanding too much to allow movement.
- The Red Skull's... well, "red skull" used to be a mask, but after his Dust of Death backfired, he doesn't need to wear a mask anymore.
- Captain Britain: A particularly chilling example from the storyline "A Crooked World": a fellow named Sid manages to survive an encounter with the techno-organic monstrosity known as the Fury, getting away with only a scratch. Unfortunately, the Fury's scratch is infectious, and the results are not pretty. Not by a long shot.
- Deadpool: Deadpool's skin appears to be horrifically burned or surgically removed. It's actually cancer, all of it. He had a Healing Factor installed in an attempt to cure his cancer, only to have the cancer become his healing factor. The dude is a walking tumor. At least he has a holographic projector to alter his appearance.
- Fantastic Four:
- Obviously, you have Ben "The Thing" Grimm, whose exposure to cosmic rays turned him from a human into what is basically a golem, with an exaggeratedly large, hulking frame and a skin seemingly comprised of individual rocks melded together. As bad as this look is, it can get worse; his original appearance was more akin to a human-shaped mass of clay that had dried out, before he was retconned into his now-iconic look, and in the 90s he underwent further mutation and his rocky design was exaggerated to the point he looked morel ike he was made of spikes on spikes.
- So of course this trope gets explored in the What If? story "What If the Fantastic Four All Had the Power of the Thing?" Ben Grimm ends up with his now-iconic form, Johnny ends up lookin like Ben's original Thing form, Reed ends up looking like a hairless purple apenote and Susan ends up as the spitting image of the Man-Thing.
- Reed Richards' stretching can cause mild body horror sometimes, especially considering what stretching like that might feel like (Required Secondary Powers notwithstanding, of course). Reed doesn't seem to mind — he thinks it's useful.
- Something like this happened to Johnny Storm while he was held captive by Annihilus. He is repeatedly killed, only to be brought back to life, often times stitched back by worms. It's not very lovely.
- The Incredible Hulk: Immortal Hulk could have this as a tagline. Specific examples can be found in the work's Nightmare Fuel entry, including Hulk being vivisected
◊, Hulk reassembling himself◊ around the person who did it to him, the new Abomination◊ and a mangled Hulk getting his heart ripped out. - Iron Man: Warren Ellis (the writer of Ruins, below) seems to love this. Remember the "Extremis" arc of Iron Man 2004? The cyborg virus that enters the brain? And then causes the immune system to reinterpret the entire body as an open wound? And then rebuild it, resulting in a cocoon of scab tissue?
- Man-Thing: There is virtually nothing left of Ted Sallis's mind in Man-Thing; Man-Thing doesn't need to cope, because most of the time, he's not even sapient. The fact that all those who know fear are horrifically burned more than makes up for that in terms of Body Horror.
- The Inhumans: The Commander-class Progenitor from the final issue of Royals. It's what was once Medusa and Black Bolt, with their heads stitched onto another body, with Black Bolt's head forming the torso. And there's still something of them in there.
- Ruins: The series is 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, Wolverine is allergic to adamantium, and the Fantastic Four end up becoming grotesquely misshapen corpses.
- Spider-Man:
- Spider-Man himself, after all the mutations he's undergone, from gaining more arms, to transforming into a Giant Spider (with a description of his feelings in the process) and what happened to him when he was killed.
- The alien symbiotes.
- Swarm the Nazi-Made-Of-Bees 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. Venom eventually ate the skeleton, but because you can't keep a good Bee-Nazi down, Swarm can now create new bodies by possessing a queen bee and using her hive. He's gone from horrific to pure Paranoia Fuel, a rather impressive feat for a fairly lame villain.
- The Tarantula is subjected to an attempt to give him spider powers. It gradually turns him into a monstrous mutated tarantula and he commits Suicide by Cop.
- Many Spider-Man villains in general to varying degrees. Doctor Octopus and the Scorpion's artificial appendages are fused to their spine physically and mentally. The Rhino's suit is permanently melded to his body. Sandman and Hydro-Man are living masses of earth and water who can only maintain human form for so long. The Lizard's mutation unwillingly turns him from a nice scientist into a feral, deformed reptile monster. Carrion is a failed clone resembling a living corpse with a touch that withers his victims to dust. And then there's the Thousand, a sentient swarm of spiders with the mind of a Psychopathic Manchild who eats his hosts from the inside out. Probably for the best he was a one-shot villain.
