10 Body Horror Movies That Went Too Far

Those body horrors that had you squirming in your seat.

Cabin Fever
Lionsgate Films

The world of horror cinema is one that forever finds fans returning time and time again.

One of the clear and obvious reasons as to why horror hounds are eager to continuously lap up this murky corner of film, is quite simply because there is such variation on offer within horror. This is a movie genre that is overflowing with countless subgenres - and here it's all about the disturbing, chilling subgenre of body horror.

Body horror is something that particularly came to the fore in the late 1970s, with David Cronenberg (yes, he'll be featured here...) one of those leading the charge and championing this sticky, icky element of the horror realm. Since then, there have been numerous great, decent or just plain bad body horrors that have surfaced, and plenty of them have had audiences wincing in disgust.

Of course, certain body horrors tend to be a smidge more wince-inducing than others, and that's what's on offer with this list. Simply making a body horror movie is one thing, but the ten pictures in the spotlight here proved particularly hard for moviegoers to stomach.

10. The Brood

Cabin Fever
New World Pictures

For full disclosure, it's pretty difficult to not just give in and dedicate this entire list to the movies of David Cronenberg.

Few, if any, have ever done body horror as well as Cronenberg, with the Canadian filmmaker having a masterful eye for what is likely to make an audience wince. And if you're looking for an exemplary, extreme body horror from this legend of the game, look no further than 1979's The Brood.

Written in the aftermath of the director's own divorce, this picture centres on Samantha Eggar's Nola as she goes through a divorce while battling her own mental health problems - all as a slew of mysterious murders take place across the city.

In typical Cronenberg fashion, The Brood reveals how a group of dwarf children have been responsible for these murders, and that Nola had given birth to said children via an external womb that was driven by shock treatment and her own memories of abuse and abandonment from her childhood.

When the big reveal of all of this comes, with Nola going as far as to lick clean one of her newborns, it was David Cronenberg at his absolute David Cronenberg best.

Senior Writer
Senior Writer

Chatterer of stuff, writer of this, host of that, Wrexham AFC fan.