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#1. Critics Consensus: David Cronenberg combines his trademark affinity for gore and horror with strongly developed characters, making The Fly a surprisingly affecting tragedy. Synopsis: When...
Jul 19, 2022 · On this special occasion, we have decided to delve back into his gruesome repertoire. From ‘Shivers’ to ‘Crash’, we’re ranking every David Cronenberg film — spanning his low-budget classics, forgettable duds and the gems in between. 22. Fast Company (1979)
- Crimes of the Future (1970) Having nothing in common with his 2022 film of the same name, the 1970 “Crimes of the Future” is best seen as an early artifact of Cronenberg’s obsessions with flesh and sex.
- M. Butterfly (1993) Based on David Henry Hwang’s play of the same name, Cronenberg’s story about a French diplomat’s 20-year affair with a Peking opera performer feels oddly too classy for the filmmaker who would just a few years later start “Crash,” his adaptation of J.G.
- Stereo (1969) Cronenberg’s feature debut is cleverly presented as an educational film about test subjects granted telepathy, who are encouraged to test their limits sexually among their peers.
- Maps to the Stars (2014) Cronenberg’s mad-as-hell Hollywood satire “Maps to the Stars” is a bit of a bumpy ride, as Bruce Wagner’s script takes a few too many obvious swings at Tinseltown, railing against nepotism, Scientology, sequels and bad behavior of the rich and famous.
- The Dead Zone
- Shivers
- Scanners
- Eastern Promises
- The Brood
- Dead Ringers
- Videodrome
- Naked Lunch
- A History of Violence
- The Fly
After spending half the ‘70s directing for Canadian television, Cronenberg made his early low-budget horror classics, Shivers and Rabid. By 1983, we had already seen such early Stephen King adaptations as Brian DePalma’s Carrie and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis tapped Cronenberg to direct what, on paper, seems like...
Shivers — also released under the delightfully campy title They Came From Within — was produced by the director's longtime friend and fellow Canadian, Ghostbustersdirector, Ivan Reitman. A twisted, amoral doctor (a trope Cronenberg will keep revisiting) creates a disgusting parasite, which spreads through a luxury Montreal highrise. The infected be...
Famous for its exploding heads, Scanners inspired a cult following almost as soon as it was released in 1981. Scanners is less a horror film than a gore-laden sci-fi/paranoid thriller and featured some of Cronenberg’s favorite tropes and themes pumped to queasy life via a relatively large budget. The private security company ConSec recruits the men...
Remembered today for a brutal, naked fight scene in a London bathhouse, Eastern Promisesis one of Cronenberg’s biggest swerves away from his body-horror origins. Written by Peaky Blinders and Taboo contributor Steven Knight, the filmdelves into the London underworld as midwife Anna (Naomi Watts), searches for the family of a baby whose mother died ...
Written by Cronenberg in the aftermath of his acrimonious divorce, The Brood hones in on the physical effects of trauma and the existential terror that can come with being a parent. The film also finds Cronenberg developing two themes he would further develop in films like Naked Lunch and Dead Ringers: megalomaniacal doctors and the ways the mind c...
Inspired by the true story of identical twin New York City gynecologists who were found dead together in their suave Manhattan apartment, Dead Ringers marked Cronenberg’s first shift out of the core horror genre and into complex psychological thriller territory. Starring Jeremy Irons as Beverly and Elliot Mantle, Dead Ringers has lost none of its h...
Released in the same year as The Dead Zone, Videodrome is so different from Cronenberg’s Stephen King adaptation, itmight as well have been beamed in from another planet. When small-time cable TV programmer, Max Renn (James Woods), discovers an underground signal called Videodrome, the sadomasochistic, snuff-like content excites him. He discovers t...
Drug addict and pest exterminator William Lee (Peter Weller) develops an addiction to his pest-control bug powder and hallucinates a talking typewriter-insect hybrid creature that gives him orders. The hallucinatory narrative leads Lee to the creepy Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider, playing the apex of Cronenberg’s evil medical professionals), large green ...
Cronenberg returns to his version of small-town America with A History of Violence. Diner owner, Tom Stall (Mortensen), has his entire life upended after he dispatches two sadistic criminals with shocking ease. News of the event makes Tom something of a celebrity and attracts the scary Irish gangster Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), who claims Tom is actu...
A brilliant and eccentric scientist named Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) meets journalist Ronnie Quaife (Geena Davis). As the two fall in love, Brundle cracks his revolutionary teleportation project, successfully transporting himself from one “telepod” to another. Unfortunately, a fly transports along with him. The computer fuses Brundle and the fly ...
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- 'The Brood' (1979) — IMDb: 6.8/10. Frank (Art Hindle) grows suspicious when he discovers bruises on his daughter Candace (Cindy Hinds) following one of her visits with her mother, Frank's ex-wife Nola (Samantha Egger).
- 'eXistenz' (1999) — IMdb: 6.8/10. eXistenz is like Cronenberg's version of The Matrix, which came out the same year. It centers on Allegra (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a videogame developer who suspects there is a glitch in her latest project, and Ted (Jude Law), a trainee at her company who is dragged into the mess.
- 'Spider' (2002) — IMDb: 6.8/10. Spider follows two stories: in the present day, schizophrenic Dennis (Ralph Fiennes) is released from a mental institution and moves into a halfway house; in 1950s London, young Dennis suspects that his father (Gabriel Byrne) has murdered his mother and started a new relationship with prostitute Yvonne (Miranda Richardson).
- 'Naked Lunch' (1991) — IMDb: 6.9/10. One of Cronenberg's more bizarre movies, Naked Lunch revolves around an exterminator (Peter Weller) who becomes addicted to the chemical he uses to kill pests.
Jun 1, 2022 · Watching Ringers is not unlike watching a critical operation — unnerving but also enthralling." —Desson Thomson, The Washington Post. (Updated May 2024) We rank every film directed by legendary horror/sci-fi filmmaker David Cronenberg by Metascore, from his little-seen 1969 debut to his newest film, The Shrouds.
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Nov 5, 2022 · Combining grotesque body horror with gruesome psychological anguish, the films of David Cronenberg can sometimes be difficult to stomach, but they are among the best movies of the past half...
