I saw The Substance tonight. It was disturbing. I can appreciate body horror, but this was body horror, full on splatter and gore and women transforming into grisly disintegrating smears of goo, all with a feminist message about the commodification of women’s bodies. Just terrifyingly icky.
But the real horror wasn’t the movie, it was the old guy in the back row of the audience who was laughing throughout the show. He needs to be put on a watch list, but I’m afraid I just put my head down and rushed out of the theater before he could dismember me, so no, I wouldn’t recognize him.
I hope he didn’t follow me home.
It was a very good movie. Definitely not a date movie, though.
Hey, don’t diss Herbert West!
PZ, I recommend keeping a chainsaw handy tonight.
I’d say true horror is the political reality in the USoA right now. If only it was only a movie not something all too real the world is facing.
I’m not huge into horror and have a lower tolerance for suspense than before the pandemic. I’ve seen most of the V/H/S stuff, the first Terrifier and suffered through Martyrs. Phantasm will always be my fave, mostly because the Barracuda.
I have watched a few episodes of Splattercast, mostly to become better acquainted with what’s out there, but he focuses a lot on brutal and disturbing. He might have some body horror stuff whatever that is. I cannot believe what people have committed to film based on his summaries. He keeps bringing up some movie with an Eastern European country in the title I will not watch nor name which I guess has become legendary for some baffling reason. I still regret watching Hostel.
Give me a comedy movie like Old School or series like Loudermilk, Cake, or Dennis in AP Bio instead. The Always Sunny crossover with Abbott Elementary was ok.
Ha, you watched that? One could say: the first half you watch, the second you endure. Does not make a tiny bit of sense, but the two leading actresses deserve every accolade they get, and more. The blurb should say: “Mental cruelty, nudity and body horror – jump right in!”
But the movie is very funny! Like all good horror, it’s got a comic timing. And the climax is one of the most hilarious things out to film! It’s downright Troma-esque.
I don’t need to see this.
I have enough horror in my head. I don’t need movies.
I still haven’t seen it, looking forward to it. have heard it is more Frank Henenlotter than Cronenberg when it comes to body horror so should be fun.
@7 yeah I’ve heard it described as a Troma film for the Cannes crowd :D
HE’S BEHIND YOU NOW!
I’ve never seen any use or value in “horror” movies. I suspect they all have the effect, intended or not, of bringing out and validating sadism in their viewers. And so many of their “plots” are just plain demoralizing, maybe intentionally so: the monster or mad killer has almost godlike powers to anticipate their victims’ every move, they have unexplained access to everything they need to completely trap and control their victims (seriously, how do killers that deranged get to have full dungeons and torture chambers with no friends in today’s real-estate market?), and the victims are so stupid, clueless and petty that I feel I’m invited to root for their killers!
Seriously, what’s the fucking point of that whole genre? Some of them have a “feminist” or “anti-capitalist” message? Big deal, the message is almost always lost in a sea of pointless gore.
Laughter doesn’t mean anything, the thing you should’ve looked for is if he had a boner. Although gory movies usually frame women getting tortured and killed as hot, and sadism is more common than you’d think, so I doubt even that is enough to discern a psychopath.
Can’t stand bloody horror movies . Finally got around to watching Gorgo a monster movie from the early 60s . Honestly my speed is about the Creature From The Black Lagoon .
@ Raging Bee, #11
The point of the whole genre? Well, let’s see:
1.) To make money
2.) To entertain
3.) To tell stories
4.) To get across a message
That about covers it, I think.
To more seriously engage with your point, the horror genre covers a vast amount of territory. To dismiss the genre as being awash in gore is, plainly, ignorant, as there’s a vast swath of horror that has little or no gore at all.
Psychological horror is rarely a gorefest. Ghost stories are seldom super gory. Dark fantasy horror may or may not contain gore. Mad killer movies are not necessarily gory. Even body horror can be relatively gore-free. For the most part, the horror in those movies is not found in explicit grue, but in the fragility of the human body and our sense of reality.
Slashers and splatterpunk, on the other hand, are typically very gory. They often use shock and blood to get a reaction from their audiences. I’d compare most of them to rollercoasters- cheap thrills meant to elicit gasps rather than share a deep message- but that’s hardly true of all representatives of even those much-maligned subgenres, and it’s certainly not true of all or even most of horror in general.
