With a brain so big it’s a wonder he hasn’t literally exposed it in any of his movies, David Cronenberg has been solidifying himself as the Grad Student God-King of Horror for over 50 years. This guy’s got a PhD in pustules. A dedication to squishing his intense philosophical pursuits into the nastiest gore to ever haunt your future consumption of Jell-O makes Cronenberg’s beautiful marriage of high and lowbrow genre filmmaking one of the most singular examples to ever grace the big screen. Sure, horror often stands for something else, but Cronenberg’s mainstreaming of body horror—more dedicated to placing mutant physicality under the microscope than splatter pictures—set him apart as a maestro of metaphor.
From his early pseudo-industrial days to his legendarily gross mid-career run to his late dramatic period, Cronenberg’s interests have mostly stayed centered on ideas of transformation, no matter the genre. Now that he’s leaning back towards the fantastical with this year’s Crimes of the Future, there’s no better time to appreciate the full filmography of the Canadian “King of Venereal Horror” (ok, Wikipedia, calm down) than right now. Here’s to you, David Cronenberg—long live the new flesh.
Here are all of David Cronenberg’s films, ranked:
Crimes of the Future (1970)
Filled with foot-worshipping scientists and other oddball male survivors of a woman-eradicating, cosmetic-induced plague, Crimes of the Future resembles a less inspired color version of David Cronenberg’s experimental first feature, Stereo. The hour-long film is similarly in the guise of a silent educational docu-drama, dialogue-free aside from the running voiceover commentary from Ronald Mlodzik’s Adrian Tripod. Though some of its ideas (including a telltale white foamy warning sign that you’ve been infected and a series of extraneous organs) tease at where Cronenberg will eventually focus his work—alongside some of his broader ‘60s and ‘70s fixations on sexual taboos and humanist altered states—the film is dull and repetitive. As it inevitably descends down its dark path, some of its quirky humor and ambitiously over-written script can knock you out of the daze that Cronenberg’s semi-industrial direction and camerawork induces. But compared to Stereo, let alone Cronenberg’s more commercial work, Crimes of the Future is a proof of concept. Homoerotic and wholly unfocused, it’s a bit like reading someone’s psych homework stapled haphazardly into a sci-fi pulp mag—with plenty of dirty drawings added to try to keep your attention. But that might be talking the film up too much.—Jacob Oller
A Dangerous Method (2011)
A Dangerous Method opens in Zurich in 1904 as we follow a horse-drawn carriage containing a raving Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) up to a large sanitarium, where she begins treatment for her violent episodes in the care of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Jung employs the new and “dangerous” method in question for her therapy, considered pretty radical for the time: Conversation. In an early interview with Jung, Spielrein sputters and stammers in a hit-or-miss Russian accent, jutting out her jaw like a Neanderthal, all the while confessing the abuse she suffered (and secretly enjoyed) at the hands of her father. It’s blatant Oscar-baiting, but this scene is sadly the most interesting in the film. Not coincidentally, it’s also where director David Cronenberg’s hand is most evident. But whether the discomfort comes from the risqué subject matter or Knightley’s less-than-grounded performance is up for debate. The rest of the film deals with Jung’s true-life relationship with Spielrein, as well as his collaboration with mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). The genesis of modern psychoanalysis as created by two brilliant men who wound up developing a permanent ideological rift certainly sounds entertaining on paper, especially when you throw in Jung’s torrid, sadomasochistic affair with Spielrein. In fact, the story was on paper twice before, as a book by John Kerr and a play by Christopher Hampton. But on the screen, it comes off dreary and pedantic, like a big-budget special for the History Channel. The screenplay, also by Hampton, is mostly to blame. It saps the life from relationships that are rife with emotion. If one were to sit A Dangerous Method on the couch and analyze it, it might be said to be using intellectualization to cover up something deeper and unexpressed. Caring more about the journey than the destination (neither of which are particularly interesting), A Dangerous Method is ultimately nothing more than a Freudian slip-up.—Dan Kaufman
