Body Horror / The DCU

The DCU

Comic Books

Comic Books

• Animal Man:
  • In Grant Morrison's first story arc, the super-powered (and temporarily insane) Nature Hero B'wana Beast, in a series of failed attempts to rescue his kidnapped ape friend Djuba, uses his telekinetic helmet to fuse various animals together (including a homeless man and a rat). When Djuba dies from laboratory smallpox inoculation, B'wana Beast avenges her by fusing her body with that of Dr. Myers, the scientist responsible. The lab technicians, not recognizing their supervisor, prepare to do ape surgery without anesthesia while their fully aware victim, attempting to stop them, can only grunt "Ma urrs! Ma urrs!"
  • The "Rotworld" arc for the New 52 features horrifying creatures of "the Rot". These creatures can devour people's insides and take the person's form by wearing their skin. Also, the longer they wear that skin, the more that form deteriorates, until the form doesn’t even look remotely human anymore.
• Batman:
  • Clayface III must stay in a containment suit because his touch disintegrates any living thing he touches. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth depicts him as naked, gaunt, and with yellow, flaking skin.
  • The Corrosive Man's skin releases acid and he can feel every bit of it.
  • Depending on the Artist, as well as in Batman: The Animated Series and the Batman: Arkham Series, Two-Face's scarring isn't just limited to his face, but also involves his left arm.
  • The New 52 rendition of the Joker has a fellow villain slice all of the flesh off his face. Then, in Death of the Family, the Joker reattaches the skin to his face with straps sewn into the skin.
  • Batman: Damned:
    • Usually, Deadman's design is just a red-suit with a high-collar. Here, it's designed to look like muscly sinew without skin.
    • Demonic Possession by Deadman turns the possessed person's eyes red, their skin blue and causes their veins to bulge as though they are being choked to death. It feels as pleasant as it sounds, the experience compared to food poisoning and Deadman's spirit ejected as quickly as it occurs from the strain.
    • When Harley sexually assaults Batman, she unbuttons her shirt, revealing that she has a full-torso, crudely stitched Y-shaped incision as if she'd been autopsied.
  • Poison Ivy (2022): Ivy's lamia spores cause anyone they infect to sprout fungi from their bodies, killing them instantly. As they die, their bodies become compost and the art really sells how unsettling the transformation is to see. The spores also have an effect on Ivy, causing protrusions that resemble dead leaves to grow on her skin and she has to shave them off frequently.
  • A group of Red Robin villains called the Council of Spiders cause body horror for their victims. First there's Funnel, who has created a poison she describes as horribly painful. It somehow causes the victim's skin to start exuding tendril-like things which almost look like spider webs, presumably a combination of sweat and minerals from the victim's body. Then there's Sac, a Pest Controller who can make his "spiders" lay eggs in people, at which point he's able to listen in on their surroundings. When he's done using them as a spy, he has the eggs hatch, chew and claw their way out of the victim en masse, killing them.
  • Robin (1993): The unwitting test subjects of Strader Pharmaceuticals' debilitating Psycho Serum start looking more and more monstrous with each appearance. Eventually their bodies start liquefying around their veins while they're fighting the mercenaries Strader sent to clean up their mess.
• Doppelganger, a villainess introduced in Issue 1 of Green Arrow: The Midas Touch (Volume 5 of his solo line and the first of the New 52 reboot), is presumably a shapeshifter. Within panels of her first appearance, she hulks out, bulking up and shredding a good portion of her slinky black dress. Any fanservice this might have been played for is immediately thrown out the window as she not only grows an extra set of arms, but a second face — still stuck to the first one as if it were a conjoined twin — and breaks out into warts.◊ Appropriately so, Ollie quips that she's making him nauseated and her accomplice Supercharge refers to her as a freak when Dynamix (the third member of their villainous trio) wonders where she's been taken after they've all been incarcerated.
• Justice League of America:
  • Dr. Destiny was afflicted with this during the late 1980s and early 1990s (mostly notably his appearances in The Sandman (1989) and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth) extending the original rationale for the Skull for a Head (his face shriveling as a result of the League ridding him of his ability to dream) to his whole body becoming emaciated. Grant Morrison, the writer of Arkham Asylum, even stated in their notes they never bought the classic Skeletor-esque look.
  • The Amazo Virus in Justice League (2011) had this going on. It depowered superpowered heroes and those it did give powers to would gain them in horrific ways (Batman was blinded when he was becoming more like a bat and had blood leaking from his face, including Tears of Blood). Armen Ikarus, Patient Zero, for the virus, ended up with a messed up mouth, bulging veins, losing most of his hair, and even patches of exposed muscle.
