Rabid: Cronenberg, Rose, and the Armpit Stinger

David Cronenberg made Rabid in 1977, two years after Shivers, for something in the region of half a million dollars, with Ivan Reitman producing. It is the same film in most structural respects — an engineered biological accident, a contagion that spreads through intimacy, a Canadian institution’s rationalism producing a monster — with one enormous difference.

Shivers had no protagonist worth caring about. Rabid has Rose.

The casting argument

Reitman wanted Sissy Spacek. Spacek had just made Carrie, and the logic is obvious: a performer who could carry a girl becoming a weapon while remaining entirely sympathetic. The financiers said no. What they took instead was Marilyn Chambers, who at that point was the most famous adult performer in North America off the back of Behind the Green Door and the Ivory Snow packaging scandal that preceded it.

The commercial reasoning was transparent, and Cronenberg has spent the intervening decades pointing out that the result was better than the plan. Chambers is genuinely good here, in a way that has nothing to do with what she was hired for. Her Rose is confused, frightened, and appallingly lonely. She does not know what is happening to her. She does not want it. She finds out what she needs by hurting someone she did not intend to hurt, and Chambers plays the aftermath of each feeding as a small private catastrophe.

That performance is the reason Rabid works, and it repairs the specific defect in Shivers. Cronenberg’s first film handed its thesis to a parasite and its point-of-view to nobody. Here the thesis walks around inside a woman who is horrified by it. The philosophy has to be argued through a person, and the person is losing.

There is a real film-history irony sitting in the casting. Chambers was hired as an exploitable object, and she is used to make a film about a woman transformed against her will into an instrument of appetite that destroys everyone she touches. Whether Cronenberg intended that reading is arguable. The film sustains it.

The Keloid Clinic and the surgical premise

Rose is burned in a motorcycle crash outside the Keloid Clinic, a private plastic-surgery outfit in the Quebec countryside, and Dr Dan Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) performs an experimental graft using tissue rendered “morphogenetically neutral” — reprogrammed to become whatever the body around it needs. Cronenberg gives Keloid a scene of pure professional vanity beforehand, in which he frets that his clinic is drifting from reconstructive medicine into a chain of franchised nose jobs.

That scene does a lot. Keloid’s tragedy is that he is a serious surgeon in a cosmetic business, and his experiment is a bid for significance. The monster in a Cronenberg film is almost always somebody’s ambition given tissue. Emil Hobbes wanted to save the species from rationality. Keloid wants to matter. Hal Raglan, two years later in The Brood, wants to be right about therapy. Each of them gets exactly what they were reaching for, in flesh.

The graft produces, in Rose’s armpit, an orifice containing a retractable stinger. She feeds on blood, and the people she feeds on develop a rabies-like condition, foam, attack, and pass it on with a bite. The incubation is quick. Montreal falls apart in about a fortnight.

The design choice is the film’s most-discussed feature and its most misunderstood. The stinger is grotesque and it is also entirely undramatic — no fangs, no claws, no silhouette. It lives in a place nobody looks. Cronenberg puts the weapon in the least mythologised spot on the human body and shoots it almost clinically, in bad hospital light, so that it reads as a symptom. The horror of the vampire tradition is aristocratic and erotic. The horror of Rabid is that you have developed something.

The plague, and the tonal problem

The second half of Rabid leaves Rose behind for long stretches and becomes a procedural about a city under martial law: soldiers in the shopping centres, checkpoints, marksmen shooting the infected in Father Christmas costumes, bodies collected by garbage trucks. Cronenberg shot much of it on real Montreal streets with a documentary flatness that costs nothing and pays enormously.

This is where the film is strongest and where it is weakest, in the same gesture. The plague material is superbly cheap — Cronenberg understood that a collapsing society is easier to film convincingly than a monster — and it also keeps stealing the picture from its own protagonist. Frank Read (Frank Moore), Rose’s boyfriend, is a functional vacancy of the kind Shivers was full of. Joe Silver returns as Murray Cypher and again supplies most of the film’s audible intelligence.

The seasonal detail deserves more credit than it gets. Cronenberg shot in a Montreal winter and set the collapse at Christmas, so the martial law arrives amid tinsel: decorations in the shopping centre, carols leaking out of the public address system, an infected man in a Father Christmas suit shot dead in front of the shoppers he was hired to entertain. None of that cost anything. The city was already decorated. It is the single most efficient production decision in the film, and it gives the outbreak a specific, dreadful cheerfulness that a purpose-built set could never have bought.

The rhythm problem is real. Rabid alternates between a devastating character study and an efficient outbreak film, and the transitions are lumpy. But the outbreak footage does something for Rose that no dialogue could: it establishes, in wide shots she is not in, the scale of what she is causing while she wanders around trying to convince herself she has not caused it.

The lineage

The ancestor everyone reaches for is the vampire film, and it is the wrong one. Rabid is a Typhoid Mary film — the horror of asymptomatic transmission, of the carrier who is themselves fine. Rose never turns. She never foams. She is the one person in Montreal who stays herself, which is the cruelty at the centre of the design, and it puts the film’s true relatives in the epidemiological tradition rather than the gothic one. Everything downstream of it that concerns a patient zero with a conscience owes it something.

Within Cronenberg’s own shelf, it is the hinge. Shivers is the thesis, Rabid is the thesis given a face, The Brood is the thesis turned on the director’s own life, and by The Fly it has become a love story. The line is unbroken and Rabid is where the grief enters it. Our Cronenberg career piece traces the rest, and the body-horror starter kit puts it in company.

The Soska sisters remade it in 2019, with more explicit gore and a fashion-industry setting, and the remake’s failure is instructive: it explains Rose. The 1977 film’s power depends on nobody, including Rose, understanding what she is.

It is easy to find. The restorations are good and the Cronenberg back catalogue is well served on the cult-cinema services.

One footnote worth carrying: the film Cronenberg made after this was Fast Company, a straight drag-racing picture with no parasites in it whatsoever, driven by a genuine lifelong enthusiasm for motorsport. Critics have been trying to fold it into the body-horror thesis ever since, on the grounds that a car is also a machine wrapped around meat. Sometimes a man just likes cars.

The verdict: Rabid is a lumpier film than Shivers and a much better one, because Chambers gives Cronenberg the thing his debut lacked — someone to lose. The last twenty minutes of this picture are as bleak as anything in 1970s horror, and they earn the bleakness through a performance the film’s own financing was too cynical to have anticipated.

Spoilers below

The ending is the argument.

Rose has spent the film in denial, feeding and rationalising, telling herself each victim was the last. What finally breaks her is not being hunted. It is a piece of evidence. She feeds on a woman in an apartment, waits, and watches to see whether the woman turns — a deliberate experiment, conducted by Rose on Rose’s own behalf, to settle the question of whether she is the cause.

The woman turns. Rose has her answer, and the film gives her no way to unlearn it. She phones Frank while the infected woman is coming for her, and the call is the only moment Chambers plays without any defence at all.

The last shot is the coldest thing in Cronenberg’s early work. Rose’s body is found in the street by a clean-up crew in hazard suits, and they pitch her into the back of a garbage truck along with the rest of the refuse, and the compactor runs, and the truck drives away. No mourning, no recognition, no music swell. The woman who caused the catastrophe is disposed of as sanitary waste by men who will never know what she was.

Cronenberg cuts there. It is the correct ending, and it is entirely of a piece with the film’s refusal to make Rose either a villain or a victim — she is a biological event, and biological events get cleaned up. The 2019 remake could not bring itself to do this, which is exactly why nobody talks about the 2019 remake.