PROFILE: David Cronenberg, The Fly, Scanners & Body Horror

Why did David Cronenberg spend fifty years making films about bodies betraying the people living inside them?

David Cronenberg, the Canadian director known as the Baron of Blood and the King of Venereal Horror, built an entire subgenre out of that question. Working out of Toronto from the 1970s onward, he made the human body itself the monster: not something that chases you, but something you cannot get out of.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy take apart what body horror actually does to a viewer, why transformation, contagion and the loss of bodily control reach a nerve that a jump scare never touches, and why Cronenberg's films keep working decades after the practical effects stopped looking real.

In this episode:

• Videodrome (1983) — media, flesh and the hallucination of control
• The Fly (1986) — the most humane film ever made about watching a body fail
• Scanners (1981) — psychic violence and the horror of an unguarded mind
• Crash (1996) — desire, injury and the limits of what an audience will tolerate
• The invention of body horror as a subgenre, and the filmmakers still working inside it
• Practical effects, and why gooey and physical still frightens more than clean and digital
• Our favourite Cronenberg films, the quotes that stuck, and the moments that made us stop the tape
• A look back across the whole Influential Horror Directors series

Clinical concepts discussed: body horror · somatic anxiety · disgust response · loss of bodily autonomy · contagion and infection fear · transformation anxiety · health anxiety · embodiment and the abject · the psychology of practical versus digital effects

The rest of the Influential Horror Directors series:

• S7E6 — Tom Holland
• S7E22 — Sam Raimi
• S7E26 — John Carpenter
• S7E40 — Wes Craven
• S7E67 — Dario Argento
• S7E77 — Tobe Hooper
• S7E83 — Roger Corman
• S7E88 — David Cronenberg (this episode)

Earlier director episodes: S3E65 Alfred Hitchcock · S4E28 Guillermo del Toro · S6E72 Ari Aster · S6E82 Jordan Peele

Two licensed therapists — one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

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