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Fear the Flesh: The Films of David Cronenberg

The agelessness of David Cronenberg’s films springs from an uncommon authorial focus.

The Films of David Cronenberg, Ranked
Photo: Neon

David Cronenberg’s films don’t age. This is incredible when one considers the range and speculative nature of the material that often attracts the filmmaker, particularly across the works he made during the first half of his career. Many low-budget 1970s and ’80s genre films are quaint now, but the years haven’t diluted Cronenberg’s early “body horror” films one iota, and, in many cases, time has intensified their outrage, which mixes the visceral with the cerebral in a fashion that’s distinct to the filmmaker.

Cronenberg has subsequently worked in every genre, save, arguably, for comedy, though his films are reliably informed by a subterranean strain of mordant humor. He’s adapted a handful of notably subjective novels thought to be “un-filmable,” and he’s consistently wrestled with defiantly alienating subjects, often associated ambiguously with unconventional sex.

This agelessness springs from an uncommon authorial focus, directness, and clarity, which is reflected by the films’ deceptively unfussy, nearly sculptural mise-en-scène (honed in significant part with a group of longtime collaborators). Cronenberg rarely strains for melodrama, never leans too heavily on the score when silence or diegetic noise will more effectively establish emotion or mood. The director never approaches shocking material as if it’s shocking, and this casually intellectual need to explore something, while reserving judgment in a manner that’s analytical yet human, is the very center of his cinema.

Cronenberg’s greatest accomplishment, however, may be the mystery that tinges almost all of his films, which still, for all their thematic ambition, ultimately possess an element of unknowability. The weird pull of these films can be attributed to a contradiction: They’re the work of a literalist who’s determined to plumb the figurative.

Editor’s Note: This articale was originally published on February 24, 2015.

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Crimes of the Future

22. Crimes of the Future (2022)

Cronenberg’s first true dud, Crimes of the Future quickly devolves into self-parody, suggesting a master’s desperate attempt to replay the hits. In a predictably terrible future composed of anonymous noir-movie hovels and monstrous operating instruments straight of out of Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch, a performance artist named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) specializes in having mutant organs removed by his lover, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), to the appreciative coos of an obsessed crowd. We’re told that “surgery is the new sex,” which, as Cronenbergian mantras go, has nothing on Videodrome’s “all hail the new flesh.” Among the surprisingly dull designer surgeries and unspeakably awful expository dialogue, a plot sort of emerges: Rival cabals are fighting over the implications of a new human evolution in which people are able to eat synthetics, which is expressed by the ineffably ludicrous image of Scott Speedman munching on what appears to be purple Charleston Chew bars. None of Cronenberg’s gimmicks land here because he’s so transparently out to top his prior work, particularly Crash, that he never establishes an emotional through line. Crimes of the Future is a static fiasco, suggesting a necklace of macabre absurdities devoid of a chain.


Stereo

21. Stereo (1969)

Even the director’s most rabid fans will find Cronenberg’s 1969 feature-length debut to be a tough sit. The film is an abstract and bone-dry collage of images and sequences of young telepaths interacting in a vast corporate building, while disembodied narration tells us of the experiments that are being performed on them. The similarly themed Scanners is vastly more accessible, but Stereo evinces a compassion for its characters that’s lacking in the former, and there are a number of sophisticatedly lonely images that pave the way for memorable moments in Shivers and The Brood, among others.


Fast Company

20. Fast Company (1979)

Cronenberg’s weirdest movie bar none. The talking assholes of Naked Lunch have nothing on the reality of a drag-race movie as directed by the king of body horror. The film is diverting, but the director’s discomfort with the uplifting platitudes of the good-old-boy narrative prevent it from taking off. Cronenberg savors the processes of maintaining the dragsters, which is to say that the non-action scenes are characterized by a sense of bracing visual tactility that’s missing from the theoretical high points of the film: the racing sequences. Fast Company’s characters are flat where they should be rowdy, and the atmosphere is intellectualized, chilly, and self-conscious where it should be unpretentious and fun-loving. A cruel and unceremonious ending, which might fit a characteristic Cronenberg film, exacerbates the tension between the essentially pat, assuring nature of the story and the anti-authoritative sensibility of its teller. The director’s interest in the potentially alluring textures of cars would find a far more distinct expression years later with Crash.


