Day One: Shivers (1975)
David Cronenberg is one of the few horror filmmakers that has survived the prejudice that almost always greets one who chooses to work in the genre. It’s not hard to see why. Cronenberg respects the genre, respects the need for ambiguity, for slow burn, for inescape. Audiences do not go to horror films to be let off the hook by the filmmakers, they want to revel in the fear, and let themselves off the hook later, by assuring themselves of the film’s fiction. A happy ending, generally, is an anti-climax in a horror movie, you leave the theatre wondering “is that as bad as it can get?”
Cronenberg also deals, particularly in his early work, with the most sensitive of audience pressure points, the frailty of the human body and, much scarier, the changability of the human body. Early Cronenberg films are about caterpillars changinging into butterflies*, only they haven’t been blessed with the foresight of the process’s result. The films, and this has been said many times before, take the POV of the agent of change, and are generally actively rooting for said change, ending with an ironic sigh of relief.
All of this is true of Cronenberg’s first major release, Shivers, which plays a bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers reborn as a satire of the just say yes liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. You don’t have to dig deep for subtext in the film’s plot, which concerns a bunch of little leech penis creatures who invade a remote high rise apartment building and turn its citizens into sex crazed zombies.
The remoteness of the setting is established in typically efficient, curt, masterful fashion by Cronenberg in the opening credits, where we see an advertisement for the Starliner Apartments complex bragging about the remoteness of the location. By minute three of the film we’re watching a couple’s introduction to the apartment, but, also typical to Cronenberg, this couple is not our POV, they are only our entryway into the picture (much like the Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen switcheroo in Eastern Promises).
Cronenberg is obviously an intelligent person. He knows he’s working in B subject matter on a B budget with a B (two weeks) amount of time to complete the picture. It’s fascinating in Shivers to watch how Cronenberg skates around the potential pitfalls of the subject matter. The acting in Shivers is, at best, adequate. Cronenberg works around this with limited exposition, limited back story, and a terrifying lack of feeling.
Like much early Cronenberg, Shivers feels less like a movie about penis leech creatures, and more of a retrospective documentary about a penis leech creature outbreak. Yes, this clinical style is born out of Cronenberg’s sensibility, but I think its also logical self-preservation. The less sentiment there is, the less potential there is for bad acting to laugh you out of the picture.
The potential hazard of going back and looking at the early work of a great filmmaker is that we give the earlier picture a special break because we know how these themes will be refined in the future. I tried not to do that with Shivers as I revisited it for this post. I found a film that holds up, its dated aspects (clothing, decor) only enhance the satire of the picture. The film’s climax is unnerving in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on. It involves a total invasion, that’s easy to pinpoint, but it occurs in a public swimming pool, and this is queasy in a way that I can’t identify. Maybe its something about all the fluid in a sexual invasion metaphor movie, but I’m not sure.
One final thing about Cronenberg’s satire, you can’t quite pinpoint which side of the satire he’s on in any given movie, especially Shivers. One could say that’s he’s totally in favor of what eventually happens, or one could say that he’s mourning a perceived loss of the discriminate fuck. Or he’s ambivalent (as he’s often accused.) Either way, its one of the principle reasons his films last, and linger, and will be revisited by anyone who gives a damn about the genre.
*I hadn’t considered this upon initial posting, but Cronenberg almost literally did the butterfly thing in his masterpiece, The Fly. The footage was rightfully discarded, but you should take a look on the most recently issued DVD (out a couple of years ago).
