Best Body Horror Movies for Beginners

Horror is full of monsters, murderers, and other malignant entities. But there’s always the chance someone could manage to escape an axe murderer, kill a werewolf, or shove a vampire into the sunlight. However, there are some horrors they can’t run away from or beat with a silver bullet.

In body horror, a person’s own physical form turns on them, mutating them into some abomination, reducing them to goop, or other grisly fates. Some are already familiar with the term, but there are likely some readers out there who haven’t seen much of the subgenre. So, for any body horror beginners out there, these are some of the movies to check out first.

10 Scanners

A Mindblowing Movie

• Director: David Cronenberg
• Release: January 1981
• Streaming On: Max, The Criterion Channel, IndieFlix

A list of body horror movies wouldn’t be complete without David Cronenberg. The Canadian filmmaker made his name with movies about grotesque bodily changes, from the alien parasites in Shivers to the surgical nightmare of Dead Ringers. One of his most famous movies, Scanners, is relatively light on body horror compared to his other films, but it makes its few scenes count.

A vagrant named Cameron Vale discovers he’s one of a few hundred people with ESP, called ‘scanners.’ A company called ConSec takes them in to use them for their own needs, and they need Cameron to stop Daryl Revok, a rogue scanner who seeks to destroy ConSec. Most people know it for the scene where Revok makes a guy’s head explode, which has been referenced in other movies and used as a reaction GIF online. If people haven’t seen the movie in full, they should, as it’s a solid picture with more explosive scenes to show them.

9 Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Steel Seduction

• Director: Shinya Tsukamoto
• Release: July 1989
• Streaming On: The Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Night Flight, Asian Crush, Arrow Player, Midnight Pulp

Shinya Tsukamoto’s movies have delved into the terror flesh can bring, even if they’re not strictly horror, like Vital or Tokyo Fist. But his most famous film is Tetsuo: The Iron Man, his first feature-length picture (albeit at a humble 67 minutes).

The titular salaryman discovers bits of metal growing out of him. He’s haunted by erotic, metallic imagery in his dreams, until he becomes a monstrous mix of man and machine. The film became a rising star of cyberpunk media, as its themes of technology literally taking over a man’s life fit the subgenre perfectly.

8 Street Trash

Don’t Trust Off-Brand Booze

• Director: J. Michael Muro
• Release: September 1987
• Streaming On: AMC+, Tubi, Night Flight

For something less artsy and esoteric, Street Trash is straightforward in its goal as a comedy horror ‘melt’ movie. Like Scanners‘ exploding head, it’s best known for one scene. It shows a hobo melting into a puddle of goo while in the bathroom. In a bid to survive, he ends up flushing himself, leaving behind a single hand on the chain.

This melting was caused by a liquor store selling spoiled cases of an old batch of hooch called ‘Tenafly Viper.’ It was made during the Prohibition era, and spoiled so badly that it will melt whoever drinks it. One overzealous cop tries to solve these mysterious deaths, while two brothers try to survive amid the chaos that the deadly concoction has caused throughout the homeless community. It’s an old-school gross-out classic.

7 Videodrome

The Worst Kind of Channel Hopping

• Director: David Cronenberg
• Release: February 1983
• Streaming On: Peacock

Cronenberg upped the body horror and mutilation in Videodrome, which has some of the psychosexual themes people would see later in films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man. It’s about Max, a TV station CEO who comes across an unauthorized broadcast called ‘Videodrome,’ showing real snuff footage. He agrees to put it on his channel, and becomes obsessed with the show, until he learns its broadcast induces hypnotic hallucinations in its viewers, including him.

Did he really see his S&M girlfriend on Videodrome? Did he really get absorbed by the TV when he tried to kiss her? Is the VHS slot on his stomach real or in his head? Like Tetsuo, Videodrome shows how people can become obsessed with technology, especially when it uses their fascination for explicit content.

6 From Beyond

Some Things Are Best Left Undiscovered

• Director: Stuart Gordon
• Release: October 1986
• Streaming On: Amazon Prime, PlutoTV, Freevee

This Lovecraft adaptation could do with more attention from burgeoning horror fans. From Beyond sees Doctors Pretorius and Tillinghast create the resonator to stimulate the pineal gland enough to let people see beyond perceptible reality. Through it, they discover malevolent interdimensional beings that kill Pretorius.