Crimes of the Future

19. Crimes of the Future (1970)

Expands on Stereo’s chilly sense of personal discombobulation, reaching toward a macabre deadpan aesthetic that would find fruition in later films. As in the similarly inchoate Stereo, detached voiceover supplies a horror story overtop images of people who’re doing vaguely defined things in existentially anonymous office buildings. Gradually, Crimes of the Future becomes a surprisingly thorough and anticipatory working draft of the prototypical Cronenberg body-horror film, dramatizing, with characteristically repulsed fascination, a series of biological mutations that usher in a micro-culture given to cannibalism, pedophilia, and other practices that indicate a looming erasure of personal identity.

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M. Butterly

18. M. Butterfly (1993)

Awfully stodgy and theoretical. Cronenberg’s aversion to sentiment and overstatement often scan as bracingly disciplined, unblinking, and un-self-conscious, but this film is pared down to the bone. The director wisely downplays the overt French-Chinese politics of David Henry Hwang’s play, allowing much of the “Oriental” obsession that blinds Jeremy Irons’s diplomat to assert itself physically through his affair with John Lone’s gender-masked opera singer. But the relationship, as dramatized, is too cold and abstract to take hold in the imagination, and Irons and Lone are poignant individually, but have no chemistry with one another. That’s partially the point, as their relationship is built on a series of false cultural bottoms, but this divide also fosters an almost contemptuous “who cares?” reaction within the audience that’s compounded by the disastrously anticlimactic staging of the diplomat’s discovery that his lover is really a man. The images are ravishing, suggesting a China that only exists in a white man’s dreams, but this tale of sexual obsession is dead from the waist down.


Maps to the Stars

17. Maps to the Stars (2014)

Cronenberg is a peerless orchestrator of chic metaphorical chamber dramas, but Bruce Wagner’s script encourages him to operate almost too comfortably within his hermetic wheelhouse, which favors characters who undergo vicious alterations or transformations that embody their succumbing to obsession. Perhaps it’s the satirical Hollywood Babylon milieu, which recalls too many films and scans as smug and obvious. With the exception of Mia Wasikowska, a remarkable actress who appears incapable of a false gesture, the actors are unconvincing and occasionally disastrously over the top, particularly Julianne Moore, who proves again that she’s tone deaf in roles that require a sense of humor. There’s a metaphysical horror motif that connects the film explicitly to Cronenberg’s body of work and literalizes the governing theme of incestuous, walled-off alienation, but nothing adds up to anything. Maps to the Stars is the rare Cronenberg film that actually is what its detractors claim it to be: a stylized bauble in love with its own hollowness.


Scanners

16. Scanners (1981)

Angry, narratively efficient, and memorably lit in shades of industrial fugue-state gray by cinematographer Mark Irwin, Scanners certainly fulfills Cronenberg’s narrow design, which is also partially the rub. The film is surprisingly routine and emotionally drab for the director, particularly compared to the tragic familial intimacy of his prior film, The Brood. The telepath story often appears to be at odds with the actual plot, which is a stalk-and-run narrative that reduces the power of the best scenes. The characters are interchangeable, and that’s more noticeable than usual because the film doesn’t quite have a governing metaphor. The car chases and gunfights are disappointingly ordinary considering that the principles can mentally connect to supercomputers or other humans’ nervous systems. This film ends at a point where Cronenberg’s subsequent Videodrome would just be getting started: with identities mooted and the new flesh beginning to emerge.


eXistenZ

15. eXistenZ (1999)

