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Body Horror / Western Animation

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/body_horror_western_animation_page_image.png
"Oh wow! That's a great offer. How 'bout instead I shuffle the functions of every hole in your face?"

For examples from animated movies, see BodyHorror.Film.

Works with their own pages:

  • Adventure Time:
    • In "Freak City", the Magic Man turns a bird inside out, organs and all, and it attempts to clumsily fly off, eventually just bumbling its way along. And it's never seen again.
    • Simon Petrikov's transformation into Ice King. "As you can see, my skin is starting to turn blue. My body temperature has been lowering at a supernatural rate, to what is now about thirty degrees Celsius. I don't know when it will end... I'm really scared."
  • Aladdin: The Series:
    • The young wizard Mozenrath uses a gauntlet, which allows him to perform magic; however, this comes at the cost of his right hand, which is now completely reduced to bone, and is also slowly draining him of his life force.
  • The Amazing World of Gumball:
    • "The Void": Minor character Rob didn't quite escape the Void in one piece, going from this to...this.
    • "The Saint": Gumball and Darwin participate in "highly experimentally testing" and turn into horrifically mutated abominations as seen in The Last of Us. Especially Darwin.
    • "The Parasite": Gumball and Darwin find that Anais has fused with her new "friend" Jodie. It later turns out Anais was the aggressor in their situation when the boys thought it was Jodie, and when they unfuse offscreen they're covered in a green slime.
  • 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 eyeballs, the list goes on and on.
    Master Shake: Are you sure he can't chase us? Because...if I woke up looking like that, I would just run towards the nearest living thing and kill it.
  • Arthur: Even a PBS kids' show has its moments, even if it's all in imagination sequences.
    • "Bugged" has Brain, who fears he's bugging everyone with his know it all tendencies, wake up one morning to discover he's become a giant beetle with only his face unchanged. He's then ostracized by his friends to the point they try to murder him out of annoyance. Thankfully it's all a dream, but the episode ends with Francine, who's called a "big mouth", waking up to find her mouth has become a pelican beak. She reacts appropriately.
    • In the opening of "Buster's Back", Buster is shown as an astronaut coming back from Jupiter, then transforming into a one man spoof of The Fantastic Four. His right arm turns to rock, his left stretches and warps, his right leg generates flame, and his head starts turning transparent. Buster isn't bothered at all but Arthur certainly is.
    • In "I'd Rather Read It Myself", DW's story to the Tibbles recounts DW's hatred of spinach with a twist. Eating spinach turns everyone at a restaurant, including the Read parents, into "Spinach Heads", green zombie-like creatures with giant spinach leaves growing from their heads.
  • Ben 10: Some 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.
    • In the first series, the Stock Footage transition montage could become this as well.
    • The mutations inflicted by Corrodium in the original series 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 Mix and Match Critter, complete with lots of screaming.
    • Perhaps this is why the Alien Force transformations are more boring and less graphic...
    • The final part of Ben's initial transformation into Blitzwolfer, in "BenWolf". Sure, it only lasted for a few seconds, but still...
  • Birdgirl:
    • "Thirdgirl": Gillian attempts to juggle being Judy's assistant and pretending to be her two other assistants while also keeping herself awake with oil supplements that are not-so-subtly hinted to be radioactive. At one point, a crack forms in the side of her face and she covers it with makeup. At the episode's climax, she snaps and turns into a three-headed monster until she finally gets some sleep.
    • "Baltimo": The titular element explodes into particles at the end of its shelf life. If ingested, it merges with the imbiber's body and causes holes to form in them, while their limbs and even heads may spontaneously explode.
  • Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: Ty Parsec is bitten by "energy vampire" NOS-4-A2, and the radioactive moon on the planet he's stationed on causes him to transform into a "wirewolf", which is a werewolf cyborg. The very first time Ty transforms, wires start 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.
  • 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 bloodshot 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.
  • ChalkZone: According to Word of God, any human that stays too long in the Chalk Zone transforms into a zoner. Considering that real world liquids are shown to dissolve chalk, it would probably be a painful process.
