Rabid (1976)

Despite the furore over David Cronenberg’s first professional film, Shivers (1975), which resulted in questions being asked in the Canadian parliament about how and why tax payers money was being channelled through the government run Canadian Film Development Board to such transgressive and disturbing film-makers, Cronenberg again turned to producers Cinépix and the CFSC to fund his second professional feature, Rabid. An extension and development of the themes first explored in Shivers, Rabid is a more polished film than its predecessor but sore;y misses Shivers‘ raw, visceral punch.

Following a motorcycle accident in the Quebec countryside, Rose (porn star Marilyn Chambers) is saved from her life-threatening injuries by radical surgery performed by Dr Dan Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) at the nearby Keloid Clinic for Plastic Surgery using morphogenetically neutral grafts on her chest and abdomen. Rose appears to recover but she’s developed a strange organ in her arm pit, a phallic probe that emerges from a vagina like slit allowing her to feed on human blood, the only thing that she can now live on. She escapes the hospital and heads for Montreal, feeding on those she encounters along the way. Her victims become deranged, infected with a disease that gives them rabies like symptoms and making them highly aggressive. As the number of victims increases and the city imposes martial law to contain the outbreak, Rose’s boyfriend Hart Read (Frank Moore) searches for Rose who is in hiding with her friend Mindy (Susan Roman), desperate to control her new urges as the city descend into chaos around her.

Crammed full of Freudian imagery, particularly that nasty phallic protrusion under Rose’s arm, Rabid is a skillfully made, witty, intelligent film but it lacks the bite of Cronenberg’s best work. It is perhaps a more conventional film (by Cronenberg’s own twisted standards) than Shivers and if the earlier film was Cronenberg’s response to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) – and certainly Romero’s film is a clear inspiration – then Rabid owes more to the same director’s The Crazies (1973). But this is no mere copycat or lookalike. This is a Cronenberg film through and through, concerned with matters of sexually transmitted disease, the revolt of the body against the mind (Rose remains immune to the effects of the virus she is spreading and struggles with her conscience over what she’s become – at one point she tries to feed on a cow instead of humans only for it to make her sick) and the plight of the marginalised outsider. There are a number of scenes of Rose wandering around the the city, isolated and alone in crowds, the bleak, seasonal setting lending the film a desolate air, perfectly in keeping with the film’s mood and Rose’s fate. Rabid may be lesser Cronenberg but it doesn’t skimp on the things that make his films so fascinating – and slightly (only slightly) sub-standard Cronenberg still stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Cronenberg had wanted to cast Sissy Spacek as Rose, the vampire with a (sort-of conscience), but producers Ivan Reitman, André Link and John Dunning weren’t keen, worrying that her Texan accent and, bizarrely, her freckles may be a turn off for potential audiences. She went on to make Carrie (1976) for Brian De Palma instead. Reitman heard whispers that Marilyn Chambers, who had made a name for herself as the face of Ivory Soap in a famous US ad campaign of the early 1970s before embarking on a successful career in adult films with the Mitchell Brothers’ classic Behind the Green Door (1972), was looking to make the move into mainstream acting and suggested her for the lead role. And she’s not that bad – not great, but not as terrible as one might have expected. As in Shivers, all of the the characters are under-written and Chambers isn’t given a great deal to do but she certainly doesn’t embarrass herself and is more believable than Frank Moore who is hopeless as Read.

The male leads in Cronenberg’s early films tend to be an anaemic lot, drifting around the edges of the narratives playing second fiddle to the “monstrous women” that take centre stage and the misguided scientists that create them. Moore is just another baffled and clueless man, impotent in the face of the disease and completely ill-equipped to do anything to save the woman he claims to love. Like Dr St Luc in Shivers and Frank Carveth in The Brood (1979) he’s almost comically useless, blustering loudly at all the wring people and completely failing to understand what it is that’s happened to Rose. Even when she pleads for understanding (“I’m still me… I’m still Rose”) he turns his back on her leading to the tragic, downbeat ending.

Rabid is a rare example of Cronenberg having a bit of fun with his film. Shivers was relentlessly bleak, The Brood would be far too personal a howl of rage (it was made after and inspired by Cronenberg’s painful divorce) for jokes but Rabid suggests that Cronenberg might be up for a laugh too, even if it is a very dark and grim laugh. Keloid going mad and attacking his patient in the operating room manages to be both funny and disturbing at the same time and of course there’s the much-loved moment when an innocent Santa Claus becomes collateral damage when the useless Canadian police open fire on a rabid victim in a crowded shopping mall.

What’s always most interesting about Cronenberg’s work is the way that he views sex in his films. With only a few exceptions, sex and sexuality are key to all of his work but his attitude towards it is often ambivalent. Usually he sees sex, no matter how weird it may get, as an agent for change, both personal and societal, for good or for ill. We may not be able to understand the changes it brings or even allow ourselves to accept that it’s being used for good at all, but it’s not hard to see that sex in Cronenberg films is transformative. In Shivers, the venereal parasites may initially cause chaos but by the end of the film their victims are a happy, smiling orderly lot setting out to create a blissed-out new world order; in The Brood when heroine Nola Carveth begins breeding offspring without sex it leads to murder and tragedy; in Videodrome (1983) sex is weaponized, used as the trigger for the Videodrome hallucinations that its inventors want to harness for political ends. In Rabid, that ambiguity is lost – what Rose is doing may not seem overtly sexual but she’s attacking victims, men and women alike, with a grisly phallus that transits an STD like virus and in this case it’s all entirely destructive. It’s not clear how the virus intends to spread from the infected (perhaps through simple bites but if that’s the case, what’s Rose’s new organ actually for?) but it is clear that no good will come of it and if “sex” – or what passes as sex – is transformative at all in Rabid it’s definitely for ill.

Rabid was remade in 2019 by fellow Canadian’s The Soska Sisters, Jen and Sylvia, who had shown a clear love for and inspiration by Cronenberg in their excellent American Mary (2012). It may lack the ragged punch of Shivers, the deeply personal aspects of The Brood, the glossy sheen of Scanners (1981) or the sheer genius of Videodrome but Rabid is, at the time of writing, the only one of Cronenberg’s films to be given the remake treatment. Perhaps that’s because it’s his least distinctively Cronenbergian film. It’s a marvellous, witty and engaging effort but it doesn’t quite match the wild inventiveness of the films that surround it.