Suggests what Total Recall might’ve been like if Cronenberg had directed it as originally planned. Also the closest the filmmaker has ever gotten to staging an outright farce, as the plot is composed of a purposeful chain of convoluted absurdities that collapse in on themselves, especially in a meta ending that bluntly parodies not only gaming, but filmmaking along with any other endeavor that might supplant reality, assuming that anyone can agree on what the term means to begin with. Video-game consoles are imagined, in one of the most powerfully irrational images in the director’s oeuvre, as fleshy quivering bladders with umbilical cords that connect to gamers via artificially fashioned openings in the spine (which, surprisingly, aren’t vaginal in appearance). eXistenZ is a greatest-hits party for Cronenberg: The lost-in-La-La-land narrative is reminiscent of Naked Lunch, right down to the preponderance of squishy mutants, and there’s also the anxious, quasi-invasive, yet erotic sexual imagery that surfaces in every other film. eXistenZ doesn’t have much tension until the ending (it lacks the snap of a classic), but it abounds in the vivid textures and grossly tactile objets d’art that have understandably rendered Cronenberg a museum darling.

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Shivers

14. Shivers (1975)

Shivers features the first Cronenberg monster: a phallic slug that anticipates the stinger under the woman’s arm in Rabid and proceeds to destroy a tony living complex, and perhaps all of Canada, by turning people into uncontrollable sex zombies. It’s impossible to miss the filmmaker’s contempt for a certain sort of permissive 1970s high life, though the film’s reservations appear to be less with sex itself than with the misguidedly smug assertion that “free love” isn’t ultimately another embodiment of insidious mass ideology that compromises the populace’s capacity and respect for intellectual rigor. (It’s a theme that would be refined in Videodrome, Naked Lunch, and eXistenZ, among others.) In other words, most rebellion is yet another incarnation of conformity. The atmosphere, an extension of the chillingly antiseptic realms of Stereo and Crimes of the Future, is dank, luridly yellow, anonymous, and impossible to shake. The swimming pool climax is one of the most unsettling sequences in horror cinema.


Rabid

13. Rabid (1977)

Essentially a sequel to Shivers that dramatizes the mass destruction implied in that film’s conclusion. Rather than slugs, the carrier of a deadly disease is a gorgeous sort of Typhoid Mary (played by adult film actress Marilyn Chambers with a hesitancy that’s oddly moving) who infects people with a phallic stinger that emerges from a vaginal opening under her arm. A jokey but pointed reference to Freud early on encourages a read of this film as a gallows parody of penis envy. Rabid lacks the concentrated, streamlined containment of Shivers, but it’s funnier and more assured, with set pieces that astutely connote a collapse of infrastructure (such as the often cited shot of a department-store Santa as he’s accidentally gunned down by a police officer). As in Shivers, a public body of water, in this case a spa, is memorably used as a troubling setting for rape-as-casual-sex that serves as either a perversion of individuality, the ultimate ironic embodiment of freedom, or both. An image of a female corpse frozen solid, loneliness personified, is echoed by the film’s unexpectedly mournful conclusion, which would appear to pave the way for the emotional intensity of The Brood.


The Dead Zone

12. The Dead Zone (1983)

Cronenberg’s first adaptation (of one of Stephen King’s best novels), The Dead Zone displays a working philosophy that will characterize his future interpretations of “difficult” books by William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Don DeLillo: He finds the thematic center of the source material, pruning or changing whatever’s necessary to heighten it. In this case, Cronenberg softens King’s kink and gore, honing the narrative to entirely reflect the yearning for “normalcy” that hounds Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) as a car accident and prolonged coma transform him from a meek, gawky schoolteacher into a tormented, decidedly Walken-esque eccentric who resembles a rock star and proceeds to alter people’s futures. Walken’s playing a classic Cronenberg protagonist: a gifted, temporarily empowered man who’s altered in a fashion that allows him to wrestle, tragically, with the differences between his internal and external selves. There’s a memorably lonely, unsettling image of a long, gray tunnel that encapsulates Johnny’s straddling of two worlds: the conventional world, and the “dead zone” that he accesses when calling on his new power.


