SpongeBob SquarePants Has a STRANGE Fascination With Body Horror

SpongeBob SquarePants Has a STRANGE Fascination With Body Horror

SpongeBob Squarepants may be for kids, but some episodes are downright disturbing.

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SpongeBob SquarePants Has a STRANGE Fascination With Body Horror

There’s no denying that SpongeBob SquarePants is an iconic cartoon. The titular sea sponge and his many Bikini Bottom friends have given viewers plenty of quotable lines and memorable moments. But the franchise has also produced its fair share of strange episodes. In the series’ later seasons, many SpongeBob SquarePants episodes have heavily leaned into body horror for its comedy.

Body horror is precisely what the name implies: a genre of horror that usually centers around gross transformations into disgusting monsters. Films such as The Fly and The Thing are great examples of the subgenre as they follow humans slowly morphing into grotesque creatures with all the gross details shown on screen. While much of SpongeBob’s body horror results from the series’ signature slapstick comedy, some episodes have gone pretty far, putting the characters in terrifying and violent situations.

SpongeBob SquarePants Has a STRANGE Fascination With Body Horror

One of the earliest examples of body horror is in SpongeBob’s first Halloween episode, “Scaredy Pants.” When SpongeBob tries to create a scary ghost costume for Halloween, he ends up shaving off all the skin on his head to give himself a rounder shape. At the end of the episode, SpongeBob reveals his exposed brain, which is pretty disturbing. The following episode, “I Was A Teenage Gary,” also delves into body horror when both SpongeBob and Squidward turn into snails after accidentally injecting themselves with snail plasma.

As the series progressed, the body horror got more outrageous. Season 4’s “SquidBob TentaclePants” sees SpongeBob and Squidward mashed together thanks to one of Sandy’s experiments. The episode concludes with the two and several other characters morphing into a grotesque blob-like monster. Season 5’s “Fungus Among Us” finds SpongeBob getting sick with a strange fungus and infecting everyone in Bikini Bottom, with the only cure being Gary eating the fungus off of everybody. In Season 7’s “The Inside Job,” Plankton invades SpongeBob’s body in order to find information on the Krabby Patty formula. This even brings Plankton inside SpongeBob’s brain where viewer’s get a gnarly close-up of the sponge’s inner workings.

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However, perhaps the most disturbing instance of SpongeBob body horror is Season 11’s “Krabby Patty Creature Feature.” In this episode, the creation of a new Krabby Patty causes whoever eats them to turn into Krabby Patty zombie creatures. The creatures then force-feed other people their body parts to turn them into zombies as well. The bizarre Krabby Patty monsters eventually return to normal when it’s discovered chum is their weakness. Overall, the entire episode is very disturbing, especially the individual characters’ terrifying transformations.

Despite its propensity for body horror, SpongeBob isn’t the only kid’s cartoon that embraces the subgenre in some way. In fact, the trope is very common in animation. Shows like The Ren & Stimpy Show and Invader Zim are infamous for their frequent gross-out gags. Using body horror as humor can lead to some pretty funny moments, but it can still be surreal seeing a silly cartoon, like SpongeBob SquarePants suddenly turn into a David Cronenberg film.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/spongebob-squarepants-body-horror/

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