  • Clone High:
    • Some clones such as Marie Curie didn't quite get through the cloning process properly, and she became a malformed, hulking Gonk.
    • Gandhi's increasingly disturbing appearance during "Election Bluu-galoo", from consuming Xtreme Blu, which is really just pancake batter and blue house paint.
    • Geshy, the GESH High mascot, was genetically engineered with a zipper to resemble a mascot costume more. If someone pulls on the zipper, all his organs fall out.
    • The creepy talking horse fetus Nostradamus uses to ask girls out on prom dates.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door: Chickenpox 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 horror. From a distance, where there is naturally less detail drawn to discern the chicken heads, it looks like victims have perpetually writhing maggots poking out of their skin.
  • Courage the Cowardly Dog has tons of these, being a horror show and all. Most of them are shown when Courage does his signature screams.
  • Danny Phantom: One episode has the main character trying to duplicate himself, only to horribly, horribly mutate himself: Little heads on individual fingers, mouths for eyes, eyeballs sticking out and so forth. On the other hand, it was Played for Laughs.
  • Dexter's Laboratory 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.
  • Exo Squad gives us Automutation Syndrome, which causes the sufferer to slowly melt into a puddle of goo.
  • The Fairly OddParents!: Elmer has a boil on his face that has a mind of its own, and it's an evil mind. Yes, it's played for laughs. But it's pretty disturbing if you think about it.
  • Family Guy: Chris' zit, which actually held him hostage for a while.
  • Final Space: Prolonged stay in the titular dimension afflicts non-native lifeforms with "Final Space poisoning", an eventually fatal condition that manifests as golden Volcanic Veins on the victim's body. Quinn, after spending an inordinate amount of time there, is afflicted with a severe case visible on her arms, but by the end of the episode "All the Moments Lost", it's progressed to her face, indicating that she doesn't have much time left. Gary, Avocato, Little Cato, and Sheryl get it themselves later, but they escape Final Space before it becomes as bad as Quinn's case and their symptoms disappear immediately after they leave.
  • Futurama:
    • "The Honking": Parodied when Bender turns into a psycho werecar in one scene. After a while, he kind of gets used to it and it begins to actually feel quite nice.
    • "Future Stock": Although it's partly Played for Laughs, the hip 1980s CEO dying from boneitis comes with bone-snapping sounds as his body rapidly distorts into unnatural shapes. It doesn't help that, when he dies, both of his hands pull his eyelids and lips back, freezing his face that way.
    • "Thompson's Teeth! The only teeth strong enough to eat other teeth!" *crrrrunch*
  • Gargoyles, "Metamorphosis". Elisa's younger brother gets transformed into a gargoyle-ish monster, and the only scientist who understood the process is killed. The episode ends with our cool veteran cop, Elisa, crying uncontrollably at the fate of her brother.
  • Generator Rex: Body Horror is a major thematic element of this show. It's not a cartoon for the squeamish.
    • The EVOs are made of this. Nanites are inside every living thing, and can turn it into a horrifically mutated monster at any moment, at random.
    • In on episode, Rex absorbs too many nanites, which leads to him losing control of them...which, in turn, leads to horrible metallic growths with a mind of their own.
  • Ghostbusters:
    • The Real Ghostbusters: One episode has 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".
    • Extreme Ghostbusters:
      • One episode has one of the lead characters becoming an evil clown-like creature.
      • "Crawlers": People's lungs are used to host the Monster of the Week's larvae, and Jeanine is turned into the monster's mutant bug creature-bride.
      • "The Ghostmakers": Eduardo's spirit is forcibly displaced from his body by a demon with a magic mirror.
      • "Slimer's Sacrifice": Egon is transformed into a pterodactyl-like harbinger of Ragnarok:
      • "Be Careful What You Wish For": A Literal Genie graphically transforms his victims into a tree that takes root, or a pile of money that blows away in the wind.
      • "Eyes of the Dragon": Bones are stolen from living victims.