Stereo (1969)
Barely an hour, David Cronenberg’s first feature—which saw festival runs alongside Crimes of the Future before the filmmaker broke out into the commercial world with Shivers—blends some of the auteur’s pet interests with what would become his stylish calling cards. Stereo is black-and-white and silent except for extended passages of voiceover that sound as if they’re reading chunks of a hard sci-fi novel. We watch as early Cronenberg staple Ronald Mlodzik—decked out in vampiric cape and cane—ambles around a mysterious institute aimed at analyzing subjects deemed promising in the realm of ESP. Parapsychology and omnisexuality? That’s Cronenberg to me, baby. Its heady, literary blitzkrieg is only matched by a dazzlingly rapid montage of images, jostling our eyes from its otherwise charmingly strange amalgamation of industrial film and the occult. Just as the institute itself (the Andrews building of Scarborough College at the University of Toronto, where a young Cronenberg and his actor friends attended school) is a combination of dry scientific architecture and magical-thinking design flourishes (like tarot cards on a boardroom table and underlit tables), the filmmaking takes the era’s Canadian docu-drama aesthetic and tweaks it with experimental, Expressionist angles and compositions. Some stunning direction doesn’t keep Stereo from being, on the whole, more than a little unwieldy, but it lays the groundwork for the similar Scanners and for a singular artist’s fascinating niche.—Jacob Oller
Cosmopolis (2012)
In David Cronenberg’s thematically murky and pretentious-to-the-point-of-parody apocalyptic takedown of unrepentant American capitalism, an almost word-by-word adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel, Robert Pattinson is aggressively deadpan as a young billionaire asset manager whose sanity relies on a world ruled by cosmic order and predictability. That’s why, as his predictions for his new investments fail and his stock takes a nose dive during the course of a day spent trying to drive across New York so he can get a haircut, the cracks in his Patrick-Bateman-on-downers shtick begins to unravel, revealing a pathetically insecure child desperate to crawl back to some form of humanity. Even during points of great existential confusion, Pattinson rarely directly exposes the character’s true nature, since at least an appearance of self-control against any conflict is his modus operandi. The entire emotional arc of the piece rests on the shoulders of Pattinson’s impressive ability to communicate an ocean of repressed neuroses through subtle changes in body language, an asset that other auteurs clearly picked up on for his later projects. For those—including myself—who predicted that Pattinson’s involvement in a Cronenberg joint would ruin the film, it’s a tasty bit of arthouse irony that his performance turned out to be the saving grace instead.—Oktay Ege Kozak
M. Butterfly (1993)
Reuniting David Cronenberg with Jeremy Irons after Dead Ringers, the director and David Henry Hwang adapt Hwang’s play into a film that sacrifices plenty of its political and narrative power for the sake of straightforward clarity. A romance between Irons’ French diplomat and John Lone’s female-presenting opera singer/spy, M. Butterfly shows flashes of Cronenberg’s sensuality—and embraces his complex, sometimes pessimistic outlook on personal transformation in a final cosmetic-laden soliloquy—but is otherwise too wrapped up in a single facet of its own transgressiveness to truly sear. The true story of Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu is fascinating, but adapted here with too little artistry. While the questions of sexuality, gender and performance are raised, stagey dialogue clashes with the realist photography while potent political elements (such as Orientalism levied as macho overcompensation, or espionage as a metaphor for poststructuralist takes on gender) are only shallowly explored. It’s a rare case where a movie could stand to have been a good deal longer; at barely 100 minutes, Cronenberg’s chronologically structured film needed more time for its complexities (and its admittedly potent performance from Lone) to gestate before leaving the chrysalis.—Jacob Oller
Rabid (1977)
