Why the grotesque is marketing gold right now

Something beautifully grotesque is clawing its way back into the cultural spotlight.

And I. Cannot. Look. Away.

While buying tickets for Dave Franco and Alison Brie’s new codependent body horror, Together, I had a thought about the genre: suddenly, it’s everywhere. I believe we’re seeing a major renaissance.

Films like The Substance (2024) and Together (2025) offer flesh, blood and bile for squirmingly good shock value. But they also excavate deep anxieties about identity, beauty and the commodification of our physical selves.

The genre, long defined by mutation, transformation and decay, feels urgently relevant in a time when our bodies and sense of self are caught in a relentless cycle of fragmentation and reinvention.

And the horror isn’t skin-deep. It’s systemic.

Where once body horror served as a vehicle for taboo or transgression, today it feels more like a mirror. The Substance is a clear example: its grotesque narrative does not serve to shallowly repulse its audience; it critiques.

It explores how ageing women are devalued by society. How beauty, youth, and worth have become inseparable in the cultural imagination. The body in this film goes beyond the site of the horror. The Substance turns the female body into a battleground.

Similarly, Together delves into identity dissolution and bodily transformation with a distinctively modern lens. The monsters are as internal as they are algorithmic, aesthetic, cultural.

In a post-social media age, we become the trends we consume.

Literally. The rise of microtrends has made the body both canvas and commodity, constantly moulded to keep pace. Whether it's buccal fat removal, "heroin chic" nostalgia, or the sudden valorisation of “natural” ageing (so long as it’s still marketable), the (acceptable) body is endlessly rewritten.

And that rewriting is violent.

Body horror gives us permission to look at that violence. To acknowledge that our flesh is being fed through an ever-churning algorithm of desirability and erasure. In this light, the genre’s exaggerated mutations feel less like fantasy and more like truth with the saturation turned up.

Crucially, the genre is evolving.

Body horror today isn’t limited to the organic form. We are living in the age of the "new flesh": AI-generated faces, filters that offer instantaneous plastic surgery, avatars that outlive our real selves.

The line between self and self-image is dissolving. Digital dysmorphia, once a fringe concern, has become foundational.

We alter our appearances to fit an aesthetic that was never real to begin with. We absorb ourselves into TikTok trend archetypes and "xyz girl" personas, curating and correcting until the original becomes unrecognisable. Like when you sit and pluck at your eyebrows too long to the point of no return.

Body horror captures this existential fluidity.

We’re no longer talking about physical mutation. It goes far beyond that. It’s the dread of being infinitely customisable, editable, deletable. It’s the terror of having no stable self to return to.

This renaissance is no coincidence.

It’s consequence.

As we speed further into a reality shaped by machine aesthetics, trend cycles, and algorithmic validation, the genre offers something strangely grounding.

It reminds us that despite our attempts to transcend or digitise the body, we are still tied to it. Still haunted by it.

Maybe it’s not a renaissance at all, but the evolution of a genre mutating with us, documenting the psychic and physical toll of life in a fragmented, filtered world.

Anyway, catch y’all at the theatres. Because if the monsters on the screen look more like us every day, you bet your ass I’m going to have popcorn. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer