James Gunn has never shied away from telling stories about outsiders, whether it’s anti-heroes of all shapes and sizes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or mommy issues for DC. However, while many recognize him for his work in the superhero genre, Gunn began his directing career with the universally panned 2006 horror-comedy film that arrived 20 years ago and grossed pretty much everyone out in the process.
Starring Firefly’s Nathan Fillion and The Walking Dead’s Michael Rooker, Slither is the grossest horror film I’ve ever seen. While I’ve often watched horror with my hands over my face, peeking through the slits of my fingers, it’s only with Slither that my unwillingness to look comes more from disgust than fear.
When a meteorite crashes just outside Wheelsy, a small town in South Carolina, the residents become infected by alien parasites. The first innocent victim of the infection is Grant (Michael Rooker), a wealthy local whose relationship with his wife, Starla (Elizabeth Banks), is on the rocks. However, once infected, Grant becomes a new man. Taken over by the alien parasite, which is essentially a newborn discovering what it means to be human, Grant’s new loving side appeals to Starla. The downside? Grant is slowly turning into a monstrosity that craves meat, whether it’s heaps of steak, the neighbor’s dog, or the farmyard cattle a few miles outside of town.
As the infection takes over, Grant’s appearance begins to distort. It begins with pockmark-like spots. Then a gaping, tentacle-filled wound opens in his chest before the transformation really ramps up. By the end of the film, the only way to recognize Grant is through Rooker’s jawline and eyes. Despite Gunn being very squeamish about gore in real life, his direction of Rooker’s performance and look is so sinister it’s hard not to wince when he’s onscreen.
Grant’s transformation is obviously meant to provoke disgust. We see Grant’s naked flesh when he tries to woo Starla, but it’s completely different to see it slither and morph into something scaly and insectoid.
But the transformation also serves as a reflection on Grant himself. He’s cold and possessive of Starla, physically demanding that she submit to his sexual advances and losing his temper when she refuses. Even when Grant becomes an unrecognizable, venom-spitting, tentacle monster with the alien hivemind almost fully controlling him, he rants that Starla has ruined their vows by not sleeping with him and betraying him to the Wheelsy police. Grant’s transformation is particularly horrifying because it’s a physical reflection of his hypermasculinity and its impact on his marriage.
Slither may be Gunn’s directorial debut, but his love for gross-out cinema started long before. The current DC Universe boss began his career working for the independent film production and distribution company Troma Entertainment in 1996. Known for edgy horror-comedy, Troma focused on attracting an older, more mature audience by including gore and splatter, and by leaning heavily into parody. The company is best known for 1984’s The Toxic Avenger, which follows a janitor who, after falling into a vat of toxic waste, is transformed into a deformed superhero.
Gunn co-wrote the 1996 film Tromeo and Juliet, a bawdy reworking of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that reprocessed the original text into an obscene pastiche. The result is an intentionally gross rendition where Juliet transforms into a cow monster with a penis, and Tromeo walks in on a man performing oral sex at a masquerade ball.
Considering Gunn’s background, Slither’s wild antics involving phallic-shaped
parasitic aliens that infect others through the mouth — with several scenes where characters try to resist this in a way that seems suggestive at best — aren’t all that surprising. If anything, the fact that he went on to make relatively wholesome superhero movies is the bigger surprise.
While Slither absolutely bombed at the box office, a cult following for the movie has since emerged. What’s abundantly clear, two decades later, is that whether he’s helming a superhero sensation or the 2002 Scooby-Doo movie, James Gunn is far from afraid to let his freak flag fly.
