Shivers (1975)

Also known as The Parasite Murders; They Came from Within

David Cronenberg’s first above-ground feature, following his amateur shorts and the experimental features Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic) (1969) Crimes of the Future (1970), is a virtual manifesto for the first, more interesting, phase of his career. It cast a blueprint from which many of his best films were struck and for the first time – though certainly not the last – introduced him to controversy, particularly in its native Canada where a single review threatened to derail his career before it even began. Rough around the edges and not without its problems, Shivers is nonetheless a startling, challenging and still shocking opening shot from Cronenberg.

Outwardly, the Starliner Towers, a high-rise apartment complex on Starliner Island near Montreal, appears to be a well-appointed middle-class enclave but it harbours a terrible secret in the shape of the deranged Dr Emil Hobbes. At first it seems like we’re back in Stereo territory with the bland, soulless voice-over of the Starliner Towers sales video. But then we cut to one of the most unsettling of openings sequences in which scientist Emil Hobbes (Fred Doederlein) attacks a schoolgirl, Annabelle (Cathy Graham), strangling her to death, cutting open her stomach into which he pours acid before cutting his own throat. Elsewhere, tenant Nicholas Tudor (Alan Migicovsky) is suffering abdominal cramps due to something living in his stomach. The Starliner’s resident GP, Roger St. Luc (Paul Hampton), learns from colleague Rollo Linsky (Joe Silver) that he and Hobbes had been working on a project to create a parasite that could, in theory, replace damaged human organs. But Hobbes had created the parasite from “a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease that will hopefully turn the world into one beautiful, mindless orgy.” Spread by the promiscuous Annabelle, the parasites have now infested the tower and St Luc and his nurse Forsythe (Lynn Lowry) struggle to contain the outbreak as the residents are driven to commit bizarre acts of sex and violence by the creatures.

Cronenberg sets out as he meant to go on, pushing innumerable emotional buttons and taking no prisoners when it comes to sex, violence and depravity. Its catalogue of perversities (which includes the horrible implication that a waiter has raped a little girl in an elevator and the sight of a phallic parasite emerging from a plug hole to violate resident Betts (horror icon Barbara Steele)) rattled cages the world over but none more so than that inhabited by “Marshall Delaney,” a pseudonym for Canadian journalist Robert Fulford who had championed Cronenberg’s experimental early features but who turned on the director in his review for Saturday Night magazine. Fulford was appalled by what he saw in Shivers – released in Canada as The Parasite Murders and the States as They Came from Within – headlining his review “You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it,” pointing out to readers that it had been partly financed by tax payers’ money through the government run Canadian Film Development Corporation. Fulford dismissed Shivers as “the most repulsive movie I’ve ever seen” and Cronenberg suffered professionally (he found it hard to find further funding from the CFDC after questions were asked in the Canadian parliament) and personally (he was evicted by his outraged landlord after he read the review).

Though it benefits enormously from Joe Blasco’s great special effects (the parasites are suitably repulsive), the real horror, as is often the way with Cronenberg, comes not from the gore but from its ideas. Cronenberg’s coolly detached style means that he rarely moralises in his films, rarely wags a finger of disapproval at the often abhorrent behaviours of his protagonists. In Shivers there’s an ambiguity about how he seems to feel about Hobbes and his work. Like the scientists of Stereo and Crimes of the Future Hobbes, the cause of all this mayhem, is largely absent from the film, committing suicide in the first few minutes and leaving others to clean up his mess (Cronenberg often seems to have a jaundiced view of scientists and what he sees as a cavalier attitude towards responsibility) but Cronenberg concedes that he meant well. He’s horribly misguided of course but like many of Cronenberg’s scientist antagonists he’s trying to do something good, something that will benefit the world – he’s just not thought it through and, Frankenstein-like, he loses control of what he’s created. This character of the imprudent scientist engaging in ill-advised research work that leads to chaos surfaces time and again in Cronenberg’s early work – Hobbes is followed by plastic surgeon Keloid in Rabid (1976), radical psychiatrist Raglan in The Brood (1979), corporate scientist Ruth in Scanners (1981), media commentator and sociologist Brian O’Blivion in Videodrome (1983), physicist Brundle in The Fly (1986) and gynaecologists the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers (1988).

His creations are both the parasites and the highly intelligent and well-organised sex maniacs they in turn create. Though there are undeniably traces of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) in Shivers, the parasites’ hosts are not mindless zombies, rather they’re a curiously joyous lot, initially chaotic but in the film’s apocalyptic ending, happily driving out of the Starliner to begin infecting the residents of nearby Montreal. They’re happy, smiling victims, about to unleash untold mayhem on the world but seemingly content with their fate. The parasites may begin small, by ravaging a well-heeled middle-class stronghold, but have big plans, acting as a catalyst for a powerful, sudden and highly destructive release of repressed desires that will have catastrophic effects for the wider world.

So many of the trademarks that Cronenberg would be recycling obsessively over the next couple of decades were already present and correct in Shivers. The notion of a sexually transmitted horror, the body in revolt, the unexpected camera angles and effects (this would be the last time we see an example of that weird, jerky slow motion effect that Cronenberg had first used in Stereo) – even the first of Cronenberg’s many car crashes/traffic accidents, the first of many that would eventually and inevitably lead to his 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash. Cronenberg was criticised for supposed misogyny by critic Robin Wood and certainly the very early professional films (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood) feature “monstrous women” that are simultaneously both repulsive and objects of desire. Shivers is particularly problematic on this score – the chaos is initiated by male scientist Hobbes but spread by the sexually promiscuous Annabelle and there are some entirely superfluous and leering shots of Lynn Lowrie undressing that have no bearing on the film whatsoever. This may have been as much to do with producers John Dunning and André Link of Cinépix who had previously specialised in softcore romps.

But Cronenberg was never a filmmaker that shied away from contentious subjects and images and although he would no doubt deny it, he does seem to revel in controversy, at least in his early films. Shivers is undeniably a shocker, even now, marking its young writer/director as one of the most distinctive and fiercely intelligent of horror filmmakers. Shivers is rough, feeling like a work in progress which in many ways it was, but it remains a deeply affecting and intoxicating film that has lost none of its visceral power in the decades since it scandalised polite Canadian society. Cronenberg would go on to make better films but as an opening salvo in his assault on the sensibilities of film-goers Shivers established Cronenberg as a unique and uncompromising voice.