People love a good body swap movie. It could be any genre. There could be comedies where family members or friends accidentally switch bodies for a time. There could be horror movies where people are forced out of their own bodies so that other people can take control. There could be dramas where someone ends up inside another person’s body to learn an important lesson or change something in that person’s life. There are an endless number of possibilities and there will always be an audience for it.
Sunday “Bad” Movies has covered a few body swap movies over the years. In some cases, it has been the conventional idea where one person ends up in the other person’s body and the other person ends up in their body. But there have also been other instances where someone controlled another person’s body through a video game, spirits of serial killers ended up inside inanimate objects, a serial killer hopping between bodies of victims to try and bring his own body back, and even a teenager’s brain being put into an animatronic dinosaur. Lots of bodies have been swapped, and there are surely more body swaps to come.
When people think about body swap movies, they typically think about comedies. Two friends or two family members switch bodies, learn about each other’s lives, then switch back. It could be an intentional swap, or it could be accidental. Whatever the case, they end up in each other’s bodies through some sort of magic. There could be a wish, or an object, or even just peeing in a fountain. Anything the writer could think of could be used as the catalyst to have characters switch bodies.
Freaky Friday is probably the most famous body swap movie. Maybe it would be better to say most famous body swap movies, since there are at least four versions. The story first started as a novel before being adapted to the big screen in 1976. A mother and daughter each wished they could live as the other for one day, and their wish was granted. They came to understand each other after the one day and their bodies were swapped back. The movie would be remade by Disney three times in the years since.
A male version of the story was told in the film Vice Versa in 1988. It wasn’t the first telling of the story, based on an 1882 novel, but it was the first American adaptation and has become the most popular version. Instead of a mother and daughter swapping bodies, Vice Versa featured a father and son doing the swap. There’s not much more to add to this one, since it was essentially the same story as Freaky Friday, just with a gender switch.
Other movies with other combinations of body swaps in this comedy style included The Change-Up, where a working married father and his promiscuous single friend switched bodies after peeing into a fountain; The Hot Chick, where two strangers (one a teenage mean girl and the other a Rob Schneider looking thief) switched bodies after coming across some magic earrings; and even the first live-action Scooby-Doo movie, which had some island magic that was able to pull people’s souls from their bodies, and led to the entire Mystery Inc. gang ending up in each other’s bodies.
The next kind of body swap story I want to focus on won’t take too long. I’ve already written about a bunch of the movies covered in Sunday “Bad” Movies that have touched upon this type of body swap. There’s a subgenre of horror where serial killers die and their spirits transition into an inanimate object. The inanimate object becomes animate as the serial killer continues their serial killing ways. The movies are slashers, with an inanimate object being the killer. The explanation behind why the inanimate object kills is the body swap.
The most famous example of the inanimate object body swap is Child’s Play. I haven’t covered any of the movies from that franchise for Sunday “Bad” Movies, but I have seen them all. Aside from the reboot and the television series. Charles Lee Ray was a serial killer who performed a voodoo ritual that transferred his mind into a doll. He then used the doll to continue his murderous ways. Six sequels, a reboot, and a television series later, Chucky has become a household name.
Two franchises that shared a similar concept were Jack Frost and The Gingerdead Man. In each of those franchises, a serial killer had their mind transferred into an inanimate object. Jack Frost featured a serial killer as a snowman, continuing to murder. The Gingerdead Man was about a serial killer whose mind was transferred into a gingerbread man, continuing to murder. In both cases, the killer was something you wouldn’t expect to kill, all because of a body swap. A serial killer body swap.
Sticking with horror, it’s time to get to what inspired this week’s post. Another big kind of body swapping in movies involves when someone swaps two people’s bodies for more nefarious reasons. One person wants to take over another person’s body. That sort of thing. There’s typically an evil doctor of some sort involved, allowing the brains or minds of one person to be put into another person and vice versa. It all comes down to being in the name of science, when it comes to mad scientists, or greed, when it comes to rich (and typically white) people.
