Shivers (1975)

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David Cronenberg is a favourite director of mine, He occupies that strange middle ground between respected auteur and body horror genre director, at least in the early part of his career: later on,the body horror disappears and Cronenberg safely gets the approval of the snobbish critics whi sniff at his earlier work, even this film, which is safely gathered into the canon of we horror aficionados, Yet this is no B movie. It deserves more.

Amonst the cast, of course, is Barbara Steele, to whom the phrase "horror queen" could be applied. And this very modern film (for 1975), opening with a posh advert for a load of posh aparments on the St Lawrence in Montreal, is certainly within the horror genre. Yet it centres ver specifically on a body horror equated exactly with sexzuality. As Janine says, while trying to seductively kill Dr St Luc, mere existence is sexuality; we exist to reproduce, The species is all. So here we have a Dr Hobbes who plans to replace malfunctioning organs with useful parasites that do the same job, yet (after the nonce dies after murdering a schoolgirl he'd been shagging, causing distressingly little outrage) his true philosopjy is that humans are too cerebral and insufficiently sexual. This is the perfect premise for a film based on the phenimenon of disgusting little phallic worms which can hardly do other than represent male sexuality. There's a clearly rapey theme here, intended to evoke bloody disgust, and no one gets out alive, as we're all guilty of having sexual desires, if not necessarily violent ones. 

This is at once a superb horror film, belying its low budget, and a harbinger of what Cronenberg has yet to bring us.The man's a genius.