• The original Omega Men series had Kalista get mind-raped by an organism which did so by stealing her shape and memories, leaving her an unrecognizable blob. While this is happening, she starts losing her shape, then her features, then her ability to perceive things, then the ability to think. It's horrifying, and it doesn't help that she begs for it to stop the entire time.
• Plastic Man veers into this territory sometimes.
• Static: Season One: The more unfortunate victims of the Big Bang can be seen having their faces melt off. That's not even getting into Adam Evans' condition, being perpetually spread out like a chewed piece of gum, unable to do anything except futilely plead for help.
• The Basilik's cult cyber-zombie virus from Suicide Squad (New 52, volume 4). One unfortunately cursed woman was turned into a giant, tentacled blob and thankfully killed (as she requested).
• Superman:
  • Adventures of Superman: In issue #466, four NASA shuttle crew members encounter a type of radiation and suffer bodily mutations. One of them, as an example, has his body reformed into a mass of rock only with pieces of the shuttle mixed in. The pain drives him to commit suicide by way of an MRI machine, which rips him apart.
  • Bizarrogirl: As she's dreaming, Kara sees Superwoman's flesh melting off until the villain becomes a flaming living skeleton.
  • The Day the Cheering Stopped: When the massive power of an ancient sword begins flooding Superman's body, his skin starts cracking, making him look like a human jigsaw.
  • Superboy (1994): After Agenda's experiments on him cause his body to start breaking down, Superboy's skin starts bubbling and sloughing off.
  • Supergirl (1982): One of Supergirl's college teachers undergoes an experiment which turns him into a repulsive mutated creature: his body is huge and hairless, his eyes are two large, red balls without pupils, his limbs are ridiculously long and thin and his feet have only two fingers each.
  • The Supergirl from Krypton (2004) sees Superman fly to the edge of Creation fighting Darkseid and, lo, they beheld... an infinitely vast wall of living, breathing, screaming flesh and faces that act as the "wall" between Creation and the nothingness beyond, the Source Wall. Its current form is apparently made of everyone who's ever tried and failed to pass through it and discover the secrets hidden on its other side.
  • In Who is Superwoman?, the body of the titular villain becomes hideously stretched out and deformed before falling apart and exploding when her Magitek super-suit gets ripped apart.
• Swamp Thing:
  • Though later retconned into "a plant who thought it was Alec Holland", the original story is a man turning into a strange plant monster, incapable of even speech, and having to try and cope with it.
  • Later on, around Brightest Day and the New 52 reboot, Alec is brought back from the dead, and it turns out that the plant that thought it was Alec was an accident — Alec himself was supposed to have become Swamp Thing. Since Alec is back and the plant is out of the picture, Alec finds himself targeted for the transformation...
• Tales from the Dark Multiverse:
  • Blackest Night has Sinestro as a Black and White or Limbo Lantern, after trying to kill himself for his failure. As a result he's halfway between life and death, with one half of his body being visibly decayed.
  • Knightfall has Bruce mutilated by Azrael, all his limbs removed, his skullcap removed and his head separated from his body, but still kept alive for thirty years at Wayne Tower.
• In the Fully Absorbed Finale crossover series Tangent: Superman's Reign, the Clayface of the Tangent Comics universe is still a shapeshifter like the one in the standard DCU, but has the default form of a huge behemoth with skin slowly melting off the body and portions of the musculature exposed.
• In The Trial of the Flash, Big Sir mutilates Flash's face with an energy mace, distorting it beyond recognition. When a couple of kids unmask the Flash, they scream in terror and run away.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Diana has been reverted to clay on a couple of occasions, which generally starts with her skin hardening and her hands getting shattered.
  • Wonder Woman (1942): Queen Atomia's two Mook Makers horrifically and permanently alter her human victims in two distinct and horrifying ways. Her Nutron Converter is Unwilling Roboticisation turned up to eleven, with the resulting mooks all identical with only enough grey matter left to be susceptible to a Jedi Mind Trick, they are functionally dead. Her Protons started out as human individuals before going through her Proton Machine and becoming identical young women in appearance, with a ring around their heads that has branches that go straight into the skull who obey her every whim and question nothing.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): Those Ares possesses suffer from catastrophic Possession Burnout, which tends to start with them smoking and their flesh bubbling before sloughing away and leaving a pile of smoldering bones as their remains.

