Horror focused on the violation, transformation, or decay of the human body, tapping into fear of losing control of your own flesh.
Body horror generates fear through the body itself: unwanted transformation, disease, parasites, mutation, decay, or loss of physical autonomy. It exploits our deepest relationship, the one with our own flesh, and corrupts it. The genre ranges from visceral and graphic to subtle and psychological, but the core anxiety is always the same: your body is not yours to control.
Body horror forces you to write physical experience with precision. The genre demands concrete, sensory detail, and teaches you that the most effective horror is specific, not vague. If your prose tends toward the abstract, writing body horror is a corrective. It's also surging in literary fiction, not just genre horror.
A man wakes up as an insect. Kafka treats the physical transformation matter-of-factly, which makes it more disturbing.
Bodies slowly transformed by an alien biome, horror through biology rather than violence.
Write a scene where a character notices something subtly wrong with their own body: a texture that wasn't there, a movement they didn't initiate, a sensation that has no explanation. Don't reveal the cause. Let the wrongness build through physical specificity.