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Terror Incognita:
Body Horror and the Fear of the Flesh in the
Films of David Cronenberg
Rachel Victoria Richmond

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“A young child can understand a
monster jumping out of the closet, but it
takes a little more […] to understand
that there is an inner life to a human
being that can be as dangerous as any
animal in the forest.”1
– David Cronenberg
The philosopher and scientist Rene Descartes argued that there existed an
“independent nonmaterial soul inhabiting and finding expression in a mechanically
operated body.”2 This belief gave birth to the idea of Cartesian Dualism, or the mind-
body split, a discussion of the interaction of the body on the mind and vice versa.
Director David Cronenberg has chiefly devoted his career to the mind-body split and the
gap between the rational, functional mind and the body. As Cronenberg says, many issues
“revolve around the impossible duality of mind and body.”3 Some critics have argued that
Cronenberg’s work can be split into two eras with two distinct focuses - before Dead
Ringers (horrors of the body) and after (horrors of the mind). This false assertion is based
on the idea that Cronenberg’s early films are primarily body-horror genre films where
gore takes importance over psychological insight. In reality, Cronenberg’s films have
always depicted the struggle to unite the mind, restrained and shackled by modern society
and technology, with the abject and wild body. In his films, the body becomes the screen
on which the characters’ fears, obsessions, and desires are projected. Ultimately, the
mind-body gap spurs transformation, mutation, and evolution – either mentally or
physically – that pushes the characters to a new understanding of what it is to be human.
It is undeniable to those who have followed the career of David Cronenberg that
his films have increased in palatability (for mainstream audiences) while over time,
moving away from films that could so easily be labeled as biological horror.

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Cronenberg’s first two commercial feature films, Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), fall
under this simplistic category. In both films, parasites and mutations cause their hosts to
act in a manner dangerous to the established order of society, displaying either violent
rage or sexual outbursts. While it would be easy to call Shivers and Rabid “exploitation
films”4, as writer Carl Royer does in his essay on Cronenberg, “Atheism and ‘The Death
of Affect,’” the truth is much more complex. Shivers is as much a psychological horror as
Dead Ringers (1988) or Spider (2002). However, Cronenberg (in creating his own genre)
uses parasites as a form of bodily mutation, a reaction to a sterile society and a projection
of the characters’ fears of the unknown, especially that of the body.
Shivers introduces many of the subjects that will become familiar in Cronenberg’s
later works. The story centers on Starliner Towers, a new apartment high-rise on an
island “far from the noise and traffic of the city.”5 The opening shots are balanced,
unremarkable, and staid frames of the Starliner design. A voiceover asserts that the
tenants have control over the elements of life of which they find displeasing. “Explore
our island paradise – secure in the knowledge that it belongs to you and your fellow
passengers alone.”6 Cronenberg’s detached camera emphasizes the cold and
compartmentalized life that Starliner
Towers offers, a dull existence devoid of
the unknown. This civility is broken by a
struggle between a half-naked young
woman and an older man, culminating in
her murder and his suicide. The scene is a
mix of sex and violence, tantalizing and yet terrifying. It is clear from this juxtaposition

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of scenes that Shivers strives to place the characters and the audience in a new, disturbing
frame of mind, one where the old rules of conduct do not apply. Beneath the polished
steel and glass of Starliner Towers, beneath the veneer of polite behavior of the tenants,
all that is abject and restrained threatens to come bursting to the surface.
The parasites that attack the tenants of Starliner Towers are foul creatures that
seem to reference every wretched part of human nature that society deems necessary to
control. The parasite is both phallic and fecal. The
swelling dark mass oozes and squirms from the
bodies of the infected, reminding the viewer of that
which is kept hidden inside and out of conversation.
In the book The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of
David Cronenberg, William Beard notes “all things
expelled – ‘ab-jected’ – from the body interior are culturally constructed as disgusting.”7
He continues by arguing that the only thing that “contain and repress the abject”8 are
body boundaries but in Shivers, the parasites create a “boundaryless body interior”9 that
attack the sterile and repressed environment of Starliner Towers. Doctor Hobbes (Fred
Doederlein), the older man who murdered the girl in the beginning of the film and the
progenitor of the parasite, saw the parasite as an aphrodisiac that was capable of turning
the world into “one beautiful mindless orgy.”10 The parasite is an antidote to a world
where “bodies are overly regulated and restrained by society’s structures,”11 thus
resulting in a loss of the abject – a key part of human existence. Sexual repression is
replaced with uncontrollable orgiastic revelry and civility is replaced with frenzy. In the
end, a new order is born out of chaos.

