There's multiple ways to scare people. Jump scares, atmosphere, extreme blood and gore, 's all good as long as it robs you of a few hours of sleep. Or rather, if that is good or not depends on your tastes, but I digress. What I intended to yap about today is the discipline of horror known as Body Horror. Hoh yes, we're talking things growing out of or into someones body, bringing surprisingly little of the "glad it's not me"-feeling and surprisingly much unnerving squick.
I guess some thing are still kind of sacred to most people, like for example their bodies and the bodies tendency to not sprout extra parts or be infected with foreign elements, including, but not limited to alien eggs ready to hatch or cyberpunk-esque contraptions with tubes going everywhere.
Highlights of the genre includes John Carpenters The Thing, which despite its utterly horrible misuse of the Norwegian language actually manages to be quite chilling. The special effects here are truly impressive, although some of them seems a tad cheesy around the edges. We also have David Cronenberg's Videodrome, which in addition to some rather unnerving body horror also has mindfucks a'plenty.
Other mediums are not alien to body horror, of course. Pretty much everything Junji Ito has made, like Gyo or Uzumaki, pulsates with blood and other unidentifiable liquids . We also have litterature a'plenty, most memorably H.P. Lovecraft, who tends to describe horrible, horrible things that happen to people who experience all the things man was not meant to know up close and personal.
Now... don't you feel a slight itch? Under your skin, maybe.
