Shivers

SHIVERS

(1975)

Dir - David Cronenberg

Overall: GREAT

 

The best Canadian horror film ever made continues in the tradition of humble beginnings, Shivers being the first non-experimental movie from up-and-comer David Cronenberg.  Like George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, it was an unassuming genre movie done on the cheap and helmed by a largely inexperienced director, yet it was also a movie that had a seminal impact on its genre.  Comparatively, Shivers is the more overlooked out of these examples, all works that came in the wake of both the New Hollywood movement and the era where regional filmmakers were taking chances and pushing boundaries with more harrowing, naughty, and eyebrow raising material.

 

While respected on its own merits, Shivers is still mostly seen as ground zero for Cronenberg's increasingly successful career as the godfather of body horror, with many pointing to his later and more technically advanced films such as Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, and History of Violence as being his finest.  Shivers belongs in the conversation though, since its low budget shortcomings were turned into advantages, and also because its director, (despite his inexperience and reservations during filming), proved to have a fully formed aesthetic right out of the gate.

 

As Horatio McCallister would say, "Rrrrrr, I don't know what I'm doin'."

Shot on a meager $179,000 Canadian dollary-doo budget and with most of it coming from the tax-payer-funded Canadian Film Development Corporation, (hence the movie's infamous early review by Robert Fulford where he proclaimed to the local reader "You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it"), Cronenberg was given an entire crew, a couple of established actors, and roughly three weeks to shoot everything at the grandiose Tourelle-Sur-Rive complex on Nuns' Island in Montreal.  It was a larger production for the director that what he was used to on every scale, yet still one that was low-budget by conventional means.  The subject matter was Cronenberg's own, (i.e. not a preexisting screenplay and/or something that was based on a novel), exploitative, and something that the Cinépix Film Properties distribution company, (described by Cronenberg as the Canadian version of American International Pictures), was interested in getting their hands on since they wanted to break into the U.S. market with something besides nudie flicks.

 

Though he had done two full-length movies in 1969 and 1970 respectively, (Stereo and Crimes of the Future), they were not narrative works and were instead shot silently and presented as avant-garde quasi-documentaries with Ronald Mlodzik narrating over them.  As the head of the Starliner Towers complex, Mlodzik and his effeminate lisp would be on board here as well, (as well as in a handful of other future Cronenberg films), but the movie oddly has no real star power or even any lead characters that it focuses on.  Sure Barbara Steel was brought in as a deliberate draw for horror aficionados, and Paul Hampton serves as the main protagonist, but this was more by default than anything, since he was merely the last man standing.  Shivers is not about the plight of the people on screen though, their individual arcs made inconsequential by the film's eerie concept of the human body being simultaneously invaded and freed by a man-made parasite.  This forms the core of what is frightening about it, that at the end of the day, something by our own design can be unleashed upon us to wipe out our troubles while sexually liberating us in the process, (both "good" things), yet also giving us a collective one-note consciousness that robs of us our individuality and in effect, our humanity, (both "bad" things).

 

As Frank Booth would say, "Baby wants to fuuuuuck!"

As opposed to other properties that have a similar premise at its core, (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, the Pluribus television series), there are differentiating layers to Shivers.  These mostly stem from the means in which the victim is infected by an organic and disgusting organism that intentionally looks like a cross between a dick and literal piece of shit, yet also one that finds its way into the body by the human host attacking them in a sexual frenzy.  The act of love making is then rendered repulsive and dangerous, (hello sexually transmitted disease allegory), something that is then emphasized by the film's dingy and low-budget production values.

 

As far as the cast goes, it is made up of interesting faces, some attractive, some unique, some ordinary, and some not so attractive, but there is nothing sexy about they way in which they become zombified.  Instead, people rip off or seem to be falling out of their clothes, writhing around each other, smearing food or other substances around them, and slowly lumbering at people like drunkards.  Their mannerisms are clumsy, their bodies often homely, and their behavior a combination of odd, funny, and terrifying all at once.  Most of the victims do not even realize the extent of what danger they are in until it is too late.  It is not like these "zombies" look like such; they are just normal people on the surface, just ones that are behaving in a concerning manner that allows people to stare at them curiously, thus allowing the infected to get up close and way too personal.

 

Yup, nothing unwholesome going on here.

Cronenberg litters the film with bizarre and deliberately off-putting moments.  There is an early scene where Fred Doederlein attacks and then slices open a young woman before slitting his own throat with the same device, neither of them exchanging dialog.  We see secondary characters doing disturbing things like an elderly man caressing his daughter and saying how much Hampton's Dr. St. Luc would enjoy her, a heavy-set woman in garish makeup lurching at a delivery boy and proclaiming that she is "Hungry...for love!", two nearly naked children being walked around on leashes, a horde of horned-up tenants inexplicably emerging out of storage units as if they were merely waiting for the director to say "Action!", Cronenberg coincidentally even appearing as one of those horned-up tenants.

 

Alan Migicovsky acts like a gross creep throughout the film, puking up parasites, beckoning them to frolic around in his stomach, acting like a total douchebag to his wife Susan Petrie, (the extent of his behavior which may or may not be entirely due to the parasite's influence since we realize that he was also having an affair with Doederlein's victim, hence his infection), and then trying to get her in the sack before his stomach turns into a nest of critters.  It is at this point when Joe Silver is attacked, the acidic parasites burning his face as Migicovsky tries to shove them into his mouth, both actors stumbling around a modern kitchen in a pool of bright red blood.  Hampton then bursts in and shoots the poor bastard, relieving both himself and the audience of any more of that particularly grotesque display of phallic turd creatures doing their nasty business, though there is plenty more to come.