Tillinghast is arrested for his death, but his friends turn on the resonator and learn Pretorius is still alive — somewhat. He’s now part of the interdimensional realm, and wants to bring more people in by eating their brains. The movie almost couldn’t get an R rating due to its horrific mutations. Luckily, it managed to make the cut with some mild, arty frame trimming that left some details to the viewers’ imaginations.

5 Hellraiser

A Puzzle That Offers More Than People Bargain For

• Director: Clive Barker
• Release: September 1987
• Streaming On: Amazon Prime, AMC+, Hoopla, Tubi, Shudder, PlutoTV

Books get adapted into movies all the time, though they don’t always please the author. Clive Barker had good luck when he adapted his own novella, ‘The Hellbound Heart,’ as Hellraiser, which made its sadomasochistic Cenobites horror icons. They’re extradimensional beings, led by the notorious Pinhead, who are summoned when people complete a puzzle box.

It promises to take people to a world of pleasure, but to the Cenobites, pain is their pleasure, as Henry Cotton finds out in gruesome detail when he completes the puzzle. Revived as a ghoul, he implores his brother’s wife to sacrifice random men to restore his body. Things only get worse from there, as the Cenobites don’t take kindly to people who ‘escape’ their realm. It’s the go-to movie for people who fancy a more occult take on body horror.

4 The Thing

Horrors Hidden Within the Ice

• Streaming On: Amazon Prime, Peacock, AMC

John Carpenter has a lengthy resume of moody sci-fi, horror, and thriller films. Some became long-lasting hits, like Halloween. Others took some time to catch on, like The Thing. It’s technically a remake of one of his favorite movies, The Thing from Another World, but it used 1980s practical effects to be closer to its basis, the novel ‘Who Goes There?’ by John W. Campbell Jr.

American researchers at an Antarctic base discover evidence of an alien landing, and that whatever came down is hiding among their numbers. It can imitate any life form it assimilates, often in bloody, visceral detail. The group grows paranoid as they can’t be sure which one of them is infected with ‘the thing’. With no help and no way to escape, they have to figure out how to flush the creature out and destroy it.

3 The Fly (1986)

Teleportation Leads to a Devastating Transformation

• Director: David Cronenberg
• Release: August 1986
• Streaming On: Hulu, Peacock, AMC+, The Criterion Channel

The Fly, a loose remake of the 1958 movie, managed to become a big hit in 1986. It helped that its premise was simple to grasp, with Seth Brundle trying to make teleportation a reality with his telepods. He tests it on himself, and it works, until he learns that a fly joined him for the ride and ends up bonding with him at a molecular level.

At first, he feels better than ever: stronger, more energetic, and more arrogant. Then he starts changing, losing body parts as he becomes more fly than man. Performances by Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis help make the horror feel real. They add a relatable human core to the story to go with the increasingly grisly Brundlefly transformation, as whatever was human about Seth gets lost to his ambition.

2 Slither

Terror and Tentacles in a Small Town

• Director: James Gunn
• Release: March 2006
• Streaming On: Peacock, Tubi

In James Gunn’s directorial debut, an alien parasite infects Grant, a wealthy South Carolina resident, turning him into a tentacle monster whose only goal is to breed. The only things in his way are police chief Bill Pardy, mayor Jack MacReady, teenager Kylie Strutemayer, and Grant’s wife, Starla.

The film shows influences from Gunn’s days with Troma Entertainment, as it’s a gross-out horror comedy that combines Cronenbergian transformations with dark comedy. The movie didn’t do much at the box office in 2006, but it caught on with horror fans when it reached home media. Slither can serve as a nice capstone to the other movies listed here, as it has a few references to other body horror masterpieces.

1 Society

• Director: Brian Yuzna
• Release: June 1989 (UK), June 1992 (USA)
• Streaming On: Fubo, Kanopy, Night Flight, Plex

Society embodies the old saying: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.” Billy is a teenager who suspects the people around him aren’t who they appear to be. He sees freakish distortions of his family and classmates, and hears one thing when others hear something else. He tries to get help from his psychiatrist, but he can’t shake the feeling something is going on.

The movie parodies the upper class and yuppies of the day, showing them as freakish and inhuman. It’s a tour-de-force of freakish body horror, with flesh melting, molding, and mingling in stomach-churning ways. If beginners want to dive into the deep end of body horror, Society will be sure to swallow them whole.