Now, what a fan gets out of the genre is as unique as the individuals themselves, but for my part I love horror for the following reasons:
1.) A good horror story, in my view, strips away the pretense and masks we all wear, laying bare who we are in the dark. It forces people to confront what they think they know about the world and themselves and deal with something outside the norm. How they react, be it by rising above their own self-imposed limitations to become something better in order to strive for some noble goal (even in the face of truly hopeless odds) or by becoming monsters themselves, fascinates me, provided that it rings true. There are a lot ways such a story can go wrong but, when it goes right, it’s sublime.
2.) The horror genre is, in my view, the best genre at exploring the language and possibilities of film. Horror stories can be almost completely nonsensical, but still fundamentally work as a portrayal of nightmare or madness. There are horror movies I enjoy precisely because of their illogic, a flaw that would be fatal in just about any other genre.
3.) Sometimes I just wanna see a really cool monster. It takes more than a cool creature or great effects for a film to be one of my all-time favorites, but I still enjoy quite a few movies mostly because their visual artistry. It’s terribly wonderful, the things the human mind can create.
A few examples of not-super-gory horror movies from my list of personal favorites:
1.) Let the Right One In (2008)- A story of loneliness, friendship, and vulnerability, this story does have some gore, but it’s hardly the scary part, and it’s an important part of the story.
2.) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)- Some who look down on horror insist this is strictly a sci-fi movie, but it’s quite possibly the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.
3.) Matango (1963)- Don’t let the goofy English title, “Attack of the Mushroom People,” fool you, this is an extremely bleak story about hunger, addiction, and desperation.
If you’re willing to handle a bit (or a lot) more grue:
1.) Les Yeux san Visage (1960)- a ghost story without a single supernatural element, and a classic for a reason. The surgery scene that accounts for most of the gore is still shocking, but it’s key to the story.
2.) Ginger Snaps (2000)- a feminist coming-of-age tale of sisterly love and the limits of devotion, there’s a fair amount of gore, but that’s all a part of growing up.
3.) Hellraiser (1987)- a story of obsession, addiction, and the dark places they can lead us, this one is ultra-gruesome, but it’s neither accurate nor fair to say that the gore is the point. It’s more a case of the metaphorical becoming literal.
I personally can’t see the appeal in sports movies, war movies, biopics, or the turgid dramas that litter the Oscar noms every year, but I recognize that some people find meaning in them. Me? My life has been horror movie. Mostly psychological, with occasional forays into body horror, and a couple of brief stopovers in my least favorite subgenre, torture p**n.
I grew up in an abusive household. I’ve seen shit I wish to the gods I could unsee, and experienced things I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I look to horror not for cheap thrills, but for hope and wonder, for stories of people persevering in spite of the nightmares they find themselves living in, or at least going out doing their very best against hopeless odds. Those stories are there, if you know where to look. That’s the point, to me, and I am not unique in finding truth and beauty in the darkness.
Yeah, their way of mixing hints of sexual feeling with the gory violence is another issue I have with that genre. Too many times the victims are young people who are, or are trying to get, sexually active; and we’re being invited to enjoy seeing them horribly punished as a consequence of their misbehavior.
Body horror is a respectable genre; one of my favourite stories is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voice_in_the_Night_(short_story)#External_links
“‘The Voice in the Night’ is a short story by English writer William Hope Hodgson, first published in the November 1907 edition of Blue Book Magazine.”
I see The Substance stars Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid. My streaming options are currently limited to paid rentals, so I’d have to wait for it to be offered by one of the streamers.
One movie I noted from a Splattercast list was Bone Tomahawk with Kurt Russell. I’m kinda thinking about giving it a try. Judging a movie by its cover I had assumed it’s just a wester with Kurt Russell. I like westerns, but I now know it’s far more than that. Very dark.
One kinda horror movie I watched recently was The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s book. It’s bleak and dark post-apocalypse. One of the sheriff’s dreams in No Country for Old Men is an oblique lead in with the firehorn metaphor. The Road is The Walking Dead without the zombies. I’m probably going to attempt reading Blood Meridian at some point soon. The dark shadow figure in that, Judge Holden, is supposed to be one of the most horrific characters in all of fiction, maybe eclipsing Anton Chigurh.
I’m not a horror regular. But, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is still a claustrophobic thriller that I remember fondly, for lack of a better word. I probably shouldn’t rewatch it, given its age.
