David Cronenberg enraged Canada’s moral guardians and started his career with a bang 50 years ago with Shivers. We take a look back at body horror’s patient zero…
The same year that Jaws invented the modern summer blockbuster, David Cronenberg was up in Canada, quietly inventing his own horror subgenre. In 1975, Shivers emerged like a monster escaping from a lab: ungainly, weird-looking, eliciting a mixture of fascination and disgust from those who happened to cross its path.
It’s fitting, really, that the filmmaker’s debut begins with an archetypal mad scientist: one Dr Emil Hobbes, who’s invented a grotesque parasitic organism – “a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease” – and appears to be attempting to destroy it with acid.
Needless to say, Hobbes is too late: the disease-spreading parasite has, thanks to the activities of a promiscuous lady named Annabelle, already begun to spread around a luxury apartment block. Shivers – alternately titled The Parasite Murders, Frissons or They Came From Within – then becomes a battle of wits between the coolly rational Dr Roger St Luc (Paul Hampton), who also tries to prevent the parasite from turning the building’s residents into an army of sex-obsessed zombies. It’s fair to say his efforts aren’t an unqualified success.
Shot in less than a month on a tiny budget (and produced by a pre-Ghostbusters Ivan Reitman), Shivers is in many respects the typical kind of horror B-movie a filmmaker might make in order to kickstart a career. It has copious dollops of gore, bare skin, shocking images and simple yet creative special effects. Horror icon Barbara Steele (Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, Federico Fellini’s 8½, Roger Corman’s The Pit And The Pendulum) even shows up to provide a couple of particularly striking moments – one of which inspired the design on the poster.
Cronenberg was too smart a filmmaker to make a sensationalist cash grab, however, and Shivers is far from low-budget schlock. Its sleek, contemporary tower block setting gives it a Ballardian feel (Ballard’s novel High-Rise coincidentally came out the same year), with the assorted characters and their private lives almost looking like organisms wriggling on a microscope slide. If George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead was a zombie movie for the era of the Vietnam war and Civil Rights movements, Shivers is a horror for the age of the sexual revolution and second wave feminism.
For conservative reactionary types who were quietly horrified at the women and gay liberation movements flourishing in the 1970s, or the increasing popularity of explicit, ‘porno chic’ films like Behind The Green Door or Deep Throat, then Shivers was a nightmare imprinted on celluloid: humanity stripped of its inhibitions, morals and undergarments.
And if the acting in Shivers isn’t the most polished or as interesting as it is in later Cronenberg films, then maybe that’s partly because the filmmaker’s interest really lies in the unforgettably disgusting parasite and its antics. Legend has it that the filmmaker originally wanted it to look like a spider, but special effects makeup designer Joe Blasco couldn’t figure out how to make all those spindly legs look convincing on Cronenberg’s minimal time and resources. Necessity being the mother of invention, the monster was then imagined as a cross between a maggot, a leech and something that drops out of a dog’s backside, its inching movement realised by an off-screen hand pulling on a fishing line.
Read more: Why is Hollywood so smitten by body horror right now?
It really is a loathsome little beast, whether it’s swimming in a bath with Steele or attaching itself to victims’ unsuspecting faces. Full marks as well to actor Allan Migicovsky, whose physical performance really helps sell the idea that he’s becoming an incubator to a brood of tiny critters – his fast breathing, coughing and gagging helps sell Blasco’s surprisingly good makeup effects, from bulging necks to undulating stomachs.
Shivers first began screening in 1975, and it was a hit with Canadian audiences, even as critics and politicians expressed their distaste. The film represented something of a quandary for the country’s parliament because, while it was a scurrilous film partly funded with taxpayers’ money (via the Canadian Film Development Corporation) it also made a profit when many other independently-financed films of the time didn’t. All the same, the flap surrounding Shivers temporarily torpedoed Cronenberg’s reputation and his ability to get his next project funded.
“The taxpayers’ money was paid back on that film,” the director said in the book, Cronenberg On Cronenberg. “It filled the coffers, but the attitude was that they didn’t want the coffers filled with filth. Huge pressure was put on the CFDC and the whole episode cost me a year.”
Suggested product
Film Stories issue 53 gift bundle: Magazine + Nic Cage scratch poster + Nic Cage coasters!
£30.00
Shivers’ roll-out to territories outside Canada was slow, much like the early growth of a disease; mainstream critics like Roger Ebert saw it in early 1976, by which time Cronenberg had already begun working on his next movie. Released the following year, Rabid is in many ways a continuation of Shivers’ style and themes. A medical breakthrough – in this case a skin graft – turns an ordinary woman into a disease-spreading vampire, creating a plague that sweeps across Canada. As if to continue the conservative-baiting, Cronenberg even cast Marilyn Chambers, star of the above-mentioned Behind The Green Door, as Rabid’s pandemic-spreading lead.
After years of making short films, Shivers provided the launchpad for a feature career that is still going strong half a century later. Cronenberg’s personal brand of body horror – as much a philosophy as a subgenre – continued to evolve over each of his subsequent films. The Brood (1979) was a bracing look at parenthood and marital breakdown viewed through a freaky sci-fi lens. Videodrome (1983) was similar in approach to Shivers, in that it took an almost satirical look at what might happen if mass media was really capable of reprogramming people and making them commit murder.
Cronenberg gradually moved away from his horror roots as his stature grew in the 1980s and 90s, but the impact of his filmmaking has spread far beyond his own movies. There has been some speculation that the parasitic creature of Alien may have been inspired in some way by Shivers – a theory Cronenberg has mentioned himself in the past. Whether that’s true or not, Cronenberg’s film was undoubtedly one of the earliest films to explore subjects that, before the 1970s, would have been taboo in mainstream cinema.
A generation of filmmakers have since taken up the body horror banner and flown it for themselves. Writer-director Julia Ducournau’s work (Raw, Titane, Alpha) is distinctly Cronenbergian; Coralie Fargeat moulded the subgenre to Oscar-nominated effect in last year’s The Substance. Cronenberg’s own children, Brandon (Infinity Pool) and Caitlyn (Humane) have also inherited some of their father’s appetite for the extreme.
These and other writers and directors have used body horror to explore themes of gender, trauma, body image, disease, ageing and more besides – subjects that audiences might otherwise find too difficult to countenance in a more conventional drama. Most recently, Cronenberg has returned to his own territory with what might be his most personal work so far: The Shrouds, a horror-drama which fictionalises the grief he felt over the loss of his wife of 43 years, Carolyn.
“I’ve met Coralie, I’ve met Julia,” Cronenberg told The New York Times earlier this year. “It’s very sweet, they’re like my cinematic daughters. And I have a son and a daughter who are also moviemakers, so it doesn’t threaten me.”
From a sexually-liberating parasite to loss and death, body horror has proven to be an adaptable organism for Cronenberg – one capable of morphing and expressing all sorts of fears and ideas. And it’s that adaptability that has seen this strain of genre not just endure but flourish over the past 50 years. Whether we like it or not, body horror is part of all of us.
