The challenges of modern womanhood are powering a blood-spattered resurgence in one of cinema’s goriest genres.
New female-focused “body horror” movies have tackled everything from unrealistic beauty standards to modern clampdowns on reproductive rights, but some cinemagoers are finding it way too much.
‘Bloody and brutal’
Body horror is a subgenre of horror that specialises in grotesque or psychologically unsettling violations of the human body. “Characterised by scintillating gore”, it “arguably originated” with “proto-scream queen” Mary Shelley and her 1818 novel “Frankenstein”, said Colin Doerffler and Hannah Strong in ID.
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But the term was officially coined in 1983, to sum up a “palpable” new trend in horror cinema that included “The Thing” and “An American Werewolf in London”, wrote James Balmont for Dazed.
The genre is enjoying a renaissance this year, notably in “The Substance”, in which an ageing media star takes a mysterious drug to create a younger version of herself – with monstrous results – and “Nightbitch”, about a woman who gives up her career to become a stay-at-home mum, and finds herself transforming into a dog.
In this age of Brazilian butt lifts and procedures that “scrape out your buccal fat” to fix the “problem of being ugly, fat or old”, it’s no surprise that “female filmmakers are turning to” body horror to “explore the tribulations of modern womanhood”, said Doerffler and Strong.
Pregnancy and childbirth are also “their own kind of body horror”, wrote Gayle Sequeira in The Guardian. And, marking a “significant trend in the wake” of the overturning of Roe v Wade, “a slew” of 2024 films, including “Immaculate”, “The First Omen” and “Apartment 7A”, deal with “just how bloody and brutal” giving birth can be.
‘Heading straight to the toilet’
But is the new female body horror too horrific? The “fleshy nerve” of “The Substance” might well go “too far for some”, said Peter Suderman for Reason.
The film’s depictions of “injecting, vomiting, bleeding, eating, self-harm” and “violent and grotesque” body transformation definitely build strong feelings of “tension” and “disgust”, said Sara Oscar and Cherine Fahd on The Conversation.
It’s a film that will get you “heading straight to the toilet”, said Emily Ruuskanen in Far Out. Its “visceral and repulsive quality” leaves you “wanting to empty your insides”.
And it’s true that the “The Substance” has caused “walkouts in cinemas across the world”, said Jacob Stolworthy in The Independent. The “enticing plot” had clearly “lured in” audiences who “weren’t prepared for how extreme things get”.
