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.

Rabid (1977)

 “I don't want to become the Colonel Sanders of plastic surgery..."

Well. I've always said until now that I've seen an awful lot of David Cronenberg films (I may do an index for the blog after this if I remember. Maybe David Lynch too.), but I've somehow contrived to focus on the ones with the least emphasis on his signatute body horror- although his later films are indeed very good.

This one goes a long way towards redressing the balance, in being the Canadian auteur's second film- low budget, and a  glimpse at a talented young man rather than an established director- and having body horror coming out of its armpit, by means of a suspiciously phallic-looking bloodsucking proboscis, which makes it interesting that the affected protagonist, Rosie, is a woman. Perhaps this film is inspired by sex during a period, but... moving swiftly on.

Basically, this is a low budget film with no stars and few extras that nevertheless achieves brilliance necause it's directed by an enfant terrible. Cronenberg's pacing, signature camerawork and visual style are already present and correct as a B movie plot- a girl has a motorbike crash and has to have emergency surgery by an unconventional plastic surgeon (called Dr Keloid!), leading to said body horror and a rabies-type plague on a suspiciously Anglophone Montreal where only a random exposition-spouting cop happens to be from the French-speaking majority- is raised to something much greater by sheer style. The locations, the lighting, even the mid-twentieth century architecture are made to look stunning.

It can be a fascinating experience to see a cinematic genius at work in their early, unheralded, years, where the creativity relies not on Hollywood visual tricks but on making something wonderful out of nothing. This is one of them.