I like horror for its comedy sub-genre. It can be so grotesquely gory that it’s funny. I’m thinking of Bad Taste, Brain Dead (both Peter Jackson), Army of Darkness, and its under-appreciated TV series Ash vs Evil Dead. Always good when horror doesn’t take itself too seriously.
As for scary laughing in the cinema – it depends. Can’t judge for this fellow, but I do know people can react strangely to what might be impactful situations or imagery. I’ve seen people giggle or laugh incessantly during funerals, or be uncannily cheerful when someone has had a serious accident. It’s a strange knee-jerk reaction one can fall into if they’re not prepared to emotionally deal with the circumstances.
vucodlak @14
Thanks for your personal impressions of horror. It can be a polarizing topic. I’m sorta particular and idiosyncratic in what I like. The best scene ever is the chase scene from the farm house in 28 Weeks Later, but the rest of the movie ebbed and flowed IMO. I like Ringu and find the Americanization offputting. Yet the American version of The Grudge was ok. Aficionados might scoff at a found footage franchise like V/H/S, but I like that there are short segments that vary in subjective appeal. “Tuesday the 17th” was my favorite segment from that series because the unstoppable nature of the demon figure. “Safe Haven” about an Indonesian death cult was a close second. Other segments I did not like.
Does The Elephant Man qualify as, ” Body Horror”?
This is the saddest movie I have ever seen. I almost want do nothing more than weep through the entire thing.
There are also moments of rage.
fishy, it sure does. Doesn’t have to be an unnatural transformation to qualify.
Akira MacKenzie @10
An iconic final scene from Phantasm. That one came out in the late 70s. I saw it soon after on HBO (I think) and was too young to be allowed to see that (lax patenting). Etched in my memory. Had a great scifi premise. The sequels varied.
I watched Nightmare on Elm Street delirious with fever from strep unable to sleep any more. My own quite harrowing experience with that movie was probably rare. It stayed with me. But in a good way. The sequels largely sucked. Freddy became a cult hero figure. Why? Another disturbing icon was Frank Booth, a David Lynch creation. Hopper may have been well suited to that role but it was still kinda messed up!
Don’t some of the Alien Invasion genre stories usually classed as SF also count as horror? Thinking War of the Worlds in its various versions going back to 1898 which was inspired by how British colonialists treated the Indigneous Australians and having non-gory but strong horror scenes like the burning train scene in the TomCrusie movie version and in a different grim but not really gory scene here – Don’t Scream in the robo-dogs BBC TV series version? Then there’s the monster movies -SF – horror blends such as Cloverfield (again not a gory scene but still pretty effective. Then there’s the ‘Aliens’ franchise which is both horror and SF etc.. Of course, horror can be a component and aspect to a lot of movies and other genres just as comedy can be.
To add to the reasons.listed by vucodlak (25 January 2025 at 3:58 pm) there’s also the aspect of facing your fears or facing scary things in safety and being able to overcome your fear which many people find exhileating in much the same way people go out of their way to eat extremely spicey food or risk their lives for thrills in, say, rock-climbing, driving fast, etc..
I did hear / read somewher ethat its actuallya good and helathy thing for people to actually be scared once in a while. (Obvs NOt constantly.)
I do remember reading about this movie, so from my history:
https://slate.com/culture/2024/09/the-substance-demi-moore-movie-margaret-qualley.html
See :
Source : https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/health-benefits-being-scared-fear/
PS. Whilst mileage obvs varies; most or at least an awful lot of the best and most effective (?) horror minimises and implies the gore rather than actually showing it. The killing in the shower in Hitchcock’s Psycho being one notable example.
/ Cap’n Obvs..
John Morales @24
I saw Promising Young Woman. I didn’t realize it was so problematic. It did feature Laverne Cox who also did a newer version of Rocky Horror. The revenge aspect of Promising Young Woman fell short a bit if I recall. She did get back at some people though.
I’m not an expert in that genre but found Kate to be a great watch. Tears through a yakuza nest with a knife and pistol. Yakuza Princess too.
According to Wiki, “A Voice in the Night” mentioned @16 inspired the Japanese film “Matango,” mentioned @14. Apparently the story has spawned works as diverse as Stephen King and Naruto. I suspect “Matango” also inspired one stop in the anime “Train to the End of the World,” where the townspeople ate mushrooms that made them blissfully happy. Though their bodies sprouted mushrooms and their lifespans were shortened as they became mushrooms, they were so at peace they just didn’t care.
