For nearly his entire career, David Cronenberg has been considered a trailblazer of the ‘body horror’ subgenre — and it’s easy to see why.
The renowned Canadian filmmaker is behind Scanners, Videodrome and the 1986 remake of The Fly — just some of the highly influential sci-fi and horror classics he’s made throughout the decades. Many of the films share a focus on disturbing and graphic violations of the human body.
Yet the 82-year-old Torontonian has only reluctantly accepted that title — or allowed others to connect the phrase ‘body horror’ to his films.
“I’ve never used that term to describe my own work,” Cronenberg says in an interview with Global National’s Eric Sorensen. “But it has stuck, and I’m stuck with it.”
Personal connections
For the average moviegoer, Cronenberg’s latest work, The Shrouds, won’t necessarily help with his defence. The film is all about a tech entrepreneur inventing a machine that monitors corpses as they decompose inside their graves — allowing people to watch their dead and buried loved ones slowly wither away.
But it is one of Cronenberg’s most personal films yet, having been inspired by the death of his wife in 2017 and the grief that followed.
The movie itself makes that no secret. Like Cronenberg, the morbid inventions of the film’s protagonist are a product of his longing for his own late spouse. In past interviews, Cronenberg had described an intense urge to join his wife inside her coffin during her burial — a feeling also mentioned in the film.
“The death of my wife was the instigator of this movie. I wouldn’t have made this movie, I wouldn’t have thought to write it, if it hadn’t been for that. But I think you could overstress the idea of the personal aspect of it because I think all art is personal in some way,” Cronenberg says.
“There’s always an autobiographic element because it’s your life that allows you to understand what your characters are, who they are, how people relate to each other.”
For the uninitiated, that raises questions about what else inspires the disturbing visions present in Cronenberg’s other movies, such as a man’s sexual fetish for deadly car collisions in Crash or the harrowing human mutations driven by technology in Crimes of the Future.
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But for Cronenberg — long fascinated with the human body — these extremes simply reflect just how intense our anxieties are for our changing bodies and our mortality.
“There comes a time when a child learns that the child will not live forever … That’s pretty difficult. That’s a major turning point in any human’s life,” he says.
“The body is reality. Once you start with that and then you consider death is inevitable — and if you’re an atheist like me, you consider that death is oblivion — I mean, it is the end of you. You disappear. We put all that together, then you have my movies.”
True to Canada
Cronenberg never made it a point to be this subversive when he started making movies more than 50 years ago. Son of a musician and a writer, he was just a creative attracted by the potential of the medium to express his ideas. With short films and no formal training, all he cared about then was being any good at it.
“It wasn’t even the idea of the subject matter that was considered. It was my ability to be a filmmaker technically,” he says, while recollecting the challenges of making his first commercial film.
“At first, I thought, ‘Oh my God, I don’t think I can do this. The faces of the heads are the wrong size in the frame. The angle is not right. The two shots don’t really work together.’ And I thought maybe I really don’t have the sensibility.”
Cronenberg also wasn’t sure whether his career as a filmmaker would even thrive in Canada. Partly motivated by better financial incentives in the American film industry, he pitched his first feature, Shivers, to Hollywood executives first. He also considered moving permanently to the U.S. since he already had personal ties south of the border through his American father. It was only when he secured funding from the Canadian Film Development Corporation, now Telefilm Canada, that he decided to stay.
He preferred that anyway and still does.
“I really felt that my sensibility was Canadian and different from the U.S.,” he says. “I don’t think in the U.S., they imagine that Canadians were different, but I really could feel it when I went to America how different it was.”
Quintessentially Cronenberg…and Canadian
Decades of international acclaim later, the eccentricity of Cronenberg’s movies is now considered quintessential Canadian cinema. His impact and influence beyond it is also emblematic of how Canada’s filmmakers do their best work when they are not trying to mimic mainstream Hollywood.
Not that Cronenberg hasn’t found success there either, having directed star-studded dramas like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. He was even initially approached to work on crowd-pleasers like Top Gun, Star Wars and, to his confusion, Flashdance.
“I thought I probably would have destroyed that film (Flashdance) somehow,” Cronenberg admits. “[But] I took it as a positive appraisal of my skills as a director.”
It’s clear Cronenberg’s distinct body of work will continue to fascinate audiences and aspiring filmmakers alike long after he’s gone. Even if that also means his name will be forever associated with the ‘body horror’ genre.
But true to his beliefs, he’s not all too concerned about legacy.
“I’m not worried about it,” he says. “Once I’m dead, it’s not going to be a problem.”
