Body horror
3The Telling · 66Also written: body-horror
Horror that comes from the human body being invaded, transformed or broken apart.
3Three — expression. That is the reduction of this term, and the shelf it is read from.
What it means
Body horror is horror in which the threat is to the body itself: infection, mutation, parasites, uncontrollable transformation, or flesh that no longer obeys its owner. The fear is not of something outside, but of one's own body becoming strange.
In manga
Manga has a strong tradition of it. In Hitoshi Iwaaki's Parasyte, alien creatures replace human heads with shifting blades and mouths. In Junji Ito's Uzumaki, a town's inhabitants are twisted, literally, into spirals. In Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, Tetsuo's power bursts out of his body as a mass of flesh, and in Go Nagai's Devilman humans fuse with demons.
Why it suits the medium
A drawing can show a transformation that would be difficult or expensive to film, and black-and-white art makes it harder for the eye to look away. A page turn can reveal a change all at once, which is one of the strongest shocks manga can deliver.
What it is about
Body horror often expresses anxieties about puberty, illness, technology or the loss of identity. In manga it frequently asks what makes someone human when the body itself is no longer reliable.
The term by its numbers
Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 66, which folds down to 3. The weight sits in “horror”, which carries 47 on its own and reduces to 11.
What the 3 brings is expression. The reference files it as an act of telling. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 3's instinct to turn everything into a story worth telling.
The vowels alone reduce to 9, the consonants to 3. Reckoning underneath, expression on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The 3 asks you to watch the technique rather than the plot it is carrying. The 3 talks past the point. Where an entry here runs long, it is usually because the technique was more fun to describe than it was important. The other entries that reduce to 3 are collected on The Telling.
Seen in
- ParasyteAlien parasites take over human heads and feed on people, and a schoolboy whose right hand was taken instead must live with one of them.
- DevilmanA gentle teenager merges with a demon to fight an invasion of demons, and watches humanity turn on itself in one of manga's darkest endings.
- UzumakiA small coastal town is slowly consumed by an obsession with spirals, in Junji Ito's best-known horror work.
- AkiraIn a rebuilt Tokyo after a catastrophic explosion, a member of a teenage biker gang develops uncontrollable psychic power, with consequences the city cannot contain.