Films

Films

• Batman & Robin features a painful transformation scene of the villain Bane, who grows ungodly huge muscles by having "Gatorade" pumped directly into his skull. This was intended as a family-friendly film.

Video Games

Video Games

• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • Much like in Batman: The Animated Series, the Arkham version of Two-Face doesn't just suffer from Facial Horror, but the scars extend to at least his left arm as well. A hallucination of the Joker in Batman: Arkham Knight makes a comment that not-subtly questions whether or not Dent's penis also suffers the same scarring.
  • The Joker in Batman: Arkham City certainly counts, as he is covered in a giant red rash due to the Titan he injected himself with in Batman: Arkham Asylum poisoning him. The Joker hallucination in Arkham Knight starts out this way, with the twist that the rash slowly gets better over the course of the game, as each time Batman gets fear-gassed by Scarecrow, the Joker personality is able to exert more and more control. By the end of the game, he is as squeaky clean as he was in Asylum.
  • Joker's blood also infects several people in Batman: Arkham Knight, bleaching their skin, turning their hair green, and giving them the same nasty "rash" Joker had (as well as giving them a fragment of Joker's personality, but that's another story).

Western Animation

Western Animation

• The Batman: Clayface's couple of minutes of screen time in "The Clayface of Tragedy" combine this with Tear Jerker.
• Batman Beyond:
  • Terry's arch-nemesis from the first season, Blight. After getting radiation treatment from his own nerve gas, he turns into a living blight emitting radiation that ruins anything (or anyone) he touches. He looks like a blackened skeleton surrounded by a green glow in the shape of a man. He has fake skin that erodes away when he gets angry and lets out excess radiation. Over time, the radiation eats away at his sanity and causes him to eventually lose his mind and fully assume the role of Blight.
  • Inque, a shape-shifting mutant who provides plenty of canon fetishes for the technician who releases her from a cryogenics facility in "Disappearing Inque". She dupes him in the nastiest way imaginable. She also likes to engage in Orifice Invasion and at one point tries to suffocate the protagonist by forcing herself down his throat.
  • Jackson Chappell from "The Winning Edge" is rendered an obscenely muscled but brain-dead vegetable after an overdose of steroid patches. He didn't look so good before that, though; like his charge and employer Bane, the overdose seemed like it was about to tear his muscles through his skin. And speaking of Bane, he wasn't doing too well in the episode either, going in the opposite direction entirely: He seemed to have lost the entirety of his musculature to venom abuse and age, leaving him a bag of squalid, semi-catatonic skin and bones.
  • There's also Magma, one of the Terrific Trio from "Heroes". Imagine Clayface made of magma and you got the idea.
  • "Earth Mover" features a rotting, living corpse who was buried alive with a radioactive chemical that fused his body into the surrounding dirt.
  • "Splicers" is about this new fad of people (mostly teenagers) getting some animal genetics mixed with their body so they look like human/animal hybrids, including a bull, a snake, and a big cat (sounds really familiar for some reason). Even Terry McGinnis involuntarily becomes an actual batman until he got better. However, the really bad part is when, after splicing becomes illegal since it makes people more aggressive, Batman goes to confront the guy who invented the process, who then turns himself into some weird Hawk-tiger-snake thing he calls a "true Chimera" and after knocking away Terry's gun filled with mutagen cure-all, Terry starts sticking the villain with multiple syringes. The villain then transforms into a disgusting creature that is even today one of the most disturbing things ever put into a kid's show. Unless you want to possibly be scared witless and lose some sleep, Take Our Word for It. Otherwise...◊
    Cuvier: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!
  • Big Time from "Big Time" and "Betrayal" was at first a big-mouth teen before mutating into a grey, hulking brute.
  • "Ace in the Hole" features a dog-fighting club whose owner uses steroids on the dogs. The first test subject is... a bit overdone.
• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • Kirk Langstrom turning into Man-Bat in "On Leather Wings".
