From The Beauty to The Substance, why is the new age of body horror having its moment?

When horror expert Xavier Aldana Reyes went to see a screening of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a 2024 body horror film filled with gruesome and grotesque scenes, nothing seemed to indicate that it would go on to receive the attention it did. “It looked like something that was made for people like me; people who have always enjoyed body horror.”

Universal Pictures, which was originally supposed to distribute the film, believed the same thing. According to Fargeat, it refused to release her final cut of the film without changes, specifically to its ending.

But after Mubi acquired the movie and gave it a wide theatrical release, it went on to become a massive hit, grossing more than $78 million worldwide (over four times its production budget). The film also went on to generate significant awards buzz, including a best actress Oscar nomination for Demi Moore.

Body horror, a sub-genre of horror concerned with uncontrollable transformations and mutations, was first popularised in the late 70s and 80s through releases such as David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and has typically remained niche in audience appeal, its graphic content often polarising among viewers.

What’s more, many of the films we use to define the sub-genre were released as horror films – not body horror films – with the term being applied retrospectively.

But now, a growing list of films are explicitly being labelled as body horror, and many of them are resonating with non-horror audiences. Alongside The Substance, body horror films such as Love Lies Bleeding (2024) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024) have had wide releases in recent years and gone on to achieve critical acclaim.

Julia Ducournau’s Titane, a body horror film full of grotesque graphic imagery to rival The Substance, became a cultural talking point after premiering at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where it was the surprise winner of the Palme d'Or.

A number of TV shows are also fitting this trend, from Alice Birch’s 2023 adaptation of Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers – a six-part body horror series for Prime Video – to numerous episodes in Guillermo del Toro’s eight-part Netflix horror anthology Cabinet of Curiosities (2022).

Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty – a body horror show about an injection that brings physical perfection to users (“One shot makes you hot”) – came out this week on Disney+. There’s been buzz around the series from the off, with the trailer hitting nearly 190 million views across social platforms and becoming FX’s most-viewed ever.

So, what’s driving the newfound popularity of the sub-genre? Sarah Lahm, a lecturer in Media, Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, says that creators are being drawn to body horror because it can be used to “tap into the cultural anxieties of our era”.She notes Titane, in which the serial killer protagonist becomes unexpectedly pregnant after having sex inside a vintage Cadillac, as an interesting example of a film that taps into anxieties around bodily autonomy and pregnancy that have surfaced “in the post-#MeToo movement, amid the Trump era, and amid the resurgence of major threats to reproductive rights that we’re seeing”.

Aldana Reyes, Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-president of the International Gothic Association, agrees, saying that creators are being drawn to body horror “because of the social and political potential of the messages that can be got across with that language”.

He notes 2016’s Raw, a violent coming-of-age body horror film by Ducournau in which cannibalism acts as a metaphor for sexual awakening, as a "significant point" in the development of this new wave of more socially and politically invested body horror, but adds that “the 2020s in particular have been a period where that sort of galvanised”.

Many of these recent titles tap into anxieties “about the rise of cosmetic surgery and how it’s connected to social media in particular”, Aldana Reyes says, and “about how social media is selling these perfected versions of our bodies that are even more possible to attain”.

This includes The Substance, which centres on Elisabeth (Moore), a former Hollywood star who takes a black-market serum that creates a beautiful and younger version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley). Meanwhile, del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities entry The Outside (directed by Ana Lily Amirpour) also takes aim at ridiculous beauty standards. The episode follows Stacey (Kate Micucci) as she experiences severe and self-inflicted skin reactions from a lotion that promises to transform users from an ‘ugly duckling’ into a ‘stunning swan’.

In a similar vein, Emilie Blichfeldt’s newly Oscar-nominated film The Ugly Stepsister centres on Elvira (Lea Myren), one of Cinderella’s ‘ugly’ stepsisters. The movie reframes the fairy tale to focus on Elvira’s psychological and physical suffering as she attempts to make herself attractive to the prince through various horrifying means – DIY nose jobs, ingesting a tapeworm, and cutting off her toes to fit into shoes, to name just a few.

Murphy’s The Beauty also tackles these themes, while also engaging with current anxieties around the long-term effects of Ozempic, the miracle weight-loss drug, which – much like the beauty-enhancing injection on the show which turns deadly – can shrink your body, but at a cost that remains unknown.

A lot of the creators and directors behind these titles are women and minority voices, who aren’t necessarily being drawn to the sub-genre consciously, Aldana Reyes points out, but rather because “body horror becomes a medium for these personal messages”.

The likes of Titane, The Substance, Tiger Stripes and The Ugly Stepsister, which all use body horror to visualise the internal consequences of external pressures on women to some degree, are all written and directed by women. 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow, which uses body horror to represent gender dysphoria, is written and directed by non-binary filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun.

