Crimes of the Future

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

Writer & Director - David Cronenberg

2022 ~ Canada

Stars - Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart

Judging a film on what has gone before surely only goes so far. Mark Kermode’s review has been reduced to mostly one just namechecking the obvious nods to Cronenberg’s previous works as if this mitigates ‘Crimes of the Future’s worth. But Cronenberg is totally self-aware and deliberate – oh, ‘Videodrome’ TVs; ‘Dead Ringers’ wish for a beauty pageant for internal organs, ‘Shivers’ autopsy; a chair that could be furniture from ‘Naked Lunch’, etc. – which surely means he is slotting this into the tapestry of what he originated. The ae debate. ‘Crimes of the Future’ even takes its title from Cronenberg’s earliest works; the conspiracies and underground rebel groups are the kind from ‘Scanners’ and the dirty dilapidated rooms and backstreets remind me of Interzone (‘Naked Lunch’). Saying “This is just like his earlier stuff and that was better” doesn’t really say much about how it therefore relates to Cronenberg’s oeuvre, or its independent merits, o. Easter egg spotting doesn’t illuminate more than homages, influences and derivatives. But when the artist is drawing from his own extensive back catalogue, and when that artist is Cronenberg, there’s more at play.  

If this namechecking is meant as a criticism of thematic and artistic repetition, and therefore inferiority and stunted artistic growth, I would argue that this too doesn’t quite enlighten: there’s Tarantino’s or Scorsese’s recourse to ensemble criminals, or Schrader’s lost male existential angst, or Bergman’s existential concerns, Ozu’s family dramas, or, etc. And if anyone has established his themes and held them close throughout a long career, it's Cronenberg. He is even credited with forming a subgenre known as body-horror.

Rather, that Cronenberg can still capture the spirit of the muse that set him off appeared a little remarkable to me, rather than reductive, considering how singular it is and with the evolution of his extensive filmography. ‘Crimes of the Future’ is just as talky, uneven, occasionally disturbing, visceral and not-quite-gelling, a little confusing, a little random, viscerally inventive and a little prescient as his earliest body-horrors. As soon as Mortenson said, “My bed needs new software,” I chuckled, because knew I was in Cronenberg’s world and therefore in safe hands for a somewhat messy palette of provocative ideas firing off here and there. But what we also have is the latter-day Cronenberg inclusion of pretty/slicker visuals and elegance smoothing down the scruffiness of exploitation. The opening shot of a boy framed with a sunken ship is a gorgeous holiday picture subversion. Then he eats a waste bin and the oddness is introduced to the narrative. That’s the surprise that sets questions; and then the mother murders the boy and that’s a shock. Then cut to a quite beautiful medium shot of an odd levitating bed-mechanism in which Mortensen is moaning in his sleep.

The husk of a ship also appears later as the backdrop to Saul Tester’s (Mortenson) clandestine meetings. Throughout there are clues to a ruined world that is hinted at but never explicated. The clues scattered around are what provide fun and discussion when trying to figure it out afterwards. The capsized society signified by the boat is at odds with the expense and luxury of the artists we follow, who indulge in body self-mutilation in a manifestation of cultural confusion of finding the human race has turned immune to pain. But there’s an obvious divide between the poverty and disenfranchisement alluded to by those grubby backstreets and the hipsters that are our protagonists.

It is the questions left hanging, the pictures you can extrapolate and paint that makes this more that sum of its parts. It’s focused on one subculture’s response to the next phase of human evolution, but its proposition that Those In Power will always try and thwart this and any arguable progression that strikes true. It also has a prod at Look At me Art culture without recourse to mobile phones. 

But then there’s some nudity which, for the first time in a Cronenberg film, felt to me to be gratuitous. And although some enjoy Kristen Stewart’s performance seemingly for camp value, its wink and neediness seem out-of-tune with the careful calibrations of tone elsewhere. But Cronenberg was always a little messy and uneven at times. Raw is the word, even if the ideas are serious and dense. 

That is, to say, even if you judge this lesser Cronenberg, ‘Crimes of the Future’ is still fully spiced with a headful of ideas that interrogate culture, evolution and technology and reaches existential and exploitational ruminations characteristic of this singular director. What this film tells is that Cronenberg is no less an interrogator of these themes than he ever was at this later point in his career.