  • In "Feat of Clay, Part 2", Clayface suffocates Batman with an attack lifted frame-for-frame from AKIRA. (TMS Entertainment worked both on Akira and this episode.) Near the end, confronted with images of his acting roles, he starts morphing involuntarily in a Superpower Meltdown scene which can only be described as a cross between Tetsuo's final mutation and T-1000-in-the-smelter.
  • In "Heart of Steel, Part 2", an android contorts his limbs horribly in order to chase Batman down an elevator shaft. The commentary mentions that this was an homage to Legend of the Overfiend.
  • Poison Ivy makes a habit of creating plant creatures that can pass for human. These often reveal themselves to be horrifying monsters. In "House & Garden", Poison Ivy appeared to have reformed, marrying a college professor and becoming stepmother to his two sons. However, it turns out that the professor and his children are clones made from plant matter, and they only stay "human" for three days before turning into something that looks like Swamp Thing after a lawnmower accident. On another occasion, Ivy rips the skin off of the upper torso of one of these creatures like it's a shirt, revealing the green flesh underneath. This is enough to cause onlooker Robin to start to heave (he's saved from actual puking by Batgirl).
  • At the end of "Bane", the titular muscleman gets a little too much Venom. His appearance in Batman & Robin absolutely pales in comparison.
  • Two-Face isn't just scarred on the left side of his head, but also has scarring on at least his arm.
• Justice League:
  • In "Panic in the Sky", Supergirl kills Galatea by... smashing a giant freaking power cable from the Watchtower's main reactor into her stomach, right as it's being turned on. As Supergirl and an injured Steel limp away, you see Galatea twitching, her skin grey and a massive scar on her stomach. It's not entirely certain that killed her, but that might only make things worse.
  • At the end of the same episode, Brainiac morphs Lex Luthor's body into some bizarre hybrid of biology and technology. Not to mention revealing itself involved tearing its way out of his body, somehow bloodlessly but still ripping holes in his torso and entirely destroying his limbs.
• Legion of Super Heroes (2006): Timber Wolf undergoes a forced transformation into a werewolf-man, which also gives him superpowers. At least one instance shows his spine starting to protrude from his back. Also, his feet normally have five toes, but when he's in his feral form, they're down to three — make of this what you will. The others experience some form of this, such as Bouncing Boy being splattered against a wall (don't worry, he lives) and them being transformed magically into monsters by evil wizard Mordru.
• Static Shock: In "Junior", the attention-seeking son of wealthy Edwin Alva uses gas from the Big Bang to grant himself various superpowers so that he will gain attention from his dad as a supervillain. At the end of the episode, all of the containers for the gas pop at once, which causes him to transform unpredictably — the final form he takes is some sort of horrible, one-eyed, tentacley thing, but shortly afterwards reverts to normal and turns to stone, which only makes Alva's earlier remark about wanting a statue creepier.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • In the episode "The Beast Within", Beast Boy is infected with a virus that turns him into a werewolf-like monster. When he transforms for the first time, he reacts like it's very painful.
  • When Red Star transforms involuntarily, every molecule of his body goes from solid to liquid to gas to plasma in a nanosecond.
• Teen Titans Go!:
  • Beast Boy's painful-looking attempt to turn into a hippogriff in "Friendship".
  • In "Truth, Justice, and... What?", the Titans other than Robin try to mutate themselves into turtles to hang with the Turtle Dudes by drinking Mutagenic Goo. They succeed, but the transformation is clearly very painful and a few seconds later, they're shown in the tower's infirmary after Robin de-mutated them.
  • When Bumblebee moves in with the Titans, they force her to sleep in the same room as the tower's nuclear reactor. While she's sleeping, one of the hoses comes loose and fills the room with radioactive gas, eventually mutating her into an enormous blob monster. The other Titans assume their mistreatment of her throughout the whole episode is the cause.

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