It Does Body Horror Really Well
Long before there were any rumors that the Dr. Strange sequel might be a horror movie, there were rumors that the Fantastic Four reboot would get there first. You see, the director, Josh Trank, who also did the excellent movie Chronicle is a big fan of David Cronenberg, who pretty much created the sub-genre of body horror. In this sub-genre, the horror is actually of the human body, usually in the form of self-mutilation, but sometimes, it can be as existential as aging or deteriorating. This sounds like a prime source to pull from for a superhero movie, right? Well, Fox apparently didn’t think so, either, which is why there is so little body horror in the final product.
But the stuff that is in there is actually super effective. When the team gets back to Earth, the characters—most notably Miles Teller’s Mr. Fantastic, and Jamie Bell’s The Thing—are truly suffering through their transformations, with Jamie Bell’s distress of turning into a human rock genuinely horrifying, which brings me to my next point.