Daily Halloween: Night 10

Due to poor Netflix queue management Rabid (1977) arrived in my mailbox yesterday. I didn’t need to watch another early Cronenberg film so soon after Shivers, but who am I to fight the fates? Rabid stars Marilyn Chambers¹ as Rose. After a motorcycle accident Rose undergoes experimental  surgery², during which skin from her thigh is treated to become “morphogenically neutral” and grafted to her abdomen and other damaged areas. After a month-long coma, not only has the graft repaired the damage, but it has mutated into a phallic protuberance that projects from an orifice in her armpit. (This is not hard science fiction.) Rose becomes a sci-fi vampire, seducing men and penetrating them with her armpit stinger to drink their blood. She is cunning and self-aware, but her victims become voracious and highly contagious – they are the rabid. When they fully succumb they’re like the infected from 28 Days Later, only less enthusiastic (the infected set a high bar). Shivers is a claustropobhic film taking place entirely on the grounds of a high-rise enclave; in Rabid we see the malady spread from the clinic and overrun Montreal.

These two films mark the middle of what I think of as Cronenberg’s early, raw period. In 1983 he made Videodrome, a highly conceptual, metatextual sci-fi horror film about violent media and S&M (it still involves new bodily orifices, that remains a motif until 1999’s eXistenZ, at least). It’s also his first film with a cast widely familiar to American audiences – James Woods and Debbie Harry. After that come The Dead Zone and The Fly, with higher budgets for cast (Christoper Walken, Martin Sheen, Geena Davis, and Jeff Goldblum) and effects. From there, Cronenberg makes all kinds of movies: crime films, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, an investigation of Freud and Jung, and others. Somehow, after mentioning J.G. Ballard in my Shivers post, I neglected to mention that the Cronenberg adapted Ballard’s famous cult novel Crash for screen in 1996.

David Cronenberg’s son, Brandon, made his directorial debut with Antiviral last year. As a filmmaker, he’s very much his father’s son. I don’t think Antiviral holds together very well but Brandon shoots it with a lot of style and an uncompromising (if somewhat derivative) vision. Finally, father David published his first novel, Consumed, less than two weeks ago.

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¹Chambers was a sometimes mainstream, sometimes pornographic actress known best for Behind the Green Door, a film that came into my consciousness when Jackie Chan watches it in his teched-out Subaru in The Cannonball Run. As a kid I loved Cannonball Run.
²No good comes of experimental research and treatments in Cronenberg’s world – see Stereo, Crimes of the Future, Shivers, Rabid, Scanners, The Brood, The Fly, Dead Ringers, eXistenZ…