The Body Horror Of David Cronenberg, A Director Filming From The Point Of View Of The Disease

Whether we are talking about a telekinetic splatterfest in a shopping mall food court, a vagina-like slit opening up in your stomach and swallowing your gun and your video-tapes, or just a dose of some good old car crash-sex, Canadian director David Cronenberg is responsible for some of the most brain-bending moments in cinema. Many of his movies concentrate on a fear of bodily transformation and infection, and therefore it is reasonable to talk about him as a maker of Body Horror-movies. The theme of graphic descriptions of diseases and mutations turning human beings inside out was established in Shivers from 1975. In the BBC-documentary David Cronenberg And The Cinema Of The Extreme the director tells us that he “wanted to have a kind of claustrophobic, trapped feel, and there was something about a high-rise apartment building in which little dramas were unfolding in each apartment. I wanted to suggest that the proliferation of this strange disease was on one strange level liberating, and that gives the film I think its very disconsertive feel.” To this zombie-maestro George Romero adds in the same documentary that “it’s really part of the job of the genre to rattle your cage and to create an environment that is not the environment that you’re in, it’s not the world, it’s meant to shake that world up, particularly if you’re using it as some form of criticism of the ways things are. The big problem I’ve always had with normal horror is that things are restored to normality in the end, whereas the whole genre is meant to bring down reality or destroy it.” Cronenberg went on to direct many conceptually interesting and culturally significant movies throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties. The gore-remake of the classic The Fly is for all its broken eighties logic and dated dialogue and special effects an enjoyable two hours of popcorn-magic. Who better to remake this fifties classic of extreme science and bodily mutations than Cronenberg? And who could have been more fitting for the adaption of William S. Burroughs underground classic Naked Lunch to the silver screen? Here it is perhaps better to talk about mutation rather than adaptation, since the idea of sticking to the story in the book is wisely thrown away. Such a treatment would after all – according to the director – “cost 500 million dollars and be banned in every country of the world”. Instead we get a movie where episodes from Burroughs personal life as a bug-exterminator in New York City and as an expatriate in the lawless, drug-filled Interzone in northern Africa are mixed with dusted segments of typewriters turning into giant, slimy cockroaches and sadistic female nazi-officers interrogating him about who knows what. In eXistenZ the reality matrix is distorted when players enter a deadly Virtual Reality game, without an idea of when they get out, or if they even can. The bad acting and technical glitches of certain video games are here taken to a higher level, and it is all fun stuff and weird moments. Crash, based on a novel by J.G. Ballard, tells us about a group of people with one thing in common, they all get really turned on by car accidents. The hot date between man and machine is yet again explored from an unexpected angle. In the end, these are all more interesting to talk and write about, than to actually watch. All are fine, enjoyable movies, but none of the mentioned have the attractive low budget-qualities and the perfect narrative synthesis between sex, gore and brain that we find in three movies from 1979, 1981 and 1983 – The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome.