Things That Get Under Your Skin in Movies

Scarlett Johansson plays the lead in 'Lucy,' forced by smugglers to carry a drug package surgically inserted into her body. Here are other movies that gave us (mostly icky) scenes of foreign elements being implanted in their characters.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) owes his life to the electromagnet, grafted to his chest, that was designed to keep shrapnel from entering his heart. The arc reactor that powered the magnet also powers Stark's armored suits.

The entire Bourne saga begins when Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) awakens on a fishing boat with no memory of who he is – but a tiny laser device, dug out of his hip, contains a valuable clue: a Swiss bank account number.

The Bourne bank account laser is taken a step further in this dystopian thriller: In the future, humans are genetically engineered with countdown timers in their forearms, displaying the amount of time they have left before they die.

'In Time' owes a lot to this film, including the "life clock" concept. Co-star Jenny Agutter models hers: A crystal, embedded in the palm of the hand at birth, that changes color as each wearer approaches death, i.e. their 30th birthday.

Scarlett Johansson wasn't the first actress to play a drug mule: Catalina Sandino Moreno scored an Oscar nomination as a Colombian woman who smuggles heroin into the U.S. by swallowing plastic pellets filled with the drug.

Heroin typically winds up in a needle – which goes under the skin, naturally – but Uma Thurman's character snorts it instead. It takes a giant shot of adrenaline to bring her back to life. (No more needles in this gallery, we promise.)

Remember cyberpunk? In this ill-fated sci-fi feature, Keanu Reeves plays the titular character, transporting top-secret data via a memory chip implanted in his head.

Reeves returns to sci-fi to get even more things inserted into his body, including (but not limited to) the headjack in his skull, a quicksilver-like substance that takes him out of the Matrix, and one nasty robotic beast in his belly button.

Did someone say "nasty beast"? Get a load of the mind-controlling Ceti Eel that Khan (Ricardo Montalban) lets crawl into Chekov's (Walter Koenig) ear. That's way worse than a cotton swab.

Science fiction would have us believe that, like Halle Berry's character here, our future selves will insert tons of stuff under our skin. In fact, some are already doing this: Look up "subdermal implants," but don't say we didn't warn you.

Talk about hard-wired: Matt Damon's piston-powered exoskeleton drills through his skin and muscle -- even down into his bones.

In 'National Lampoon's Vacation,' Cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) often speaks of the plate in his head. But in this action flick, the metal plate in Dwayne Johnson's head comes in way handier.

Were the insects that ultra-paranoid Michael Shannon supposedly finds in Ashley Judd's house placed there by the government? Does he have these same bugs in his own body? This psychological thriller is open to interpretation.

Here's how these aliens – known as Xenomorphs – use human hosts to propagate: The facehugger goes in, the chestburster comes out. In short: Poor John Hurt.

These days everybody and their brother – and sister, and grandparents – has tattoos, but in 1981 getting inked was still pretty edgy. Bruce Dern is at his craziest as a tattoo artist who kidnaps Maud Adams to be his "canvas."