A Dangerous Method

11. A Dangerous Method (2011)

It’s amazing that it took Cronenberg this long to make a movie concerned, at least partially, with the life of Sigmund Freud, as his films are informed by an intense occupation with Freudian notions of sexual repression. When Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and protégé Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) discuss their blossoming psychoanalytic theories, they could just as easily be deciphering the symbolism of David Cronenberg films, particularly when “the self-annihilating tendency of the sexual drive” is mentioned. Written by Christopher Hampton from his play The Talking Cure, A Dangerous Method is concerned with the war between the mind and the id, which is appropriate given its subjects and obviously resonant to Cronenberg’s work at large. Few directors are his peer in realizing films in which ideas are embedded with the vitality of discourse and its attending suffering and uncertainty. The film is moving, inventively performed (particularly by Mortensen, who plays Freud as a sly, tragic blowhard whose genius is obviously inspired by suppressed, prejudicial urges), and visually astute, most notably in its use of vertical planes to compress close-ups of performers together so as to heighten a sense of emotional claustrophobia.

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A History of Violence

10. A History of Violence (2005)

The first of Cronenberg’s fruitful collaborations with actor Viggo Mortensen is the work of an exacting formalist who no longer requires elaborately literal creatures to fashion his tales of evolution. A History of Violence is another Cronenberg monster movie about the physicalizing of the internal, though the monster is the free-floating principle of violence itself. Violence is constantly sensed throughout this film as an invasive force that can seemingly grab bodies and alter them, should the owners of those bodies lose emotional control. This effect is achieved by Mortensen’s subtle differentiation between the two roles he’s playing, which collectively embody a traditional contrast between an “ideal” good citizen and a man of the shadows who ruthlessly quells his hungers and protects his interests. Major sequences are pared down to a few shards of fleeting incident, which intensifies a sense of violation that’s further affirmed by unexpectedly stylized effects. Also key to the film is its very Cronenbergian understanding of sex as an ungovernable, mutable assertion of power and, unexpectedly, of love.


Eastern Promises

9. Eastern Promises (2007)

Steven Knight’s script could’ve been a relatively routine bit of fish-out-of-water business about Russian mobsters in London, but Cronenberg shapes it into a sharp, ambiguous story of a cultural intersection as an embodiment of conflicts between inner and outer selves. In a commanding, iconic performance, Viggo Mortensen is a stranger in a strange land who’s a reverse of the character he played in A History of Violence: an outwardly evil man who’s revealed to contain reservoirs of decency. Like all Cronenberg films from The Fly on, Eastern Promises is formally faultless; there isn’t a wasted or indifferently rendered image, or a superfluous beat or gesture. Cronenberg’s succinctness as an artist isn’t simply for economy, though that’s its own reward; it also establishes a tension between the moments that are actually on the screen and those that are pointedly elided so as to trump audiences’ expectations of the genre (in this case, the mafia crime film). Mortensen’s nude knife fight with a pair of goons in a bathhouse, a kind of love scene that relieves the film’s escalating homoerotic tension, is a classic sequence of action filmmaking, and it’s amazing what Cronenberg can get away with as a filmmaker by this point; the climax, featuring a stolen baby, is so old-hat it could’ve been swiped from Griffith.


Cosmpolis

8. Cosmopolis (2012)

Cronenberg adapts Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel as a present-day story of capitalist apocalypse. The director casually finds a film language for expressing wealth (and even the generally isolating properties of contemporary Internet-enabled society) that has eluded nearly everyone else save for Martin Scorsese. The film is awash in a sea of purples and blues; it’s a noir with a truly relevant millennial edge. Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) is a billionaire watching his wealth rapidly bottom out from the vantage point of his plush limousine, which suggests an animate high-rise apartment that floats over the city’s miserable, mocking their dire straits. Like the cars in Crash, this limo simultaneously suggests the comforts and dangers of constriction. It also conjures thoughts of a metallic placenta, empowering Eric’s refusal to emerge from his cocooned stasis; his fantasies of destruction are what the ultra-rich might take for fantasies of freedom. The incantatory dialogue, often straight from the novel, intensifies the atmosphere of surreal detachment until its purposefully disrupted by a long, comparatively conventionally emotional sequence with a proletariat citizen (Paul Giamatti) that resembles an isolated one-act play. Cosmopolis’s intensity is head-spinning.