- Wolverine: Wolverine's "feral" form◊ that he devolved into in Wolverine (1988) #100 after his body rejected a second adamantium infusion, which had elongated, barbed claws, a warped face with the nose shrunken to little more than slits, diminished height, bulging muscles, exaggeratedly hairy arms, hunched back, and Sabretooth-like clawed fingernails and fang-like canines. Picture Wolverine as somewhere between a troll and a caveman, and you have the basic idea.
- X-Men:
- The X-Men comics in general feature many cases of Body Horror. For every two mutants, one of the two is deformed in some shape or form due to their powers. Making things worse was the notion of when these deformities manifest themselves; while some mutants are born deformed, others are born normal-looking until they reach their teenage years, at which point their mutant powers kick in and they find their bodies warping, turning them from being handsome/beautiful to being hideously disfigured freaks. Even then, it's a crapshoot towards the extent of one's body horror: Angel and Wolverine, for instance, only suffered minor deformities, whereas mutants like Marrow (bones growing out of her body, which had to be broken off at regular intervals like one might cut one's hair), Husk (ability to develop and shed layers of skin of various biological compositions), or Mercury (body turning into a liquid metal substance) manifest far more grotesque variations. This led to Chris Claremont conceiving "The Morlocks": an underground community of homeless mutants, most of which were mutants that were too deformed to fit in with normal society.
- Yet another example would be a nameless and hideous mutant in New X-Men who was shot down by the police before he could "transform" into his "final" form, one which was implied by Xorn to be of incredible beauty and power. Oh, and he was a child too. Crying shame, heavy emphasis on crying.
- 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.
- Masque, a disfigured flesh-warping mutant who gets his kicks warping the flesh of anyone who has the misfortune of coming into contact with him. When he takes over the Morlocks following the Mutant Massacre, Masque forces the surviving Morlocks to be his playthings, changing their faces and bodies into such horrific abominations that the bulk of the community are driven irreversibly insane. Part of this motive is based upon the fact that Masque (originally) was immune to his own powers, which drove him mad because he could alter anyone's face except his own disfigured face. Thought killed off in the early 1990s, Masque returned in X-Treme X-Men (2001) #36-39, in which he is given upgraded powers: he can now use his powers on himself, which he used to render himself genderless as far as showing the ability to warp his own flesh to go from male to female. However, he is still insane in the head and then some: he uses his powers to turn Callisto (ex-Morlock leader who Masque hated) into a tentacle-limbed freak and (with help from his fellow Morlocks) assaults a subway train full of innocent people and uses his powers to disfigure each and every person on said train as an act of mutant terrorism.
- Chamber is another X-Man with quite a unique form of mutation; he has a psychic furnace where everything between his upper jaw and diaphragm would normally be. That's no lungs, ribcage, digestive system, etc. Granted, eventually he gets better, but when he loses his power to contain the energy, boom — everything south of his jaw is quite graphically vaporized. He still lives!
- Kenji Uedo, full stop. Think of what happened to Tetsuo at the end of AKIRA — now give him full control over it. Yeah. Due to his technopathic abilities, he can also force other machines to shapeshift as well, send one-way messages through screens similar to Hermit Purple, and let him survive extreme damage due to him lacking organs. He also made burgers for a whole group using his own body to make the patties, cook them, and serve them. Thankfully, he didn't make the condiments... maybe.
- Many times, if a character is drawn super-muscular, it's usually just dismissed as the art style. Not so with frequent X-Factor member Strong Guy's top-heaviness: that is how he looks in-universe thanks to the nature of his powers (absorbing kinetic energy).
- In District X, the mutant Gregor Smerdyakov 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.
- In Mutopia X, Agent Popova (after a failed assassination attempt on Daniel Kaufman) was blackmailed into performing favors for Kaufman by having her surgically altered into what many might consider a hideous (or beautiful) mutant appearance.
