David Cronenberg's debut feature includes everything that would contribute to his name being in the dictionary. The police investigation reveals that the older man was a medical researcher whose experiments in engineering a parasite to solve organ transplants have resulted in the creation of a sexually transmitted creature that can drive its hosts to libidinal mania. Guess what happens when that gets loose in an exclusive apartment complex.
Epidemic horror like The Satan Bug or The Andromeda Strain built tension through the threat of mass panic. On the other side of that was the force of law and science that could save the day. Cronenberg took the problem's point of view. STDs don't punish sex, they encourage it. He also made it an unlovely thing that looks something between a penis and scrotum and a turd. It is ickily transferred through kissing but can also chose any orifice available.
Outside of the monstrous appearance there is then the extended effect of the parasite. Victims variously enjoy their sexual benefits, become smoothly seductive or in the creepiest moment, speak like spacey cult members. Forsythe's monologue about her dream is so flinty and chilling it borders on AMSR. The subsequent orgy in the pool as everyone is infected is simply the end point of the virulence. The real chill happens when the final stage takes over and the residents leave the isolation of the building and drive in a cortege across the bridge to Montreal, smiling like they've all had full body lattes.
David Cronenberg had come to a very limited notice with two films too short to be features (both around sixty minutes). As a Canadian, his break came from government funding. Unlike the funding that led to Picnic at Hanging Rock to herald the Australian film renaissance, Shivers found its fortune and mass distribution in the drive-ins of the USA. Known variously by Roger Cormanesque titles like The Parasite Murders or They Came from Within, the tale of a massive deadly sexual contagion was a hit. And we thought we were clever with eerie schoolgirls in the bush. That's the other thing about Cronenberg revealed here: he has zero problem with genre cinema, sleaze or grindhouse aesthetics, as long as the idea survives, he's happy.
Survive it did, through a string of ever slicker projects like Rabid, Scanners, The Brood and Videodrome all produced without a care of achieving conventional accolades, all affecting their audiences profoundly by stacking compelling ideas on top of the sensationalist action. When you go back to Shivers, though, you start to understand the struggle to get to the mainstream polish of The Fly. The effects work is of its time but still top shelf and the action is fluid. The problem is with the performances. Apart from the dream monologue and some of the dialogue about the effects of the parasite (the old man saying he could move them around had me grimacing for days after my first viewing) almost everyone is planky. The exception is genre goddess Barbara Steele whose bug eyed seducer is note perfect. Until you get into the film's rhythm you are constantly frustrated at how all of the future genius auteur was spending all his energy on the effects while surrounded by wooden zombies.
This is not something that affected his contemporaries to the same degree. John Carpenter had his performance approach nailed during his quirky debut Dark Star. By the follow up it was set. David Lynch produced such committed weirdness that there was no room for shortfall in acting (seriously, there isn't a slight performance in Eraserhead). Cronenberg's problem for Shivers and the next few was that he needed to warm up. That would take a few goes.
I first saw this on VHS where it felt comfortable. I had a routine of catching up with movies I had never seen in the '90s and made Saturday afternoons the time for it. I'd go to Smith St and get a treat or maybe make a pasta and take it all in. I put myself on a course of Cronenberg and recall the effect of the more troubling aspects repeating in my thoughts for weeks after. By that stage, new Cronenberg films had veered from the strident shock and awe of the early films and, while I still went to see them at the cinema, I pined for the rawness of them. For all the sheen and elegance of something like M. Butterfly or Crash, I missed the rough lighting and action of the infected maniacs of Shivers. This might be a punk thing; I have never preferred the slicker option in anything because of the slickness since that democratising ethos. I can even get a kind of corporate training video vibe in the stiffness of the acting. I still love Cronenberg but I'll take that frisson any day.
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