Shivers
In David Cronenberg’s recent Maps To The Stars, Mia Wasikowska arrives in Hollywood, where glittering surfaces play host to seething desires. In 1975’s Shivers, a young couple arrive at Canada’s luxury Starliner Towers, where an aphrodisiacal parasite will unleash orgiastic outbreaks of lust.
Re-watched 40 years after it outraged moral guardians (and his landlady), Cronenberg’s film breakthrough reminds us what a singular slug-trail of sex, suggestion and psychoanalytic subversion he has left behind him. It’s almost as if he had his route to auteur fame mapped out, so clear is his imprint.
Of course, it isn’t that simple. Interviews on decent archival extras (no new DC input, alas) suggest Cronenberg almost didn’t even get to direct his own script: the production company pencilled Jonathan Demme in. When Cronenberg did start directing, he was winging it so much he worried he wasn’t cut out for film.
But Cronenberg’s control and vision resonate. The opening sales pitch for the Ballard-ian apartment-block setting is a droll masterstroke of scene-setting and tone-pitching: it lays out the land and the sting of this satire on repression.
Once we’re inside, Cronenberg’s boundary-blurring sensibility kicks in. The sense of outward paranoia while hell erupts inside is set by the contrast between the door-man armed to defend against invaders and scenes of a doctor murdering someone inside. Said Dr Hobbes invented a sex parasite to cure the high classes’s prudence; now he wants to kill it. He fails, it spreads, and residents become lusty zombies in an ingenious psychosexual inversion of attack-from-further than narratives (‘They Came From Within’ was an alt-title).
Somewhere else, there are bathroom violations, muddy hygiene and infection divisions, while Cronenberg assiduously rejects excellent/evil binaries. The slug, he’d say, is just doing its job. Seen from its eyes, critic Jason Anderson joshes on the extras, “It’s really quite a nice report.”
But Cronenberg isn’t worried to max the nasty. If “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”, as one on-screen poster declares, then Cronenberg’s wisdom inspires his slugs’ work. Taboos are uproariously bust: equal-ops sex is rampant, the gore generous. Add Joe Blasco’s gooey FX work and it’s easy to see why Shivers inspired genre fans and French cineastes alike.
It isn’t perfect: the acting (mostly amateur, Barbara Steele aside) and sound mix lurch and wobble erratically. But it was an intelli-punk declaration of intent for Cronenberg’s cinema of sexual symbiosis and visceral smarts, where mind/body and art/horror sensibilities shared fluids. As the parasite is spread city-wide in a cavalcade of cars, you half expect to see a bespectacled, softly spoken, severely articulate Canadian behind the wheel: ready to spread his seed across cinema.
