10 Body Horror Movies That Broke All The Rules

10. The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter's The Thing has endured as perhaps the gold standard for body horror for almost four decades for one reason above all else - its groundbreaking practical creature effects.

Nothing speaks to The Thing's tectonic impact more than the fact it was largely rubbished by reviewers at the time of its release, who criticised the gore and mutation effects as excessively nauseating and even distracting from the story.

Quite simply, critics and audiences - who, shame on them, largely ignored the film - just weren't ready for The Thing's creatively revolting effects in 1982, such that it only became recognised as a genre gem in the years that followed.

But The Thing is also unique in the body horror genre given the context of its creation: academics have written extensively about the film serving as an allegory - whether intentional or not - of the '80s AIDS epidemic.

With the film's all-male characters intensely distrustful of one another and paranoid that their own bodies could fall foul of an invisible infection, the parallels speak for themselves.