A history of David Cronenberg’s best body horror movies

David Cronenberg’s name is synonymous with body horror. Before Cronenberg arrived, there were many examples in film like the Val Lewton image. People for Cats (1942) or Ishiro Honda’s Matango (1963), each of which made the human body irregular. Cronenberg, however, is the clearest example of body horror’s visual language.

Cronenberg took pictures in the years since. Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), Fly (1986), With examples such as Tetsuo – The Iron Man (1989). Ginger Snaps (2000) Follow in the footsteps the great Canadian director. Cronenberg’s last genuine foray into the subgenre was 1999’s eXistenZ, videogames as a basis for his ideas, such as umbilical USB cables. His latest innovation is, however Crimes of the Future, Once again, he steps into the famous subgenre Pulsating.

Body horror seems to be on Cronenberg’s mind, and in the press notes for Crimes of the Future given to critics, the director states, “At this critical junction in human history, one wonders — can the human body evolve to solve problems we have created? Can the human body evolve a process to digest plastics and artificial materials not only as part of a solution to the climate crisis, but also, to grow, thrive, and survive?” Cronenberg’s application of body horror has always run parallel to technological concerns as an extension of the human body, and with Crimes of the Future He is curious if the body of a human being can grow new organs and identities.

Cronenberg’s reputation as a great filmmaker is pinned to body horror, but he very nearly stopped making films entirely in 1970. Cronenberg was a filmmaker who shot at least two science fiction movies in Toronto during the 1960s. Stereo Crimes of the Future. Cronenberg was not quite as skilled at visuals as his films, but they were filled with philosophical stories about human evolution that go beyond what Cronenberg can create with his camera. Cronenberg was more involved in scripting and, around the same period, he thought about retiring early as a director to pursue a career as a novelist.

Image: Cinépix Film Properties

Image: Cinépix Film Properties

The Canadian film industry had no precedent in genre filmmaking until the mid 1960s. David Cronenberg was not particularly interested in either the National Film Board of Canada or the CBC, as most of Canadian directors ended up being documentary filmmakers. He began writing scripts in 1971 for a novel idea that he was directing. The Orgy for the Blood ParasitesHe was like a parasite and was infected by a desire to keep directing. It is then that he discovered his voice as horror.

The Orgy for the Blood Parasites It would be Shivers, and it would cause shockwaves all through Canada because of its “dreadful”, “perverse” content. Due to Canada’s tax-shelter policy for filmmaking, the country suddenly found itself leading the way for horror in the mid-’70s with the likes of Black Christmas Popularity was growing. Cronenberg, like many others of that era’s filmmakers, was pleased with the success. But the controversy around it? Shivers This was news that made national headlines. Robert Fulford (Canadian journalist), wrote under an assumed name.ShiversHe was a taskmaster. In the pages of the magazine, he wrote.Saturday Night and he penned the rather damaging and now legendary headline, “You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it.” David Cronenberg was suddenly a controversial household name in his home country.

Image: Cinépix Film Properties

Body horror was the main reason for concern. It’s important to remember that in the mid-1970s, horror films were beginning to be overwhelmed with stabbing, bloodletting and murder. It was beginning to bear fruit. Shivers It is quite remarkable. Cronenberg came up with something new, rooted in medical reality. Parasitic infections are a major concern. Shivers They were squishy and slippery with a smooth, easy-to-breathe texture. Shivers The film was in essence a zombie flick. After the infection occurred, the parasites took over and turned human beings into conduits to reproduce more parasites via sexual ejaculate. Cronenberg’s original title, The Orgy for the Blood ParasitesThis gives you all that plot information one could need.

The film that followed was his last. Rabid, The plot was restructured and Marilyn Chambers became the lead. Chambers gives an excellent performance. Rose (Chambers), who is in a transformative process after being involved in a motorbike accident, has to have an experimental skin-grafting procedure that leaves her with contagion. She can’t digest food and cannot process blood. She feeds as a vampire and spreads a highly contagious disease that makes everyone who comes in contact with her, a bloody husk. Infected people produce milky puss and thirst for the flesh. This melding of zombie and vampire film is made all the more disquieting by the cold grey skies of Montreal and the looming pandemic reality brought about by Rose’s skin graft gone wrong. Even with the short time between these two pictures, Cronenberg’s understanding of body horror evolves. Cronenberg’s understanding of body horror evolves even though these two images are only a few seconds apart. Shivers It is used in an extremely basic way, to provoke shock, disgust and bile. Rabid’s Rose struggles to understand such things and is isolated from others.