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If the parasites and the infected represent the body, primarily driven by urges,
then the doctors in Shivers are the defenders of rationality and the mind. Doctor Roger St.
Luc (Paul Hampton), the resident physician in Starliner Towers, battles against the
parasites with the help of his nurse and fiancé Forsythe (Lynn Lowry) and Hobbes’
former partner, Rollo Linsky (Joe Silver). St. Luc’s
mission to restore Starliner Towers back to normal is
aided by his reliance on facts and science. He
doggedly pursues clues, even spurning Forsythe
when she strips in front of him in his office.
Cronenberg contrasts the sexless St. Luc with his hot-blooded fiancé who is in touch with
her feelings and her sexuality. It is of course no surprise that towards the end of Shivers,
Forsythe becomes infected. Before she reveals this to St. Luc, she recalls a dream in
which she had sex with a strange man:
He's old and dying and he smells bad, and I find him repulsive. But then he tells
me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He
tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh. That disease is the love of two alien
kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That
talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual.
And I believe him, and we make love beautifully.12
Cronenberg’s idea of The New Flesh as mentioned in Videodrome (1983) and The Fly
(1986) is first introduced here in Shivers. The New Flesh of which Forsythe speaks about
is born out of the body overriding the mind. That which the mind says is disgusting or
diseased becomes beautiful. The end of Shivers has St. Luc finally being infected and
leading a caravan of automobiles back into the city. Cronenberg takes great care to show
the infected not as monsters but as a new order, more in touch with the humanity they so
long denied.

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Cronenberg’s early works, Shivers and Rabid, seem to take on the society as a
whole and how modernity (with the paradox of improving and extending life through
technology) affects the individual’s psyche. In The Cinema of David Cronenberg: From
Baron of Blood to Cultural Hero, Ernest Mathijs draws a parallel between Cronenberg’s
work to German philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse “saw the regulation of sexual
impulses and instincts […] as the key to establishing civilization and culture” through the
use of “abjection and repression.”13 The disadvantage of repressing desires is that it can
lead to unnecessary “surplus repression” and the formation of a “onedimensional man,”
an unwavering conformist to society’s norms.14 But within that onedimensional man there
is the Other, controlled by desire and always at odds with the rational self. As William
Beard says, “Whatever is destructive to the ego-self is to the benefit of the bodily-
Other.”15 In a hermetic world, both are not allowed to exist in balance. Cronenberg uses
mutation to push out into the world for all to view that which is reviled. After Shivers and
Rabid, Cronenberg refines his focus to the mind-body connection as it is reflected by an
individual’s own nature. Beard notes this change as well, “You can’t fix human nature,
that is the moral of the early films (which in the later films is amended to ‘you can’t fix
your own nature’).”16
Cronenberg progresses from the body rebelling against the mind to the mind
transforming the body because of internal conflict. The Brood (1979) and The Fly remain
two of Cronenberg’s most popular and commercially successful films. In both films,
Cronenberg depicts characters who through their own makings are slowly transformed
(literally) into monsters, aided by science. The characters experience “an inner
exploration of the self through ritualistic science or pseudoscience.”17 What the characters

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become is not completely due to the meddling of science but because of their unresolved
internal conflicts, as noted by Ernest Mathjis. “The monster comes from within ourselves,
bursting out of our bodies; it is everywhere, in all walks of life, in what we hold familiar,
as well as in our own families.”18 In The Brood, a woman gives birth to her rage, in the
form of disfigured children who carry out bloody revenge against those who have hurt
her. In The Fly, a scientist is transformed by love, obsession, and ambition into an insect
– an embodiment of his “innate otherness.”19
The Brood is one of Cronenberg’s most personal films, interesting in the way he
blends his own experience with horror genre conventions to create a true psychological
study of a broken family and the effects of repressed anger. Like the couple, Frank (Art
Hindle) and Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar), Cronenberg and his wife experienced a
destructive divorce that placed their child in the middle of the conflict. In The Brood,
Nola finds herself in the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics, being treated by Doctor
Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) for her anger and the abuse she suffered as a child by the hands
of her mother (Nuala Fitzgerald). Doctor Raglan’s treatment of psychoplasmics requires
the patient to relive their traumas (“Show me your rage.”20) and allow their negative
emotions to physically manifest. A man in the beginning of the film produces welts on
his back as a result of the process, while another man later on develops a cancerous lump
on his neck. Nola, on the other hand, becomes able to asexually reproduce, a twisted form
of parthenogenesis.
What Nola gives birth to are her children, her physical manifestations of hate just
as her real daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds) is a physical manifestation of the love she
used to have for her husband Frank. The children are sexless and deformed and only

