David Cronenberg

For more than three decades, his films have been taking you to the weirdest of worlds. Lucky for you, you can always walk out -- unless you're too terrified to move.

By Steve Burgess

Nov 30, 1999 | The movies of David Cronenberg inspire strong opinions. Here's the blurb they put on the video box for "Crash," released in 1996: "'... sex and car crashes ...' -- Janet Maslin, New York Times."

Yup, that's "Crash," all right. Maslin might have added "... a film ...," but basically, she captured it. And really, what else can you say about that flick, which cataloged the adventures of people who stage serious auto accidents for erotic stimulation? Well -- you could call it hypnotic; creepy; fascinating; repellent; pornographic; tedious; bizarre; very stylish; a tour de force; a complete waste of time and money. Only please, try to remember which Cronenberg movie you're describing -- when summarizing critical reaction to the 13 feature films he's made over the past 25 years, the adjectives tend to be interchangeable.

What to do with David Cronenberg? A Canadian who never went south, an exploitation horror king who revealed himself to be a genuine auteur, a B-movie Fellini who jumped to the A-list while pursuing the very same themes that once saw him reviled in the Canadian Parliament as a public menace.

The local video store doesn't know what to do with him: "Crash" sits on a shelf right beside La Toya Jackson's Playboy video. Hollywood couldn't figure him out: After Cronenberg seemed at last to be going mainstream by filming Stephen King's "The Dead Zone" in 1983, he received offers to direct "Flashdance," "Top Gun" and "Beverly Hills Cop." One can't help wondering what a different world we'd be living in if the director had accepted any of those offers. And critics can't make up their minds, either. "In Cronenberg's hands," wrote critic Stephen Schiff about the 1979 film "The Brood," "horror is no longer a disreputable bastard genre but a new avenue of expression, gleaming with possibility." "Halliwell's Film Guide" called the movie "idiotic and repellent."

Born in Toronto in 1943, with a freelance writer and a dancer for parents and a home filled with books and art, Cronenberg enjoyed an enlightened upbringing rare for that straight-laced time and place. (Since Louis St. Laurent was Canada's prime minister from 1948-57, this period is known in Canada as the Eisenhower era.) Cronenberg admits that he was not your average tyke. "When I grew up," he told interviewer Chris Rodley in the book "Cronenberg on Cronenberg," "most other kids weren't into watching praying mantises eating grasshoppers."

His early interests were fiction and science. He never saw them as incompatible. "I had a great English teacher and a great science teacher," he tells Rodley. "I went into science to begin with [at the University of Toronto] because I thought you couldn't be taught to write but you needed to be taught science."

However, Cronenberg soon found himself hanging out on the far side of the campus with the much livelier arts students, and before the year was out he had dropped science in favor of English. A friend named David Secter made a short film called "Winter Kept Us Warm," using people and campus locations familiar to Cronenberg. For the future director it was a road-to-Damascus experience. "I was stunned. Shocked. Exhilarated," Cronenberg said. "That won't happen to kids now because they've got video cameras and everybody has made 12 films by the time they've reached puberty. But then it was unprecedented. I said, 'I've got to try this!'"

Cronenberg's first effort was a 1966 short film called "Transfer," about a psychiatrist being stalked by a patient. Next came "From the Drain" -- two veterans of a mysterious war sit in a bathtub until one of them is strangled by a plant that grows out of the drain. Definite sequel potential, but it was never followed up.

Inspired by the Film Co-op of New York, Cronenberg formed the Toronto Film Co-op with Bob Fothergill, Iain Ewing and that noted independent radical, Ivan "Kindergarten Cop" Reitman. But in the late '60s, independent filmmaking was not the well-established tradition it has since become. In order to get a Canada Council grant to finance his first serious project, a 62-minute film called "Stereo," Cronenberg pretended to be writing a novel. He submitted a sample chapter, got the money and started making the film. "Stereo," released in 1969, and the 1970 follow-up "Crimes of the Future" earned Cronenberg a bit of attention in art-film circles.

But neither the artsy crowd nor the unsuspecting Canadian public was prepared when the director's first feature film slithered onscreen in 1975. "Shivers" (aka "The Parasite Murders" and "They Came From Within") is the story of a parasite, designed to help ailing human organs, that goes out of control with sickening results. It's full of the straight-from-the-subconscious imagery for which Cronenberg would later become famous. Gory flesh effects were provided by Joe Blasco, who told Cronenberg that his apprenticeship in horror make-up was the stint he put in on "The Lawrence Welk Show." "Shivers" originated from a dream Cronenberg had about a spider emerging from a woman's mouth and was made for a Montreal soft-core porn outfit called Cinepix. "Sleazy distributors," Cronenberg called them. "My kind of people."

Canadian politicians and critics were not amused -- particularly when they discovered "Shivers" was partly funded with government grant money. Robert Fulford's article in the influential magazine Saturday Night was titled "You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All, You Paid For It." (Decades later, British critic Alexander Walker responded to "Crash" with a review titled "A Film Beyond the Bounds of Depravity." Cronenberg hasn't lost his touch.) Fulford suggested that if movies like "Shivers" were necessary for the development of a Canadian film industry, it would be better for the country not to have one.

"Shivers" made money. Grateful taxpayers were reimbursed. A star was born.

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