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The 25 Goopiest, Grodiest, Gnarliest Body Horror Movies, Ranked
What if you couldn’t distance yourself from something horrific, because it’s impossible to escape your own flesh and blood.
The better body-horror film on this list about an older actress who seeks out an unorthodox and dangerous anti-aging procedure to combat the internalized misogyny she inherited from her culture, Fruit Chan’s sly and provocative Dumplings touches on the frequency of abortions under China’s one-child-policy and takes the unempathetic nature of Hong Kong beauty standards to an invasive, morbid extreme. Like in The Blob, the horror creature is an external force that kills and replaces its victims, overriding their biology to mimic their voice and appearance only after murdering them, but Carpenter wisely lets the world-class effects — where chests open up like the maws of sharks and the titular thing gets frequently tired of abiding by the rules of bipedal humanoid anatomy — erupt in a few select but unforgettable bursts. Jack Finney’s original sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers and its numerous adaptations both invite and repel easy, graspable interpretations, but this second update to Don Siegel’s “We Swear It’s Not About the Red Scare” 1956 version certainly draws attention to America’s complacency with power being used in abruptly oppressive ways — in no small part because it’s set within the hierarchy of a military base and released around the same time as Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History announcing liberal democracy was the natural evolutionary endpoint for the world.
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