Naked Lunch

 Naked Lunch

Director – David Cronenberg

1991 – Canda-UK-Japan 

Writers - William S. Burrough (novel) & David Cronenberg

Stars – Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm

Cronenberg’s surreal comedy mash-up of William Burrough’s life and work, led by Peter Weller’s sublime deadpan Burroughs impression and bug-typewriters. If the plot and conspiracy are barely cohesive, that’s all part of the druggy paranoia that propels the plot into barely acknowledged trauma.

Although there are plenty of names, skits and autobiographical notes to please Burroughs’ fans, ‘Naked Lunch’ is very much Cronenbergian. It’s trashy and lucid, gross and intelligent in equal amounts in a way that Cronenberg has made his own. It starts with a Saul Bass-style opening credits with Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman's jazzy, retro score, at once ominous and dizzy with Coleman's solos. From the start, the tone is slick and edgy. The set design is colourful and resonant of an imaginary golden age of a decadent scene and cluttered writer's rooms.

But beneath the increasingly crazed WTF surface moments, and wayward plot concerning “double-agents” and sedition, there are numerous baubles concerning creativity and muses. Not least of all an early conversation about writing between Burroughs and characters representing Karouac and Ginsberg, which grips from the first. It’s a heady mixture in which cognitive dissonance and denial are pulled out as Burrough’s true muse, not just sex and drugs and an oppressively permissive North African town. It is repression of his homosexuality and guilt for the William Tell accident that killed his wife. When another character tells Bill “There are no accidents,” Cronenberg proves himself alert to Burrough’s philosophy. He is attuned to Burrough’s plunging into further absurdities, creativity, addiction, disgust and bugged out fetishes in his attempt to spiral away from he is and has done.

Cronenberg seems the right director for Burroughs when he presents the creativity tool of typewriters as sexually active provocateurs, filling the artist with conspiracies. Who would have thought antique typewriters could be so repulsive? And although it’s not subtle, there is something complete in the film’s use of metaphor, in the typewriter-bugs symbolising sexual self-loathing churning out intimate creations, or in the pieces of a broken typewriter becoming a junky’s kit. And then here are the unforgettable mugwumps – Chris Wallis’ creations are unsettling and clunky in the way only practical effects can achieve. 

But perhaps it is Cronenberg’s affinity for Burrough’s jet black humour that makes this more than an acolyte’s fawning. It isn’t that. Burroughs and Cronenberg are certainly suitable fits when it comes to expressing the trauma of the human condition with surrealism. Elsewhere, Tom Waits’ collaboration with Burroughs would bring out and prove, somewhat impressively, the latter’s oddball romanticism. And it’s the obvious playfulness and intelligence of the script that evidently enticed such a solid cast: Davis and Holm are deliciously straight; Julian Sands is delightfully camp; Scheider gleefully makes a crazed entrance to chomp scenery and cigar; Joseph Scoren is elegantly soft and charming; and here’s plenty of fine lines to go around. 

But if Cronenberg’s awareness of the absurdist humour means it never takes it totally seriously – it’s the comedy of the outrageous, which is in the blood of horror - by the end he finds the core of trauma that humanises such a notoriously chilly subject.

https://linktr.ee/Buck_Theorem

Possessor - the chill of psychopaths

‘Possessor’: 2020, Canada-UK

Writer- director: Brandon Cronenberg

Okay, so ‘Possessor’ is a film by Brandon Cronenberg, but I would have said its bloody, visceral surface and clinical, cold centre were Cronenbergian anyhow. This is the genre inverse of epics such as ‘Oblivion’ or ‘Interstellar’: here, the science-fiction rides roughshod over the individual and identity in ways we can barely contain. And it’s the opposite of ‘Gravity’ or ‘Arrival’ that have the mind-boggling to hand but retreat to the safety of familiar human sentimentality. But I am doing that thing on dwelling on the name Cronenberg, but I really don’t mean that as an accusation of derivativeness: it’s more like Brandon is just taking off from the path set by his father’s early work and running into his own. After ‘Antiviral’ and this, it’s obvious that either Cronenberg is a brand worth following.

‘Possessor’ doesn’t really seem to care if you like it. It’s for a certain kind of audience. After all, its protagonist is a psychopath, using her job of possessing the bodies of unsuspecting others to turn them into assassins for her own kicks, although ostensibly it's for corporate intrigue. At first, I was doubting that someone empathy-deficient could carry out missions passing as others, but I realised I was wrong as the mimicry of normalcy is exactly what psychopaths do. And anyway, Tasya is mostly just bluffing her way through, intermittently successful. That’s why they’re scary. 