      • "Deadliners": The Vathek, a trio of "literary" ghosts. Visually, they're expies of Clive Barker's Cenobites who perform on unwilling victims "unnecessary surgery" that would make Ivo Shandor put away his tools in disgust. The worst part? The Ghostbusters are unable to put a dent into them because "if it is not written, it cannot be done," given as how the writer who brought them into this world never wrote that they were vulnerable to proton beams. In the end, they were defeated when Eduardo incinerated the typewriter they originally entered through.
  • Gravity Falls:
    • "Double Dipper": Dipper finds a copy machine that lets him clone himself. Unfortunately, when he makes the fourth clone, there's a paper jam. The result is a clone of Dipper that looks folded and creased like a piece of paper and can only speak pained-sounding gibberish.
    • "Into the Bunker": The Shapeshifter turns into an unholy combination of Mabel and Dipper to pursue them.
    • "Weirdmageddon, Part 1": Preston Northwest asks Bill Cipher if he could join Bill's Gang. Bill rearranges every orifice on his face instead (pictured above).
  • The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
    • One episode has Billy suddenly gets a pimple on his back which turns into a creature that acts like him who is dubbed Yupp Yupp. 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, and in "Prank Call of Cthulhu" when Billy's nose changes into a squid-like appendage which can flip up and spawn hundreds of insect-like creatures with Billy's head, sharp teeth and tiny tentacles. Screaming wildly, they all fly to Grim and attack him.
    • One episode has Mandy slowly transform into a Giant Spider, much to Billy's arachnophobic horror. For Billy's "son" Jeff, though, it's love at first sight.
    • Another Billy example: Billy is transformed into a chocolate sailor, and he's just so delicious that he can't stop eating himself. He screams with every bite, until he's just a head.
  • Happy Tree Friends runs on this, but one of the biggest examples is "Read 'em and Weep", where a cursed book warps Cub into a tentacle monster.
  • I Am Weasel: One episode has Weasel as a doctor who specializes 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.
  • Inhumanoids is full of this. A lot of it comes from the hands of D'Compose, who himself kind of qualifies, being a skull-headed dinosaur-creature whose chest has rotted away, revealing his ribcage and his rotting lungs and heart under the ribcage.
    • Within the first three episodes, Sandra Shore receives the "Touch of D'Compose" and is turned into a hideous giant undead monstrosity. The same thing happened to her again in the eleventh episode.
    • In Episode 7, Doctor Manglar dissolves on-screen when he falls into swamp water contaminated with toxic chemical waste. In the next episode, D'Compose revives him as Nightcrawler, a monster that can be called "human-looking" only in that it's still bipedal. The same episode also has D'Compose creating an army of undead teenagers.
  • Invader Zim: Well, it's Jhonen Vasquez's show, after all, so every episode has its fair share of horror.
    • In "Bestest Friend", Zim gives Keef a present that rips his eyeballs out and replaces them with mechanical ones.
    • In "Walk of Doom", when Zim stares at the sun, his eyes bubble and burn. He has to lay down and wait for them to regenerate.
    • In "Dark Harvest", Zim collects organs from children and stuffs himself with them, replacing the organs with various painful objects that he inserts in those kids' bodies.
    • In "Rise of the Zitboy", Zim gets a huge pimple that appears to hypnotize everyone around him and then it explodes and floods the entire school.
    • What happens to Dib in "Bad, Bad Rubber Piggy". The poor kid loses several teeth, gains purplish scars and bulging Tainted Veins, chunks of his hair fall out, he needs a machine with tubes in his neck just to breathe, he becomes very thin and gaunt, and apparently his arm was mangled so badly in one accident that is had to be replaced by a prosthetic. Not the most grotesque thing that happens in this show, but man, does it look gross.
    • In "Bolognius Maximus", both Dib and Zim slowly transform into bologna.
    • The Parking Garage Rat People in "Game Slave 2". They used to be human, but the Parking Garage turned them into rat-like monsters. In fact, it also occasionally gender-bends them.
    • Then there is the episode in which Dib has a huge hole in his head that absorbs nightmarish creatures, along with Zim.
