Shivers (1975, David Cronenberg)

56/100

Second viewing, last seen at Anthology Film Archives' complete Cronenberg retro in 2002...during the course of which I also first watched Rabid and found that to be Shivers' much more accomplished near-identical sibling. A recent revisit saw me slightly less impressed, but I still think it's the better film by some margin (specifically: an 11-point margin), for several reasons. First, it's got a riveting Marilyn Chambers in the central role; Shivers arguably qualifies as an ensemble piece, but if you had to pick one character as its protagonist, that'd be Dr. St. Luc, stolidly played by the very dull Paul Hampton. Second, I much prefer Rabid's armpit phallus to Shivers' slimy wrigglers, which sometimes attach themselves to a person's exterior like a super-gross remora (creating painful contact burns) but also enter the body and visibly writhe around, affecting the host's personality either a great deal or not at all per the script's needs at any given moment. Third, while both movies borrow heavily from Night of the Living Dead, and both equate sex with violence, it's Shivers that settles upon asking "What if zombies wanted to rape you, not devour you?" This is a horror movie about rape zombies, which, okay, bold, sure, and Cronenberg thankfully doesn't linger on details, but frankly I'd rather see entrail-munching. And then...well, actually this complaint applies to both Shivers and Rabid. But the STD metaphor in no way follows logically (or just sensibly) from the parasite's intended purpose, which we're told was to substitute for a failing organ (in keeping with Cronenberg's organic fixation). At some point we get from substitute pancreas (or whatever) to "a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease that will hopefully turn the world into one beautiful mindless orgy," but it's not at all clear to me how. Maybe some barely repressed urges seen early on would've given this scenario a bit more juice.

In any case, Shivers is among those early Cronenberg films that I enjoy primarily for his offbeat casting choices and industrial-video banality. Certain directors are drawn again and again to the same basic phenotype, and I don't think it's coincidental that Lynn Lowry, who plays Nurse Forsythe in this film, bears a marked resemblance to Nadia Litz, recently seen as Dani Router in Crimes of the Future '22.

That's just a look that he favors, independent of acting ability. It suggests something that I'm finding hard to articulate but nonetheless feel as if I "get," intuitively recognizing what he means for these women to convey without any effort. (Sarah Gadon in Cosmopolis somehow embodies this combination of fragility and danger via her performance, despite not looking quite right, which is extraordinary.) Same's true of the middle-aged actor who's saddled with most of Shivers' scientific exposition—it's more or less the same dude seen in Scanners and even at the race track in Fast Company, a schlumpy face and personality that you encounter every day in real life and almost never see onscreen. (Admittedly, Barbara Steele doesn't remotely fit this approach, as she is always singularly and magnificently Barbara Steele.) There's a corresponding low-key matter-of-factness to early Cronenberg that I dig even when his narratives and ideas feel undercooked. One of Shivers' strengths, in fact, is the way that it begins, with Starliner Towers already in the early stages of parasitic infestation; while we're shown a video ad establishing the island and apartment complex, victim #1 gets murdered and autopsied before we have the slightest clue who she is, and before we've met any other notable characters, either. There's no baseline of normality. Doom's already been set in motion, prior to our arrival. We're just watching it slowly play out. Which, again, I wish didn't involve quite so many people being beset by horny Romero-style hordes and fucked to death, but perhaps that's strictly my own hangup.