10 Body Horror Movies That'll Make You Squirm

What could be worse than eating a raw rabbit kidney? You’re about to find out…

Raw, the 2016 French film written and directed by Julia Ducournau, gives a fresh take on the well-known cannibal character.

Cannibalism and body horror go hand in hand; it takes away the notion of our bodies being “us” and instead frames them as nothing more than a piece of food, meant to be consumed by another creature.

As the characters in Raw lose more of their flesh, the line blurs between human bodies and meat. As Ducournau frames it herself in an interview:

“Are you your body, or is your body you?”

As we see Alex lose a finger, or Justine have a bite taken out of her face, we’re reminded of the brutality of nature - the body horror which occurs in the wild, shown to us in the form of the film’s veterinary school and the powerless animals/specimens that are housed there.

However, it’s not just the cannibalism that causes the film’s body horror. In a tale similar to The Fly or District 9, Justine begins to transform. She goes from lifelong vegetarian girl to cannibalistic adult over the course of the movie.

This change is marked by a particularly grotesque scene in the nurse’s office: as Justine has an allergic reaction to the rabbit kidney she is forced into eating, a violent rash breaks out over her skin. We see the blistered flesh inspected by the nurse before fine layers of dead cells are peeled away. She is shedding her skin.

This marks the beginning of her change, and the start of a second and third act packed with ghoulish body horror.