  • Johnny Test: Johnny has suffered from this on more than one occasion, as a result of his sisters' experiments.
  • Jonny Quest:
    • The New Adventures of Jonny Quest: In the episode "Creeping Unknown", Mr. Trudge is slowly turning into a plant and has green, gnarled branches for hands. He also attempts to turn other people into human-plant hybrids.
    • Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures has some pretty good examples as well. One episode has some poor guy turn into a werewolf because of a genetic condition. It does not sound pleasant.
  • The Magic School Bus involves this in every episode where the kids wind up transformed into various animals when you consider the fact they have no time to get used to the new form and can most certainly feel their internal organs being re-arranged as it happens.
  • The Mask: Parodied. Stanley is in Dr. Pretorius' base, having found out that the madman has kidnapped the mayor. On a workbench, we see a red lump of something with a glass dome over it. Stanley immediately exclaims, "Mayor Tilton!", and an exasperated Pretorius says, "No, that's hamburger meat!" Crisis averted...until Pretorius turns the uncooked hamburger meat into a living, snarling monster.
  • Men in Black: The Series: Former MIB agent Alpha combines this trope with Organ Theft. Examples of this include grafting the heads of aliens to his torso against his will and pulling out a ‘larval’ version of himself out of his own arm to create an evil clone of Agent J loyal to him. A rather humorous example is when he accidentally assimilated with his dragon, when he seems to be upset that the latter’s head ended up in his armpit.
  • Ninjago: The former-Big Bad-turned-Team Dad Garmadon got hit with this trope the most throughout the series. He was initially struck by magic lightning when he was banished into the Underworld, blackening his skin and hair as well as exposing his ribcage. He would later grow a second pair of arms during his hiatus in season 1 in order to wield all four of the Golden Weapons without being harmed. He then gets possessed by the Overlord and slowly turns into a dragon, at one point looking like an unnatural mix of human and dragon before going One-Winged Angel. Soon after he regained a human appearance, a spell cast by Clouse caused him and many others bearing a specific tattoo to turn into Anacondrai, and unlike the previous examples, this transformation definitely sounded painful. Jay lampshades the frequency of this trope to Garmadon's face, telling him to pick a body and stick with it.
  • The Nutshack: In the ending of "Got surgery?", the gang's cosmetic surgeries fall apart on them, including Cherry Pie's breast implants popping and leaking and Phil's nose falling off. This is all played for laughs, though.
  • Over the Garden Wall: The Beast's true form is covered in the faces of people whose souls he's absorbed.
  • The Owl House:
    • Due to the fact that he's been absorbing Palismen to extend his lifespan for over 300 years, Emperor Belos's body is only held together in a human shape by magic and pure force of will — and even then, he's got a massive, green scar with open wounds stretching across his face and neck. Underneath, Belos is a creature made of necrotic green sludge, with limbs he can extend and morph at will, and the fact that you can sometimes see bone poking through the goop means that he has far more joints than he should. When Luz brands him with a sigil in "King's Tide", he loses his human shape entirely and morphs into a skeletal creature the size of an elephant, covered in glowing blue eyes. Finally, because his body is so amorphous, he splatters when the Collector throws him against a wall, though his consciousness manages to hitch a ride to the human realm as a fist-size glob of goop riding on the back of Hunter's shirt.
    • When Belos arrives in the human realm, he quickly learns that he can infect and take over other creatures — the animals he tries this on being consumed from the inside out until only their bones are left. When he does this with Hunter in "Thanks to Them", green, necrotic scars similar to the ones Belos himself had spread across the kid's entire body, a pair of horns burst out of his skull, and his arms gain the same amorphous, stretchy qualities Belos had in his own body, despite the fact that Hunter's arms still very much have intact bones in them. When Belos finally leaves Hunter's body, Hunter is left absolutely covered in scars and barely clinging to life.