Now, I know this isn’t a movie, but I can’t help thinking about one of the Halloween episodes of Two Guys and a Girl when thinking about this kind of body swap. I love Two Guys and a Girl. It’s one of those shows where I’ll end up watching the entire run if I throw on even one episode. The show was always great with Halloween episodes. One of those, the season 3 Halloween episode, involved a mad scientist in the basement of the characters’ apartment building, switching the minds of the main characters. Four different characters were swapped. I don’t have any real elaboration on the matter.
One of the more famous, recent examples of body swapping came in the form of Get Out. It began as a simple enough horror/thriller where a Black man went away for a weekend at his white girlfriend’s family’s place. Strange things started happening involving the family and the Black people who worked for them, before it was revealed that the family was helping wealthy white people put their consciousness into the bodies of Black people. They were performing body swaps to live on as Black people. Get Out was a commentary on white privilege through the guise of a body swap film. At least, partially, it was.
It's not only the modern flicks that use the body swap idea, however. There have been body swap movies almost as long as there have been movies. In fact, the novel that Vice Versa, the body swap comedy, was based on was released in the 1800s. That was before movies were even a thing. It wouldn’t take long for movies to catch onto the body swap idea. That’s where this week’s movie comes into the conversation.
The Atomic Brain, also known as Monstrosity, came out in 1963. Hettie March (Marjorie Eaton) was a rich, elderly woman who didn’t like her life. She wanted to be young again. She hired Dr. Otto Frank (Frank Gerstle) to transplant her brain into the body of a younger woman so that she could live longer in a younger body. However, the trio of young women who were potential hosts for March’s brain, Nina Rhodes (Erika Peters); Bea Mullins (Judy Bamber); and Anita Gonzalez (Lisa Lang), soon figured out her plan and threw a wrench in it.
There were numerous body swaps in The Atomic Brain. The entire story was centered around the swap of Hettie March’s brain into the body of a younger woman. But there were other body swaps throughout the film meant to show that Dr. Otto Frank cold pull off the procedure. Most of those swaps involved people’s brains being placed into animals or animal brains being placed into the people. Anita fell victim early as Dr. Frank experimented on her with a cat. This new cat in human body began tormenting the other characters before tragically falling from the roof in a deadly accident. In the end, Hettie March had her brain placed inside a cat, when Dr. Frank realized she wouldn’t fund his experiments when she had what she wanted. Swap after swap after swap. People and animals were swapping bodies like… I don’t really have anything to compare it to. They were doing it a lot, though.
Another movie I should quickly mention with the mad scientist body swap is one I alluded to earlier in the post. Tammy and the T-Rex involved a mad scientist who wanted to put a brain into an animatronic dinosaur and bring it to life. He settled on a teenager who was in the hospital after a large cat attack. After kidnapping the teenager from the hospital, the scientist plopped the teen’s brain into the animatronic dinosaur. The dinosaur came to life, got revenge on everyone who wronged it when it was a teenager, and fell in love with the girl it loved when human. It was a strange movie that made little-to-no sense. But it was a body swap of the mad scientist type and had to be mentioned.
Where comedy made the body swap whimsical, with an important lesson for the characters to learn by the end, horror made body swaps a terrifying proposition. People would use the concept for evil. As long as they had money, they would be able to take the bodies of whoever they wanted so they could live longer. All they needed was a scientist who could put them into the body they chose. The Atomic Brain had that. Get Out had that. Tammy and the T-Rex had that. It wasn’t enough for audiences to fear that bad people would do things to them. Screenwriters wanted audiences to fear that people would take over their bodies while they watched on helplessly, from either inside their bodies or in another body. Or the would fear that people would take them away from their bodies, forcing them to become something else.
I can’t move onto the next kind of body swap without bringing up Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. This one was a little less conventional than the typical body swap horror movie. Jason Voorhees was killed at the beginning of the movie. Somehow, his presence was still within his dead body. It made a coroner take a bite from his dead heart, which then transferred Jason’s consciousness into the coroner. He then killed his way to his last surviving relative, transferring his consciousness from person to person, before doing some sort of magic that brought his own body back to life. It was one person magically body-swapping his way through a movie and leaving destruction in his wake.