Universal Pictures

Universal Pictures

In the 1980s, Cronenberg’s body horror became philosophically intertwined with technological advancements, and that was never more provocative than in Videodrome (1983). Videodrome, Max Renn is a TV executive. James Woods plays him. It doesn’t matter too much to Max if it’s staged or real because it turns him on, and he figures if it works for him, it’ll work for his audience. Max starts experiencing hallucinations, similar to a surgical open in his chest, which resembles an vulva. The television screen also begins to move like a lung, rising and falling. You can watch the program with Videodrome, Cronenberg was playing devil’s advocate with the whining conservatives who were clutching pearls about violent media. They believed certain images could change someone’s mind, so Cronenberg took it as their word and ran.

Cronenberg, in his commentary track for the Criterion Collection goes further to wonder about technology and the human body.

Technology doesn’t really expose its true meaning, I feel, until it has been incorporated into the human body. […] It’s really quite incredible what we’ve been able to do to the human body, and really take it to someplace where evolution, on its own, could not take it. We are the ones who have taken over evolution without being conscious.

Universal Pictures

Universal Pictures

Universal Pictures

Universal Pictures

Videodrome This is achieved by technology becoming an organ within the human body. One scene shows Max Renn with a Betamax cassette inserted in his navel. He pulls out a gun from the same opening, and it forms with his hand. The technology is now organic, rotting and transcendent through these types of applications. In the 1980s this was all done with the work of practical effects, and there’s a tactile quality to this particular era of Cronenberg’s filmmaking that is unmatched by the vast majority of his peers. He was expressly interested in dosing these fantastic elements with a human touch — veins, breathing sacks, and so on. Like in his previous films. Scanning The Brood The body horror consisted of tumors inside the body, which were expanding outwardly, but still with Videodrome, Fusion occurs, where objects are made human-like and become more like them.

These are the following Videodrome This was FlyIt is an amazing example of the art and science behind decomposition. Cronenberg, as a young boy was fascinated by the inner workings and insects. This obsession reappears in Cronenberg’s great William Burroughs adaptation. Nude Lunch, Complete with typewriters made of insectoid material He saw the 1958 original version and was amazed. Fly in his youth, he was dissatisfied with the integration of insect genealogy with its human host and took particular umbrage with David Hedison’s character suddenly finding himself with a human body and a fly head. He thought it was far more absurd to attempt to change to the instincts and behavior of insects. Years later, however, life gave him an opportunity to create with his own proboscis liquids.

Fly This is the story about the genius scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum). On the verge of creating a teleportation system similar to the Star Trek transporters, he is close to completing his invention.. Geena Davis plays Veronica Quaife, a journalist who is writing her next book on this amazing breakthrough. Along the way they fall in deep lust. Brundle’s experiment goes sour, when Brundle tries to teleport himself. Teleportation is possible. He’s a genius. He’s going to change the world for the better. He just has to figure out why the hell he’s transforming into an insect first. Science is an evolutionary process, so things can change. It’s probably good to know that it’s possible for DNA of two species to combine if placed in separate pods.

Image: 20th Century Fox

Image by 20th Century Fox

Image by 20th Century Fox

Fly is intoxicated by images of decay, rot, and other unpleasant things. You will find many sequences. Fly This would make weaker viewers run up the aisles. Brundlefly eats a doughnut to help his digestion, while Seth scratches his ear to release it. If he plans to fly the rest his life, he will no longer need the donuts. Cronenberg talked about mortality during the commentary track. The story of two lovers who are afflicted by disease is hidden in the amazing effects work. Cronenberg compares the experience to finding a lump under their breast. Through the long crawl toward his insectoid death sentence Seth tries very hard to hold onto his identity, but he knows it’s a losing battle. The film is a funny and apt metaphor for all diseases that can destroy the body. Cronenberg doesn’t even try to make this a horror movie, but instead chooses to use melodrama and more familiar notes. And much credit must be given to both Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum, who do a wonderful job centering everything that is at stake with Brundle’s deteriorating condition.

Cronenberg’s use of the human body is not so straightforward as to make it seem he only wanted to get the attention of the crowd. Every aspect of destruction, transcendence, evolution, and evolution, including the human body, had a wider meaning or question about us at any time. The body horror in Cronenberg’s pictures does not exist in a vacuum. He was also never interested in only using the body to suggest we’re all decomposing sacks of flesh who are always leaking fluids. These fluids are sometimes quite entertaining. There’s a sexuality to Cronenberg’s films dating back to Shivers Rabid All the way through Videodrome Crash, A philosophy that blends the technical, the sensual and the horrifying into one whole.

