David Cronenberg
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- In full:
- David Paul Cronenberg
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David Cronenberg (born March 15, 1943, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian film director, screenwriter, and actor, best known for movies that employed elements of horror and science fiction to vividly explore the disturbing intersections between technology, the human body, and subconscious desire.
Early life and career
Cronenberg graduated from the University of Toronto in 1967 with a bachelor’s degree in English. As a student, he became fascinated with filmmaking and between 1966 and 1970 created several short and feature-length experimental films. After working in Canadian television in the early 1970s, Cronenberg wrote and directed his first commercial film, Shivers (1975; also released as They Came from Within), a low-budget horror picture about an artificially engineered parasite that transforms the well-to-do residents of an apartment complex into lustful maniacs. While the lurid nature of the film was interpreted by some viewers as a mere exercise in shock, its focus on the fragile integrity of the human mind and body proved to be an enduring thematic preoccupation for Cronenberg.
Rabid, The Fly, and Crash
Cronenberg developed a cult following with the horror films Rabid (1977), starring adult-movie actress Marilyn Chambers as the victim of a surgery that leaves her with vampiric tendencies, and The Brood (1979), in which a woman’s rage causes the psychosomatic birth of deformed murderous children. During that period he also directed Fast Company (1979), a B movie about drag racing. The sci-fi thriller Scanners (1981), depicting a class of genetic telepaths, provided him with his first commercial success. For his next film, Videodrome (1983), Cronenberg imagined a television channel that transmits content so sexually and violently graphic that it causes hallucinations and even physical mutations in those subjected to it.
Beginning with The Dead Zone (1983), a straightforward adaptation of a horror novel by Stephen King, Cronenberg moved closer to the mainstream. The gory horror remake The Fly (1986), in which a scientist gradually metamorphoses into an enormous grotesque insect, was widely considered superior to the 1958 original and became a box office hit. In the chilling psychological drama Dead Ringers (1988), Jeremy Irons portrayed twin gynecologists whose identities seem to merge as they descend into depravity. The film attracted substantial critical attention and won 10 Genie Awards from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television.
Cronenberg’s three subsequent films were adaptations of transgressive literary or theatrical works. A longtime admirer of William S. Burroughs’s avant-garde novel Naked Lunch, he wrote and directed a surreal 1991 film of the same name that was based on the novel as well as on Burroughs’s life. With the romantic drama M. Butterfly (1993), starring Irons and set primarily in 1960s Beijing, Cronenberg brought to the screen a play by David Henry Hwang that challenges notions of cultural and gender identity. Crash (1996) is an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s controversial novel in which a community of disaffected people sexually fetishizes car crashes. Although the films demonstrated Cronenberg’s expanding range as a director, they were generally met with mixed reviews and fared poorly at the box office. He found more acclaim (albeit similar commercial reception) for eXistenZ (1999), a kinetic virtual-reality adventure that he wrote, and Spider (2002), a harrowing look into the mind of a schizophrenic man (played by Ralph Fiennes).
Later films: A History of Violence and Eastern Promises
By the 21st century, Cronenberg had largely abandoned his early work’s focus on “body horror,” as it was termed by critics, though he remained interested in psychological and behavioral extremes. A History of Violence (2005), based on a graphic novel, starred Viggo Mortensen as a small-town family man who, after committing a heroic deed, is confronted with his shady past. The suspenseful drama was one of the best-regarded works of the director’s career. Cronenberg worked again with Mortensen in Eastern Promises (2007), about the operations of the Russian criminal underworld in London, and in A Dangerous Method (2011), an adaptation of a Christopher Hampton play that explores the historical relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The existential thriller Cosmopolis (2012), which Cronenberg scripted from a novel by Don DeLillo, traces a day in the life of a young financial tycoon. Maps to the Stars (2014) archly investigates the menace and trauma beneath the gilded surface of Hollywood life.
After an eight-year absence, Cronenberg returned to filmmaking with Crimes of the Future (2022), which he wrote and directed. The movie also marked his return to “body horror.” In the futuristic work humans can grow new organs and largely feel no physical pain.
Other work
Cronenberg made a cameo appearance in Shivers, and he occasionally acted in bit parts thereafter, in both his own works and those of others. His credits included roles in such films as Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (1995) and Michael Apted’s Extreme Measures (1996), and he played a reverend in the TV miniseries Alias Grace (2017), an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel. In 2021 he appeared in season four of the anthology horror TV series Slasher, cast as a wealthy patriarch who makes his children compete in brutal tests in order to win his inheritance. During this time Cronenberg also had a recurring role on Star Trek: Discovery. His other notable work included the novel Consumed (2014), about a salacious pair of journalists investigating a philosopher who may have eaten his wife.