Body Horror / Music

• The Living Tombstone's video for Drunk is a prime example of this. And considering that the guest animator is JaimeR this isn't a surprise. Such horrors include...
  • The main character's head imploding while materializing a beer bottle and behaving like a deflated balloon after drinking his 4th drink and achieving a drunken state.
  • Him squashing and stretching into a terrifying skeletal form as he rants about losing more money then he can afford on alcohol and wondering if it was out of boredom or if he's really insecure about his appearance or something else entirely.
  • After that his head detaches from his body as it becomes a corkscrew and his body only showing up to pull the cork from the wine as his head returns to it's normal shape before being taken in by the wine itself.
  • Then said head pukes out eyeless and noseless copies of it’s self to form a human nautilus swimming in the wine before transforming again into his inner ear.
  • After his second trip to the bar, the main character starts to hallucinate red blood shot eyes staring at him and then proceeds to literally puke his face off revealing his skull as he laments about getting hungover and losing his friends but is willing to do it again despite himself.
  • The main character turns into his own brain as two hands with red eyes grab it forms back to his normal head looking distraught before reattaching to his body and going in a free fall.
• Frequently Played for Laughs in the music of The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, most notably in the appropriately-titled "Burrow Your Way to my Heart", "Hookworm" (Oh, God, "Hookworm"), and "The Innsmouth Look".
• Michael Jackson's transformations into a werecat and zombie in his music video "Thriller". And his real life facial transformations even more!
  • And his robot transformation in Moonwalker.
• There is no end to the mayhem in Michael Jackson's mini movie Ghosts. Michael (as "The Maestro") pulls a few funny faces and then pulls his face off as if it were a mask. Later on he pulls his entire skin off and does a song and dance number as a skeleton, and then he turns into a ghoul. He turns into water and possesses the mayor (by having the mayor drink him - um, Squick). Then his arm bursts out of the mayor's chest and causes the mayor to turn into a ghoul. He turns back to normal (for Michael) and crumbles into dust - then he appears as a giant ghoul face which scares the "Mayor" into leaping to his doom.
  • It just gets weird when his nose starts crumbling.
  • The Jackson 5's Torture. Early on, one of the brothers accidentally pushes his hand into a giant eyeball, getting his hand stuck in eye goo. He pulls it out, only to discover there's an eyeball in his palm.
• A music video by "Weird Al" Yankovic titled "Fat" (a parody of "Bad") has Al becoming a fat man. It's much creepier than that description alone would indicate.
  • Al has claimed he became a vegan because he's terrified of being morbidly obese after doing that video.
• A great many Death Metal songs feature lyrics about this trope to some degree. It's probably easier to list the bands in this genre that haven't done this at least once in their discography.
• The full version of the "Rock DJ" music video by Robbie Williams, which involves Robbie stripping to get the attention of a female DJ. When he gets down to bare skin, he decides that isn't enough, so he begins to peel all of his flesh off, layer by layer, until he's left as an animated dancing skeleton. Naturally, this gets the DJ's attention.
• The video for "Rubber Johnny" by Aphex Twin is this trope distilled to its essence. It's all from a night vision camera viewpoint as these unseen characters watch as this freakish, vaguely human thing with bulbous eyes and a twitchy disposition slowly goes from content to a body spasmy berserk rage, interspersed with scenes of a dog that happens to share the same traits. And that's only the beginning.
• Then there's the end of Radiohead's "There There" video, which gives us the image of lead singer Thom Yorke turning into a tree complete with a twisted screaming expression permanently grafted onto the front.
• Daft Punk gives us "The Prime Time Of Your Life". A young woman in a world, judging by her photographs, inhabited by skeletons decides to become one...using a razor. Once she gets her skin off, she dies. Her parents rush in, and the camera pans over the pictures again - everyone's normal. She was anorexic.
• The Slippermen from the Genesis song "The Colony Of Slippermen". They are Body Horror combined with a very literal version of Sex Changes Everything.
• The Music video for MGMT's Flash Delirum involves two guys coming back home, one has a bandage over a wound, halfway through the video he removes the bandage to reveal a singing slit in his throat, a guy reaches down into his throat and pulls out a long,disgusting fish, it's something you don't want to watch while eating.