@vucodlak, have you seen the original 1956 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”? It terrified me as a kid and I still find it unsettling, whereas the remake left me pretty meh, especially the bizarre screaming at the end.
Hemidactylus, re “One movie I noted from a Splattercast list was Bone Tomahawk with Kurt Russell. I’m kinda thinking about giving it a try.”
Put it this way: it’s much more Holstel and much less Old School.
(Pulp noir, basically, of the gore variation)
John Morales @28
Curiosity killed the cat but I wonder if Blood Meridian takes whatever * Bone Tomahawk* is to a much further extreme.
At least with No Country McCarthy mixed neo-western with noir.
I stopped watching Law and Order SVU because of all the pointless S&M shown and hinted at. it seemed to be done just a little too titillating and not about “catching” the bad guy.
I have not watched the remake of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” the originals really stays with you, the effects are good and the plot makes Qanon sound like children playing in the backyard.
Tod Browns “Freaks” however has its own images of horror.
Another memorable movie is “The Road” bleak and in the end upliftingly poignant.
movies and stories with tense and scary parts are good. There are parts of “Smiley’s People” that are very hard to watch or read. Same in “The Lord of the Rings”
One of the best “monster/horror? movies in my Mind is “Pan’s Labyrinth” truly a nightmare filled story
to each his own!
Sacrilege!
@ Raging Bee, #15
That’s largely a feature of the cookie-cutter slashers that peaked in the early 1980s, which were themselves heavily influenced by the Italian giallos of the 1960s and 70s.* Giallos mixed sex and violence in liberal (and lurid) doses, but violence as a punishment for having sex (and/or using drugs) was more a product of Reagan-era US puritanism.
But, while slashers can pretty much all be fairly classified as horror movies, nowhere near all horror movies are slashers. Too, the “violence as punishment for having premarital sex” trope is hardly unique to the horror genre. You can find it in significant doses in dramas, mysteries, action films, even ostensible romances.
Horror in general has a reputation for being particularly puritanical and misogynistic but, in my view, this is unjustified. That’s not to say that there aren’t tons of horror films that fit that description, for there certainly are quite a few. My problem is that every genre has similar proportion of seriously problematic material, which critics of horror gloss over when they smear the entire genre as being a particularly guilty of those sins.
It’s not hard to see why. The visceral nature of slasher films and the like makes it very easy to see that kind of ugliness on the screen.** It’s easy to see the anti-sex message in a bunch of teenagers getting machete’d to death after smoking some weed and having sex.*** It’s harder work to pick out the subtler instances in works from other genres.
Now, if you go beyond the slasher sub-genre, there are a great many horror films with some really interesting things to say about the way sex and violence are frequently intertwined in our society. For that matter, there are slashers that break out of the Friday the 13th**** mold that are worth a look for the ways they subvert expectations in that regard.
But I could go on and on about this- like, a lot more than this- and I suspect I’m the only one interested in this, so I’ll stop there.
*Which grew out of the body count mysteries of earlier decades, and so on.
**Or, all too frequently, to cherry-pick pieces of films and stories so that they appear to show these vices when a viewing of the work as a whole may give an entirely different picture.
***Although I would be remiss if I failed to point out that the primary audience for the Friday the 13th films and its countless imitators were teenagers who wanted to see two things: naked people and gore. The calculus that created the sex=death trope that defined most 80s slasher movies was mercenary first and foremost, although the results were undeniably also misogynistic and puritanical.
****Last footnote, I promise. While John Carpenter’s original Halloween is often erroneously considered the original slasher that set the rules, that’s not accurate. It’s not the first, and the it’s really Friday the 13th that set the sex/drugs=death template for the simple reason that it was A.) very cheap to make and B.) made a ton of money.
@ John Morales, #16
I, too, really enjoy that story. You’re probably already aware aware of this, especially since (Ridana mentions at #27), but Matango is loosely based on “A Voice in the Night.” It’s made by Ishiro Honda, who also made Gojira, but it’s a very different film (although it’s similarly bleak).
@ Ridana, #27
I have! It’s quite good, but I feel the 1978 version surpasses it in terms of horror, owing mostly to the bleakness of its ending. The fact that it takes the protagonists longer to really grasp just how bad things have gotten is also a big factor. I think it rewards repeat viewings, too, as you notice little things that the main characters don’t (and I, at least, missed the first time through).
Also, I like the more explicit body horror aspects of it, but your mileage may vary.