What does it mean to represent the interior of the human body? Recent scandals around exhibitions of ‘real’ dissected human bodies, such as Gunther von Hagens's notorious Body Worlds exhibition and the recent closure of a similar type of anatomical exhibition, ‘Our Body – à corps ouvert’ by a French court in 2009, have served to keep this question alive. And yet the interior of the body has been represented in the cinema practically from the beginning of narrative films. Horror films and war films regularly expose the interior of the body for its shock value. Indeed, with increasingly sophisticated special effects now available to film directors, the interior of the body is exposed with a realism designed to turn the stomach of the most hardened spectator. However, this is not the only context in which the body's interior has been represented in fiction. The interior of the body can also be explored in more artistic and scientific ways, with such representations often playing on the wonder or even the miracle of the human ‘machine’ both to engage the audience and to convey a message about the significance of life. Yet even if one adopts this more positive attitude to the interior of the body, there are many different ways to do so, and new scientific discoveries have served to add to this panoply.