MM29 - Early Cronenberg feat. Nick Newman (Patreon)

Death to all other movie podcasts! Long live the New Mindset!

Today we are joined by Nick Newman of The Film Stage to take a trip inside the bodies and spaces of Canada through the early films of our Northern neighbor’s finest cultural export: David Cronenberg. 

In Shivers (1975), the clean, manicured luxury of an apartment complex becomes the site of disgust, shit, blood, and the total breakdown of society as an epidemic of parasitic leeches spread through sexual contact and turn the infected into, for lack of a better term, fuck-zombies, acting out the most compulsive and taboo instincts of the human animal.

Then in Rabid (1977) an experimental skin graft procedure gives a young woman an exiting new organ and soon she finds herself becoming patient zero for the outbreak of a rabies-like disease that threatens to destroy Montreal. 

Both films demonstrate an embryonic form of the clinical Cronenberg style which takes an epidemiological view humanity and sexuality, combining the intellectual and visceral to create extreme and upsetting metaphors for why sex is scary.

You can read Nick’s interview with Cronenberg here:

https://thefilmstage.com/life-is-suffering-david-cronenberg-on-kidney-stones-nfts-and-crimes-of-the-future/