By David Young · October 23, 2023
Canadian director David Cronenberg is, famed for his establishment of the modern body horror film. Starting first with 1970s TV movies, Cronenberg’s work soon extended well into the zeitgeist with several films that have his personal marks on them, including Videodrome and Crimes of the Future. It’s a bummer that the scripts for those movies aren’t available, but the movies we did find showcase David Cronenberg’s fascination with thrillers and horror films that explore the boundaries broken in human minds and bodies alike.
Wanna talk about body horror? This might be the ultimate David Cronenberg body horror flick!
Known for many moments of ultimate desperation, The Fly explores, first and foremost, the idea of someone losing his body to something beyond himself. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is one such man forced to look on as his existence is ripped apart by the entrance of a single insect into his groundbreaking experiment, the telepod. While aware of what’s happening, Brundle’s slow change into a genetic hybrid scared audiences with grotesque makeup and sound effects, much in the same way John Carpenter did with The Thing three years prior.
In name and concept, this film is a remake of The Fly of 1958, and both are based on the eponymous 1950s short story. That said, the spirit of the 1986 film deals with the gradual realities of dying as well as other truths about what makes a human truly “human,” making this the iconic body horror that it still seems to be so many years later.
Danger, tension, violence, and death — all favored concepts of that David Cronenberg employs often. This, then, makes a gangster crime drama like Eastern Promises all the more up his alley as a director.
Within it is a tale that follows a woman’s search for a home to place a motherless baby in London — but of course, nothing is ever so simple in films about crime. Anna (Naomi Watts) finds herself in contact with a Russian mafioso, and must work with him to protect the child. Based on what she learns about the baby’s parents, she soon may need protection herself, as her discovery opens up a big, deadly can of worms in the middle of a Russian gang war.
Originally known as They Came from Within, this David Cronenberg film is one that turns sex itself into a weapon. While many were fascinated by the intriguing angle of the more recent It Follows, depicting a supernatural STD of sorts, audiences first got to enjoy a more grounded and disturbing concept in the 1970s thanks to David Cronenberg: Shivers.
In this flick, a frightening sexually transmitted parasite causes victims to emulate the behavior of cinematic zombies: mindless and bent on infection of everyone in their path. Soon, the setting devolves from a place of residence into a crime scene with “sex maniac” slugs — and the people these things use to transmit their obsessive, horrifying acts. Imagine It Follows meets Wrath of Khan, and you’ve got the right idea. Scary, isn’t it?
Another film directed by David Cronenberg, the adapted A History of Violence shares a modern film noir story wherein a man forced to protect himself and others becomes recognized for his quick action. However, Tom (Viggo Mortensen) was on the run from the mob, and his recognition begins to become a serious impediment to his safety once more as the same people come knocking and threatening him and his unwitting family.
Through this series of events, Tom has to resurface a part of his life he thought he’d left behind, and with it, a trail of violence becomes his new legacy in the town where he thought he’d found safety.
The idea of Jeremy Irons taking on two roles at once in a film was just too tempting, of course — but Dead Ringers isn’t just a celebration of clever editing, deft camerawork, or Irons’s own prowess onscreen. It’s also about individuality and the problems that having someone share your identity might cause.
The Mantle twins have that exact discovery for themselves when they begin to ruin their own cruel seduction process. When Elliot first begins a tryst with their latest patient, Claire (Geneviève Bujold), the dependence that his twin brother Beverly forms on the woman becomes one red flag of several to come. With it, drug abuse and psychosis follow as Beverly suffers separation anxiety from Claire and Elliot comes to his aid, attempting to regain their seemingly damaged connection. It’s this dependence on such a connection that gets Elliot and Beverly to make their worst mistakes, proving the final point of David Cronenberg’s vision: These brothers are so grotesquely attached in their spirits that they truly can’t live without one another.
The psychological ramifications of horror, violence, and violation of natural law have always been regular inclusions in films directed by David Cronenberg. The ability to do a deeper dive into the human psyches he so loves to depict, though, becomes the main feature in A Dangerous Method. This movie trades visual shock for something more conceptual.
In this film, David Cronenberg envisions and displays imperfect things like friendships and sex through the eyes of Carl Jung. The famous psychologist juggles an affair with his patient and an intense growing debate with his colleague, Sigmund Freud about the methods they use to analyze the human mind. It’s through the events that these two doctors experience that psychoanalysis as we know it came to be — birthed in the wake of the mind’s most pervasive flaws and mysteries.
Gruesome may begin to describe the idea, but Scanners is a movie that does a lot more than shock people. The movie (and its marketing) establishes a premise around the idea of ESP, a concept that had already plagued the world of popular intrigue for decades.
With that in mind, it was David Cronenberg’s heady sci-fi approach that gave life to the story, providing with it a world full of complex history and business politics. The most famous feature of this film is, of course, an exploding head — iconic enough to create a trope about psychic activity in cinema ever since. Corporate agendas and secret wars play a great part in building the tension of this film, but ultimately, it’s a sci-fi flick of the period — as is demonstrated by the spectacle of a psychic battle between two people on different sides of a much larger struggle.
David Cronenberg’s fascination with the grotesque doesn’t just extend to the visually grisly images he shares with his audiences. While The Fly can frighten on looks alone, A History of Violence puts another disturbing thing on display: the human mind. It’s a deeply troubling source of problems, much like the human body, and in whatever way he can, Cronenberg works hard to challenge his audiences to think about those limits and the ways that they are breached. Whether through science fiction or pure, unadulterated hubris, people always find a way to reach horrific new levels of what can be labeled gruesome — be it gruesome visuals or gruesome behaviors.
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