The Brood
Cronenberg’s horror films could be described as unnerving and unsettling, or majestically gross, but they’re almost never scary in the traditional sense. The Brood is a blood-curdling exception, unleashing a small army of half-formed dwarf-children with murderous intent. Written in the wake of Cronenberg’s bitter divorce and custody battle, The Brood is a raw expression of anger and psychic distress, which manifests itself in the bodily mutations that often find their way into his work. Only here the little monsters are literally the product of broken marriage, asexual offspring that the mother, Nola (Samantha Eggar), spawns while undergoing an intensive New Age therapy.
The Brood follows Nola’s husband, Frank (Art Hindle), as he tries to gain custody over their young daughter, but they’re stalked at every turn by the girl’s freakish siblings, who are small enough to squeeze through windows and strong enough to wield blunt instruments of death. Cronenberg builds to one his most notoriously grotesque images, but the film has a pulpy intensity throughout that’s unusual for the director, tied to personal emotions that don’t feel as intellectualized as his other work. It’s a war of the heart – nasty, brutish and short. Scott Tobias
Scanners
“All right. We’re gonna’ do it the Scanner way – I’m gonna’ suck your brain dry.”
So says Michael Ironside’s evil telepath Darryl Revok in David Cronenberg’s Scanners before beginning one of the most bonkers showdowns in film history. Revok and Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), our hero looking to prevent, or at least understand, a dangerous pharmacological conspiracy, stare each other down and think at each other. Like every kid who has tried to use the Force, their faces twitch, their arms shake, their eyes go bug out. Because this is a movie, the blood begins to spray, the flesh pulls apart, and everyone goes “ewwww”.
Scanners was Cronenberg’s last film financed by Canadian tax shelters, and was enough of a hit to get him on Hollywood’s radar. It has the action, plot twists, and gore to hook a mainstream audience, but is also still fundamentally subversive. It has the dying gasps of late 60s radicalism wearing early 80s Space Shuttle-era clothing.
I’ve seen the movie 10 times and still can’t decide if Patrick McGoohan’s Dr Paul Ruth is a villain. I do know, however, that the brutalist Canadian architecture, enormous lab computers, and the Lyle Mays-esque keyboards and fortissimo strings in Howard Shore’s score are magnificent. The movie’s still-shocking early kill – that exploding head – has also come in handy as a GIF for reacting to surprising emails and texts over the years, too. Jordan Hoffman
Videodrome
Even if it wasn’t the source of “long live the new flesh”, the closest thing to a mission statement for David Cronenberg’s entire oeuvre; even if it didn’t give us the character name Brian O’Blivion, or an all-timer performance from Debbie Harry at her most dizzyingly gorgeous; even if it didn’t presage the brain-melting nightmare of the Internet one media revolution ahead of schedule, predicting the unlimited stream of sadism on LiveLeak and the like; even if it was stripped of the thousand little things that make it a master’s crowning achievement, Videodrome would still be an immaculately assembled thriller from a director operating on an intellectual plane no one else can access.
In his creepily prescient vision of a dystopian future in which moving images have saturated the public’s brains to the point of causing tumors, Cronenberg advanced his pet themes of technologies run amok and permeable bodies to hallucinatory new highs, situating what could’ve been a simple gross-out exercise in a larger, more ambitious framework of political turmoil. We have not been desensitized by accident. The benumbing effect of overexposure to what we now understand as ‘content’ is deliberate, the conscious doing of nefarious institutional powers who want to control our thoughts. Just look at star James Woods – now a fringe ideologue wingnut, like a living cautionary tale for failing to heed his own warnings. Charles Bramesco
The Fly
More than 35 years later, The Fly remains the biggest hit of David Cronenberg’s career. Which makes sense, as it also may be his most accessible: a remake of a 1950s B-movie that twists all the director’s body-horror preoccupations into the shape of a state-of-the-art creature feature. But far from losing himself in the Hollywood machine, Cronenberg fused his outré preoccupations to the demands of a plum studio gig.
