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Sasha Rainbow's superficiality satire Grafted feels like a J-horror inversion of Coralie Fargeat's breakout body-horror stunner The Substance. Shudder's latest original plays in a sandbox with titles like Sion Sono's Exte: Hair Extensions, where cosmetic alterations lead to unsettling results. Rainbow pulls from traditional mad scientist frameworks to tell a coming-of-age struggle from a Chinese immigrant's perspective, but in doing so, creates push-and-pull friction between a host of thematic intentions. Grafted deals in body-horror squeamishness, slasher heartlessness, and university ecosystems, but it's not always the steadiest execution. Highs are high, but they come at a cost.

Joyena Sun stars as Wei, a shy, reclusive daughter who watches her father die during a skin-replacement experiment gone Twilight Zone-y. He tries to cure them both of genetic facial birthmarks by inventing a self-healing patch using regenerative Corpse Flower cells—but the mind-of-its-own flap spreads over his mouth and nostrils,...

In a dingy lab somewhere in China, a young girl named Wei (Mohan Liu) watches her father, Liu (Sam Wang), go about his work. He’s developing a new kind of skin graft procedure that he hopes will rid both of them of the large purple birthmarks adorning their faces. And like your average B-movie scientist with a little too much on the line, Liu decides to use himself as a guinea pig. He applies a strange, fleshy substance to his face and then grins triumphantly as it wriggles into life, replacing his birthmark and melding perfectly with the rest of his skin. But Liu’s delight quickly turns to horror as he discovers—like, well, so many B-movie scientists before him—that his invention works a little too well, and with deadly consequences.

Grafted is full of spluttering effects that look and sound wet and nasty, and they’re...