Adventures in Streaming: Elevated horror? David Cronenberg practically invented it

David Cronenberg instructs Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis in The Fly.

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The term “elevated horror” has been much discussed in genre circles in relation to filmmakers such as Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar), Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse), and Jordan Peele (Get Out, Nope).

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These are films marked by narrative sophistication and challenging layers of meaning. They are more likely to achieve their impact, not through jump scares or gory brutality, but mounting existential dread.

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But the term “elevated” condescendingly suggests artistic aspirations are something new in the realm of horror. In Canada, at least, we should know better.

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We’ve got a Cronenberg.

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This Halloween season, David Cronenberg’s films are easily accessible all over various streaming services, especially Hollywood Suite, which has multiple Cronenberg works, including a new restoration of his 1981 mindblower Scanners.

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The Toronto native’s early work was initially met with scorn. Cronenberg was an iconoclast who enjoyed injecting provocation into the veins of his work, particularly in his first feature film Shivers (1975, also known as They Came From Within, available on the Criterion Channel), a romp very much patterned after Night of the Living Dead, except the zombie plague that gradually overtakes a Montreal high-rise is caused by a sexually transmitted parasite, in what would become a very Cronenbergian wrinkle.

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The fact that government funds from the Canadian Film Development Corporation were used to fund roughly 40 per cent of the film’s budget became a scandal upon the publication of a Robert Fulford-penned hit piece in the magazine Saturday Night titled You Should Know How Bad This Movie Is. After All You Paid for It.

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But as much as Fulford might have disliked it, it was one of the rare Canadian films that would turn a profit around that time, unlike many a dour drama produced under the auspices of the CFDC that would disappear without a trace.

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Hence, Cronenberg returned with Rabid (1977, on both Prime and Tubi). It too is a kind of zombie film, in which Patient Zero is Rose (Marilyn Chambers), a woman who suffers disfiguring injuries after a motorcycle accident, only to end up in a cutting-edge plastic surgery clinic that experiments with a laboratory-made “neutral skin graft” (a Cronenberg concept anticipating stem cell research by two decades). Unfortunately, the procedure transforms Rose into a sexual predator who “feeds” off her victims through a pointy proboscis that emerges from her armpit. Her victims are afflicted in turn with a rabies-like strain of virus that turns them into vicious, foaming-at-the-mouth killers besieging Montreal.

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For his next film, The Brood (1979, on Hollywood Suite), Cronenberg once again turned to the world of theoretical medicine, casting Oliver Reed as a mad psychologist who encourages his patients to physically manifest their psychological maladies on their bodies. In the case of Nola Carveth (the recently departed Samantha Eggar), the experiment works too well, and she births the titular homunculi, vicious humanoids who act out Nola’s deep-seated aggression toward her parents, a perceived romantic rival, and even her own daughter. It’s an unnerving film, and weirdly, a personal one for Cronenberg, refracting his own divorce from his first wife through his own dark lens.