Another instance where the term “vampire” is debatable, this early work from Canadian body horror maestro David Cronenberg nevertheless offers a valuable and engrossing (not to mention distinctively gross) interpretation of the typical vampire tale. Rather than emerging as some sort of mystical evil force, the vampires of Rabid are the result of a biological mutation caused when a young woman crashes her motorcycle and develops a phallic stinger under her armpit. The obtrusion subsequently develops a craving for blood, spreading a vampiric disease that turns those infected into rabid animals. Like the best horror filmmakers, Cronenberg filters this admittedly absurd premise through a personal lens, highlighting a society gone to paranoia and frenzy after the supposed “liberation” of the 1960s. And while the film is burdened by a sporadically undercooked script and the stilted acting of noted porn star Marilyn Chambers, it remains a valuable insight into the mind of a future master.—Mark Rozeman
Shivers (1975)
Shivers is quintessential David Cronenberg, the first in a long series of films that had audience members asking “What the hell is wrong with this guy, anyway?” Everything that freaks him out has just been ripped from the director’s subconscious and placed on screen—powerlessness, apathy, invasion of the body by outside forces. This nihilistic horror story revolves around a parasite that drives its hosts wild, causing first uncontrollable sexual desire and then extreme violence. The film is quite literally an orgy of violence, shot in a dark, grainy, unclean visual aesthetic that Cronenberg made into a signature. It’s as icky as it is captivating. As the narrator says in the closing moments of Shivers’ original trailer, “If this picture doesn’t make you scream and squirm, you’d better see a psychiatrist.”—Jim Vorel
Crimes of the Future (2022)
Sharing a title with Cronenberg’s second film, the latest from the body horror auteur is a return to (de)form after two decades of more dialed-back drama. Digging into the art world’s juicy guts and suturing it up as a compelling, ambitious sci-fi noir, Crimes of the Future thrills, even if it leaves a few stray narrative implements sewn into its scarred cavities. The dreamy and experimental Crimes of the Future (1970) sees creative cancers develop in a womanless world ravaged by viruses. New organs are created (and sometimes worshiped) in a broken society now run by fetishists and hurtling towards a dire, damnable biological response. While Cronenberg’s 2022 do-over on the subject of organic novelty in a collapsing society isn’t a remake by any stretch of the new flesh, it addresses the same pet interests that’ve filled his films since the beginning. Thankfully, it does so with new subtextual success and a far more straightforward and accessible text (despite the full-frontal nudity and graphic autopsies). Unlike Cronenberg’s early work, this movie has color, diegetic sound and movie stars. It embraces traditional dramatic pacing and supplements its perversion with cutting-edge effects. And at least now the characters speak to each other—in that detached, psychology-textbook-meets-FM-2030-essay style—while the camera dives deep into the guts that fascinate us. Specifically, the guts of Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen). He and Caprice (Lea Seydoux) are performance artists whose medium is the generation and removal of neo-organs. Saul builds them up, Caprice slices them out. Our destruction of the world, filling its oceans with plastic and its air with pollution, allowed this to happen. Humanity is now literally numb. People slice each other with knives at clubs, or in the street. Recreational surgery is commonplace. Many can only feel real pain while asleep. This unconscious suffering is just one of many sharpened sides of Crimes’ metaphor. Art is evolving to meet this nerve-deadened world on its terms. Humans are too, literally. That’s why Saul’s able to squeeze out nasty new lumps of viscera and why National Organ Registry investigators Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart), as well as radical transhumanist Lang (Scott Speedman), find him fascinating. The trio help narratively blend the dystopian bureaucracy and thriving, subversive multimedia generated by Cronenberg’s nihilistic predictions. When we eventually ruin things, there will just as surely be new cogs in old machines as there will be new rebels in old resistances. Erudite and exploitative, gory yet gentle, Crimes of the Future shows the new kids on the chopping block that an old master can still dissect with the best. But Crimes of the Future’s more meaningful impact is in its representation of a trailblazer finally seeing the horizon. Cronenberg’s view of the future understands that the true death of an artist and the death of society at large result from the same tragic failure to evolve—even if that innovation is simply renovation.—Jacob Oller
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