10 Body Horror Movies That'll Make You Squirm

There couldn’t be a list about body horror without mentioning the king of the genre, David Cronenberg, and his 1986 masterpiece, The Fly.

The film started off as a remake of the 1958 movie (which itself is an adaptation of the 1957 short-story of the same name). But a decision to radically change the story and take it in a different direction meant the film had a whole new impact.

Rather than having Seth (Jeff Goldblum) change instantaneously into a man-fly hybrid, he begins a slow, frightening metamorphosis into a monster – his humanity slipping away piece by piece. Seth is left staring into the unknown.

We see him gazing in horror into the mirror as his teeth begin to fall out. His skin becomes loose and flaky. He begins to vomit digestive enzymes. Cleverly, the body horror is given a new ferocity by imbuing a love story within the film. The empathy we feel for Seth doubles once we see he has a life to lose – and that makes the changes that are happening to him even more disturbing.

This is the first aspect of body horror in The Fly: what Seth becomes. The second is: what Seth does.

A fly is too small for humans to take much notice of. They live in a different world to us. So, when the impossible happens, and man is put against fly, the gore of a leg dissolving under digestive enzymes feels a whole other level of wrong.

It’s this quality that cements The Fly as a body horror classic.