Spider

7. Spider (2002)

Another story of an addled mind attempting to make its way back to “reality,” or at least to a place where it might enjoy the company of others. Adapting Patrick McGrath’s novel, Cronenberg fashions a prismatic series of planes that visually literalize the spider motif, which embodies Dennis Cleg’s (Ralph Fiennes) struggles to work through the cobwebs that are spun from the tragedies that have distorted his perception of the present. For Cleg, events tend to collapse on themselves, stranding him in a timeless realm that suggests a less ostentatiously fantastical version of Naked Lunch’s Interzone. Spider’s accomplished aesthetic isn’t the only reason it’s one of the better films about mental illness. Cronenberg adamantly refuses to condescend to his hero with pity or strained pathos, instead fashioning a kind of process film that honors the physical specificities of Cleg’s struggle to decipher himself. The filmmaker understands that the tactility of Fiennes’s extraordinary performance requires no fake sentimentality as enhancement.

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Naked Lunch

6. Naked Lunch (1991)

Cronenberg’s chilly aesthetic isn’t an intuitive fit for William S. Burroughs’s scorching, obscene prose, and that unlikely contrast renders a film that often operates as an implicative dialogue between the director and the writer. William Lee (Peter Weller) functions as a surrogate for both artists: His detachment mirrors the misleading aloofness of Cronenberg’s artistic temperament, while his unresolved hungers hauntingly correlate with Burroughs’s tormented obsessions. The film is about Lee’s attempts to know himself in the face of disaster, just as it’s about Cronenberg’s attempt to capture Burroughs. The filmmaker’s resolutely un-cowed by the demanding, legendary source material; he straightens it out, slows it down, and lends it a comparatively conventional narrative structure that serves to subsume the author’s outrageousness and self-loathing into the film’s astonishingly beautiful formal fabric. Naked Lunch doesn’t appear to break a sweat; it’s at ease with its ambiguities and wild-and-wooly monster symbolism, yet it still somehow captures the chaos of Burroughs’s writing. It also manages to be one of the best and most emotionally devastating films ever made about a variety of notoriously difficult subjects: writing, addiction, closeted homosexuality, and the jagged contours of a brilliant, troubled, possibly unreachable mind.


The Brood

5. The Brood (1979)

The longing and the sense of tragedy that were beginning to peak through at the end of Rabid are allowed to blossom in this profoundly moving film. Cronenberg’s interests aren’t quite as explicitly psychosexual in nature as usual, as he turns instead to the cycles of damage, repression, and abuse that originate in the nuclear family. In other words, he’s relaying an origin story of psychosexual tension, and he especially favors close-ups that trap you in the claustrophobic environments with the characters. The Brood marks the beginning of Cronenberg’s career as a significant formalist, though this film is also as raw and primal as anything he’s made. The pent-up emotional turmoil suggests at times what Ingmar Bergman might’ve done with a full-fledged horror film, and it features one of Cronenberg’s most audacious metaphors: a group of vengeful mutant children who’re conjured from the rage of a deeply troubled woman. This woman, Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar), passes her psychic torment on to everyone even peripherally in her path, most devastatingly of all to her young daughter, who may soon begin to grow her own creatures, born of inescapable, inexpressible anger that’s provoked by the seemingly predestined trauma of life with family.


