At the controversial intersection of graphic violence in pop culture and women’s liberation in politics, you’ll find the taboo and too often overlooked subgenre of feminist body horror. In 2025, Coralie Fargeat, Demi Moore, and Margaret Qualley are changing all that with “The Substance”: a triumphant all-timer that was nominated for five Oscars , including Best Picture and Best Director. These extreme female-centric movies wield over-the-top gore and violence like exacting scalpels, peeling away society’s thick skin of deference and niceties (you know, the surface-level subjections too many men regard as pre-requisites for women deserving safety and respect?) to reveal an insidious underbelly of gendered violence, gendered shame, gendered betrayal, gendered hell.
You’ll see flourishes of those themes in all kinds of movies, including last year’s “The First Omen” and “Alien: Romulus.” But movies like “The Substance” and Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch” — starring Amy Adams as a young mom who shape-shifts into a dog — make a meal of them for their movie’s entire duration. As with all body horror, these feminist themes can play out in (.
.. or on) the flesh of the hero, villain, or both.
What sets them apart is not who wins and who dies, who suffers and who laughs, who has a penis and who doesn’t, but the emotional and sociopolitical motivations behind the filmmakers’ decision to shock — and even brutalize — their audiences with violent.