Shivers (1975)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg

A good horror movie explores our fears, the more universal, the better. My goal is to get at the fears being examined in these flicks and films. That having been said…I freakin’ loved this movie. J

This month’s Tuesdays, are four films directed by David Cronenberg. I start with his very first full-length feature Shivers, a movie I had never seen before this project. Having seen other Cronenberg films, I knew his movies explored connections between sex and violence. Shivers was no exception. If anything it’s the early seeds that drove some of his visuals in future films such as Videodrome and Dead Ringers.

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Watching this movie in our current cultural moment, it’s easy to dismiss because of the dated look (there’s a dial phone for Heaven’s sake). It was shot in only 15 days and the lighting is poor in many of the shots. It being the mid 70s, the costuming is heavy on the perma-press double knit polyester slacks and the Rib knit cuffs of polyester scramble stitch sleeves. The set dressing’s not much better. In one apartment there’s zebra print wall paper with matching bar stools. Yikes! But what IS here and what Cronenberg nails on the head is ALL FIVE OF THE FIVE KINDS OF FEAR…and that is why this movie succeeds.

What are the five kinds of fear? I’m glad you asked. They are EXTINCTION, MUTILATION, LOSS OF AUTONOMY, SEPERATION, AND EGO-DEATH (according to some fancy schmancy article in Psychology Today…you can Google it), and this film has them all.

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Plot summary: Good thing-Science lab creates a human parasite to assist in organ replacement. Bad thing-Doctor creates the parasite out of a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease (yeah, that’s what I said…venereal disease). Good thing-The parasite is a success and replicates like gangbusters. Bad thing-The parasite is a success and replicates like gangbusters! And that’s really all you need to know about the plot. That and it’s set on Starliner Island…and Edenic isolated island off of Montreal (which I think is important because this sh*t never happens in America, right?)

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FEAR OF EXTINCTION: This is self-explanatory. It’s our fear of dying, of ceasing to exist. Developing parasites that replace the functions of diseased organs is in itself an attempt to stay the fear of our own mortality. The fact that it gets out of our control and is spread through kissing and sex is compounded by the fact that this film predates the AIDS pandemic. Granted, having shriveled up turd-looking critters movie-magically jumping into people’s mouths or crawling between their legs while they’re in the bathtub is not a symptom of AIDS. This movie dishes out enough death to cultivate our fears of extinction at the hands of the very people who are meant to help us fight it off: DOCTORS. I always say that’s why they call it ‘practicing medicine’…none of them have it right anyway.

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FEAR OF MUTILATION: This fear includes anything that invades the boundaries of our bodies...and that’s exactly what these parasites do. The reactions are different for each character. One male character lies in bed talking to his inner parasite. It come from his stomach like a bizarre kind of birth only to leap up into another doctor’s face. Campy yes, but also frightening. The fact that these things drive the libido of their hosts leads to another kind of bodily violation…there’s lots of depictions of rape in this film. Granted, most people have their clothes on, but I’m talking about the violent forcing of one’s self sexually onto another. Cronenberg gives us splashes of humor mixed in with his violence, though. Two underwear clad men emerge from an elevator hugging when they see the handsome hero doctor trying to get to the bottom of all this craziness, and they chase him until he ducks into another apartment. They stand outside repeating, “Hey, come on out.” Hmmmm…. This is not the first time our hero has had a homoerotic run-in, however. The first guy who tried this stuff got bludgeoned to death with a tire iron. So much for the “First do no harm” doctor stuff.

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LOSS OF AUTONOMY: This is our fear of being controlled, imprisoned, manipulated either physically or by our circumstances. The paradisiacal appeal of being isolated on this island…away from the riff raff of the everyday world, soon becomes the one thing that works against our hero. He can’t seem to escape because more and more of the Tower tenants become infected/possessed, even his wife, until everyone ends up in a wet orgy that rivals the “Don’t Dream It, Be It” pool scene from fellow 1975 flick The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Once infected, there is no more autonomy, just lust filled rampage leading to some of the more disturbing images like a man offering up his daughter: “I think you’d really like my daughter Erica.” Children being led around on dog leashes. A slow motion shot of a child kissing the doorman on the mouth while he’s being raped by another man and held down by her mother. The doctor running out into an open space only to have the zombie-like residents emerge from the darkness to chase him back inside…I kept expecting these zombie sex freaks to start chanting, “One of us! ONE OF US!”

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FEAR OF SEPERATION: Before the end, we see the hero doctor becoming more and more disconnected from the people he has served as Starliner Island’s resident medical practitioner. In one scene, he literally becomes separated from his wife after they wonder down some strange corridor in the basement and are attacked by their infected orgy-minded neighbors.

And finally…

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One of the many male on male physical attacks that doubles as sexual assault.

EGO-DEATH: There’s humiliation, there’s shame, there’s definitely a loss of integrity for the medical profession. Cronenberg is unrelenting and shies away from nothing. There’s just about every form of sexual variation on display…and all because of a little old parasite.

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Throughout the film, I was thinking, “Thank God they’re on an island and this will be contained. After all, the hero did call the police!” – even though earlier all the phone lines were cut…that’s another kind of review all together. But knowing Cronenberg the way I do, I should have known…foolish thought. The final scene comes right after the wet orgy where the hero doctor gets pulled in by a woman in the pool (very mythological imagery…much like the sirens!). We see everyone paired up in cars. The hero doctor and his wife pause for a moment, she lights his cigarette (post coital, I imagine), and then they lead a convoy of infected Starliners off into the night while a voice over of a radio broadcast says there’s no evidence to support rumors of a city-wide wave of sexual assaults. Credits roll.

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Nothing like kids on a leash to freak me out.

Is this the best horror movie ever made? Of course not. But it succeeds on being frightening. Cronenberg is having a field day. He knows what will scare us and he gives it to us in spades: a little gore (surprisingly little…whether that’s due to budget or artistic decision…it’s the right choice here), a little nudity right away (there’s even the word ‘titty’. I love the word ‘titty.’ Nobody uses it any more), a bathtub scene that delivers (while maybe not rivaling the shower scene from Psycho, it shows the parasite crawling between a woman’s legs and then there’s blood and screaming…ew). We see the paradise of Starliner Island become the Island of Misfit Bi-sexuals…and in 1975, a more sexually unenlightened time…I imagine this too was frightening.

Best Line:  “Disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual.”

Worst Lines:

“Can I call you at work?”

“What do you want to call me at the office for?”

“I don’t know.”

We’ll be examining how other directors deal with these five basic fears in their films. Next Tuesday – Videodrome.

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