Shivers: Cronenberg's Apartment-Block Contagion

The film opens with an estate agent’s slideshow. A calm voice sells you Starliner Towers — the island setting, the amenities, the security, the on-site dentist — over photographs of a building that looks like a filing cabinet for people. Then the film cuts to a man strangling a schoolgirl on a table in one of those apartments, cutting her open, and pouring acid into the cavity.

That is the first four minutes of David Cronenberg’s first commercial feature, and it is a complete statement of intent. Shivers was released in 1975, made for a budget somewhere around $180,000, part-financed by the Canadian Film Development Corporation, and it went on to return a profit inside its first year. It also produced one of the great pieces of film-critical apoplexy: Robert Fulford’s article in Saturday Night magazine, which ran under a headline informing readers they should know how bad the film was, since their taxes had paid for it. The question of public money funding a picture about a venereal parasite turning a housing block into an orgy went to the Canadian parliament’s doorstep. Cronenberg reportedly lost his apartment over the fallout.

Fifty years on, the scandal is the least interesting thing about it, and the film is still faintly appalling in ways the scandal never identified.

The building is the monster

Starliner Towers sits on an island in the St Lawrence, and Cronenberg shot in a real modernist block on Nun’s Island. That decision is the film’s foundation. He gets long, straight, hard-lit corridors; a car park; a laundry room; a swimming pool; a lift. Everything is clean and rectilinear and slightly too bright. There is no gothic anywhere in this movie.

The horror emerges from the architecture’s core promise, which the opening slideshow makes explicit: this building will keep you separate. Your own unit, your own door, your own life, no obligation to anyone across the hall. Cronenberg then releases into that system an organism whose entire function is to abolish separateness. The parasite is a solution to the problem the building was built to enforce.

This is why the film is genuinely difficult to sit with, and why it is a great deal cleverer than “sex plague in a tower”. Dr Emil Hobbes, the man in the pre-credits sequence, engineered the thing on purpose. His stated reasoning — relayed through his colleague Rollo Linsky, played with terrific rumpled exasperation by Joe Silver — is that humanity has become an over-rational animal, that thought has strangled instinct, and that what the species requires is a good dose of mindless flesh. He designed a parasite to be an aphrodisiac. The cover story was organ replacement.

So the villain of Shivers has a thesis, the thesis is half-persuasive, and the film declines to refute it. Cronenberg has been asked about this for five decades and has never really apologised for the ambivalence. The parasite wins, and the film’s final movement is shot like a liberation.

Craft on no money

The direction is more assured than a debut has any right to be, and the assurance is mostly in the withholding. Robert Saad’s camera stays wide and static far more often than a first-timer’s instinct would allow. Cronenberg shoots the horror in flat institutional light with the composition locked off, so the viewer’s eye has to go hunting inside the frame. There is a shot of a lobby, or a corridor, and something is wrong in it, and the film will not point.

The parasite effects, by Joe Blasco, are physically unconvincing and psychologically perfect. They look like what they are: dark red rubber things, roughly the size and demeanour of a turd, moving with the ungainly determination of an animal that has no plan. That lack of grace is the point. Cronenberg’s monsters are never elegant. They are organs that have decided to travel. When one comes up a drain, or moves under a bathwater surface, the crudity of the puppet reads as biology rather than design, and biology is the whole subject.

Barbara Steele is in this film, which in 1975 was a signal in itself — the face of Italian gothic, of Bava’s Black Sunday, relocated into a Canadian bathtub for the sequence everyone remembers. Casting her is Cronenberg’s one piece of overt film-history wit. The gothic vampire tradition arrives at Starliner Towers, and the tradition is now a plumbing problem.

Lynn Lowry, as Nurse Forsythe, gets the film’s strangest and best scene, a monologue about a dream in which everything is erotic — old flesh, disease, the act of dying — delivered in a dreamy singsong that is the closest Shivers comes to stating its philosophy out loud. Lowry had come from I Drink Your Blood and The Crazies; she is the one performer here who seems to have understood exactly what film she was in.

The ancestor, and everything downstream

The obvious parent is Invasion of the Body Snatchers — a community converted one person at a time, the dread of looking at a neighbour and wondering. But Shivers inverts the politics of its parent. The pod people take your passion away. Cronenberg’s parasite gives it back, with interest, and the film’s horror is that the conversion might be an improvement. Siegel’s film asks you to resist. Cronenberg’s asks why you are resisting, and the question is not rhetorical.

The truer ancestor is Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and specifically its discovery that a siege film can be a documentary about a society’s internal wiring. Everything Cronenberg would spend the next twenty years on starts here in embryo: Rabid is Shivers with the plague let out of the building and a protagonist to grieve for; The Brood is Shivers with a marriage instead of a lobby; Videodrome is Shivers with the parasite replaced by a broadcast signal. The whole body-horror lineage that runs from Cronenberg down to Ducournau has its origin in a Montreal car park in 1975. For the fuller map, our career piece on Cronenberg lays out the through-line.

It circulates well: the boutique restorations look sharp, and the film turns up in Cronenberg retrospectives and on the cult-catalogue services with some regularity.

The verdict: Shivers is a nastier and more coherent film than its maker’s own later dismissals of it suggest. The performances outside Silver and Lowry are stiff, the dialogue clanks, the hero is a void, and none of that matters, because Cronenberg had already located the thing he would be right about for the rest of his career — that the body is the site of the argument, and that the argument has two sides. Almost no debut in the genre contains this much of a finished sensibility. It is crude, it is cheap, it is faintly disgusting, and it is a manifesto.

Spoilers below

The structure is the giveaway. Shivers has a nominal protagonist in Roger St Luc (Paul Hampton), the building’s resident doctor, and the film treats him with almost open contempt. He is rational, decent, competent and utterly ineffectual. He works out what is happening, and his understanding changes nothing, because the film has no interest in a man who solves things.

Nicholas Tudor (Allan Migicovsky) carries the actual horror — the host, sitting in his flat, feeling the thing move inside him, and the marriage to Janine (Susan Petrie) collapsing around a symptom neither of them can name. Cronenberg keeps returning to a man staring down at his own abdomen with an expression of grieved curiosity. That look is the birth of a genre.

The Steele bathtub sequence is famous because of what enters and how. It is also the moment the film stops using the parasite as a threat and starts using it as an invitation, and the shift in framing is deliberate: the camera gets closer, the light gets warmer, the score relaxes.

Then the ending, which is the whole scandal. St Luc is cornered at the swimming pool, and the converted residents do not tear him apart. They embrace him. Cronenberg shoots the conversion as a welcome, and then cuts to the residents of Starliner Towers filing calmly into their cars and driving off the island towards the city, and the film ends on the radio reporting nothing yet. No cavalry, no cure, no last-minute reversal. The building was a containment vessel and the containment failed, and the survivors are the ones who were converted.

Fulford thought that was decadence. It is closer to a diagnosis, and the fact that the film hands its argument to the parasite and then declines to talk it out of it is exactly why Shivers has outlived every respectable Canadian picture the CFDC funded that year.