“I think those are communities of people that have very direct experience of what it’s like to be judged,” Aldana Reyes says. “I mean we all have a sense of what it’s like to be judged, in terms of not being handsome or pretty enough, not being enough of this, or the other.

“But I think being a woman for example, you’re a lot more aware of how your body should be perceived socially. You’ve got every form of media telling you what you should look like. And if you’re trans your body is even more actively policed by other people, and monitored.”

Indeed, Ducournau has previously said she doesn’t view any of her films as body horrors. “I don’t think I make body horror,” she told IndieWire back in 2021. “I use body horror tools in my films, which I believe are dramas, or love stories. I use these tools because I express myself like this in the way I relate to the body. But it is a completely honourable term.”

And while Fargeat has explicitly used the term to describe her work, in an interview with Variety, she emphasised the sub-genre as “the perfect vehicle to express the violence all these women's issues are about”.

That creators are being drawn to body horror as a tool to explore how characters relate to their bodies, rather than to the sub-genre itself, is also evidenced by a handful of recent titles that contain elements of body horror, but wouldn’t actually be categorised as the label.

This is the case in 2020’s Ramy, a Hulu comedy-drama which is primarily about a young Muslim man but which features an episode that pivots its focus away from Ramy and onto his sister, Dena, and her anxieties.

“There’s this scene where she starts losing hair in the shower, and there’s anxiety around a lump in her breast. This isn’t usually a show that uses body horror, but in that episode it does,” says Lahm.

The Netflix comedy-drama Russian Doll also uses a moment of body horror to represent Nadia’s (Natasha Lyonne) trauma and mental state in its second run. “There’s not usually any body horror, but in season 2 there are these sequences of the main character pulling little black bugs out of her skin.”

The normalisation of graphic content is another factor making body horror an attractive medium for creators, notes Aldana Reyes. “I think the levels of graphic content, whether it be graphic content, or nudity and sexuality, have definitely gone up in the last 10 or 15 years. Just think about how many people vomit in shows, or how much blood appears in horror shows.”

Research in 2023 found that 80 per cent of American TV shows included some form of violence, with some programmes exceeding 150 violent acts per hour.

“I don’t know if we have become more desensitised to violence or explicit content, but it’s definitely become a lot more normalised,” he adds. “And if you put the two together about people wanting to tell personal stories about how they’re experiencing the world through their bodies, and the increase in explicit content, it’s a great place for body horror to come in.”

Body horror is becoming increasingly popular among audiences for the same reasons it’s attracting creators – because of the messages and themes that it can be used to convey, Aldana Reyes says.

He notes that for a long time body horror was perceived as “just a sensational thing” and that “the only body horror films that have ever been awarded, have normally been awarded for their make-up, and for their sensational elements.” And that, while The Substance “obviously had a lot of special effects and interesting elements in that regard, it was mostly the message of the film that got through to people”.

It’s this message that got Demi Moore, who Fargeat has said she hadn’t expected to take on the role as she thought the film would be “too scary”, on board. Moore previously told The Wrap: “It really touched on so many different levels. While I am not Elisabeth, I immediately extracted from the script the potential depth of what it could bring forward, which is what we do to ourselves.”

Lahm agrees that it’s the sub-genre’s growing complexity and diversity that’s resonating with audiences. While horror has historically been a male-dominated genre, she notes, “often when you have a female creator or creators and when the story is women-centric you get more of a sense of interiority, more of a sense of the psyche, rather than just doing things for a sense of shock.”

Body horror’s newfound popularity among audiences can also be attributed to the fact there’s more money in it now, both Lahm and Aldana Reyes agree. This is particularly evident in The Beauty – a big-budget and glossy show that focuses more on style than substance.

While the likes of The Substance, The Ugly Stepsister and Dead Ringers provide in-depth examinations of their characters’ increasingly self-destructive relationships with their bodies (through increasingly grotesque scenes), The Beauty offers a surface-level look into the minds of its characters – a woman wants a boob job so she can get attention from men, for example, or an incel wants to be attractive so he can sleep with women.

Moving forward, Lahm wants fewer mainstream projects like The Beauty and “more body horror that is more transgressive and more, dare I say, arthouse”.

Aldana Reyes notes that “body horror is now more expensive, more complex, more diverse than it has ever been” and can see it heading further down this road in the years to come. He hopes we’ll see more female, non-binary, trans and non-white filmmakers being drawn to the sub-genre.

“These would be the places I would say body horror is going,” he says. “More in the direction of identity politics. A much more social and politically aware type of body horror. And one that continues to prod the diversity element.”

The Beauty is available to watch now on Disney+ in the UK. You can sign up to Disney+ from £5.99 a month now.

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