eXistenZ: Cronenberg's Game That Predicted the Console War

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In the spring of 1999 two films about jacking your consciousness into a fabricated world opened within weeks of each other. One of them dressed its heroes in black leather, gave them guns and a messiah, and became the defining blockbuster of its generation. The other grew its game consoles out of amphibian tissue, plugged them into a hole at the base of your spine, and quietly told the truth about where the games industry was heading. The Matrix got the decade. David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ got the future.

The Body-Horror Lineage From Cronenberg to Ducournau

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Body horror is the subgenre that believes the call is coming from inside the house, and the house is you. Its terror lives in the slow, intimate treachery of your own flesh rather than in any monster in the woods: a growth, a mutation, a transformation you can feel but cannot stop. It is horror without an exit, because you cannot run from your own body, and the greatest practitioners have understood that this makes it the most philosophical corner of the genre. What is a person, when the person’s meat starts to disagree with them? The lineage that answers this runs cleanly from one filmmaker to the next, each inheriting the flesh and doing something new to it.

Cronenberg - vo.rs

eXistenZ: Cronenberg's Game That Predicted the Console War

The Body-Horror Lineage From Cronenberg to Ducournau