50 Years Ago, A Legendary Horror Director Carved Out His Disgusting Niche

"In the early '70s, David Cronenberg had a handful of short films and two tiny indie features - Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970) - under his belt when he realized it was time to take the next step towards becoming a professional filmmaker. Stereo and Crimes were avant-garde experiments, shot for under $20,000 apiece and with Cronenberg doing virtually everything except acting."

"While they captured some of the essence of what he would accomplish, it was his first true feature, the 1975 Canadian production Shivers, that established the style and template that turned him into one of horror's leading auteurs. Produced by, of all people, fellow Canadian Ivan Reitman - the late producer-director who gave us Ghostbusters, Stripes, and Dave, among many others - Shivers was an early dive into biological horror that laid down some of the genre markers that would define the iconoclastic filmmaker's work."

"Shivers is set in a luxury high-rise apartment building called the Starliner Tower, which stands on an isolated island outside Montreal. It's there that a scientist, Emil Hobbes (Fred Doederlein), murders a young woman named Annabelle (Cathy Graham), slicing open her stomach and pouring acid inside before cutting his own throat. Hobbes, feeling that society had become too repressed, had been working on a venereal parasite that he hoped would lower human beings' sexual inhibitions."

David Cronenberg moved from experimental shorts and two low-budget indie features to his first major film, Shivers (1975), which crystallized his interest in the body and biological horror. Produced by Ivan Reitman, Shivers centers on a venereal parasite created by a scientist that erodes sexual inhibitions and spreads through an isolated luxury apartment tower, driving residents to violent, primal behavior. The narrative follows an on-site doctor and his nurse as they try to contain the outbreak before it reaches Montreal. The film established recurring Cronenberg themes of corporeal transgression, low-budget ingenuity, and genre-defining markers that shaped his later work.

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