DAVID CRONENBERG (1943)

BODY HORROR SPECIALIST

From body horror to scathing satire, David Cronenberg’s work is a battlefield between the body and mind, frequently shocking and often mordantly funny.

At some point, Cronenberg, who was born in Toronto, became established. No longer the filmmaker whose early work saw him accused of being a pariah of the Canadian film industry and whose ‘sick’ films should have seen him institutionalised, recent films such as Crash (1996), A History of Violence (2005) and Maps to the Stars (2014) have been feted by critics and played in competition at major festivals. Perhaps the change came with the commercial successes of Scanners (1981), The Dead Zone (1983) and the breakout hit The Fly (1986). Yet those films, like the subsequent Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1991) and more recent work, still have the power to shock. Through them all is a probing exploration of the human psyche and its impact upon the physical self. If later films differ in any way from his earlier work, the reason lies in Cronenberg expanding his interest beyond the corporeal.

After two celebrated medium-length films, Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), Cronenberg wrote and directed Shivers (1975). Also known as The Parasite Murders, They Came from Within and the overly literal Orgy of the Blood Parasites, Cronenberg’s feature debut remains an unsettling examination of sexual promiscuity run amok in a state-of-the-art residential block. Rabid (1977) continued the theme of the infected body, albeit on a city scale, as an operation on a young woman who survives a road accident transforms her into a virus-infecting carrier. As with the subsequent The Brood (1979), these early features were a stark contrast to much of the horror being produced at the time. They could not be written off as merely gory entertainments – Cronenberg’s preoccupations were too radical. His examination of contemporary society and its ills, manifested in the physical transformation of his characters, unsettled many critics and would continue to do so in later films, such as Dead Ringers, Crash and Maps to the Stars. But arguably no other film in Cronenberg’s canon has continued to seem as relevant as Videodrome (1983): his exploration of the way media – both the message and the medium – can affect our lives.

After the startling head-exploding excess but narrative linearity of Scanners (1981), Videodrome arrived as something of a head-scratcher. What initially appears to be a thriller that delves into the murky world of violent porn soon becomes a surreal portrait of the way television has come to dominate our culture. A film that mainlines William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and the theories of Marshall McLuhan, Videodrome suggests that the medium is not so much a massage as a carcinogen, as it follows James Woods’ sleazy television producer on a journey into an alternate reality. Increasingly incoherent as its protagonist becomes enmeshed in a nefarious world on the other side of the television screen, Videodrome finds Cronenberg at his delirious best.

“CENSORS TEND TO DO WHAT ONLY PSYCHOTICS DO: THEY CONFUSE REALITY WITH ILLUSION.”