Good Body Horror

[TheMonotonePuppet]

Lately I've been feeling like my inspirations for writing body horror have been mundane; rote. It's disappointing. I can write all I want about making incisions in one's stomach to unspool guts for a safety harness or cry ribbons of blood as you plummet to the unforgiving puce walls of flesh below, but it still fails.

Good body horror requires a theme. And more than a lot of horror, it requires you to flesh out the boundaries of said theme over multiple separate instances of body horror throughout your fiction. For example, Bloodborne does a great job of repeatedly pushing the themes of werewolf-like transformation, Blood, and eyes, as well as the supernatural associations of the moon, into body horror. Building a cohesive image has been difficult lately. I can't think of new themes of body horror, which is sad, because I want to explore writing themes of body horror that I haven't written yet.

Good body horror also benefits heavily from medical knowledge, which I am realizing after reading someone's amazing fiction involving surgery that mine is incredibly lacking.

So, my questions to you all is: What is a unique theme of body horror that sticks out to you? What would a scene in that theme look like in your own writing?

 

[Dieter]

Good body horror is good horror when it isn't shock horror. A mother of two you've only just met was brutally murdered in so and so ways. Why aren't you feeling afraid, reader? Good horror requires first and foremost to unsettle you. That means as the creator you'd have to be good at dealing with vagueness and suspense, preferably without being wordy or theatrical/performative. I write horror also, so that's my take on it.

>What is a unique theme of body horror that sticks out to you?
>Body horror is mostly aesthetics for me. The one's that've stood out to me haven't stood out because of their concept, but cus of their execution.

>What would a scene in that theme look like in your own writing?
>In my own writing, one of my characters gets operated on and turned into a toy. Said toys still keep their sanity, but are on the verge of falling into madness. If you hurt them, they bleed and are made of flesh inside. Not a new concept, but how I execute it will make it or break it.

 

[SRB]

Good body horror is me.

 

[TheMonotonePuppet]

Good body horror is good horror when it isn't shock horror. A mother of two you've only just met was brutally murdered in so and so ways. Why aren't you feeling afraid, reader? Good horror requires first and foremost to unsettle you. That means as the creator you'd have to be good at dealing with vagueness and suspense, preferably without being wordy or theatrical/performative. I write horror also, so that's my take on it.

>What is a unique theme of body horror that sticks out to you?
>Body horror is mostly aesthetics for me. The one's that've stood out to me haven't stood out because of their concept, but cus of their execution.

>What would a scene in that theme look like in your own writing?
>In my own writing, one of my characters gets operated on and turned into a toy. Said toys still keep their sanity, but are on the verge of falling into madness. If you hurt them, they bleed and are made of flesh inside. Not a new concept, but how I execute it will make it or break it.

I'd be interested in reading a sample of your execution of that in your own writing.

 

[corruption]

When it uses what could happen, making you realize just how lucky you are not to be that way.
Imagine if something happened so we can't tune out the sound of our heartbeats. Hearing the blood pulsing through our eardrums all the time, unable to concentrate or think, not able to sleep. The only thing that you can know is the sound of your pulse drumming in your ears.
There are many medical conditions that exist that would make horror writers need to change their pants (for both joy and fear, sometimes both at once) if they knew about them.

 

[Toast2Venus]

Good body horror is what Necromancy is supposed to be all about but nothing has been the same since Solo Leveling...

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Blanking on the titles at the moment but, while I am not a huge fan of body horror, the two most unique examples I've seen were a short story that was more psychological than body horror and a movie.

The short story was about a woman who seduces evil men and then steals their lives - literally; she takes on their form and she takes over their old lives. Been about 25 years since I read it, but I believe that most of the men take their own lives and she returns to her original body to repeat the cycle (but the men can also perpetuate it by seducing another evil man and taking over his life). Very creepy stuff, really, the most "bent" gender bender I've seen.

The movie, for the first third or so, looked like a typical werewolf film, though one set near the Louisiana Bayou, until the first time you see the main character transform ... into a giant insect. Mediocre film, but the effects for that scene were worth sitting through the rest of it (especially when you can see it with commentary by Joe-Bob Briggs between scenes).

 

[Dieter]

I'd be interested in reading a sample of your execution of that in your own writing.

nuh uh

 

[WinterTimeCrime]

When it comes to theme, most of my horror scenes derive from a weapon of some kind. I also write gore or bloody brawls very well, which is also a reason readers enjoy my work.

For instance, in one of my books, a young woman wields an axe that doesn't deliver physical damage, but if it slices through a person, they receive a curse. This curse can range from disembowelment and blindness to myiasis and hysteria. In one scene, she performs a cut so severe that it causes the man's body to become mechanized—blood pusses out oil, skin peeling back into metal; even when he screams defiance, his voice becomes a rattling static.

She has other varying scenes where she involuntarily changes organic matter into something else entirely, but that one is probably my most gruesome.

 

[Anonjohn20]

Lately I've been feeling like my inspirations for writing body horror have been mundane; rote. It's disappointing. I can write all I want about making incisions in one's stomach to unspool guts for a safety harness or cry ribbons of blood as you plummet to the unforgiving puce walls of flesh below, but it still fails.

Good body horror requires a theme. And more than a lot of horror, it requires you to flesh out the boundaries of said theme over multiple separate instances of body horror throughout your fiction. For example, Bloodborne does a great job of repeatedly pushing the themes of werewolf-like transformation, Blood, and eyes, as well as the supernatural associations of the moon, into body horror. Building a cohesive image has been difficult lately. I can't think of new themes of body horror, which is sad, because I want to explore writing themes of body horror that I haven't written yet.

Good body horror also benefits heavily from medical knowledge, which I am realizing after reading someone's amazing fiction involving surgery that mine is incredibly lacking.

So, my questions to you all is: What is a unique theme of body horror that sticks out to you? What would a scene in that theme look like in your own writing?

Imagine an MC with trypophobia gets turned into a bee and is forced to make honey in a sentient anthropomorphic beehive. lol

The beehive has a body and MC is horrified by it.