It takes a lot of great work over a long career to be considered a great filmmaker, but it could be argued that the true mark of legendary status is when your name becomes synonymous with an entire aesthetic or style, when enough people have attempted to do what you did first that you become the zero standard for those who follow. You hear it all the time: Spielbergian journeys taken by young people through lushly photographed locales, Tarantino-esque bursts of violence. But of them all, few are more uniquely distinct than the subset of films that come to mind when you talk about David Cronenberg.
The signature is “body violence,” and throughout his career there’s been no shortage of it. The filmmaker has worked heavily in the arts of repulsion and paranoia, those often informing one another, and has spent decades challenging the boundaries of popular art. His films engage with our bodies in ways few others do, both theoretically and in the literal sense of the nausea his films have the capacity to induce in audiences.
So, with his latest film, Maps to the Stars, debuting in limited release and via VOD platforms this weekend, we got to debating the best work of one of modern film’s most unique, perverse, and wholly distinct voices. Read on, and long live the New Flesh.
–Dominick Suzanne-Mayer
Film Editor
10. eXistenZ (1999)
A funny thing happened to David Cronenberg in the 2000s: he went mainstream. He traded in his decades-long obsession with physical deformity, over-the-top gore, and sexual symbolism for relatively straightforward narratives, ones that were more palatable for the average moviegoer. This directorial shift proved successful, and he quickly began racking up more award nominations (especially for A History of Violence and Eastern Promises) than at any other point in his career. Prior to this switcheroo, there was eXistenZ (1999), the last of Cronenberg’s old-school body-horror films.
On the surface, eXistenZ tells the story of a video-game designer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who becomes the target of a violent political group opposed to virtual reality. A security guard, Ted Pikel (Jude Law), tries helping her escape their assassination attempts…and then things get weird. Honestly, none of this film’s greatness has to do with its paper-thin plot or its philosophizing about the nature of reality. Nope. This movie is a must-watch because of its gruesome special effects and its Freudian prosthetics.
Somehow eXistenZ gets away with showing half a dozen graphic sex scenes disguised as video-game play. Ya see, the game’s plug looks like a giant umbilical cord with a phallic tip, and it must be jammed into an asshole-shaped bioport located in the player’s spine. This leads to scene after shocking scene of Jennifer Jason Leigh penetrating Jude Law, including a spit-take-inducing moment when she sprays WD-40 on his bioport to loosen it up because first-time players tend to be “tight.” This movie definitely isn’t for everyone, but it brims with the same originality and jaw-dropping weirdness that made David Cronenberg a cult favorite in the first place. –Adriane Neuenschwander
9. Rabid (1977)
Here’s one of Cronenberg’s earlier hints at his fetish for body, vanity, and the horrific relationship each has with each other. Marilyn Chambers (yes, porn ingenue Marilyn Chambers) is Rose, the unlucky lady in a motorcycle accident that forces her to have plastic, restorative surgery. Seems pretty fair, and this being a Canadian production, the surgery was likely covered in full. However, her doctor is a freaky, furry eye browed guy experimenting with shady biological skin grafts, and, well, surprise baby! Rose grows a nasty little protrusion, a penile stinger, out of her armpit. It sucks the blood of others, and leaves them zombie-like. Gross. Gross gross gross.
Rabid is considered an early cult hit for Cronenberg, and it still gives the willies because of its sexually transmitted terrors, and bloody scares. Rose’s affliction becomes addiction, and Cronenberg shows her struggle not as a monstrous transformation, but a sad flaw in something that should have saved Rose. Her mind’s seemingly there, she doesn’t seem to want to be evil, but the needs of the body, the bad biology, take over. Who knows what funky side effects await us in an operating room? What danger is there in something that’s supposed to help? For a C-grade thriller, Rabid’s got some genuine chills to it. Cronenberg showed his early intelligence and nerve for horror here, along with Shivers in 1975.
Between the shrieking score, the pandemic scares, the medical fears, and Chambers’ sad, sultry performance, Rabid never truly goes away. –Blake Goble
8. Scanners (1981)
“Did you ever see that scene in Scanners when that dude’s head blew up?” Very few moments in cinema have catapulted its respective films throughout pop culture history like this one. People who have never even seen Cronenberg’s 1981 classic know about the messy explosion to minute detail, and long before GIFs or Tumblr culture made it an everyday occurrence. Hell, back in the ’80s and ’90s, Scanners was the film to rent for rambunctious sleepovers, solely because of that opening scene.
The rest, however, weighs heavily on patience. The story follows a renegade “scanner”, aka people with telekinetic powers, who wants to wage war against an evil corporation called ConSec, which collects similar telepaths for its own nefarious purposes. It’s an intriguing pitch clumsily carried out by a former CoverGirl (Jennifer O’Neill), a Canadian painter (Steven Lack), and the co-creator of The Prisoner (Patrick McGoohan), leaving much of the legwork to the great Michael Ironside.
Acting aside, the film’s a technical diamond, coming off like a more crass and unforgiving Carpenter production. There’s a crude elegance to the many frantic set pieces, enlivened by Howard Shore’s essential score. And really, make-up artist Dick Smith (The Exorcist) should have been nominated for an Academy Award because, damn, that final showdown between Ironside and Lack is something otherworldly. You’ll probably turn away and reach for a doggy bag. –Michael Roffman