Andrea Riseborough is convincingly icy and on-edge as Tasya, nonplussed in the extreme to the carnage she leaves behind. There’s the sense that this possessing lark has made her a little deranged. Jennifer Jason Leigh hides her psychopathy behind a kind of Tired Mom façade. Christopher Abbott as Colin Tate is the one that has to run the full gamut as the latest victim (Abbot is one to watch for choices: he was great in ‘Piercing’, and titles like ‘It Comes At Night’, ‘Vox Lux’ and ‘A Most Violent Year’ shows he prefers something off-centre and challenging). There may be a detached veneer to proceedings, but the performances are fully rounded, even down to the warmth of Tasya’s ex-husband and son. One of the high points is when Tasya has possessed Colin and is trying to pass as him to his girlfriend, but the girlfriend just instantaneously knows something is wrong – Tasya can’t even fake one of his kisses. In such a moment, the chilly detachment is shown to be lacking.

The body-horror is there in the hallucinatory segues, but also in details like chopped fingers. The effects work of Dan Martin and Dan Liscoumb is predominantly practical and in-camera, adding a little extra ickiness that CGI just can’t quite reach. We indeed start with a woman inserting a long needle into her scalp, so this should be the first warning. The killings are unnerving in their persistence and length. The moment of wearing another’s face is basic but so disturbing and quite unforgettable.

There is also the air of the privileged running amuck, obsessed only with their own agenda. After all, Tasya Vos’ latest target is the obnoxious Sean Bean, CEO of a data mining corporation that acts as if he has bullied his way all his life and had never been told no. There’s industrial intrigue here, but this is just the thriller framework to hang all the freaky ruminations on identity, sexuality, technology, etc. Certainly Shelia O’Malley feels Cronenberg doesn’t offer enough focus or examine some of the possibilities, and there’s certainly enough here for a longer film: as ‘Possessor’ entered the third act, I was feeling disappointed it wasn’t going to be longer as I was hooked and fascinated. But the finale – a shocker – reveals that this tale is ultimately about Tasya’s complete loss of humanity.  Indeed, doesn’t she end up as a head of department in this shady organisation?

 It’s a genre piece that throws a much bigger picture out there to consider and boggle the mind but focuses on one element; and in this case, any feeling that the thriller element lacks focus is made up for by the sensory overload. It’s gorgeous to look at: Robert Lazarus’ production design is a treat; the way an average street is filmed reminds me of the way Lorcan Finnegan makes mundane suburbia sinister.

It’s not as overtly trippy as ‘Mandy’, but it has an iron grip on bursts of disturbing psychedelia. There are criticisms that it’s joyless - and certainly Jim Williams' score doesn't let you forget the tone of dread - but that’s Tasya’s world: it’s stifling and pitiless. ‘Possessor’ is fascinating, cerebral, often cruel and shocking and recommended to anyone that likes the transgressive and dark genre corners.

FrightFest 2019 - Day 5

DAY 5

THE BLACK STRING

Brian Hanson, 2019, USA

At the Q&A afterwards, the filmmakers spoke of how sweet and humble Frankie Muniz was and how he really pursued this role. And surely Muniz gives the performance of his career as mild-mannered Jonathan, a hapless slacker just trying to get through the day. But to stave off loneliness, he meets a woman on the internet, seems to contract an STD and it’s all downhill from there. Hanson spoke of the inspiration as being what if the homeless guy on the street ranting to himself is telling the truth? Muniz’s sincerity, intelligence and wiry energy makes it all consistently on edge as this seemingly meek guy gets more potentially dangerous. Is Jonathan just paranoid and deluded, suffering from a mental breakdown, or is he really the target of a Satanic conspiracy? The ambiguity is wisely kept right to the very end to let the sadness and tragedy linger. Surely a small cult favourite in the making.

