Deform (2020)

Original title: 変容

A group of nine students play at paranormal investigation and enter a derelict building upon which some kind of flying, glowing thing has supposedly descended. Ignorant of genre rules, the kids split up for their search of the building. One after the other, they are infected by a, curious, wormlike creature that spits mini-mes and transform them into creatures rather beyond my abilities of description, and most probably beyond comprehension. There’s also a creepy guy with a very peculiar dress sense running around, whose presence will be explained in a wonderfully cosmicist way that adds a bit of weird plot meat to the body horror meal.

Someone – not me – should really write an essay or ten about how much the sub-genres of body horror and cosmic horror have converged over the years in ways poor old HPL could never have imagined while getting grumpy about early Universal horror. Case in point is this lovely – at least by my very broad definitions of the term – piece of claymation by Shigeru Okada.

Claymation, a style of animation that’s all about physically transforming the sculptures you work with, is obviously an ideal style for body horror – all of these transformations we are allowed to witness are indeed real. Okada’s imagination lets his characters break out and down into some fascinatingly grotesque things – at least one of which suggests one of the Elder Things from “At the Mountains of Madness” to me – which I mostly have not seen quite like this before (which curiously lines up with the Brian Paulin gore movies I’ve also been watching these weeks).

These transformations aren’t just great, but also the absolute stars of the show, so much so, that about two thirds of the film’s slightly more than an hour of runtime consist exclusively of them. One can certainly argue there are a couple transformations too many here for the Deform to be genuinely well-paced, but then, I wouldn’t have known which ones to cut either, were I in the filmmaker’s shoes.

All of this culminates in a wonderful and awesome (in all meanings of the word) sequence that adds an exquisite sense of wonder to the grotesquery, and made me rather happy, as does Deform’s mere existence.