 

Probably a good idea NOT to watch this movie when you sit down for dinner.

This only scratches the surface of what kind of nauseating horrors are unleashed in the film, but even the less over-the-top moments are given a permeating sense of ickiness.  Not surprisingly, the budget was not sufficient enough to hire a composer, but amazing, the library-cued music makes for ideal atmosphere setting.  Mood is crucial to any horror film of course, and the soundtrack plays a pivotal role in establishing this mood, whether it is going for deafening nightmare screeches like in Suspiria, the prepared piano ambiance in Kwaidan, no musical score at all in The Birds, or the goth punk new wave songs that clutter up Return of the Living Dead.  In Shivers, the assorted musical cues are underplayed, lingering beneath the surface while more alarming and ridiculous things continue to transpire on screen.  It provides a strange juxtaposition, clashing with the the ugly eroticism, crude gore and special effects work by Joe Blasco, as well as the contemporary setting of a luxury apartment complex serving as one that is otherwise pleasing to the eye.  It in fact comes off as charmingly dated now, with some loud decor in some of the rooms that the actual tenants of the location allowed the production to shoot in.

 

This gives the movie yet another layer, similar to Philip Kaufman's 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  It is a critique on the 70s "Me" generation of baby boomers who gravitated towards convenience after Watergate, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War had traumatized a nation.  Shivers takes place in a luxury apartment complex where the diabolical twist is that everyone gets trapped there by their own design.  The parasite is able to get to everyone not just because the human bodies that it inhabits can easily get within range and attack quickly, but also because everyone there is complacent, everything that they need is on site.  There is little desire for anyone to be out and about, little desire for anyone to flee at an earlier opportunity.  Usually when they are pounced upon or about to be, everyone just runs back into their apartment or tries to find a place to hide, and the audience can laugh at the futility of this since we know as well as they do that this will hardly keep them safe for long.

 

They even have a golf course, sign me up!

The film opens with a montage of still images as Mlodzik once again does his narration shtick, selling us hard on how the place has everything that one could want in today's comfort-seeking society.  He also ominously states that even though Montreal is only a twelve and a half minutes trek, "The noise and traffic of the city may as well be a million miles away".  This plays out while the soundtrack mildly yet menacingly caresses Mlodzik's voice, wasting no time in establishing that mood and directly implying that all of the modern niceties are going to come back and bite everyone in the ass by the time that the film is over.  When the doors are locked, the garage is locked, the phones are cut off, and all the occupants just want to get in your pants, you may as well be a million miles away from normal civilization indeed.

 

Though David Cronenberg's Crash is not a horror film even by a stretch, it does bare similarities to Shivers.  Both movies feature characters who are psychologically driven by perversity, ultimately to their doom.  Yet they also each contain performances that have a type of warped haze to them.  This is more pronounced in Crash where every person that we meet seems to be on a mixture of sleepy time tea and Spanish fly, but many of the roaming, infected tenants of Shivers also appear to be hindered by their newfound sexual appetite.  As stated before, this is what makes their behavior zombie-like, apart from the mere idea that like Romero zombies, they contaminate those whom they attack.  It would be less unsettling if they were jacked-up on horny juice, running towards their victims at full speed while flaying their tongues around and caressing themselves.  Instead, the infected in Shivers stumble around and take their time, which heightens the idea that they are on an island and can strand themselves there until the parasites have properly overtaken everyone.

 

"Eh, we'll get this guy later.  Ooo look, another tasty morsel!"

It is at this point in the closing scene where Hampton is finally overtaken by the horny horde, a fantastic look of desperation on the actor's face as Steel pulls him down into the pool, dozens upon dozens of residents enter from the outside, and the curiously alluring Lynn Lowry casually approaches him, delivering that final parasitic kiss as the frame slows down almost to a series of still images, much like the movie opened.  Then in the morning, the Starliner folk pair up in their vehicles with content smiles on their faces, venturing out into Montreal to spread the love.  Like many post-Night of the Living Dead horror films, Shivers has no happy ending.  Well, not a happy ending in a conventional sense, since once again we are left to ponder the question of the film's evil, its nature to turn the world into one "giant, mindless orgy".  Is this such a bad thing?  More to the social commentary point, is it the culmination of a sexual revolution that fought for free love?  The parasite victorious, it is now time for every human out there to lose their inhibitions, all taboos to be shattered, and in a sense, a warped, gross parasite-ridden, and naked form of peace on earth shall be achieved.

 

Cronenberg with his little Canadian tax dollar-funded B-movie that originally went under the title of Orgy of the Blood Parasites, (eventually being released as The Parasite Murders, They Came from Within, and Frissons, in addition to Shivers), asks some profound questions.  It also does so while winking at the audience, never shying away from its exploitative nature, delivering its singular mixture of nastiness, silliness, and freakiness.  The filmmaker would continue to explore the concept of the human body evolving and turning against itself, but Shivers is the first and perhaps best example of this, its lingering questions just as uncomfortable as its unflattering images.  It is a product of its era for sure, but it remains chilling, funny, and provoking all these years, (and more slick productions from Cronenberg), later.  Sometimes less than $200,000, a perverse script, and a nifty apartment complex is all that you need.

 

 

The man, the myth, the nice Canadian fella who makes gross stuff awesome.