Body Horror: Man Is The Warmest Place To Hide vs. Long Live The New Flesh
There's an interesting dichotomy between most body horror, like The Thing, and the works of the genre's master, David Cronenberg. Where most will focus on the horror aspects, making it an outward threat, playing up the paranoia in wondering whether the people around you really are what they seem (Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is, perhaps, the ur-example of this), Cronenberg showed it in a transformative light, made it something inward that the characters eventually embrace as they transcend their humanity. Really, Cronenberg's body horror isn't horror at all, it just uses the similar imagery to create a surrealist formula unlike any other. Shivers is an interesting example, beginning as a horror until the parasites are accepted instead as symbiotes. Nobody's very happy to be forcefully bonded with them, but afterward they're having a great time.
I suppose the nearest the Cronenberg's themes have come to being explored in other works was Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, where the benign yet disfiguring disease the teenage outcasts are afflicted with amounts to a sign of growing up. It's how each of them faces it that decides how they retain their humanity.
I suppose the real question is why Cronenberg only wants to make action movies with Viggo Mortensen anymore.
So, uh, what're you guys up to?