• The music video for Torul's All, which contains a woman in a mirror applying makeup. Halfway through the video the mirror woman's eyes bleed. Near the end she is seen as an old woman...possibly.
• The end of Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More" certainly qualifies. Biggest problem, other than the cannibalism itself, is that she's still very much awake and attempting to squirm even as the knife goes in....
• The Talking Heads' "Seen and Not Seen" is one of the subtlest examples of body horror on this list, especially since it is delivered in a near monotone. It tells the story of a man who tries to mold his own face into the ideal he sees in the media using the force of his own will. He imagines that other people have the same ability, and mold their faces to suit their personalities. But then he comes to wondering if some people might have chosen their ideal poorly, and arrived at a face completely different from them, or could be stuck in transition between two faces, neither of which they want. The song ends with David Byrne intoning, "He wonders if he too might have made a similar mistake."
• The concept of Lou Reed's video for "No Money Down" involves an edition of Reed tearing off his own skin in a grotesque manner to reveal a robotic version of himself.
• The entire video of Bacterial Contamination sung by Hatsune Miku. Even scarier when you realize the context of the song.
  • The lyrics imply, however, that the body horror is purely symbolic and not actually happening to anyone. The implications of this, however, make the body horror even more unsettling.
• The song The Invasion From Within by Tsunami Bomb was all about this, via a Puppeteer Parasite. The song was used in the US release of the original Disgaea but had nothing to do with the plot.
• Shakira describes a certain horrific way of making love in her single "long time"
  • "I wish I had longer legs that I could fasten to your body so you'd take me with you everywhere"
• Lemon Demon's CryptoSanta references the trope directly:
  Body horror, tendons snapping / Ribbons and wrapping, stocking stuffing / Skin is sloughing, bones are bowing / Something is growing / Something. Ohhhh!
• An early example of this in music is the English traditional song "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye", first released in Originally a dark parody of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", it is now known primarily as an anti-war song. The eponymous Johnny is a young soldier who comes home from Ceylon (Sri Lanka today), the song gradually detailing injuries he suffered from the war until the second-to-last stanza reveals him to be an "armless, boneless, chickenless egg".
• The music video for "Ready, Steady, Go" by Paul Oakenfold, which was originally featured in The Bourne Identity. While the track itself is rather good, but the special effects tend to look off. Specially when the main character's face morphs from a baby to an adult.
• The infamous video for DyE's "Fantasy" starts as what seems like a poolside hentai but quickly goes south as some teenage kids getting graphically turned into abominations. One girl seemingly escapes through a Portal Pool, only to encounter the source of the mutations and Go Mad from the Revelation; the mere sight of it (it's MILES high) is enough of a Brown Note to make her eyeballs explode into streaking lines of flames.
• The Animated Music Video for Boys Latin by Panda Bear of Animal Collective involves people touching a sea anemone, causing anemone-like growths to form on their bodies.
• The music video for House of Gold by Twenty One Pilots has the duo performing while missing their lower bodies, complete with their intestines hanging out.
• Metallica's "One" is about a soldier who lost his limbs and senses to a land mine. On life support in a hospital, unable to communicate or interact with anyone, he feels completely isolated and wishes he would be allowed to die.
• The music video for IC3PEAK's "Fairytale" features a weird old woman that twists everyone and everything into fleshy abominations. The creator of this video has a fixation on this trope.
• Implied in Zager and Evans' In The Year 2525, where humanity loses the need for things like limbs, eyes, teeth, and classic reproduction thanks to machines.
• Argentinean rock band Kapanga's music video for "Postal" (from 2004's Esta!) has its protagonist being slowly turned into a cardboard person, as a metaphor for the deep poverty the lower classes of the country were suffering during the early TOTM.
• The Aquabats!:
  • "Amino Man" is about a bodybuilder who becomes so huge he "runs out of skin to strain".
  Where are his eyes? Where are his eyes?
  Something's got to give
  • "Radiation Song" has lyrics about growing all sorts of nasty mutations during the nuclear post-apocalypse.

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