Scream Series: 1976's Shivers Is an Unsettling Early-Cronenberg Masterpiece
Courtesy of Lionsgate Films ©
By Matt Fink
Although Canadian auteur David Cronenberg had already taken two previous cinematic scalps - Stereo and Crimes of the Future, the finding of which would be a challenge for even the most dedicated cinema geek - a movie he made for less than 200,000 dollars that proved wildly popular in his native Canada brought him his first significant flush of recognition. Called Shivers (the poster’s tag line reads “They Came From Within”), the film is a prime example of the “body horror” sub-genre - which it could be argued Cronenberg himself invented, or at least perfected.
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As a piece of cultural observation, Shivers works on several levels, but it can most easily be seen as a direct jab at both the sunny sexual hedonism of the 1960s and 70s and the smug self-satisfaction of the class of people who would become to be known in the next decade as yuppies.
But if all Shivers amounted to was a savaging of the bourgeoisie it would hardly qualify as a horror movie, at least not in the tradition sense. Where the movie unsettles and disturbs is in its - and by extension, Cronenberg’s - capacity to tap into our deep-seated fear of our own vile bodies and their capacity to betray us.
Courtesy of Lionsgate ©
Courtesy of Lionsgate Films ©
The film’s body-anxiety-made-flesh comes in the form of a grotesque organism, one resembling nothing so much as an ambulant turd, born mysteriously from the body of a sick tenant in the aforementioned high-rise. The bearer of a highly communicable venereal disease whose primary symptom is violent sexual frenzy, this unspeakable brown lump transforms with terrifying speed the building’s residents from a bunch of stiff, aloof and alienated yuppies to a moaning, heaving mammalian scrum, biting, grasping and fornicating in the confines of a hermetic, beige mid-Century nightmare of an apartment complex. The famously acerbic Cronenberg, tall, gaunt and bespectacled, seems to take an almost sadistic glee in engineering the swift devolution into sexual madness of his stylish, attractive cast. Nobody is unsafe from the director’s macabre wand, either: one particularly shocking scene sees a pig-tailed young girl transformed from wide-eyed innocent into just another of the aggressively horny fuck zombies the adults around her have become.
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If you like the sound of Shivers - and who wouldn’t? - know that it ably serves both as an introduction to Cronenberg’s signature brand of clammy, subtly satirical horror and as an augury of the works that followed - a template that was more-or-less perfected in movies like Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome, Naked Lunch, The Fly and eXistenZ.
A challenge to the psychically hardy: watch all of the above-mentioned movies back-to-back in a single 24-hour span. (Suggested accoutrement: a snack bar of dissected scarab beetles and anonymous, quivering cubes of grey gelatin, and a clean wash clothe to towel off your extremities.)
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