    • In "For the Future", Belos' body horror proceeds to get even worse. His sludgy body is melting and parts of himself are dripping off as he heaves from the strain of his body breaking apart. At one point, his hand falls off and he is no longer able to walk due to losing his legs, which can be seen breaking off. And when he attempts to possess a grimwalker corpse, its mummified flesh proceeds to melt off its bones nearly instantly.
  • The Patrick Star Show: In "Olly Olly Organ Free", as a result of replacing his organs with kitchen utensils, Patrick becomes an enormous, misshapen monstrosity. Everyone actually loves his new look, calls him handsome, and has nothing but praise for it.
  • Phineas and Ferb is usually a very tame show as far as nauseating jokes are concerned, but "Canderemy" is an exception. In a nutshell, Doofenshmirtz builds an inator that combines two objects together. Candace and Jeremy are lucky enough only be attached at the hip. Everything and everyone else? Not so much.◊
  • Pickle and Peanut: At the end of "Busted Arm", Peanut (who spent the majority of the episode trying to upstage Pickle, for his broken arm) gets severely injured from a water slide incident. End result: he ends up as only a head, with veins sticking out.
  • The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Knock it Off", the Professor's old colleague, Dick Hardly, obtains a vial of Chemical X and uses it to produce and market factory-made clones of the Powerpuff Girls called the Powerpuff Girls Xtreme. This doesn't sound so bad, except that apparently whoever was actually making them didn't do such a great job. Some have eyeballs for heads, one has legs where her arms should be, one has her face upside down, several have horrifically distorted head shapes, and so on and so on. Granted, some of them got lucky and didn't turn out too awful, just being limited to mix-and-match combinations of accessories from their predecessors, but still...yeesh.
  • The Powerpuff Girls (2016): In "Bubbles of the Opera", Bubbles becomes a lovely lady after (1) getting a bad haircut from a dim-witted woman who gave Bubbles a bad school photo, (2) suffering an allergic reaction to a recalled makeup set and (3) losing a few teeth from hitting the ceiling fan.
  • Primal (2019) features a horrifying and disgusting plauge in "Plague of Madness". Symptoms include eyes turning blood-red and filling with yellow veins, Blood from the Mouth, large, pustule-covered chunks of sickly-green skin either missing or rotting and sloughing off, and violent madness — essentially turning the infected into living zombies. There's even a Gross-Up Close-Up of the infected Argentinosaurus' skin when Spear and Fang have to quietly sneak behind it.
  • ReBoot:
    • 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 pained Null noises.
    • There's also what happens to people that get trapped in the Web without proper protection. Bob was only in there for a short time and his uniform was warped, his silver hair melted and turned black, his hands were charred black, and he had various scars on his neck and face. And he had partial protection from the Web too. Without that Bob would have ended up like Web Riders, which were in even worse shape.
  • Regular Show: "Terror Tales of the Park" has Rigby's transformation into a house after being cursed by a wizard for egging his house.
  • The Ren & Stimpy Show, in spades. Standout examples include Ren plucking exposed nerve endings out his mouth with tweezers, Ren and Stimpy being surgically joined together and so on. Particularly notable because, as a Grossout Show, the really horrible examples are shown via lovingly rendered and detailed paintings.
  • The Secret Saturdays: The episode "Ghost in the Machine" features a villain who creates a DNA reactor that merges living tissue. He places Zak, Fiskerton and Komodo into the machine, and... it isn't pretty.
  • The Simpsons:
  • The Smurfs (1981): The evil Wizard Nemesis was cursed to have his outer handsome appearance match his ugly inner self. The audience is never treated to the fullest extent of his magically induced deformity, but it horrifies anyone (with the exception of Clockwork Smurf) who looks upon it. Nemesis has weaponized this!
  • South Park:
    • "Trapper Keeper" 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.
    • Kyle's dad surgically altering himself into a human dolphin.:
    • Then there's a lot of the (realistically designed) title characters from "Freak Strike".
  • SpongeBob SquarePants:
    • "The Ick" is a virus that causes green ooze to grow all over the victim's body. It's contagious on both touch and ingestion. Somehow, Squidward doesn't realize he's scratching an Icky spot, and a restaurant full of diners don't notice they're eating it. In the real world, "Ick" is a protozoan parasite of fish that encysts itself in the skin, causing sores that can eventually be fatal.
