It’s not outrageous to suggest that James Gunn has become one of the world’s most prominent directors — especially when it comes to the film industry’s comic book corner. His work with Marvel Studios on the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy was a minor miracle, transforming lower-tier comic characters into household names thanks to a stellar fusion of sincere heart and self-aware humor. All three films became critical darlings and box office smashes, an elusive combination that steadily earned Gunn respect from comic fans and movie professionals alike. His distinctly auteur ways have prompted interest surrounding his and Peter Safran‘s current role as the conductors of the revamped DC cinematic universe, with specific anticipation for the effort’s inaugural feature, 2025’s Superman, which Gunn writes and directs.
As with most creators’ journeys, Gunn’s initial Hollywood days were unassuming — and enjoyably unconventional. Gunn took up the directing mantel in 2006 after a screenwriting run as disparate as can be: Tromeo and Juliet, a splatter horror retelling of William Shakespeare‘s Romeo and Juliet (and financed by Troma Entertainment, the notorious production company responsible for the original The Toxic Avenger); the very PG-rated live-action Scooby-Doo duology; and, ironically, director Zack Snyder‘s acclaimed Dawn of the Dead remake. His first behind the camera project was a low-budget but ambitiously minded horror film entitled Slither. The darkly comedic pastiche earned mostly positive responses from critics but failed to make back its $15 million budget. Nevertheless, Slither‘s wry humor, propensity for the grotesque, and prioritization of human relationships won it cult classic status among genre fans. Those aspects are Gunn’s universal storytelling approach, whether the genre and subject be Guardians, Super, The Suicide Squad, and television’s Peacemaker. In Slither‘s case, there just happens to be even more carnage.
What Horror Movies Inspired James Gunn’s ‘Slither’?
According to Gunn, Slither was partially born out of Gunn’s frustration with the state of early 2000s horror movies. For him, too many new films were recycled franchise variants or stuck with restrictive PG-13 ratings. Gunn’s critique of the latter wasn’t a blanket statement against every horror movie with a PG-13 rating; rather, he cited the studios’ general tendency to — from his perspective — play things safe. Gunn told the website Genre Busters in an interview:
“What I don’t like are PG-13 movies that should be R-rated —
Alien Vs. Predator
is one example. I think
Slither
is a testament to the difficulties I’ve been fighting against my whole [career] —
mixed genre films have a very difficult time finding their audiences
. You can have a horror movie with comedic elements, like our
Dawn of the Dead
, or a comedy with horrific elements, like the
Scary Movies
, but you can’t make a lot of money off of movies like
Slither
, which truly mix genres.”
Gunn approached his directorial debut with a clear purpose. Slither was inspired by B-movies of the 1970s and 1980s, primarily body horror maestro David Cronenberg‘s Shivers and The Brood. Gunn also cited celebrated horror manga artist Junji Ito‘s Uzumaki as another influence. Sci-fi and horror are a long-standing genre mash-up, and Slither acts as a loving amalgamation of practically every preceding creation: 1988’s The Blob, itself based on the 1958 classic of the same name; Cronenberg’s The Fly remake; the three different Invasion of the Body Snatchers films; and, last but not least, John Carpenter‘s The Thing, a masterful remake of 1951’s The Thing from Another World.
Most of the aforementioned are low budget and exceedingly gross. All reckon with violation of the body in some form (sometimes to the unfortunate point of targeted sexual violence against women). Gunn’s directorial debut embodies all the tropes, mood, and iconography while blanketing the film with tongue in cheek self-awareness. If Cronenberg and Carpenter aimed to interrogate concepts like biology and classism, Gunn wants his audience to snort into the dinner they now regret pairing with Slither.He told Bloody Disgusting, “I wanted to do something that was complete[ly] extreme, that had a lot of heart, but was humorous that harkened back to the old body horror films of the eighties. […] All these great films with that gristly, gory prosthetic effects just doesn’t happen anymore today.”
What Is James Gunn’s ‘Slither’ About?