The last kind of body swap that I want to make note of is another one that I’ve written about before. This one doesn’t quite involve one person’s consciousness being within another person’s body. So, it might not technically be a body swap. It’s a tangential thing, though, and one that should be brought up. This kind of body swap involves people using technology to take control of other people’s bodies. Specifically, for the point of video games.
Gamer is probably the most famous of the “controlling people through video game technology” movies. Convicts were placed into a Call of Duty style first-person shooter, where gamers could use them as avatars in death matches. Meanwhile, other people were working as avatars, being controlled by gamers in a Second Life style game. The people in the game could not control their actions while in the game. It was the players that controlled what their bodies did. It was a body swap that didn’t involve consciousnesses or brains being swapped. It simply involved a microchip in the body to let technology take control.
The same technological advancement was present in Beta Test, another movie about someone being the avatar in a video game. In the case of Beta Test, the player didn’t know they were controlling a real person. They thought it was a beta test for a new game. The studio head decided to use the game to get revenge on a former co-head who disagreed with the company’s direction and resigned. It was his way of forcing the former co-head to do some bad stuff against his will. Again, it wasn’t a body swap in the way that people were putting their consciousness into another body. It was simply technology allowing a person to use another person as an avatar.
Over the past 2000 or so words, I’ve gone through four different kinds of body swaps, or body control, stories. I went over the comedic body swap stories where people swapped bodies, learned something about each other, then switched back. I wrote about the horror movies where serial killers put their consciousness into some sort of inanimate object to continue their killings unsuspected. I continued down the horror rabbit-hole with the stories about mad scientists plopping people’s consciousnesses into other bodies for the sake of mad science or greed. Then I wrapped things up with a technological advancement of the body swap in the form of video games. So, not a true body swap, but something close enough to warrant discussion. Each have their differences, many of them major, yet they all involve someone being in control of someone else’s body.
Body swap stories have been popular for a long time. People like to watch what would happen if people’s minds were switched between bodies. If a mother was in her daughter’s body and vice versa. That sort of stuff. People fear having their minds tampered with, and being forcefully put into a body they don’t want. Or having their body be taken over by someone else. These are the driving forces behind many of the body swap stories that people eat up. Do they eat them up for the inherent curiosity and fear? Perhaps, deep down, they do. It’s either that or pure entertainment value. That matters too.
Of course there are some notes I’m going to toss in here:
- I mentioned a few movies that have been covered by Sunday “Bad” Movies, among others. They were Jack Frost (week 54), Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman (week 159), The Gingerdead Man (week 69), Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust (week 252), Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver (week 302), Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong (week 347), Tammy and the T-Rex (week 408), Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (week 85), and Beta Test (week 397).
- Bradford Dillman returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in The Atomic Brain. He was previously seen in The Swarm (week 253).
- Finally, Frank Gerstle was in The Atomic Brain and The Wasp Woman (week 389).
- Have you seen The Atomic Brain? What did you think of it? Do you like body swap movies? Which one is your favourite? What is your favourite type of body swap movie? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
- Twitter and the comments are good places to put any suggestions you may have for movies I should watch as part of Sunday “Bad” Movies. Any movie that you think is bad and would fit into what I watch for this blog would be great. Suggest away.
- Make sure to go to Instagram to see more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun. I’m going to get back to posting regularly there. I promise.
- Now let’s look forward to next week. I’ll be taking on a recent-ish retelling of a classic story. It’s one of those stories that people like to tell time and time again. I’m guessing it’s in the public domain, which is why they keep telling the story. Maybe the character would be a better way to say it. It’s not necessarily the storyline getting retold. Anyway, there was a movie called Holmes & Watson a few years ago, and that’s what I’ll be checking out. See you for that post, soon.
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