David Cronenberg: The Flesh and the Machine

Most horror directors are afraid of the body. David Cronenberg is fascinated by it — the way it leaks, mutates, betrays, and occasionally improves. For half a century he has made films about flesh doing things flesh should not do, and the reason they unsettle so precisely is that he never treats the transformation as evil. To Cronenberg, disease is a form of change, and change is neither good nor bad; it is simply what happens next. That clinical calm, laid over the most visceral images in mainstream cinema, is the signature. He films the end of the human as we know it with the composure of a man reading a lab report.

Understand that composure and the whole strange filmography — from a Canadian tax-shelter shocker to a Cannes competition regular to a Hollywood gangster picture and back to the operating table — becomes one continuous argument.

The early shockers: infection as revolution

He arrived with Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), cheap and confrontational, and the ideas were already fully formed. Shivers fills an antiseptic modern apartment tower with a parasite that turns its residents into ravenous libertines; the building’s clean modernist promise rots from inside. Rabid gives Marilyn Chambers a phallic stinger under her armpit and lets a plague spread through a city. Critics were appalled — one famous Canadian broadside asked whether public money should fund such things — and missed that Cronenberg was doing something older and stranger than exploitation. He was staging the body’s revolt against the mind’s control, and refusing to take the mind’s side.

The Brood (1979) is the hinge. Made during a bitter divorce and custody fight, it externalises rage as biology: a woman’s fury literally grows children who kill on her behalf. It is his most personal early film and his cruellest, and it announces the mature theme — the psyche is not sealed off from the meat; it shapes the meat, and the meat shapes it back. Scanners (1981) took that to the skull with its exploding-head jolt, but the idea underneath is the same feedback loop between thought and flesh.

Two things anchor these early films and hold across the whole career. One is Canada — Cronenberg is a defiantly Toronto director, and his sterile modern apartment blocks, empty clinics, and glass office towers give the body horror a specifically cold, ordered backdrop to erupt from; the flesh looks worse against the beige. The other is his method with actors: he casts against the grotesquerie, hires serious dramatic performers, and directs them to play the impossible material completely straight. Nobody in a Cronenberg film ever seems to know they are in a horror film. That deadpan conviction is a big part of why the images survive the decades.

Videodrome and the arrival of the machine

Then comes the run that made him. Videodrome (1983) is where the second obsession — technology as biology — fuses with the first. A sleazy cable operator finds a broadcast that grows a tumour, opens a vaginal slot in his stomach, and turns him into a weapon; “long live the new flesh” is the film’s cracked prayer. Cronenberg looked at the television set in 1983 and saw an organ. He was right about all of it — the screen as a thing that reaches into you and rewires you — a decade and a half before the internet made the metaphor literal.

The astonishing part is what came immediately after. The Dead Zone (1983), a restrained, moving Stephen King adaptation with Christopher Walken, proved he could work in a minor key and direct actors to genuine tenderness. Then The Fly (1986), his one true commercial hit, which reframes a fifties creature feature as a love story told in decaying meat — a scientist watching his own body fail cell by cell while the woman who loves him watches too. It is the film that converts non-believers, because the horror is finally, nakedly, about mortality. Anyone who has sat with a dying person recognises it.

Dead Ringers (1988) is arguably the peak of his control: Jeremy Irons as twin gynaecologists whose shared identity dissolves into addiction and horror, and barely a drop of overt gore. The dread is entirely psychological and entirely embodied. It is Cronenberg proving the flesh horror was always about the mind’s grip on the body loosening.

The technical achievement of Dead Ringers is worth pausing on, because it is invisible: Irons plays both twins in the same frame, often in close, physical contact, and in 1988 that meant a motion-control camera repeating a precise move so the two performances could be composited seamlessly. Most viewers never register the trick, which is the point — Cronenberg spends serious technology on making you forget the technology, so that all you feel is one man split in two and coming apart. It is the same discipline he brings to gore: the effect exists to serve the dread, and the second you notice the effect, he has failed. He almost never fails.

The literary detour and the great cold films

The nineties send him into “unfilmable” books and he films them anyway. Naked Lunch (1991) folds Burroughs’s novel into Burroughs’s own life and produces talking typewriter-insects and a hallucinated Interzone; it is more about the act of writing than any plot. Crash (1996), from J.G. Ballard, is the most divisive thing he ever made — people who fetishise car crashes, filmed with a mortician’s cool — and it was booed and banned and is, quietly, one of his most rigorous works about how technology reshapes desire itself. eXistenZ (1999) put a fleshy game-pod against your spine and predicted the console-war anxieties and reality-slippage of an entire coming decade of gaming.

Then he did the thing nobody expected: he made “normal” films, and they were superb. A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007), both with Viggo Mortensen, are crime pictures on the surface — a diner shooting, the Russian mob, a legendary naked bathhouse knife fight — and pure Cronenberg underneath. The body is still the subject; violence is still a mutation the flesh undergoes and cannot take back. He simply moved the horror from the tumour to the fist. A Dangerous Method (2011) put Freud and Jung in a room, which is only surprising until you remember he had been filming the war between psyche and body all along.

The misfires, the fallow years, and the return

Not everything holds. M. Butterfly (1993) is his most inert film, a fascinating premise directed at arm’s length. Cosmopolis (2012) and Maps to the Stars (2014) are chilly satires that some admire and many find airless; the Cronenberg cool, which serves the body horror so well, can curdle into remoteness when the flesh is offscreen and the target is merely capitalism or Hollywood. There is a stretch where the ideas feel argued rather than felt.

He seemed done. Then, at seventy-nine, he returned to the operating table with Crimes of the Future (2022), reusing an old title for a new film about a future where humans grow novel organs and surgery has become performance art and sex. It is a summation — the new flesh finally arrived, ageing and elegiac, made by a man contemplating his own mortality with the same calm he once brought to Marilyn Chambers’s armpit. His son Brandon Cronenberg has since taken up the family trade with Possessor and Infinity Pool, filming the body’s violation with an even harder edge, which means the lineage is now literally hereditary.

Why it works — and where to start

The craft secret is the calm. Cronenberg shoots his most extreme material with static, symmetrical, almost sterile compositions and a Howard Shore score that mourns rather than screams. He never editorialises with the camera. That refusal to flinch or wink is what makes the images lodge; a lesser director would cut away or play it for shock, and the horror would evaporate. He holds the shot and makes you a witness, calm as a surgeon, and the calm is the most disturbing thing in the frame.

Where to begin depends on your stomach. The safest door is The Fly — a great tragic monster movie that happens to be philosophy. From there, Videodrome for the prophecy and Dead Ringers for the control. If those land, A History of Violence shows you the same mind working in a suit, and Crimes of the Future closes the circle. The early shockers are for after you are converted; watch Shivers knowing it is the seed.

His descendants are everywhere the body is the subject — Julia Ducournau’s Titane and Raw, Brandon Cronenberg’s clinical cruelties, and the whole notion, now commonplace, that horror can be intellectual and gory in the same breath. The Japanese cyberpunk of Tetsuo the Iron Man reached the same fusion of flesh and metal from the opposite direction, and Brian Yuzna’s Society took the flesh-mob idea of Shivers to its grotesque satirical end. Cronenberg got there first and stayed longest, filming the same frontier — the border of the human — with a steadiness nobody has matched.