Transformation horror is one of the more intriguing sub-genres in filmmaking. Not only does it scare you by its visual aptitude, but it also thrills you with its psychologically distorted attitude. At first, there are visually disgusting depictions of the unknown monstrosity. And then, just as you prepare to recover from it, your mind is thrown into the pit of terror by the fear of losing control over the body, a sense of losing your identity.
These films don't deal with death as the final assault, but something more sinister; it's the fear of living like undead or a monster. The sub-genre is definitely not for the faint-hearted, as was proven by the works of David Cronenberg. He delivered a series of grisly and gut-churning films, like The Fly and Shiver, that were deep-dyed in terror. We would have been late by a decade or so if Cronenberg didn't introduce us with his classics that took body transformation to the level of biological horror.
Yet, fiction was unfamiliar to such themes; Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the early 19th century and then came the pioneer of cosmic and body horror in the form of H.P. Lovecraft.
In this video, we will refrain from talking about the obvious choices like The Fly or
John Carpenter
's The Thing as we have thrown enough light upon them in our previous videos, and instead, we'll focus on films that need a rewatch from the point-of-view of body-transformation-horror.
