David Cronenberg is probably the director you would associate most with body horror; in fact his output up until quite recently could be considered almost exclusively of this type. Famous examples include: The Fly (1986), featuring a disintegrating human-fly hybrid; Scanners (1981) – humans who can mentally control and manipulate the bodies of other people (occasionally to the extent of making their heads explode!); Existenz (1999), wherein people experience a virtual other world by umbilically plugging themselves into fleshy, organic consoles.
Other harrowing examples of the genre include: Society (1989), (in my opinion the most grotesque) in which the rich, as exemplified by the moneyed set of Beverly Hills, are revealed to be melding shape-shifters who keep their own gene pool healthy by ‘shunting’ (don’t ask) members of the lower classes; Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, in which the body a Tokyo salaryman, once a guinea pig for his own father’s unspeakable experimentations, sprouts phallic guns when goaded into a murderous rage by his estranged brother; Cat People (1982), which has the beautiful Nastassja Kinski (and Malcolm McDowell) undergoing hideous transformations as they periodically change into black panthers; From Beyond (1986), an adaptation of the short story by H.P. Lovecraft (himself a possible literary precursor of the genre), in which a deranged scientist shifts into a trans-dimensional state, becoming a hideous shape shifter in the process.
I rate, and even treasure, many of these films because unlike many examples of the so-called horror genre they actually tread the line between being casually entertaining and genuinely disturbing.
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