Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.
I have seen a surprising number of David Cronenberg’s films without really going out of my way to see them. This isn’t to say that I’ve specifically avoided his work; I haven’t. I like Cronenberg quite a bit, and I especially like where his career seems to have gone in the last decade, still making disturbing movies without making them explicitly horrific. That’s not where we are going with Shivers, which I think is his first feature-length film. It’s at most his second, and it predates all of those films for which he became famous.
It’s important for me to remember that Shivers came before films like Rabid and The Brood, since it’s going to cover a lot of the same territory. The problem, and it’s reason I need to keep that in mind, is that the territory we’re going to cover is generally covered better in Cronenberg’s other films. That’s to be expected. This was early in his career, after all, and there’s evidence of the director he’d become in this early, weird movie.