- Young Avengers: Hulkling was once vivisected. And guess what? His organs move while he's unconscious to protect themselves. Then there was the time Hulkling was captured by the cosmic parasite Mother. The next time we see Mother, she's sitting on a bizarre chair made of frozen green tentacles. Then you notice the chair has Hulkling's face...
- The titular villain of the 1990s "Lifeform" 4-parternote . Originally a regular guy named George Prufrock, he gets exposed to a government engineered viral weapon he was trying to steal, and is tranformed into a barely human mass of melting flesh and bone. Then he figures out he can absorb other living creatures into his mass and becomes addicted to it. After being killed by Daredevil, then brought back to life to battle The Incredible Hulk, then being revived again, he makes his way to a hospital, devours the man who invented the virus, and goes on an insane feeding frenzy. By this point, it's a ravenous mass of shifting, squamous flesh dotted with limbs, mouths and eyes that are constantly extruded and absorbed into its bulk, which grows bigger and more voracious as it devours devouring hundreds of people and tons of river life, swelling into a gargantuan shapeless mass of meat and hunger. The Silver Surfer would have annihilated the creature, only upon discovering that it started as a human, he instead stranded it in a crater on a lifeless world, screaming eternally for the mercy of death.
Ultimate Marvel
- Ultimate Fantastic Four:
- Ben Grimm has stone skin, and it's apparently a miracle that he can even breathe.
- Reed Richards' transformation has removed most, if not all, of his internal organs.
- Johnny Storm has to hibernate occasionally so that the layers of his skin that have been over-exposed to flames can flake off.
- Doctor Doom has become a being of living metal with a frankly demon-like appearance (including goat legs and a reptilian tail). Also, his organs are rotting into a noxious slime inside his body because he doesn't need them anymore; he can blast opponents with this slime or the fumes from it if he pleases.
- Rhona Burchill augmented her intelligence by literally placing some of her brother's brain matter in her own brain, causing her head to become hideously disfigured in the process.
- Ultimate Iron Man gives Tony Stark a Healing Factor (for some reason) and has many creepy scenes of him regrowing his various severed limbs (which he loses so often that it becomes a running joke).
- Ultimate X-Men (2001):
- Wolverine has been subjected to such horrors as regrowing his entire body after being decapitated and having the flesh stripped entirely off his bones but still being alive.
- While fans hated him mostly for his completely different character, the Ultimate X-Men version of Deadpool isn't any better than his canon counterpart; his face is gone, leaving his head a naked skull, with eyeballs and an exposed brain, wrapped in translucent plastic.
- The Ultimates: The Red Skull, not liking the fact that he looked like his father (Captain America), removed his entire face and scalp.
Films
Films
- In Fantastic Four (2005), Victor von Doom gets a shard of irradiated metal stuck in him, which causes his entire body to gradually turn into metal. Kind of done with Ben Grimm becoming the Thing, too, as well as Johnny becoming the Human Torch while snowboarding. "Johnny! You're on fire! ... No, you're ON FIRE!"
- Fantastic Four (2015) goes much, much further with the Body Horror than its 2005 predecessor — David Cronenberg was named as one of the director's influences, and it really shows. The team's initial Power Incontinence is played for horror, from Reed's grotesque, involuntary stretching and bodily distortion to Johnny repeatedly (and incredibly painfully) bursting into flames.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe
- Iron Man:
- When Tony Stark wakes up in the cavenote , he tries to reach for a cup of water, only for something to snag when he rolls onto his side. He turns around to see that he's been attached to a car battery, and when he rips the bandages off his chest, he sees the electromagnet embedded in his ribcage.
- There's also a scene where Pepper sticks her hand in the arc reactor's housing, showing just how deep in Tony's body this thing sits. The edge of it is level with his skin, but Pepper's hand goes in all the way to the wrist. This leads to some Fridge Horror when Tony gets it removed in Iron Man 3, as he's now walking around with a gaping hole where his sternum used to be.
- The Incredible Hulk (2008):
- Bruce Banner's transformation is horrific. Looking closely at the scene in the university lab with the induced transformation, it looks as if his bones start growing to Hulk-size before the rest of his tissues.
