ohhh!!! oh... this is a good question. there’s a whole lot of body horror I enjoy and I don’t think I’m capable of even listing everything down off the top of my head. to me, good body horror is ultimately about a fear of losing your humanity and/or self/identity or an invasion of/attack on the human body/self/form— something familiar being warped into something unrecognizable and wrong and the existential horror that comes with it, or even more generally, things happening to a body that shouldn’t, and so on. the imagery you choose is only half of it. a shapeshifter/monster doing normal monstery things that are natural for their body of their own will is going to feel different when compared to a person’s body turning/changing into something they don’t want, even if you use exactly the same visuals. I love the former, but I don’t consider it body horror. it’s just regular creepiness/horror.

I think I can like anything if I find it sufficiently unsettling! there’s so many different, unique types of body horror with their own merits, and I love it all. I think if I had to choose a favourite thing, it would be a human body rendered completely unrecognizable, with no semblance of a recognizable human shape and no remaining humanoid features, except little things that might not be instantly noticeable... It’s tempting to include some to tip the viewer off to what something was, and that serves it’s purpose for a different type of great body horror I find very enjoyable, but there’s just something incredibly and uniquely sad about this particular take... even if it might not look as visually gory sometimes. I remember reading about amorphous globosus stillbirths in cattle, where a stillborn calf is deformed and is born as a... ball....a bag of skin holding meat... and that’s always stuck with me. another particular specific thing I like is humans getting really fucked up from living for impossibly long periods of time or being kept artificially alive by someone else against their will where it’s ambiguous whether this counts as “living” anymore. In terms of media, while this is absolutely not everything because I have a TERRIBLE MEMORY— I’ve always been a big fan of what junji ito does, and I have no mouth and I must scream has been a favourite piece of mine for years... dorohedoro, fullmetal alchemist and trigun also has some great stuff... and not gonna lie, some of the best body horror I’ve read has been from internet stories written by people with the intent of one upping others in a grossout contest. I cannot possibly recount them now because I barely remember most of them but I do remember the impact they left, even if they were a little corny by some standards.