From The Fly (1986) and Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) to more recent films like Raw (2016) and The Substance (2024), body horror has explored the vulnerability and transformation of the human body through stories of mutation, disease, decay, and metamorphosis. In Body Horror, Xavier Aldana Reyes traces the development of the subgenre since the 1970s and shows how its focus on the body connects to wider questions about identity, culture, technology, and power. In this Q&A, Aldana Reyes discusses what defines body horror, why this subgenre continues to resonate, and how it has become a powerful way of thinking through experiences of marginalization, queerness, and embodiment.

Q: There has been a lot of talk about “body horror” recently, thanks to the release of The Substance and, more recently, shows like Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty (2026–). For anyone who isn’t familiar with this term, could you please explain it for us?

Xavier Aldana Reyes: Questions of genre are always a little tricky, but put very simply, I’d argue that body horror is a subgenre of horror that centers primarily on corporeal questions, particularly those concerned with the vulnerability of the body. Thematically, it gravitates toward scenarios that involve metamorphosis, mutation, disease, decay, and external harm. Having said this, body horror is inherently intergeneric and can appear alongside comedy (slapstick, in particular), science fiction, and melodrama and sometimes even as just a theme or motif in films we might refer to by different labels. In this book, I’m less concerned with defining body horror as a neat, separate category than in analyzing the cultural work it engages with. For me, body horror can’t be disentangled from body studies or the ways in which our bodies exist as biological entities but also essentially as social, political, medical, and legal categories. Body horror is ultimately existential, about the experience of existing through our bodies.

Q: What drew you to this subgenre? Isn’t it a little gruesome?

Aldana Reyes: I guess my interest developed gradually, over many years, and not always in a conscious way. Even before I took horror up as an academic discipline, I felt myself leaning towards films and stories that centered on corporeality, on the messy viscerality of life. To me, the appeal was never just the gruesome vignettes, special effects, or shock, although this is not to belittle those aspects of body horror cinema. Makeup and SFX are crucial to fantastic genres, and I find the history of what is shocking and extreme (and what is considered censorable) deeply fascinating. My point is that it was always the messages behind films like The Thing (1982), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), or Hellraiser (1987) that stayed with me, what these films said (or sometimes didn’t explicitly say) about the body and the human condition, about illness, change, pleasure, contagion, and so on. Clive Barker was a big influence since one of his stories, “In the Hills, the Cities” (1984), was the first (body) horror story I ever read as a teenager where the protagonists were a gay couple. There’s something about the experience of growing up different (gay, in my case, and also never particularly physically fit or masculine by other people’s standards) that made me hypervigilant about bodies—their materiality and meaning in social interactions.  

Q: Since you mention sexuality and it is Pride month, do you think there is a connection between queerness and body horror?

Aldana Reyes: Oh, certainly. I’d go one further and argue that for many queer people, especially those who have their bodies scrutinized through traditional bioessentialist parameters, life can be a form of body horror. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many body horror directors, screenwriters, and novelists have been and are queer, in one way or another. I cover this specifically in a section of Body Horror: how there is a direct correlation between the experience of marginalization (and public scrutiny) and the interest to explore themes like loss of control and transformation. All of us are socially policed in multiple ways, of course, but certain demographics bear that burden more directly or significantly. From my teenage years, people would deem my behaviors too feminine or my manner not enough “this” or “that,” with resulting implications about my sexual inclinations and even my psychological well-being and moral character. Something much worse happens today to trans people. And again, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we are seeing more and more trans directors turn to (body) horror as a language of self-expression. Although this book is not autobiographical in any sense, I’ve always believed that academic writing is to some degree autoethnographic, insofar as where we place our critical focus, what we find interesting, and what narratives motivate and inspire us or simply resonate with our vision of the world can tell us a lot about who we are.

Q: What distinguishes queer body horror from other forms of body horror?

Aldana Reyes: I wouldn’t say queer body horror is intrinsically different from other forms of what we may refer to, cautiously, as activist body horror, an area that has expanded since the release of Get Out (2017) made political and allegorical horror a commercial force to be reckoned with and a cultural product worth investing in. I would argue that queer body horror operates similarly to, even dovetails with, feminist body horror and African American body horror. Each of those manifestations of body horror speaks to a specific history of discrimination and fights for freedom and legal recognition that shouldn’t be conflated with one another. But as happened with the Civil Rights Movement, and more recently with the #MeToo, Trans Lives Matter, and Black Lives Matter movements, oftentimes those struggles are interconnected. As we know, personal identity is intersectional, and so are our experiences of privilege and prejudice. Queer body horror brings into relief what those hardships look like for queer people specifically, metaphorizing their difficulties and challenges and turning those who have historically been behind the “othering” gaze into the monsters. That’s also the natural larger aim of queer horror, to use the genre as a means to discuss queer experiences and identities.

Q: Does that mean body horror is always necessarily tragic? Is there any room for hope?

Aldana Reyes: Horror is about the dark and scary; fear and anxiety are built into its DNA. Yet I don’t think that means it is fundamentally tragic. Many (queer) body horror stories explore ideas of transformation and transcendence. They are about overcoming obstacles and finding oneself—processes that will be very familiar to queer people and that are inherently positive and reaffirming. But I also would add that we likely place too much emphasis on the idea of hope, to the point where it can become its own calming salve and panacea. While it is important that we can imagine a different reality and future so we have a blueprint through which to start working on the present, for many, things aren’t going to get better any time soon, and body horror can feel incredibly cathartic in its supposed negativity. I grew up in the 1990s, when there was a real scarcity of queer role models in the media, so I’ve always thought that diversity is crucial not just in keeping horror interesting but also in terms of self-articulation and representation. We shouldn’t underestimate how important it can be to “feel seen” for those who have often lived in the shadows.

Q: Why should people read this book? And why did you decide to publish it in the Short Cuts series?

Aldana Reyes: I’ve always been a huge fan of the Short Cuts series. I own more than a dozen titles and use them routinely in my research and teaching. They’re very accessible introductions to topics and simultaneously try to push the field forward. I would like to think that that’s precisely what this book does. It lays the basic ground for anyone interested in the topic but also interprets body horror through a theoretical lens that hasn’t been the core preoccupation of the very few studies on it. As I see it, and as I guess I’ve argued throughout this interview, I see body horror as a thoroughly social and even political form. Hopefully this book will prove that body horror is a lot more complex, humane and emancipatory than has previously been granted.