Alliance Communications

Alliance Communications

Alliance Communications

Crash, Elias Koteas is Bob Vaughan. This character leads a group of enthusiasts for car crashes who enjoy the thrill of collision. His character states that he is interested in the “reshaping of the human body through modern technology,” and it might as well be a thesis statement for Cronenberg at large. James Spader plays James Ballard, who is injured in a car crash and finds it boring to continue with the same old sex routines. Cronenberg enjoys filming both the physical and organic intertwining of his scars. Close-ups of leg braces clasped around skin-tight leather, a dent in a driver’s side door in the shape of a vaginal slit, and a warranty sticker peeling off a dashboard window like a scab are just a few of the images he lingers upon. Ballard’s sex life becomes infested with the death-drive of the collision, and his chilly wife Catherine (Deborah K. Unger) gets her husband to climax when she talks dirty about scar tissue and the smell of dirty grease paint on skin. She’s on board with his new way of life, and, like her, Cronenberg feels emboldened with new possibilities of how to compose the body in the ’90s.

Crash is likely Cronenberg’s greatest film because his images are so intertwined with a foreshadowing of total technological evolution with the human body. Like the changing human body, Cronenberg is interested in what objects are imbued and how they can be used to create organic meaning. Crash While he is often busy working with cars, none are unique. A vehicle’s failure, scraping metal and destruction in a collision gives these items character and give them a new life. Cronenberg considers the vehicle another organ we attached to our bodies for convenience and evolution.

Image: Alliance Atlantis

Similar to his 1999 photo eXistenZ, He proposes an artificial future made out of virtual reality, which is similar to the metaverse. We have made a new world because the world is too small. We are now. eXistenZ Allegra, a brilliant videogame creator (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and Pikul, her security guard (Jude Law), are under attack from assassins. This future version sees video games as organs. Players log in to these games via a bioport cut in the lower spine. Video game creators are now enemies of “Realists” who are protesting the deforming of reality, all of it plays in league nicely with other pictures of the mid-to-late ’90s like The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell, This concept of identity was based on reality, destiny and created fiction. Cronenberg eats this concept well and indulges in new gadgets to enjoy video gaming. The tactile sensation of Allegra’s game pod is what he lingers upon. It vibrates and curves sensually in his hands. Pikul doesn’t have a bioport because the idea of his spine being stabbed freaks him out, but that too is given a great deal of sexual charge when he is later penetrated, and a new opening is made in his body to make way for a new reality. Cronenberg can’t help but give that particular image a close-up, and when touched, this new orifice widens slightly and leaks. It’s gross and hot at the same time, like much of Cronenberg’s imagery. eXistenZ is a little dated in some respects, in the way that a lot of work in the days before the omnipresence of the internet was, but what hasn’t aged at all are the effects and Cronenberg’s application of them in this particular scenario. He manages, at the most, to make gaming appear sexy.

Since then, eXistenZ, Cronenberg hasn’t been as absorbed with horror filmmaking, but questions regarding the body, and the ways in which we identify and react to our times, have never left his work. Cronenberg sees flesh as the place where all roots sprout and form definition. Even classical works like The History of Violence, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method He has discovered ways to communicate with his body through the famous nude sauna battle between the gangsters. Promises Psychology and the development of psychology Method. Cosmopolis, Cronenberg’s treatise of the inhuman qualities of lifestyle capitalists, the film comes to a stop so Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) can have a prostate exam. He’s told his prostate is asymmetrical and assumes with foreboding that this must mean the market is about to change.

Cronenberg’s body was always there. These days, he is obsessed by his age and the way his body fails, as all bodies. He made a short film. David Cronenberg’s Death It is striking in its blunt truth. He recently spoke out with The Film Stage about his fascination with passing a kidney stone. To put it mildly, he is an exceptional intellectual and artist. Now, in his final years, he has a newfound passion for art and music.Crimes of the Future He has returned to his body of horror, wielding a scalpel in search for new flesh. David Cronenberg’s work is inextricably linked to each other. He tells us in the director’s notes for his newest picture, “Fans will see key references and moments from my other films. There’s a continuity of my understanding of technology as connected to the human body.” It is for this very reason that it comes highly recommended that one indulge themselves in Cronenberg’s larger body of work leading up to Crimes of the Future. David Cronenberg sees the body as a reality. It has always been, it will always be. This will continue to hold true for David Cronenberg and everyone else, even if it fails.

Shivers You can watch it for free, with no ads Tubi Oder You can rent and purchase digital platforms. Rabid You can watch it for free, with no ads Roku ChannelYou can also use a librarycard Kanopy, Oder You can rent and purchase digital platforms. Videodrome, Fly,eXistenz You can rent and purchase them on various digital platforms. Unfortunately, CrashIt is unavailable to view digitally in the United States. Crimes of the Future In select theatres, it is available.