The grossest, goriest movies to watch after The Substance (2024)

Right now, gory horror movies are really taking their pound of flesh at the box office. Not only did Damien Leone's triumphant Terrifier 3 beat out Joker: Folie à Deux to the number one spot this past weekend, Coralie Fargeat's gnarly body horror The Substance has been the talk of Twitter since it hit cinemas on 20 September.

And, earlier in the year, acid-blood-spurting Alien sequel Romulus became the second-highest-grossing film in the franchise after 2012's Prometheus, while brutal slasher In a Violent Nature was one of the biggest hits at the Sundance Film Festival.

But what's driving our collective blood thirst at the multiplex? Perhaps it's a similar principle to what has led to the continued success of horror movies at large. Films replete with body horror and gore are communal endurance tests for film-goers, such is why savvy marketers like to amplify (often exaggerated) stories of audiences fainting in their seats or throwing up in the aisles to sell tickets. You go, you squirm in your seat at the visceral fabricated violence, you live to tell the tale. It's all in good fun, if you have the guts.

But that doesn't mean you can't wade into the splatterverse at home. Get comfy, fill up a bloodbath — here's where to start with gory horror movies.

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

It's the 1890s, and Kurt Russell is Franklin Hunt, the sheriff of a frontier town in the old West. After a tribe of inbred, violent cave dwellers descend on the town and kidnap a handful of its people, Hunt brings together a posse to recover them, sending them into the local mountains; some die on the way in a skirmish with the tribespeople, while the others are captured.

Grossest moment: Bone Tomahawk is mostly on this list for its most notoriously stomach-churning scene, in which the sheriff's young deputy (played by Evan Jonigkeit) is hacked in half lengthwise, like a split hotdog bun, starting with his, uh, crotch. Yeah, definitely one of the worst ways to go.

Day of the Dead (1985)

George A. Romero's third …of the Dead instalment is set in a subterranean military base somewhere in Florida, some time after the zombie epidemic seen in Night and Dawn has laid waste to humankind. Inside live a handful of scientists, working diligently towards a cure — or, at least, a way to domesticate the creatures above, as embodied by Dr. Logan's (Richard Liberty) experiments on Bub (Sherman Howard), a zombie who has recovered a sliver of his humanity — and a squad of meatheaded soldiers led by Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato). The groups frequently come to blows … and then, in Day of the Dead's final act, the zombies get in.

Grossest moment: Rhodes discovers that Dr. Logan has been feeding the flesh of dead soldiers to Bub to satisfy his hunger and promptly executes him; in the meantime, the zombies breach the bunker's defences, and go about tearing the surviving grunts apart in variously horrifying and grotesque ways. (One poor guy gets his head ripped off, his scream raising in pitch as his vocal cords are strung out of his neck.) The worst of it goes to Rhodes, however, who is vengefully shot by Bub and falls into a waiting horde, who tear him literally limb from limb.

Braindead (1992)

Before The Lord of the Rings — hell, even before 1994's Heavenly Creatures — Peter Jackson made his name with a couple of cheeky horror-comedies, not least 1992 practical splatter-thon Braindead. It's a delightfully batshit film, to put it plainly: there's a zombie baby (who tears its way through an old woman's face), a priest who “kicks arse for the lord,” and it's often cited as one of the bloodiest movies ever made (literally, there's gallons of it).

Grossest moment: Braindead is cartoonishly gross throughout, such is the fun of it all. But fans often point to its lawnmower scene — in which hero Lionel (Timothy Balme) dispatches of a horde of zombified party revellers with, you guessed it, a motorised lawnmower blade.

The Thing (1982)

In an isolated Antarctica outpost, a team of researchers are attacked by an alien interloper that can not only shape-shift to look like them, but spread itself among them. It's Kurt Russell and a flamethrower versus the most fucked up practical creatures you can imagine in John Carpenter's early '80s masterwork, which struggled at the box office before eventually finding its deserved audience as so many horror movies of the era did: on video tape.

Grossest moment: It's got to be when one of the researchers tries to defibrillate a colleague, Norris (Charles Hallahan); alas, his chest opens up to reveal giant alien jaws, which bite the poor guy's hands off. And then Norris's head falls off, grows legs, and scuttles away into the darkness.

The Sadness (2021)

Morbid curiosity got me to watch Taiwanese gore-fest The Sadness after positive reviews on the enthusiast horror film festival circuit — but this nihilistic, evil little thing is really just one for the genre buffs. It's set in Tapei amid a viral epidemic causing people to commit sadistic atrocities against one another, and follows a young couple (Berant Zhu's Jim and Regina Lei's Kat) as they fight their way across the city to reunite.

Grossest moment: There's a bit in this film in which one of the infected sexually assaults someone's eye socket, so yeah.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Drew Goddard's funny meta horror is both an ode to, and send up of, the entire horror genre: its tropes, its cliches, its famous characters and mascots, its brutal deaths and final girls. Narratively it's about a group of American college students who head to the titular cabin for a weekend getaway. There, they are slaughtered one by one by murderous ghouls — before the two survivors (Kristen Connolly's Dana and Fran Kranz's Marty) discover that a mysterious group brought them there as sacrifices to appease gigantic gods living inside the Earth.

Grossest moment: Dana and Marty, appalled by their discovery of an evil underground lab housing hundreds of horrifying creatures, unleash them from their cages, which tear apart the facility's armed guards and defenceless workers.

The Saw movies (2004 - present)

The torture porn of Saw needs little introduction: it's the go-to commercial franchise for those looking for a quick gore hit. There's ostensibly a story linking all of the films together, but they're exercises in gross-out depravity first and foremost — each new trap a demonstration of gnarlier effects, all to be watched through glances between our fingers.

Grossest moment: You could justifiably pick an individual trap from each film. But the scene that sticks with me most is the one in which someone's head is crushed between two blocks of ice in Saw IV. It's just … popped, like a grape between teeth.

The Substance (2024)

In Coralie Fargeat's indie horror hit, Demi Moore plays an ageing Hollywood superstar who takes a mysterious drug on the promise that it will return her to her youth. And yes, that sort of happens — a new, younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) emerges from her back like a creature from Alien, and the rest of the film concerns their increasingly queasy struggle to coexist.

Grossest moment: We wouldn't want to spoil the finale of a film that only came out a month ago, but the ending of The Substance is one of the ickiest things you'll ever see on the big screen.

The Fly (1987)

Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundle, a scientist trying to find the secret to teleportation, goes and turns himself into a fly in this David Cronenberg classic based on the short story by George Langelaan. Silly! You could pick plenty of Cronenberg films for a list like this — no other filmmaker is more synonymous with body horror — but The Fly is the most out-and-out gruesome, not least as it hits its climax.

Grossest moment: The aforementioned climax, when Jeff Goldblum is replaced by the towering monstrosity that is the Brundlefly, a human-housefly hybrid that spits corrosive bile and definitely isn't fun at parties.