There have even been numerous stabs at a film adaptation with big names attached like Neil Gaiman, Alexandre Aja, David Fincher, and as of last year, Rick Famuyiwa. It's influenced everyone from Kristen Stewart to It Follows' David Robert Mitchell. I'm not alone in Black Hole serving as a right of passage. In many ways, discovering Black Hole set me on the path to becoming a comic book creator. The visuals were on par with the grotesqueries of The Fly or Eraserhead, yet there was an innocence in those pages that made the book stand on its own. It was body horror, but not any kind I'd seen before. I flipped through the pages to skim the interior art, and it hit me hard – the perfectionist black and white inking, the simmering dream sequences, and most of all, the mutated teenage faces carrying the weight of the world in their eyes. Then a thick red spine looked back at me with bold white letters spelling out its title, Black Hole.
As a kid who grew up reading superhero comics, I felt lost. It happened the first time I went to my university library's graphic novel section, which consisted of two shelves half-full of comics I'd never heard of before. Popping my Charles Burns cherry was as powerful an experience as discovering any one of those filmmakers listed above. One of those people is graphic novelist Charles Burns. More importantly, artists outside of film have significantly contributed to its influence and rise in popularity over the years, some of which are unsung yet equally deserving of being called masters. While cinema may be body horror's hearth, the subgenre has blossomed in a variety of mediums. As Cronenberg himself said, "You have to realize that almost all of filmmaking is body." In many ways, film being a larger-than-life visual medium offers the perfect vessel for provocative, gut-churning explorations of the human form. This isn't a surprise given that the term "body horror" was first used in 1983 by Phillip Brophy in an article describing a revelatory period for contemporary horror films. It's names like David Cronenberg, Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna, and most recently, Julia Ducournau. So much so that when we discuss masters of the subgenre, the list is usually composed entirely of filmmakers. Although it has roots in Gothic fiction, body horror is most readily associated with cinema.
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