The Fly has it all: comedy, romance, scares, the unforgettably disgusting Chris Walas effects work used to transform Jeff Goldblum into a mistake of science that would make Mary Shelley proud. The film-maker’s true coup is smuggling an all-too-relatable tragedy into the multiplex under the guise of goopy pulp. Even the winks to the source material (“Help me” gets brilliantly repurposed) reveal how Cronenberg has transformed it, finding the real horror of ageing and disease in the hubristic teleporter mishap of a cocky scientist. The result is one of the grossest, saddest box-office sensations of all time – and proof that there’s no corrupting Cronenberg’s creative DNA, even when it’s been spliced with the squarer interests of 20th Century Fox. AA Dowd
Dead Ringers
Made on the back of Cronenberg’s unprecedented box office success with The Fly, Dead Ringers was an object lesson in how not to sell out to the mainstream. Relative to anything he had made previously, however, this was the Canadian’s idea of a prestige drama, the grungy grotesquerie of his previous body-horror milestones replaced with sleek surgical-steel cool, confining many of its grisliest ideas to the interior realm. Still, there was a richly salacious undertow to this story of identical twin brothers who share a gynaecological practice – and take creepy advantage of their physical interchangeability in their dealings with women. Roger Ebert, not a fan, likened it to “a collaboration between med school and a supermarket tabloid”, as if that very description isn’t catnip to Cronenbergians: the film balances complex psychological ideas of masculine impulses and sexual power-plays with a witty, nasty B-movie sensibility.
That conflict is also contained in Jeremy Irons’s extraordinary dual performance in the lead(s), which put him on the Hollywood map after stars like Robert De Niro and William Hurt turned it down, and won him a number of major US critics’ awards. The Oscars, of course, were too squeamish to nominate him, and two years later, when Irons won for Reversal of Fortune, he thanked Cronenberg in his speech. “Some of you may understand why,” he said: 30-odd years later, Cronenberg’s shivery, slithery masterpiece has eclipsed the role he won for. Guy Lodge
eXistenZ
Released in the spring of 1999, just weeks after The Matrix, there was never going to be quite the same breakout appeal for Cronenberg’s similar but smaller sci-fi reality-bender eXistenZ (less Keanu, more fish guts). But the huge, and hugely unexpected, zeitgeist-grabbing success of the Wachowskis’ franchise-starter pushed its darker, weirder cousin even further into the shade, where it’s unfairly remained ever since. For me, it’s the far more arresting concoction, a strange, dreamy thriller that sees the director replaying some of his greatest hits without any lethargic laurel-resting. It’s the rare film about gaming that’s aged with barely any wrinkles, over two decades later, its view of the obsessive, all-consuming nature of the industry and our corrupting desire for other more immersive realities feels ever-contemporary.
It’s thankfully not the techno-blasting, gross-out horror the lurid mis-sell of a trailer promised, but its gristly vision of umbilically linked, spinally inserted game pods still seeps its way under the skin. Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s flirty, all-chips-in players alternate between arousal and unease and so do we, a weirdly graphic film about sex without a single sex scene. Benjamin Lee
Spider
Before Kings Cross got scrubbed up, it was the go-to location for directors in search of proper London grime. It had it all: railways, sidings, soot, gas works, pubs, canal, alleys, cobbles, the enveloping sense of crime. One of the last films shot in those lovely, rotten old days was Cronenberg’s 2002 adaptation of the Patrick McGrath psycho-horror about a disturbed man (Ralph Fiennes) over-optimistically released from an institution who begins to have flashbacks to his childhood, while holed up in Miranda Richardson’s boarding house. Richardson does double duties here, also playing Spider’s late mother, who frequently feels the need to call on Gabriel Byrne’s well-equipped plumber.
From the first shot to the last, Spider is tense as spun silk. Fiennes, rocking a hairdo inspired by Beckett, is on top repellent form but it’s the sleek narrative lines and filthy production design which steal the show. Cronenberg, the cast, the producers all made it just for fun, no salaries involved. You can see why: it’s rare to be happy that something so horrible is so hard to shake. Catherine Shoard
A History of Violence
The genius of David Cronenberg’s most “accessible” movie is the way the Canadian director’s perversities creep into that all-American genre, the western, corrupting it from the inside like the parasite in Shivers.