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follow the will of Nola. They are, as David Cronenberg puts it, “creatures from the
unconscious, making the mental physical.”21
Cronenberg also explains that Nola’s rage
“goes beyond certain moral categories, so the
resulting creatures were primal, nearly foetal,
nearly formless. Just pure anger.”22 The first
victim of Nola’s rage is her mother Juliana
who used to abuse Nola as a child. In a parallel, Frank finds bruises on Candice’s back
after a visit with Nola and then Juliana tells Candice how Nola frequently was marred
with bumps and bruises when she was young. Nola’s creature-children then attack Juliana
in her home and kill her in obedience to the will of their “mother.” However, The Brood
is not just about Nola and her familiars, the film also is Cronenberg’s response to
Hollywood fare such as Kramer vs. Kramer.23 Frank fights for Candice’s safety and
wellbeing in a situation that he finds himself completely unprepared for. As the male
protagonist, Frank is also saddled with the feminine responsibilities of raising a daughter.
While Nola transforms into something monstrous, Frank has joined the two roles of
parenting together for the sake of his daughter.
The most infamous scene in The Brood is also the key to understanding Nola’s

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transformation. Towards the end of the film, Frank finds Nola at Somafree and
approaches her calmly, while Raglan tries save Candice from the creature-children. “I’m
in the middle of a strange adventure,”24 Nola tells
Frank and although he attempts to appease her,
she does not believe him. Nola lifts her gown
and shows Frank the sac that hangs from her
stomach, the second womb for her children of
rage. She then pulls apart the sac and licks the fetus lying inside. Cronenberg shows Nola,
deep in a state of ecstasy while licking her new child. She seems less like a woman and
more like an animal, a wolf perhaps, celebrating the life it brought into the world. With
this shot, Cronenberg cements Nola’s complete transformation into something wholly
controlled by impulse, anger, and emotion.
The Brood at its core is a film about the destructive nature of divorce and the
emotions that arise. Ernest Mathjis describes The Brood as manifesting these emotions in
“messy fluids (blood, sweat, tears)”25 and in the physical representation of pain and
disgust. The mind-body connection in The Brood finds links with Shivers - repressed
emotions will physically manifest. Nola’s mother offers an interesting parallel when she
quips, “Thirty seconds after you're born, you have a past and sixty seconds after that you
begin to lie to yourself about it.”26 Nola’s repression of her abuse and of her rage at Frank
for taking her daughter away from allowed her to transform herself from mentally weak
and helpless to physically powerful and dangerous.
Likewise, The Fly also deals with a character’s obsession with transformation and
their tragic loss of humanity. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) finds solace “in the stable

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world of abstractions”27 offered by science rather than the unknown world of human
interaction. The teleportation
machine that Seth is obsessed
with creating is much like
himself; it is unable to understand
the body (the flesh) and its
complexities. As Seth says, “Computers are dumb. They only know what you tell them. I
must not know enough about the flesh myself. I'm going to have to learn."28 Seth’s
education of the flesh is through his girlfriend, scientific journalist Veronica Quaife
(Geena Davis) who leads Seth to an emotional and sexual awakening. Seth is then “made
crazy by the flesh”29 that threatens his relationship because of his jealous behavior and
suspicions. It is Seth’s newfound irrationality (spurred by his introduction to a sexual
relationship) that causes him to go unattended through the teleporter and become spliced
with the fly.
William Beard argues that in Cronenberg’s films, science poses two kinds of
problems – either a society based upon repression and controlling technology or “it is
infected by desire/the body and produces mad scientific projects that heedlessly endeavor
to direct the biological/instinctive realm with dreadful outcomes.”30 In The Fly, Seth
meddles with the laws of nature and the basic laws of the human body with his
transporter. Before Seth’s introduction to the flesh, the teleporter was something that he
was doing unquestionably as a project for a company. After Seth’s splicing with the fly,
he uses the teleporter to enhance himself, to create a better Brundle. The teleporter
becomes transformed into a gene splicer, a tool for Seth’s self-improvement. Seth seeks