Satanic Panic

Chelsea Stardust, 2019, USA

With an opening that evokes ‘Halloween’ and ‘Suspiria’, ‘Satanic Panic’ proceeds to give a decent bright-and-breezy fun-ride into rich people’s Satanism. It’s the kind of thing promised by the covers of teen horror paperbacks, and indeed it’s written by Grady Hendrix, author of the wonderful ‘Paperbacks from Hell’. It’s also backed by the genre bible ‘Fangoria’ and agreeably female-centred. Sam (Hayley Griffith), the sweet but not stupid pizza girl, amusingly gate-crashes a coven’s motivational speech looking for tips and – as she’s a twenty-two year-old fuzzy-bunny virgin and eligible for sacrificing – from then it’s a rush for survival through rich people’s yards and houses. There’s an excellent regally camp performance by Rebbeca Romijn as head witch, some coven politicking, some rudeness, a decent helping of gore and one-liners (“A sweater that smells like racism.”). There’s also the theme of rejecting your parents and adults and asserting yourself.  As a piece of camp bubble-gum pop horror, it’s highly entertaining without any feeling it should be exceptional.

TALES FROM THE LODGE

Abigail Blackmore, 2019, UK

Old friends reunite to commemorate the death of their friend Jonesy at a remote lodge and launch into horror stories at intervals. These mini-tales are minor diversions, not strong enough to give an old ‘Amicus’ feel, although the corpse on the windshield and the open rib-cage of Mackenzie Crook are vivid, the sex-ghost raises an eyebrow and Vegas-‘Lost Boy’ mullet isn’t quite the comedy segment as expected. These tales, occasionally directed by the cast members, that brings the memorable imagery.

The main tale is held up by a strong and playful cast, convincing as a bunch of very different but fond friends from University with Martha Fraser as the unaccountably bitchy one and Johnny Vegas puncturing any threat of pretension. But we don’t really get to know why the storytelling is a thing for them, or why Jonesy was loved. Mostly the comedy and drama is decently balanced before it goes-for-broke for a highly convoluted twist that undoes much of the down-to-earth goodwill earned by the cast to that point.

RABID

Jen & Sylvia Soska, Canada, 2019

The Soska sisters are FrightFest favourites and certainly their bubbliness and friendliness was all over the festival weekend. They expressed enthusiastically their love of David Cronenberg and their take on his ‘Rabid’ displayed much of the same competence and weaknesses of their former FrightFest win, ‘American Mary’. I saw one comment that we didn’t really need “Cronenberg’s ‘Zoolander’”, which I don’t think is quite fair: there’s plenty of room for updating body-horror in a fashion industry context – just as Refn used it for covens in ‘The Neon Demon’ – but there’s a sense that the two themes of fashion and Rose’s (Laura Vandervoort) surgery don’t truly end up saying much about one another. 

Rose has a car accident that leaves her hideously deformed, crashing her dreams of becoming a fashion designer, but an experimental skin graft not only cures her face but also her fashion sense. Afterwards, she no longer wears her hair back, big glasses and clothing up to her neck, but is more prone to a more conventionally idea of beauty (hair down, no glasses, more cleavage, etc). Cronenberg’s original may have been scruffy and lo-fi but it was visceral and disturbing in its ideas: a zombie virus transmitted as an STD through an armpit penis-syringe. Despite the make-up, the Soska’s reimagining is a far safer affair by comparison by excising the STD element and relegating things to a confusing CGI armpit tendril, or making victims toxic males deserving of death. Although Mackenzie Gray camping it up as Gunter is a delight.  

More disconcerting for me is that ‘Rabid’ threatens my criteria for internal logic, those details that aren’t paid enough attention to or just make me question general plausibility. For example, Rose is forever taking off her dressing as if that’s easy with minimum of weeping from a huge gaping wound – surely it would never be taken off immediately that way – especially when this very point is brought up later by a nurse with another patient. And we never see it reapplied. Of course, this is done to get to the gross make-up, but there’s no sense of suspense or realistic timing with it. Or when she returns home and messily eats blended food through a straw: wouldn’t she already be used to that; wouldn’t that be a scene best relegated to the hospital? Or there’s just a corpse left in the alley and never mentioned again?  Or there’s the writing board that magically clears itself between her scrawlings; or how, in the finale, they walk into the room but don’t seem to see that behind them until it’s wanted by the script. It’s this kind of lacunae that is generally dismissed with “It’s just a movie” but it’s also a sign of a script’s strength or weakness. It’s hard to concentrate on a serious film when it’s playing fast-and-loose with detail and using genre as an excuse. All films have this but when it’s a recurring feature it scuppers investment in the material. (For instance, compare with ‘Why Don’t You Just Die!’ where detail is all or ‘Bullets for Justice’ where it doesn’t matter and isn’t needed.)