    • In "Scaredy Pants", SpongeBob has Patrick shave down his head until it's round enough to make a perfect ghost. It's later revealed that he's been shaved down all the way to his brain. SpongeBob takes it all in stride, though, and reassures everyone that it'll grow right back.
    • In "I Was a Teenage Gary", Spongebob and Squidward accidentally get injected with snail plasma and turn into snails.
    • In "Jellyfish Hunter", Mr. Krabs captures a bunch of jellyfish so he can mass-produce the stuff. His factory jelly-extracting equipment is absolutely brutal on the poor jellyfish.
    • In "Squid on Strike", SpongeBob is stuck to a window. When Squidward tries to pull him away, he ends up tearing his entire face off, and you can see his internal organs.
    • "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy IV" takes Body Horror to a new level; when trying to reverse the Shrink Ray, SpongeBob puts Squidward through an increasingly painful series of agonizing morphs — catching fire, being cut in half by scissors, having no skin... the worst transformations happen off-screen, with hideous gurgling sound effects that leave the true horror to the viewer's imagination, which only made it worse.
    • In "Can You Spare a Dime?", SpongeBob lifts up Squidward's shirt to show that both his and Squidward's hearts have joined together, beating.
      "We're like brothers... only closer."
    • "SquidBob TentaclePants" has Sandy's teleportation device screwing up and fusing SpongeBob and Squidward into a weird mess. Then they later get un-fused, then re-fused with every other main character into a blob with people's heads sticking out of it.
    • In "Sing a Song of Patrick", the song that Patrick wrote is so bad that when he and SpongeBob play it for the head of a radio station, it turns his ears inside out. Though it happens offscreen, so we'll have to take SpongeBob's word for it.
    • There's a rather gruesome scene in "Plankton's Regular" in which SpongeBob is lying in front of the Chum Bucket's door, and the regular customer opens the door over him, scraping off his face in the process. It doesn't get really disturbing until he sits up, and you can see all the (rather detailed) muscles of his face exposed. Plankton also skins himself earlier by pulling on his antennae.
    • "The Inside Job" is full of this trope. Losing sight and hearing, a complete version of SpongeBob's house made of brain including Gary, and two scary transformation sequences.
    • "The Bad Guy Club for Villains" is based almost completely around SpongeBob and Patrick watching a Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy episode in which they fight all of the show's villains. In it, the Atomic Flounder uses his Atomic Touch ability, which causes Barnacle Boy to sprout a third arm from his shoulder, which proceeds to beat him up. Once he's knocked out, the hand then deforms and sprouts a face before proceeding to take over Barnacle Boy's body.
    • At one point in "Code Yellow", SpongeBob chops Squidward into sushi and gives him his normal nose back at the cost of his arms and legs.
    • "Krabby Patty Creature Feature" involves a new genetically altered Krabby Patty formula that turn all who consume it into monstrous Krabby Patty hybrid zombies (and in brutal detail in the case of Mr. Krabs and Sandy), who multiply by forcing the victims to eat them.
    • In the ending of "Teacher's Pests", after being caught in an explosion SpongeBob, Mr. Krabs and Plankton are sewn together. Namely, Mr. Krabs has been reduced to a head and has lost one of his eyes, which Plankton's body is now replacing, and he's sewn to SpongeBob, who has lost the top of his head where his eyes were.
    • In "Ink Lemonade", Patrick tries to scare Squidward into excreting ink so Patrick can sell it as lemonade. The first time, he does so by rolling up his skin, revealing his organs, and talking to Squidward, moving his intestines as lips.
  • In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "Much Ado About Boimler":
    • The patients on the Osler are Starfleet personnel turned into mutants by various accidents and couldn't be cured by their crews. The more visible mutations include several with grossly shortened or elongated limbs, an individual with a head shaped like a half-moon, and another whose head is breaking up into several floating pieces.