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to marry both the mind and the body with the teleportation device, just as he seeks to
marry his own rationality with his new desires – a disastrous combination.
Seth’s transformation into the Brundlefly slowly deteriorates his humanity, both
physically and mentally. He becomes addicted to the teleporter because at first it refines
his senses and makes Seth feel, for once in his life, stronger than those around him. This
period of self-realization has also come with Seth’s slide into egomania and irrationality.
After Veronica shows concern for Seth, he berates her for her refusal to be teleported:
You're afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren't you? You're afraid to be
destroyed and recreated, aren't you? I'll bet you think that you woke me up about
the flesh, don't you? But you only know society's straight line about the flesh.
You can't penetrate beyond society's sick, gray, fear of the flesh.31
Veronica’s rationality about tampering with the body is seen as fear of evolution by Seth.
Seth has descended into mania and becomes less logical as more of his fly-self takes
over. He sees the teleporter as the next step in human evolution, the key to the
purification of the self through modifying the body.
The visceral horror of The Fly mirrors Seth’s
psychological decay. As his teeth fall out, his body
becomes deformed, and his ears fall off, Seth also
moves further away from any semblance of humanity,
as William Beard argues is measured in decency,
unlike insectness, which is “marked only by the predatory instinct to destroy.”32 What
once seemed as a positive growth has now transformed into disease. Seth remains lucid
through his transformation into the Brundlefly and soon begins to see the truth of his
experiment. As Seth sadly muses to
Veronica, “I'm an insect who dreamt he was

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a man and loved it. But now the dream is over and the insect is awake."33 Even though
Seth was physically combined with the fly through the teleporter, his secret side and his
“innate otherness”34 were his all along. They were only released by the experiment and
physically mirrored by his slow decay into the Brundlefly. Writer David Roche breaks
down the Cronenberg ethos that runs from Shivers to The Fly:
What Cronenberg's films demonstrate is that the self cannot come to terms with
his body because: (1) it is mortal and open to diseases and will one day die, taking
the self along with it--the mere possibility of disease reminds the self that he does
not control his body; and (2) it represents the hidden perversions the self tries to
repress. So it is often when they are sick that Cronenberg's characters become
aware of their body as if it were separate from themselves.35
Seth fears his new body because it opens up to him the possibility of death, the death of
the body and the death of the self, of his identity. Seth’s transformation represents the
“hidden perversions” he tried to deny himself through hiding behind science. In the end,
the Seth does see himself as separate from the Brundlefly he becomes. He marvels at his
decay as though it is happening to something else. But no longer can Seth deny the body
and its complications until finally, he becomes that which he initially feared and must
accept death over total psychological transformation.
Two years after the release of The Fly, Cronenberg radically switched genres with
Dead Ringers, the psychological drama starring Jeremy Irons. This change caused many
to believe that David Cronenberg had turned the corner from the biological horror films
of his past and into deeper examinations of the mind. However, from Dead Ringers and
on, Cronenberg still wrestled with the mind-body split in his films. In the article “Body
Work,” writer Andrew Hultkrans describes Cronenberg as having “distilled his primary
theme - psychological and bodily mutation - dispensing with rebellious flesh and
twitching viscera in favor of far more unnerving internal transformations.”36 Hultkrans

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certainly is correct about Cronenberg’s distillation of his films – Cronenberg owes a lot to
the sophisticated cinematography of Peter Suschitzky in this respect. However, the
internal transformation that Hultkrans mentions does not occur without a physical
representation or impetus. Cronenberg still deals in repression but he also adds a
discussion of the connection between the body and the self in the modern age. Science
and technology play a major role in his films (especially Crash and eXistenZ) but instead
of being portrayed as the destroyer of the body, Cronenberg portrays technology as a part
of normal life. The characters struggle to adapt to technology and still retain their human
desires. Instead of parasites and deformations, the later films in the Cronenberg canon
center on the struggle for identity through one’s own body.
The Mantle Twins (Jeremy Irons) in Dead Ringers represent Cronenberg’s
fascination perfectly. As David Cronenberg notes, the Mantle Twins essentially are
“[one] body separated into two parts.”37 They share physical makeup, women,
employment, and secrets. They even share identities. When Elliot presents Beverly with
the Mantle Retractor (a surgical device), he tells him that he should have been at the
reception where they were honored for their work. Beverly, without a second thought,
replies, “I was.” This short scene between the two hints at a shared consciousness
between the twins. This intense relationship isolates them from outside influence. As
children, Bev and Elly seem strangely detached, analytical, and scientifically minded.