Many others liked ‘Rabid’ more than me and, despite my complaints here, I have the sense that the Soska sisters are onto something good but that they aren’t quite disciplined or scrappy enough. Their worthy themes surely demand more fine-tuning? If anything, comparison show that however clinical Cronenberg appeared to be, he was very punk and his ideas inherently scary. The Soskas offer a fine, smoother doodle but it’s not as threatening.

A GOOD WOMAN IS 

HARD TO FIND

Abner Pastoll, uK, 2019

If Mike Leigh did horror? Pastoll’s follow up to 2015’s highly recommended ‘Road Games’ goes from the sun-drenched to the dull atmosphere of Northern Irish estates. Sarah (Sarah Bolger) is a recently widowed mother trying to get by. It’s pretty clear that wherever she goes, she’s up against knee-jerk assumptions and that there’s no help or sympathy coming; even her mother criticises her life choices. So, when petty criminal Tito (Andrew Simpson) gatecrashes her place and makes her an accomplice in his drug-dealing by stashing them in her place, she has nowhere to turn. Also, he’s taken from the estates’ ruthless underworld bigwig so trouble just keeps mounting. Sarah is forced to become resourceful and ruthless, all the time giving reassuring asides to her young children.

Firstly, Bolger is exceptional, a force of nature, never once compromising her character’s strength or vulnerability; never once do we think of Sarah’s reactions as inauthentic. Simpson’s performance as Tito is also of note, as we can believe he is as disarming as he is frightening. Edward Hogg as Leo Miller, however, comes from the predictable stock of villains with a quirk (he’s a grammar Nazi, so he’s a class above), whose humourlessness is unintentionally amusing because the bad guys are stereotypes where the film elsewhere is effortlessly nuanced; they are far more suited to some Krays knock-off. It arguably makes him scary but surely not economically savvy when he seemingly tortures and kills people for what they don’t know. The third act falls into standard vigilante vengeance denouement, although there is still the sense that Sarah is being forced into this role, just as everyone wants to see her a certain way. She does the required thing of letting her hair down and becoming more conventionally attractive to kick ass; this is ostensibly to disguise her appearance, but she keeps this look afterwards too, just in case we have any doubt that she will no longer be messed with.

Such an ending is crowd-pleasing and set up nicely but also safe. A little more ambiguity would not have gone amiss, but always Bolger as Sarah elevates the material. As Father Gore says, “We’re meant to applaud that, somehow, she’s able to make it out of a desperately ugly male world intact.” And add class to that too because Ronan Blasey’s script is always aware of social status and the impossibility of getting out. But who would begrudge Sarah from making it after all?

Scanners

David Cronenberg, 
Canada, 1981

Popular early Cronenberg where his excursions into physical and psychological breakdowns take on a decidedly more commercial bent. Compared to the more medical – and difficult – tone to his earlier works, a more straightforward thriller trajectory makes ‘Scanners’ a more accessible tale of battling psychics and exploding heads. Scanners are telepaths with remarkable mental abilities that allow for all kinds of random and telekinetic possibilities. They are being rounded up and recruited by Michael Ironside for a war against plain average humanity. The somewhat shady ComSec company find Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) on the street - a broken down, homeless Scanner, barely aware of his own powers - and recruit him to infiltrate Ironside’s secret army, tutored by splendidly grey-bearded Patrick Magoohan. 

Not quite as theologically scary in implication as those that came before - 'Crimes of the Future', 'Rabid', 'Shivers' - 'Scanners' offers rather more action-orientated fun, heavily coloured by Cronenberg’s vision of untapped human potential unleashed by man’s experiments in technology and pharmaceuticals. There is still that typical Cronenbergian clinical objectivism, which perhaps make the characters less relatable and wanting in general, but Ironside produces great scowls and charisma even so and McGoohan knows how to keep a straight face. 

That legendary early exploding head set piece is still thrilling and genre defining that perhaps not even the prolonging squishy scanner showdown can quite top it. An interview in a gigantic sculptured head also provides a wonderful moment of surrealism, as does a melting phone (Cronenberg even manages an exploding phone booth). The underground group of good scanners seems to present them as the inheritors of the hippie legacy, or at least of counter-culture (they're the homeless, disenfranchised and the artistic, for instance). The malignant corporation is typical of the conspiracy plot that is practically obligatory to this scenario, exploiting and corrupting for crazed ideology. Binding it all, Howard Shore score makes it clear that this is bombast and an updating of old-school horror.

