Is all horror “body horror”? Can we think of the horror genre without thinking about the body’s messy and intimate materiality? This chapter looks at some of the queasier manifestations of horror culture, a mode that foregrounds questions of the body’s (and the reader’s or viewer’s) limits. Despite body horror’s association with recent cinema, this chapter argues for a longer and more diverse lineage for the term, an attention to embodied experience and its grotesque transformations that can be found in US fiction from Charles Brockden Brown’s spontaneous combustions in Wieland (1798) through to the zombie apocalypse novels of the twenty-first century. The emphasis is placed on five main types of body horror and their differences: hybrid corporeality, parasitism, abjection and disgust, the grotesque, and, finally, body horror built around gore and the explicit rendering of violence.

This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer creators have intentionally deployed such Gothicisms for the sake of representing queerness. This chapter explores the conflicting purposes of horror’s depiction of queerness by reviewing several Gothic tropes as they appear in American horror texts, focusing specifically on monstrosity, vampirism, the asylum, medical body horror, and haunting.