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The opening scene depicts how alien they are in comparison to the outside world. Their
fascination with sex is not one based on arousal but on mechanics. They seek to dissect
what they cannot understand – the female Other.
The Mantle Twins chosen profession (gynecology) allows them to observe,
analyze, and deconstruct that which they are fascinated by. Generally, the sexual organs
are a physical representation for desire, lust, emotion, and love. The twins can learn about
the female sex in a “controlled and impersonal”38 setting, with no room for emotions or
relationships. Just like Dr. St. Luc in Shivers and Seth Brundle in The Fly, the Mantle
Twins find comfort in the world of science, where there is no fear of contamination or
intrusion on their relationship.
However, Cronenberg adds an infection into the sterile lives of the Mantle Twins
in the form of Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold), an actress with a vaginal deformity that
intrigues the twins. When Claire begins her affair with Bev (or what she thinks is Bev, as
Elly often plays his brother’s part), Bev withholds intimate details from Elly for the first
time, creating the first fracture in their bond. As the relationship progresses, Bev pulls
away from Elly and instead of finding his own identity, he suffers immensely from the
absence of his brother. Much like Siamese twins, one flourishes (Elly, who continues his
life to his best ability) while one grows weak (Bev, who falls to drug addiction). Elly
realizes the toll of the separation on Bev and confronts Claire, saying, “You bring a
confusing element to the Mantle Brothers saga.”39 What she brings is emotion, feeling,
and the question of identity into the twins’ sterile world, a sense of the body against their
focus on the mind.
The final scenes where both brothers fall to drug abuse are heartbreaking, yet

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Cronenberg strives to make the point that the brothers were doomed to failure from the
beginning. Their outlook on life, especially women, was too extreme and their
dependence on each other faltered. Their own innate Otherness would not allow them to
integrate into the world. In the last shot of the film, Bev is lying over the corpse of Elly in
their apartment, a final attempt to rejoin themselves through death. In his book on Dead
Ringers, Michael Grant explains that “for Cronenberg, individuality finds expression in
the body.” 40 The vagina, for the Mantle Twins, becomes a physical manifestation of
those concepts they cannot understand. By being
able to manipulate and control a woman’s
fertility, they gain a great power. Their tools that
once helped women conceive later become
Beverly’s weapons against a race of “mutant women”41 whose bodies have transformed.
Perhaps the most telling quote about the mind-body relationship in Dead Ringers comes
from Beverly at the height of his addiction. The women, he complains, “look alright from
the outside. But their insides are deformed.”42 Just like these mutant women, Bev and
Elly look alright from the outside. They are handsome, intelligent, and successful.
However, on the inside they are deformed by a conjoined consciousness (Cronenberg’s
very own Chang and Eng) and a lack of understanding for human nature.
Physical and mental deformities play a large role in

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Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), a tale of the search for meaning and pleasure in the
technological age. In Crash, James Ballard (James Spader) finds his life irreversibly
changed after a car crash he has with the mysterious Helen Remington (Holly Hunter).
The two begin an affair that marries sex and violent car crashes in a frenzy of sensuality.
Through Helen, James meets Vaughn (Elias Koteas) and his flesh and metal wife
Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette). Vaughn acts as the leader of the car crash cult, a prophet
of “benevolent psychopathy”43 that fuses the machine (cars) with the flesh in order to
elevate mankind out of its emotional despondency brought on by the hollowness of
modern life.
From the opening scenes of infidelity, it is clear that James and his languid wife
Catherine (Deborah Unger) are desperately searching for something – “a meaningful
iconography in a world of meaninglessness”44 – that will make them feel alive and better
connected to themselves. James brings Catherine along in his journey by introducing her
to the enigmatic Vaughn. Cronenberg juxtaposes the graphically depicted scene of
Catherine painfully having sex with Vaughn to the aftermath of James caressing
Catherine’s cuts and bruises from her encounter. For a while, Cronenberg allows the
characters to experiment in their new world but after the death of Vaughn, their bonds are
broken. In the final scene, James steps into
Vaughn’s role (even driving his car that he
died in) and initiates a crash with Catherine.
However, Catherine survives the crash
unharmed and unscarred. When James makes love to her on the side of the road, they
echo the phrase from the beginning of the film: “Maybe next time.”45 The new sexuality