The plotting and execution is thrown around, bordering on stream-of-consciousness and probably will not hold up under close scrutiny, but it is easy to digest and great pulpy horror. Tapping into the sub-genre of psychic-power fantasies - where just force of will can either pour bloody vengeance on all or can better anyone threatening you  - proves a potent resource and Cronenberg mines it for as much head-popping and face-tearing as he can manage. The revelation that Cronenberg could be both cerebral and fun had never quite been so evident. Or maybe you just can’t go wrong with exploding heads.

SHIVERS

a.k.a: The Pararsite Murders; They Came From Within

David Cronenberg, USA, 1974

The culmination of the themes begun by Cronenberg’s earlier "Stereo" (1969) and the rarely seen "Crimes of the Future" (1970). A sexually transmitted disease mutates people of all ages into rapists in the hi-tech Starliner complex, set on its own island. The visuals possess the prosaic gloss of brochures and style magazines, but the most striking colour motif is blood on un-glamorised flesh. Assured and controlled to a greater degree than the earlier films, and more so than the subsequent "Rabid" [1976], Cronenberg mixes the banal with sudden but equally matter-of-fact shocks from the outset: we begin with an advert for the complex which gives way to a girl in her late teens apparently about to be raped by an older man in one of the luxury apartments. The truth of the matter, when revealed, is just as horrible. Soon, it is apparent that a faeces-like creature has been created and let loose in the building, sliming its way around the rooms, turning everyone into carriers. The old man is a professor, who has experimenting with organ replacement and created these parasites which are "a mixture of aphrodisiac and venereal disease"[1].

The apocalyptic vision that defined much of Seventies horror and science fiction is here merged with the possession theme and turned inward: Cronenberg’s vision is a sexual apocalypse where man cannot help himself, where he has little control or defense against his body, its desires or its mutations. As a visionary, Cronenberg has proved daring, pioneering and singular but increasingly accessible; he is a true auteur. Decades later and his early films would all be seen in the context of fear of A.I.D.S. and promiscuity. His sense of both horror and the domestic, and where the two overlap, is always both clinical and essentially humane, not to mention black-humoured. Comparisons with "Crash" (1996) - Cronenberg’s later assault on the shine of a car-fetishising culture - shows how fearless and sharp his analytical, objective style has consistently been. Any budgetary restrictions and patchy scripting is often overcome by an obvious intellect and allegory (which is perhaps why the British censors passed "Shivers" uncut). In this way, Cronenberg is also able to create scenes dealing with husband-wife rape, incest, predatory homosexuals, child carriers and afflicted elders without prejudice: the sexual holocaust shows no preference.

A more experienced Cronenberg would have matched the Bright New World of the complex with sleeker cinematography and camerawork. "Shivers" has no showy camerawork, but the sudden shocks are upstaged only by Cronenberg’s ability to turn everyday orifices into deadly threats, from letterboxes and plugholes to ajar elevator doors. Likewise, he underplays how Hampton’s doctor turns into a pragmatic killer without the slightest hesitation: he is simply a man of medicine trying to destroy a virus. Society’s gloss and alienation barely suppresses the violence and sexuality of ordinary people; the clinical succumbs to the visceral and primal, creating a sexualised zombie plague.

This is Cronenberg’s "Night of the Living Dead" [1968], but the threat is manifested from within, trying to get out, right down to the cars leaving the underground car park of the phallic complex. A venereal "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers". Peter Nichols calls the film part of Cronenberg’s "bizarre cinema of disgust" and a deeply black comedy, and it is probably so that Cronenberg’s earlier work ventured clearly into such uncharted territory that only some of the audience would respond to. "Shivers" was badly received upon release. This merging of evident intellect and out-right horror convention is probably what dumbfounded many critics: or, as Kim Newman puts it, "Shivers" seems like the director’s reaction to his seriously cerebral earlier experimental films, so that "‘Shivers’ is so unswervingly gripping that rational thought is impossible." [2] Certainly, there is an accumulation of action typical of horror - a sort of "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) meets "Dawn of the Dead" (1979) - but the allegory justifies such cinema of transgression and achieves uncomfortable insight that other genres can only dream about. "Rabid", ultimately, can only end up seeming a lesser sequel to this initial, fierce vision.

[1] The Science Fiction Film Source Book, (ed. David Wingrove, Longman Group Ltd, Essex, 1985) pg. 202

[2] Nightmare Movies: a critical guide to horror films, ( Kim Newman, Harmony Books, New York, 1988), pg. 118