The Boys and beyond: How TV’s latest body horror shocks and unsettles us

Body horror, huh? Yes, TV has turned the body into a stage where power writes its rules in flesh. Three current universes push that idea in radically different directions.

Peacemaker wields the gross-out as a punchline with a mean aftertaste. The Boys and Gen V treat bodies as branding and ammunition inside a warped entertainment machine. Alien: Earth strips the body down to an argument about what a person even is when biology, memory, and machinery cross wires.

The result? A wave of stories that don’t just scare; they reach into how we cope, how we look away, and why we keep watching.

These shows don’t arrive out of nowhere. They inherit a long tradition that runs from nineteenth-century fiction to late-twentieth-century cinema and manga, then loop back to streaming with new anxieties about surveillance, celebrity, and synthetic life. The thread is simple: if you want to expose the rules of a society, show what it does to the body. Hence, we have the application of body horror.

From Shelley to Junji Ito: a short lineage of body horror

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein framed the body as a moral experiment and a social wound. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde turned the split self into anatomy. Bram Stoker’s Dracula imagined infection as a map of fear.

Decades later, David Cronenberg’s films made mutation intimate, from the skin-deep transmissions of Videodrome to the tragic metamorphosis of The Fly. Manga and anime intensified the geometry of dread and the body horror: Akira stretched flesh into uncontrollable growth, while Junji Ito’s Uzumaki carved terror out of patterns that invade the human form.

Comics kept pace, folding body change into heroism and ruin. Today’s TV borrows all of that grammar and then adds platform logic, pushing transgression through humor, viral shock, and existential thought.

Peacemaker and the grotesque joke that lands in the gut

Peacemaker thrives on a tone that feels like a dare. Aliens that crawl into people’s mouths, faces that peel, fluids that spatter across rooms that look oddly ordinary. Pure body horror, right? The series pairs juvenile banter with images that would belong in a midnight horror screening, and it weaponizes the mismatch.

Laughter arrives first. Discomfort follows, because the characters have to sit with consequences the way the audience does. When a morally confused hero insists he’s doing the right thing while the show fills the frame with mangled bodies, viewers feel the whiplash as judgment, not escape.

The comedy keeps you in your seat; the rot underneath keeps you from relaxing. It’s body horror as social grit, the kind that sticks to your fingers and won’t wash off even when the scene cuts to something silly.

The Boys and Gen V: when bodies are brands and battlegrounds

In The Boys, violence is public relations disguised as heroism. The camera inside the story and the camera outside it often want the same thing: an image people can’t stop talking about. Body horror inside and outside. Heads pop on cue, limbs scatter across polished floors, and the edits feel like an algorithm learned how to choreograph outrage.

Gen V sharpens the idea by placing it on a campus where ambition meets biology in laboratories and dorm rooms. Marie Moreau’s blood control turns veins into a precision tool. The show doesn’t treat it as a magic trick; it treats it as a discipline, something she learns to read and shape. It's body pain and body horror. Bodies become data, performance, collateral, and protest. That’s the point. The horror is less about guts and more about how institutions package them.

Fans laugh, gasp, and share, and the series makes that reflex part of the critique. You’re meant to feel the tease of desensitization and the instant after, when you realize you just accepted something unforgivable as content.

Alien: Earth and the terror of losing the self

Alien: Earth moves slower and cuts deeper. Here the body is a thesis. Wendy bleeds white synthetic fluid and forces everyone around her to redraw the map of kinship and loyalty.

Hermit’s removed lung becomes an incubator, a single organ turned into a hostage situation. The Lost Boys carry childhood inside adult synthetic frames, and every conversation with them sounds like a riddle about memory and consent. Even minor creatures push the edge of what life means, as parasites repurpose anatomy and a ruined cat births an impossible eye.

The horror isn’t only pain. It’s the suffocating idea that personhood is negotiable, that a machine can inherit trauma, and that biology will be rewritten by design. When characters argue about who counts as human, the body is the evidence and the crime scene at once.

Three modes, three reactions

These modes don’t hit the audience the same way. Peacemaker uses embarrassment and laughter to pull us viewers closer. We laugh, then we catch what we just endorsed, and the laugh curdles into self-awareness.

The Boys and Gen V aim for a jolt that feels like scrolling past an outrageous clip and finding yourself complicit in the view count. The shows expose how entertainment teaches us to accept harm when it’s glossy and confident.

Alien: Earth chooses dread. It asks us to breathe inside a question with no safe exit: if bodies can be edited and souls can be copied, what’s left to protect? People don’t just flinch; they carry the scenes with them, replaying the logic long after the screen goes dark.

Power, control, and the politics of flesh

All three worlds turn anatomy into law. In Peacemaker, possession and infestation say what ideology does in the real world: it finds an opening, crawls through, and uses people’s mouths to speak.

In The Boys and Gen V, corporate science writes clauses into the body, from hidden compounds to PR-ready miracles, and then sells the results as destiny. It's body horror from inside out.

In Alien: Earth, engineers and survivors negotiate who gets to define life, who can be discarded, and why violence against the body can be called progress. The shows disagree on tone but agree on the stakes. Control the body and you control the narrative. Lose control of the body and the story rewrites you.

Why this moment of using body horror looks like this

The current wave of body horror isn’t only a trend; it’s a mirror. Audiences live with feeds that reward extremity, with medical advances that promise enhancement while raising ethical alarms, and with politics that constantly refer to bodies as problems to regulate. TV translates those pressures into visible horror because visibility is how our culture processes fear now.

Peacemaker gives us the shock in terms of body horror you can joke about, a coping mechanism with sharp edges. The Boys and Gen V give us the numbing carousel of outrageous images that still move markets and elections. Alien: Earth gives us the nightmare that won’t resolve with a quip, the one that asks whether human dignity survives when everything that made us distinct can be manufactured.

Where the tradition of body horror bends next

History suggests the form will keep mutating. The literary roots made monstrosity a metaphor for social anxiety. The body-melt/body-horror cinema of the eighties made science the culprit and the cure. Manga turned geometry and pattern into invasions of the flesh. Streaming has added the pressure of virality and the intimacy of long arcs. That’s why these three shows feel so current.

Peacemaker shows that humor doesn’t erase horror; it preserves it, letting the unease settle beneath the laugh. The Boys and Gen V insist that performance can normalize almost anything, then shove that truth in our faces. Alien: Earth argues that the oldest fear isn’t death, it’s replacement. If the body is negotiable, so is the self. And that's where body horror comes in.

Taken together, they map the modern body as a contested territory. They’re thrilling because they’re inventive. They exploit body horror. They’re disturbing because they’re accurate. And they’re essential because they force a question that refuses to fade after the credits: in a world that edits flesh, sells it, and rebuilds it, what part of us remains untouchable?