The Fly

4. The Fly (1986)

Proof that Cronenberg can do anything, including fashioning a surprisingly rich and intimate love triangle from a hokey Vincent Price film. Despite the provocative symbols of decay and mutation as simultaneous enablers and imprisoners, which are common Cronenberg concerns at this point, The Fly is most unsettling for its operatic poignancy (Cronenberg and composer Howard Shore subsequently spun the film off into an opera). The irony of this film is that it’s a remake of a fun but trivial monster movie that further personalizes its distinctive creator’s obsessions. Like The Dead Zone before it, The Fly features intense yet remarkably engaging performances, the best of its respective actors’ careers, and their likeability releases Cronenberg’s kinkiness, rendering it more intimate and relatable, which is to say that The Fly, for its “mainstream” virtues, is as disturbing as anything the filmmaker has made. It sheds light on his work’s troubled relationship with sex, highlighting sexual alienation as springing from profound self-loathing. The hero’s attempts to correct that self-loathing, with exertions of intellectual control, lead to physical changes that only ironically embody and embolden it. It’s the Raging Bull of nerd-centric horror movies.


Dead Ringers

3. Dead Ringers (1988)

All of Cronenberg’s films are neurotic about sex, though Dead Ringers is most explicitly concerned with the resentment that brilliant, accomplished, socially awkward men can nurse toward attractive women that they feel they’re privileged, yet unfairly unable, to enjoy. This subtext fueled The Fly too, but here there’s no charm or genre-film gratification to dilute the bitterness of the brew—yet there is a deep well of tenderness that prevents the film from becoming monotonously cynical. (The gynecological torture instruments—the scariest props in any Cronenberg film—embody feelings of desire that are warped by bitterness and isolation.) As the doomed twin doctors who eventually succumb to their internal sickness, Jeremy Irons gives the two most strikingly intimate and imaginative performances of his career. You forget the stunt of a man playing his own brother, and come to accept both siblings as the most complicated human creations of Cronenberg’s career.

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Videodrome

2. Videodrome (1983)

This hard, sleazy riff on a famous Marshall McLuhan quote (“the medium is the message”) is one of the great visionary horror movies, and potentially the most prescient. It marries disconcertingly erotic images with Cronenberg’s great theme of misleadingly frivolous technology as an insidious initiator of ambiguous new evolutions. Though TV is the medium under consideration, all of the film’s observations can be adapted, with chilling ease, to suit the ongoing proliferation of laptops, cell phones, the Internet, you name it. Dialogue regularly appears to be piped in from the future, such as an observation—that we will all have special names for our personas on television—that bridges Warhol’s “15 minutes” quotation with the rise of a multiple-username culture that renders specificities of identity and humanity moot. The ghastly, daringly sexualized special effects are, eerily, Videodrome’s one quaint gesture, as they imbue technology with a disgusting yet comforting tactility that’s rapidly disappearing from a culture that’s slipping into a cloud of ever-shifting soft data.


Crash

1. Crash (1996)

Cronenberg’s most amazing achievement, Crash is nearly dialogue free, except for the utterance of a few purposeful banalities and a pointedly self-parodic sentiment: A character reasons that an interest in how “technology changes the body” is juvenile stuff, though he initially says this so as to gradually prepare new associates for the intensity of his automobile-erotic fixation. Largely, though, Cronenberg no longer needs words, exploring the consumptive properties of obsession in purely aural/visual terms. A long scene in a car wash is the finest sequence of his career—a formal symphony that contrasts the simultaneous comforts and imprisonments of social luxuries (the car, the car wash) with an unusual desire to sate a fetish for sex that’s wedded to the threat of a particularly heightened kind of death. (The notion of sex as self-annihilation hasn’t been this pointed in the director’s work since Shivers and Rabid.) The remainder of Crash is similarly intense and controlled, as the images flow together with an intuitive ease. If there’s such a thing as “fatalistic ecstasy,” this film captures it with unsettling definitiveness. Throughout it all, Cronenberg remains characteristically unflappable while looking into the abyss of unconventional yearning and self-loathing; his sobriety as a filmmaker, his willingness to go anywhere without losing his cool and succumbing to melodramatics as self-justification, is the highest hallmark of his great, unyielding empathy.

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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