- The Abomination lives up to his name. Bruce at least manages to keep his bones in his skin, whereas the Abomination has several of them exposed, including a good portion of his ribcage.
- Doctor Strange (2016):
- The film gives us a lovely slo-mo shot of Stephen Strange's horrific car crash, and close-ups of his bloody and battered body as he's rushed to the hospital. But the real clincher comes when he wakes up with twelve metal bars embedded in his hands. Even after he's fully healed, his hands — aside from the nerve damage causing them to shake uncontrollably — sport nasty scars all over them in all of his subsequent appearances.
- When the Ancient One throws Stephen Strange across the multiverse, there is a lot of kinda disturbing Body Horror. For example, one dimension just consists of hands and when the hands touch Strange, his fingers developed mini hands and these hands also developed hands, which leaves a very disturbing image.
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 offers a mild, even comedic, example of this trope, when Rocket, Yondu, Baby Groot and Kraglin do 700 straight hyperspace Jumps to Ego (50 is considered the safe maximum for mammals). Their faces start getting cartoonishly warped as they travel, but they are at least intact when when they arrive at their destination.
- Avengers: Infinity War:
- Thanos uses the Reality Stone to foil an attack from Drax and Mantis by breaking Drax into a mishmashed pile of body parts and unwinding Mantis like a coiled spring, clinched by a close-up of Mantis' still-moving eye. They change back after he leaves, but it's still rather disturbing.
- Then there's the ending, where you get to watch almost all of your favorite superheroes graphically turn into dust and blow away. The effect wouldn't be so bad if they didn't keep their face and general shape moments before fully disintegrating.
- Avengers: Endgame shows how a vanilla human putting on the Infinity Gauntlet with all the Infinity stones will be like. Bruce Banner first puts on the gauntlet and once he snaps his finger to bring everyone Back from the Dead, his right arm is completely withered and has become useless. Then in the climax, Tony Stark puts on a makeshift gauntlet and does a Badass Fingersnap of his own to obliterate Thanos and his army and we see glowing energy sparks shooting out of the gauntlet into his face and other body parts, leaving nasty scars, and post snap, half of his body has burned and he can no longer form coherent sentences. He succumbs to his injuries shortly afterwards.
- Iron Man:
- X-Men Film Series:
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Weapon XI, especially his mouthless face with perpetually open eyes.
- X-Men: First Class:
- Hank McCoy's transformation sequence; the process is depicted as rather painful and horrific, bones, muscles and skin shifting and stretching while fur aggressively sprouts along his body.
- The death of Darwin.
- X-Men: Days of Future Past:
- Happens to Wolverine during the film's climax, when Magneto impales him with several rebar pipes, entwining them within his flesh and leaving him to drown in the Potomac.
- Several of the deaths in the Bad Future. First time out, Colossus has his head caved in whilst in his metal form and Iceman's head is snapped from the rest of his body in his frozen form, only for the events to later be undone. In the climax, Bishop explodes due to being "force-fed" too much energy, Colossus is ripped in two, Sunspot loses an arm, and Iceman has most of his torso vaporized.
- X-Men: Apocalypse: Angel's empowering by Apocalypse is surprisingly disturbing. He contorts his body while his wings twist and shift as they get embroidered in metal and a second, smaller pair grows, seemingly breaking part of his ribcage and skin. He's understandably screaming in pain throughout the whole transformation.
Western Animation
Western Animation
- The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes gives us the two-part episode "Gamma World", in which you see the Avengers mutate into Gamma monsters.
- 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.
- Spider-Man: The Animated Series:
- Poor Spider-Man undergoes quite an unpleasant transformation into ManSpider in the "Neogenic Nightmare" arc. Later on, the Vulture absorbs Spidey's youth and powers... and also his unstable mutating DNA, meaning he sporadically changes fully or partly into the same creature.
- To avoid the "violence" of sinking his fangs into peoples' necks like regular vampires do, the creators gave Morbius sucking lamprey-like mouths in the palm of each hand. His typical feeding habit is to slap his hands over someone's face and suck out the plasma through them. After getting hit with the neogenic recombinator for the second time, he turns into a hulking bat thing.
