The term “body horror” is largely self-explanatory, so self-explanatory, in fact, that its shadow stretches over much of the horror canon. At its core, body horror is concerned with the violation, transformation, or loss of control of the human body, but it can take many different forms.

Since The Substance, some of the body horror films currently in vogue have leaned toward speculative premises, where a pill (Saccharine), injection (Grafted), or contaminated substance (Together) causes potentially horrific changes within the subject. The source of the horror varies, but the underlying fear remains the same: losing control over your own body and being forced to watch it become something you no longer recognize.

Other films approach body horror through cannibalism or vampirism, such as Raw, Trouble Every Day, or Bones and All. Here, the horror comes not only from the act of devouring another person but from what that appetite does to the person doing the devouring. Werewolves and zombies can fall into a similar category when the emphasis is placed on physical transformation, infection, decomposition, or the loss of bodily autonomy.

Then there are films in which the body is violated by someone else. Boxing Helena, for example, tells the story of an obsessive surgeon who stalks an ex-lover and eventually amputates her limbs to keep her with him. Films like this have often faced backlash, while some of the more extreme examples have circulated primarily through the home-video market, such as Guinea Pig: Flowers of Flesh and Blood.

There was, however, a small period in the early 2000s when the success of Saw coincided with a greater appetite for graphic violence, and films like Hostel reaped the benefits. Of course, Saw’s sudden breakout did not occur in a vacuum. Growing exposure to extreme cinema from Japan and France, along with the work of Western independent auteurs, helped create an environment in which American audiences were becoming increasingly accustomed to graphic depictions of violence, bodily mutilation, and taboo subjects. 

More recent examples of body horror involving externally inflicted bodily alteration include Tusk, The Skin I Live In, and Crimes of the Future, though Crimes of the Future shows us a world in which bodily modification can involve willing participants. You also see a version of this in the first half of The Ugly Stepsister.

Mind you, the latter half of The Ugly Stepsister is also a great example of a rarer form of body horror: self-harm or self-mutilation. A clearer example of this is the film Swallow, a personal favourite of mine, which involves a lonely housewife who becomes addicted to swallowing dangerous household objects.

And that brings me to Marina de Van’s 2002 film In My Skin, perhaps the mother of all self-mutilation movies and an important piece of the French Extremity canon that I have let pass me by for far too long.

If you are unfamiliar with French Extremity, it can probably be best summed up as a movement in French film that combined the graphic nature of exploitation cinema with the intellectual and artistic ambitions of art-house filmmaking. These films were not always horror films per se, at least not in a traditional sense, think Trouble Every Day or Irreversible, but were often embraced by the horror community because the gore went beyond what audiences were accustomed to seeing in mainstream cinema. It’s hard to get through these films without cringing or needing to look away at least once.

And that brings me to Marina de Van’s 2002 film In My Skin, perhaps the mother of all self-mutilation movies and an important piece of the French Extremity canon that I have let pass me by for far too long.

In My Skin is better described as a drama than a horror film. In fact, horror became more synonymous with the genre in its second wave. Yet the queasy feeling I experienced watching many of its scenes was more powerful than anything I’ve felt from the vast majority of horror films. One might categorize some of its scenes as extreme.

God, I miss this period in cinema.

In My Skin, directed by Marina de Van, follows Esther (also played by Marina de Van), who injures her leg while wandering the grounds of a house during a party with work colleagues, where she hopes to network for her marketing career. The cut, which was caused by her tripping over industrial debris, is severe, but she goes through the party unaware of it until she finds she’s bleeding in the bathroom at the end of the night.

Esther sees a doctor, who finds it strange that she never felt any pain during the party. Esther, for her part, finds the cut fascinating…maybe a little too fascinating.

And this begins an obsession with mutilating her body that keeps getting in the way of her professional and personal life.

I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who remembers David Cronenberg’s notorious 1996 erotic thriller Crash about a subculture of people who got off seeing, or being in, car crashes. Coming only six years later, In My Skin might feel like a natural progression of that fascination with fetishism and spectacle. But the fact that Esther suffers alone makes the experience different. Her experience could easily act as a metaphor for any addictive behaviour, an experience made more relatable by her climb up the corporate ladder before heading towards her eventual downfall.

In interviews, de Van has claimed the motivation for the film is based on her own experience. Reviews with a feminist slant have noted Esther’s self-destructive behaviour as part of a desire to take ownership over her own body. But for me, what is most interesting is how, like Hunter in Swallow, Esther’s addiction increasingly distorts her state of mind, to the point that her real life, her boyfriend, her job, and her everyday responsibilities, begin to feel like an inconvenience, or even an illusion, compared with the world she has created around her obsession…and not the other way around.

And you have to admire Marina de Van’s commitment to bringing her vision to the screen. Though In My Skin embraces the sensational and transgressive qualities traditionally associated with exploitation cinema, they feel a little less exploitative when the woman putting her own body on display is also the one directing the project. 

However, if you like clear resolutions, you might find the film’s ending a bit disappointing. Personally, I felt we had reached the end, and I can handle some ambiguity, so I didn’t mind. I appreciate all that’s implied and it’s not like we can’t imagine what comes next. 

In My Skin combines strikingly realistic gore with a subversive descent-into-madness tale. Marina de Van makes us voyeurs to Esther’s increasingly dark desires, resulting in scenes that can be wonderfully darkly humorous one moment and masterfully stomach-turning the next. It belongs to an uncommon subset of body horror centered on self-harm that remains grounded because the horror isn’t supernatural and is not being perpetrated by another. The horror lives in our own heads, and that makes it tragically relatable.