Body Horror Elements in Marvel's Ultimate X-Men (2024)

 Recently, I've been reading the current Ultimate X-Men run from 2024, and let me tell you it's jam packed with horror! It's wild guys, with Peach Momoko's art, it takes such a inoccent watercolor style and twists it into unimaginable nightmares. In this post we're mostly going to cover some instances of Body Horror within the current issues out.

Before we jump into the terrifying frights, let me introduce you to what Body Horror is exactly. Well not exactly, Body Horror has some very flexible definitions attached to it, but my interpretation is that it's a violation of the human body. It's taking the human form we know and transforming or distorting it in some sort of horrific way, this can also be through things like mutating. To take it a step further, I think a large part of body horror is the loss of autonimy over yourself, not being able to fully control your own flesh. It gives me the creeps just thinking about it. To give you a famous example of body horror think of Ridley Scott's Alien from 1979, the xenomorphs impregnating you and then using your body to birth their babies is very much a transformation and loss of control over your body.

Ultimate X-Men #1

So what's up with the big bad teenage mutant of this series, Shinobu Kageyama. He's a freaky guy obessed with our main character, the titular hero Armor or Hisako. Kageyama uses his powers to look like freaky monster pictured above, he literally transforms his body through astral projection, into this black figure. What's so creepy about this form is how uncanny it looks, it takes a vague human figure but controts it's body and eyes just enoguh to make it disturbing. But even more body horror comes from how Kageyama uses his powers, he also has the abilliy of telepathy which he ususally uses to influence people or harrass Hisako with halucinations.

Ultimate X-Men #2

While these projections are literally examples of body horror, take for instance the image above showcasing a man's face turning into worms and maggots. His use of telapthy to manipulate others is a genuine violation of human rights, he creeps his way into their psyche and shows them the worst parts of themselves. We see this the most with Hisako, who is literally tormented by Kageyama with visions of her dead friend and the guilt for what she thinks was her part in his suicide. However it's later confirmed that Kageyama had some part in telepathically influencing Tsubasa to take his life. His power can force others to do his bidding, it takes away control of their bodies. The same happens to Hisako after she has been broken down enough, she gives in to Kageyama's control, unkowingly control in her decision making literally cocooning into a darker grotesque form. 

Natsu, the Scott Summers of the Ultimate universe is a perfect example of body horror. Much like her main continuity counter part, she has great difficulty controling her muntant power, usually having to cover it up in fear of hurting someone. Well we still get the beautifully horrific image above of Natsu blasting multiple holes into her dead mother's body thanks to Natsu's mutation. Uncontrollable eye blasts that shoot from your eye whenever you take off your eye patch definitly seems like a loss of control over ones body, and the way Natsu reacts is what makes it so tragic. 

There's a lot of examples of having no control over you're own genetic mutations in X-Men, in this comic we also get a scene where a fire mutation gets out of control and he presumibly burns his mother to death. It's the idea that you can't control your own power that makes this body horror, that the simple act of someone touching you at the wrong time could set them a blaze. Or the idea that if you lose control of yourself you could turn into an inferno lighting everything on fire. That possibility of your powers going out of control is one aspect that connects body horror and mutants so well.

Let's use Akihiro, who we presume is Wolverine's son or connected to him in some way based of his apperance. In this series he's been in a coma, as the cult Children of Atom have been harvesting his blood in order to make more mutants. Each and every moment he's in intense pain and all he wants is to be free via diying, instead they use his healing quirk and countless tubes stuck onto his body to keep him alive while using his dna. That all sounds pretty messed up right? It's classic body horror, one of the best examples from this series. 

So that's all the obvious examples of Body Horror I was able to find in Ultimate X-Men, but you guys should let me know if I forgot anything! After collecting all these examples I've sort of discovered something about body horror I hadn't none previously, that being it's deep connection to psychological horror. When you think about it a large part of the disturbing nature of body horror is the idea that the mutated body was once a regular human, the psychological damage an individual must go through while undergoing such drastic physical changes is astronamical. The presumed psychological suffering is what gives more weight to the physical suffering. It's an intersting connection to think about, what other ways can you think of Body Horror connecting to other sub genres of horror? And most importantly why do you guys think it's important for mutants to undergo such horrific events in their life tied to their body having powers that are uncontrollable an dangerous?