    • Although not human, many of the "upgrades" that Tendi made to The Dog, such as twisting its head and limbs around or inverting its head into a round fleshy maw, are physically uncomfortable to look at.
  • Star Wars: The Bad Batch: "Bounty Lost" takes place at an abandoned Kaminoan cloning facility on the planet Bora Vio. As Omega tries to escape from the bounty hunters Cad Bane and Fennec Shand, she comes across an embryo room filled with test tubes containing several dead specimens, possibly the Kaminoans' earliest attempts at cloning. While the Kaminoan looks relatively normal, the other specimens◊ in the room run the range from vaguely humanoid, but horribly malformed to just being blobs of flesh with randomly placed body parts.
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
    • Savage Opress undergoes a ritual that causes his body to mutate into a much larger and more ferocious looking form. What makes the scene horrific, however, is that you can hear his bones extending, and see his horns grow longer out of his skull. It's a good thing he was unconscious at the time, because one gets the impression that he'd be in agonizing pain if he had to go through all that while conscious.
    • Obi-Wan's transformation into "Rako Hardeen" in "Deception" involves his skin visibly warping, and his skull reshaping itself to create his new face. Judging from his reactions, the procedure was very painful.
    • Darth Maul's condition in "Brothers". His missing lower body has been replaced with a crude, spider-like apparatus, his horns have tripled in length, and there are veins visible all over his body.
  • Steven Universe:
    • Steven, while practicing his shape-shifting powers, turned all his fingers into cats. It's played as a joke initially, but then the rest of him starts turning into cats... the result is one of the show's biggest Nightmare Fuel and Tear Jerker moments.
    • "An Indirect Kiss": Amethyst's shapeshifting goes awry due to a cracked gem. At first it just switches the place of her head and one foot (largely comedic), but towards the end of it she starts... unraveling.
    • "Reformed": Amethyst has another bout. First, she rushes a regeneration and ends up with her arms turning into legs. Then, when she misunderstands Garnet talking about the strength of the team as saying she's not strong enough, she rushes another regeneration while trying to fit into what she thinks Garnet wants her to be, rather than what's actually right for her. She tries to come back in a beefier form, closer to someone like Jasper or her Purple Puma identity, but one arm and one leg end up much larger than their counterparts, and the moment she loses concentration on keeping it stable, one arm visibly deflates into a length of purple hose with a huge, veiny fist on one end. Then the Slinker knocks her out again, and thankfully her next regeneration actually feels right.
    • "Keeping It Together": When you try to force gem shards together, it makes everything up to this point look cuddly in comparison. Most of the creatures are only two limbs stuck together, but the final creature... And I Must Scream doesn't even begin to cut it. Even Garnet is visibly horrified, and nearly falls apart until Steven snaps her out of it. This could count as Body Horror too, as she turns white, and her body starts pulling itself apart, leaving a gaping hole in her stomach. After defeating the monster, she begins talking to herself as Ruby and Sapphire are in severe distress.
      Garnet (Ruby): So This is what Homeworld thinks of Fusion!
      Garnet (Sapphire): [shakily] We couldn't have known they would do this...
      Garnet (Ruby): This is where they've been! All the ones we couldn't find! They've been here the whole time!
      Garnet (Sapphire): Rose couldn't have known!
      Garnet (Ruby): THIS WAS PUNISHMENT FOR THE REBELLION!
      Garnet (Sapphire): IT'S NOT OUR FAULT!
    • Pink Pearl has a blank spot where her left eye should be and cracks running down her face. It is assumed that White Diamond caused this injury. This isn't the case.
  • Steven Universe: Future:
    • "Volleyball": It turns out that the crack on the above character's face was caused by Pink Diamond, who had a tantrum and accidentally injured her with "destructive powers". The injury is psychological, not physical, meaning that nothing is able to fix it — in fact, it only gets worse as Pink Pearl claims she's fine.
    • "Prickly Pair": The living cactus starts off cute, but mutates into a monstrosity with a split down the middle and multiple heads.
    • "Growing Pains" has this trope in spades. First, it starts with Steven's body "swelling up", randomly inflating and deflating. Then it's revealed that Steven doesn't have Super-Toughness after all and that the only reason he's still standing is that his healing factor heals injuries and broken bones the moment they occur. This has left him with many fractures all over his skeleton, including a noticeable fracture on his skull. And at the end of the episode, he accidentally grows so big that he takes up most of the room.
    • "Everything's Fine": Steven turns into a monster at the end, and the transformation begins with a tower of spikes abruptly bursting out of his back. We don't see the rest of it.
  • Street Sharks: Gene-slamming is rather nasty, what with growing the extra limbs and the screams of pain and whatnot. Bonus points to the first transformation, when the one guy's hand starts to change before the rest of him does.
  • Superjail! is really fond of this trope, but the episode "Jean and Paul and Beefy and Alice" takes the cake. In the episode, Superjail slowly gets infected by a strange alien virus which causes your body to bleed and grow extra limbs, eyes, mouths, and all sorts of parts. Made even worse when at the end of episode, where it is discovered there's no cure to the virus.
  • Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go has this in a few places.
    • "Wonder Fun Meat World": Said meat contains an alien parasite which causes anyone that eats it to horrifically bloat, as well as becoming addicted to their food. Also even a tiny bit of said meat can become a Blob Monster to take care of anyone who knows too much. As if that wasn't enough, the process to reverse the main character's transformation goes a bit wrong, causing his face to temporarily melt in multiple ways. The villain is also a 30 foot tall gangsta' colon; the episode managing to be both pure Body Horror and incredibly silly at the same time.
    • The power of the Dark Ones can also have this effect. Too much exposure to it transformed the kindly Alchemist into the biomechanical Big Bad, and then there's Mandarin who was Swallowed Whole by one of said abominations. He eventually got better, but the combination of said energies and pure stomach acids were not kind.
  • Sym-Bionic Titan: The Mutraddi Xeexi forces itself down its victims' throats to make them tell the truth, often exposing their veins. In "The Demon Within" Ilana becomes infected by a Muculox, transforming into a Mutraddi similar to him.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): It doesn't happen often, but it shows up sometimes. Mutagen Man, here, is arguably more horrific than his later 2012 counterpart, being a mess of human organs — brain, staring eyes, chattering teeth, guts — held together by a life support mechanical suit.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): The focus of "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, ending with the result seen in the former trope picture. Worse still, his mind is going with it...
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012):
    • Snake's transformation into Snakeweed, and his subsequent appearance. It includes an exposed beating heart, and visible flesh and bones in his legs.
    • The Rat King (AKA Dr. Falco). His body is emaciated and covered all over in horrific burn scars, his eyes are sunken and his teeth are crooked and yellow.
    • Mutagen Man is a Blob Monster who Was Once a Man, but is now an amorphous translucent green mass of slime with human organs floating around inside it.
    • "The Mutation Situation", the Season 2 premiere, sees April's father Kirby transformed into a bat-like creature. What makes it even more frightening is his left arm (which was gripping April to protect her) begins bulging before Mr. O'Neil topples off the roof and into a flock of bats.
  • The Tick episode "That Mustache Feeling".
  • Van Beuren Studios: Done in one of the Tom and Jerry shorts (no, not THAT Tom and Jerry) — and Played for Laughs. In one episode taking place in the Swiss Alps, the duo eat a strange type of cheese that causes swiss-cheese esque holes to pop open in their body.
  • Transformers:
    • The 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.
    • Beast Wars gives us Cheetor's transformation into a Transmetal II 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.
    • Transformers: Animated: Blackarachnia's unnerving mutation from a promising young Autobot into a techno-organic freak.
  • Turbo Teen: The main character's face stretches out to become the grill of the car, his hands and feet become wheels, etc.
  • Turtles Forever takes the mutagen from the original series and plays it much straighter, with most of the new mutants in the 2003 'verse suffering involuntary transformations involving a lot of hissing ooze and screaming. Hun in particular ends up Ax-Crazy and vengeful after becoming a turtle.

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