Shivers - 1975 - Film

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

This screening of Shivers was on 35mm, "the only 35mm copy in North America," --that's what the curator of the film program told me. Cronenberg's film is playing as part of the U of C Doc series, "Revisiting the 'American Nightmare': Horror in the 1970s".

It was fantastic. I'm a big Cronenberg fan and Shivers is now the earliest of his films I've seen. Prior to this it was Rabid (1977), another exploration of the physical form that gets destructed, then rebuilt by foreign elements. Cronenberg approaches horror from a clinical perspective; he dismembers his characters with a surgical knife, exposes them to a monster-like mutation, then we observe their behavior change. The body undergoes a metaplastic transformation wherein the destructive force of the "monster" (here it is a worm-like phallus that uses the body as its host) changes the dynamic of bodily function so that the abnormal is now considered normal. Likewise, fewer and fewer characters are able to escape the wrath of the parasitic phallus, and by story's end everyone is infected; the status quo is altered.

The distinction to make between Cronenberg's Horror is that it is always of a tangible nature: his deviants are not supernatural, they don't haunt characters like a ghost, they physically infect them--and quite graphically. The images are horrific and grotesque by the nature of their realism. The alternate title of Shivers is They Came From Within, an apt title that states the most frightening, most provocative horrors are the ones we can't see; the ones under our own skin.