Viggo Mortensen – coming straight off the bloom from his Lord of the Rings run into the first of four collaborations with Cronenberg – stars as Tom Stall, a diner owner living the American dream with an impossibly perfect family in a sleepy midwest town. Their manicured facade crumbles when Tom protects his community from two visiting baddies like a rancher in a classic John Ford narrative. Cronenberg seduces audiences with explosive bursts of movie action that meet his standard; there are smashed heads and shredded cartilage. But then he lives in those celebrated acts of heroic violence long enough to let discomfort and anxiety settle in.
The “heroism” causes a fissure. The kids act out. Domestic sex between Tom and his wife Edie (a brilliant Maria Bello) goes from innocent cheerleader cosplay to a carnal, aggressive and masochistic bout on a stairwell (the Cronenberg of Crash gets his moment in the midwest). And more villains pull up. The bad guys don’t bring violence to this small town. The simple and evergreen point A History of Violence so elegantly makes is that it was always there, hiding in plain sight. Radheyan Simonpillai
Cosmopolis
Cosmopolis is far from the most-loved of Don DeLillo’s novels, and it’s safe to say the same about Cronenberg’s 2012 cinematic adaptation. That’s a shame, because this piece of intellectual malarky centered around a Bezos-rich twentysomething stands out among the auteur’s post-millennial movies. Also, in an era where lone angry men committing acts of gun murder has become commonplace, the film is sadly relevant and prophetic.
Cosmopolis takes place across a single day, as billionaire man-child Eric Packer rides in his limo across New York City to get a haircut. He faces increasingly direct threats to his life, although appears unconcerned, or even welcoming of the potential violence as a novelty. With the plot all but a red herring, the texture of Cosmopolis takes center stage. The limo itself is one of Cronenberg’s slickest, strangest simulated realities, and I can’t imagine many film-makers exceeding the job Cronenberg does of rendering DeLillo’s unique dialogue – blending absurdism, stark humor, pop cultural currency, and postmodern theory-speak – into brilliant repartee that’s at once sardonic, ludicrous, and deep. The film can be scrutinized for insight into how massive, transnational flows of money warp our sense of body and ethics, or it can just be enjoyed as a stupidly entertaining romp, complete with a subplot of rats – one of New York City’s most plentiful natural resources – becoming the latest trendy currency (crypto-bros take note). Ultimately a tale of a murder in search of a justification, in which the victim seems in cahoots with his assassin, it is singular Cronenberg. Veronica Esposito
Maps to the Stars
Though David Cronenberg has made a Stephen King adaptation, a big hit remake, and an Oscar-nominated drama, he’s not really associated with the ins and outs of Hollywood studio film-making – which makes the sort-of satire Maps to the Stars both an unusual project for the film-maker and an admittedly strange pick for a favorite. In truth, it’s not Cronenberg’s absolute best; my far more basic choice would be The Fly, that aforementioned hit remake. But I’ve returned to Maps repeatedly, puzzling out why I respond so warmly to the entanglements of Havana (Julianne Moore), an aging actor; Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), her mysterious personal assistant; Jerome (Robert Pattinson), a limo driver; and Benjie (Evan Bird), a child actor, among others.
Part of it is Cronenberg’s talent for teasing darkness out of the sunshine. Though it’s not precisely a horror film, Maps is full of gothic touches, like the gloves Agatha wears to cover her extensive burns, the various characters’ hallucinatory encounters with ghosts, or the ghastly family secrets eventually unveiled. Typical Hollywood-satire talking points are sidestepped in favor of depicting a vivid sense of rot, and even some common logistical compromises – shooting parts of this Los Angeles-set movie in Canada – emphasize the industry’s disconnected, alien qualities. Mostly, I love Maps to the Stars because Cronenberg seems to be spending the movie thoughtfully considering whether to burn the whole city down – the perfect prelude to the eight-year break he took after making it. Jesse Hassenger