Starring Nathan Fillion in his first leading role post-Firefly and pre-Castle, Elizabeth Banks pre-Pitch Perfect and her own blood-coated horror-comedy Cocaine Bear, and now-longtime Gunn collaborator Michael Rooker, Slither is set within the small fictional town of Wheelsy, South Carolina. After a meteor crash, Wheelsy’s residents find themselves ground zero for a parasitic alien intent on planetary domination. The parasites resemble giant slugs and assume control over human bodies by crawling down the mouth. Infiltration leaves their hosts as nothing but walking, talking zombies helpless to the aliens’ control and subject to a hive mind (think Star Trek‘s Borg or the Cybermen from Doctor Who, but with more slime).
Rooker’s character, Grant Grant (yes, that’s his actual name), has the inauspicious honor of hosting the parasite leader. Grant retains some of his human memories, such as his love for his wife Starla (Banks), and initially tries to protect her from the parasite’s instincts before it corrupts his affection into twisted, single-minded tyranny. As aliens overrun his humble town, local police chief Bill Pardy (Fillion) is mystified about how to handle something so…well, nasty.
James Gunn’s ‘Slither’ Mocks and Mimics the Legacy of Body Horror
When it comes to body horror, a cinematic notion where all bets are off, Gunn doesn’t flinch. What starts small, with the lead alien shooting a sharp, wiggling barb into Grant’s chest, evolves in consistent measures. After what still remains of Grant’s original personality refuses to attack Starla, several thick, wiggling tentacles spring from Grant’s chest to instead penetrate the stomach of Brenda Gutierrez (Brenda James) and pump glowing goo into her. It’s Slither‘s most explicitly sexual connotation, but thankfully, Gunn reduces the genre’s tendency toward violent assault into an obvious metaphor that, while uncomfortable, is depicted as intentionally ludicrous. After being infected with alien eggs, Brenda transforms into a massive, room-sized ball of flesh that’s only recognizable by her face. She’s then ruthlessly torn in half while birthing thousands of baby alien slugs that immediately start shoving their way down residents’ throats, their victims choking, gagging, and flailing all the while.
Grant himself undergoes bulbous, grotesque evolutions reminiscent of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly: large deformations on his head resemble tumors, massive pimples ooze out puss, and drool gushes from his snarling and too-large teeth. Midway through the film he becomes a human-sized slug “standing” upright, complete with long barbed tentacles capable of bisecting a police officer with one flick. (That action, of course, necessitates the poor man’s guts spilling out in a squelching heap.) Grant’s final form covers the length and breadth of a house and lacks any human resemblance except for Rooker’s eyes; “Grant” keeps growing in scale and ooze capacity with every slug-controlled Wheelsy resident that merges into his squirming body.
Then, there’s the mass invasion of Wheelsy from the birthed baby slugs. Watching them wiggle along the grass in hordes proves disgusting enough, but like the most superior horror movie concepts, their ability to infiltrate houses turns innocuous daily activities into vulnerability. A teenage girl, Margaret (Jennifer Copping), takes a bath while her younger sisters read in bed just down the hall. A slug crawling into Margaret’s bathtub and swimming through the water toward her is deliberately reminiscent of Freddy Krueger’s (Robert Englund) clawed hand reaching for Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) in the bathtub in the first A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Margaret realizes the threat and tears the slug out of her mouth before burning it to death with a nearby curling iron, but the separation leaves blood gushing from her mouth. Her little sisters and parents aren’t so lucky (yes, Slither morphs young children into flesh-eating monstrosities; talk about breaking the rules). Faster than Margaret can blink, slugs infest every inch of her home’s walls and floors. She flees onto the roof and into the family car, but so many cover the car that their sheer mass blacks out the windows. Oh, and the slug-controlled humans spit green acid, too — meaning the remaining protagonists have two growing armies to contend with. Both harbor an insatiable need for meat, leaving behind slaughtered animals and veritable mountains of flies circling the noxious corpses. Are you grossed out yet?
‘Slither’ Shows off Some of James Gunn’s Directorial Trademarks
All of Gunn’s productions carry his stylistic tendencies, with the majority present throughout Slither. He strikes a fairly balanced mood between extreme violence and ominous wit, often combining the two for maximum irony. This is best illustrated by cross-cutting between a deer hunting kick-off celebration and Grant advancing on Brenda alone in her home, followed by lively country music from the party playing over Grant assaulting Brenda with his impregnating tentacles. The one-liners are an indomitable presence all their own, whether they’re as simple as Pardy crudely deadpanning, “Well, now that is some f*cked up shit” at the first sight of a metamorphized Grant, or muttering, “my easygoing nature is getting sorely f*cking tested” while pursued by a herd of slug (!) humans.
Wheelsy’s mayor, Jack MacReady (Gregg Henry), enjoys his share of the farcical as well. After Pardy assures a room-sized Brenda that they’ll take her to a hospital, MacReady hisses, “What the f*ck they gonna do with her at a hospital?” Likewise, he throws a temper tantrum at the lack of Mr. Pibb in the drinks cooler and argues with Pardy over the definition of the word Martians. “Martians are from Mars,” Pardy explains, exhausted. “Or, it’s a general term for outer space f*cker,” MacReady snaps. Even an infected human gets to rail against one of the protagonists for staring in horror at their disgusting visage: “Are you judging me? Damn Republican. We’ll run all you Republicans out of town.”
It’s the same kind of unpredictable humor with which Gunn infuses most of his projects, and as successful in Slither as Guardians of the Galaxy. Gunn knows that bizarre humor complements the tonal contradictions at play, especially where horror is concerned. Fusing horror and comedy isn’t an easy line to walk despite how closely tied the moods are. As Gunn alluded to in his Genre Busters interview, if one exaggerates too far, scenes become distractingly slapstick. Lean too heavily in the other direction, however, and the extreme gore overpowers everything else. With Slither, Gunn set out to make a successful mixed genre movie — neither one nor the other, but cohesively both. Gunn strikes an impressive balance between absurdism and violence, especially for a first-time director. Viewers are never quite meant to take Slither‘s events seriously, but we are supposed to care about the characters’ emotional dilemmas.
Slither also reflects Gunn’s ability to draw cohesive pitch-perfect performances from his cast. As an established master of poker-faced buffoonery, Fillion fits Gunn’s tonal requirements to a T. Banks, having already flexed her comedic timing in minor roles, makes her Southern housewife an appealingly down-to-earth woman whose self-conscious quirks don’t preclude her from holding her own in a fight. But it’s Rooker who’s the standout performer — perhaps not a surprise, given how the actor practically ran away with the first two Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Slither might be a dark horror comedy, but its concept demands Rooker do the most heavy lifting out of the cast. Grant straddles both genres: an average guy forcibly turned into a villain but who still adores his wife, even while he’s transformed into a giant blob creature saddled with increasingly extravagant makeup and prosethetics. Rooker is a blast to watch whether he’s dismembering people with relish or pleading for Starla to forgive him.
‘Slither’ Is Actually About Love, Just Like James Gunn’s Other Movies
Despite Slither favoring gross-out moments over true characterization and only running for 90 minutes, Gunn doesn’t rush the plot along. He devotes time to the Wheelsy townspeople before the pandemonium kicks in, creating an effective atmosphere for his tale even if the characters aren’t more than sketches. Their small town dynamics, while comedically exaggerated, are transparently accurate to anyone from a small town. Here we have the jerk mayor honking his horn and cussing out a kid crossing the street; over there, it’s families comfortably gossiping at a bus stop while their children eavesdrop. Ninety-nine percent of the town love their guns, their beer, and shooting deer. Grant almost cheats on Starla because he’s a sex-obsessed moron, and Pardy’s spent ages in unrequited love for Starla.
Love, in fact, is Slither’s truest theme. Grant’s love for Starla is flawed long before the slug corrupts it, but it did exist between the couple, and Starla certainly held love in high regard. So does Gunn as a creator; the thematic point and individual motivations behind the Guardians trilogy has always been the bonds of found family. Beneath the spewing pus and bodily debasement, the people of Wheelsy care for one another. Only three residents survive the alien attack, but they wearily stumble out of town together to face their unknown future. There’s always more texture to Gunn’s stories than sheer violence or total absurdity, even in a debut film that might initially seem like more of its parts than its sum.
Slither is available to watch on Peacock in the U.S.
Watch on Peacock