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they chase after cannot elevate them or transform their lives. As William Beard notes,
“the ‘radical’ transformative experiment has not succeeded in transforming anything.”46
In the end, James and Catherine are stuck in an endless cycle of a joyless life.
Cronenberg is able to deftly portray the gap between the mind and the body in
Crash through the repetitive sex scenes. The sex that James and Catherine have, though
graphic, is mechanical. Their disconnection from their bodies has turned sex into a
passionless act controlled by the mind. Once James discovers the thrill of crashes, he
wants to experience more and transform himself, much like Vaughn and Gabrielle.
Cronenberg directly addresses the mind-body split as it is related to Vaughn’s philosophy
in Crash:
Merging with technology - our bodies merging with metal - is us merging with us,
with different aspects of ourselves. There is no technology without the human
mind. Technology is the human will made physical - the incarnation of human
will and creativity.47
Technology can be viewed as the antithesis of the world of the flesh and desire yet the
characters are able to adapt to the changing world by realizing that technology and
machinery can be beautiful is imbued with a sense of the flesh (as with The Fly).
Gabrielle seemingly bridges the gap with her
body, creating a new ideal beauty. Her legs are
held up with metal rods and leather straps, while
a scar on the back of her thigh becomes an
orifice that James cannot help but want to
penetrate. Her twisted form is in direct opposition to that of Catherine – the perfect and
flawless human sex doll. James’ involvement of Catherine in the crash is an attempt to
transform her body and mind to that of the free-spirited and more sexually desirable

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Gabrielle. Cronenberg uses Gabrielle to portray the ultimate in new sexuality – the
marriage of pleasure and pain (called jouissance) and of body and machine.
Cronenberg’s films after Crash still hold to his genre-defying message of the
mind and body. The videogame-thriller eXistenZ (1999) centers on the division of mind
and body caused by technology and virtual reality gaming. In Spider (2002), Dennis
“Spider” Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) is haunted by the murder of his mother – one that he
perpetrated. The repression of his memories and the reshaping of his reality cause other
characters to physically transform to look like his mother including his father’s mistress
and the woman overseeing the boarding house that he calls home (both are played by
Miranda Richardson). Their physical transformation forces Spider to come to terms with
his actions for the first time in his life. Cronenberg’s recent films A History of Violence
(2005) and Eastern Promises (2007) are a far cry from his science fiction roots yet still
argue that the body bears the history of an individual and also the trauma of the mind that
is imprinted on it through violence
and crime. Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo
Mortensen), the undercover
cop/Russian gangster in Eastern
Promises, is covered in ornate
tattoos. In one scene, Nikolai sits
before the gang elders and explains his history through the tattoos. They tell who he is,
where he’s been, and what gang belongs to. As one Scotland Yard detective says, “In
Russian prisons your life story is written on your body in tattoos. If you don't have
tattoos, you don't exist.”48

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Over his career, Cronenberg has examined the various connections between the
mind and the body. At first, Cronenberg’s films pitted the logical mind against the
licentious body in a battle for sexual expression and the destruction of society’s
repressive order and structure. Cronenberg’s films then grew to encompass ideas such as
the body, identity, and the struggle to find personal meaning in a changing world. In the
article “David Cronenberg’s having to make the word be flesh,” writer David Roche
describes the Cronenberg philosophy:
The fear of the body is ultimately the fear of the other within me, whether it be
my uncontrollable flesh or my unconscious desires which often express
themselves through my flesh. […] The self cannot be defined as purely
psychological: it is the psychological self plus the physical self. The Cronenberg
project thus aims at coming to terms with the fact that, not only does my flesh
represent my self in my own subjective gaze and that of others, it is in fact my
self.49
While his current films are not exclusively focused on the mind and body connection, one
can still find Cronenberg’s fascination with the subject in bruises, tattoos, and strange
doppelgangers that mar and haunt his main characters. Just as in his films, David
Cronenberg’s body of work is constantly transforming, evolving, and becoming a more
complex creation that challenges our beliefs and forces us to look on the outside of
ourselves to fully understand what lies beneath.

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21. 1
ENDNOTES:
David Cronenberg, Cronenberg on Cronenberg (London: Faber & Faber, 1997) 58.
2
Arthur Custance, “Cartesian Dualism: Mind and Brain Interaction,” Doorway Papers April 10, 2009 <
http://www.custance.org/old/mind/ch2m.html>.
3
Cronenberg 79.
4
Carl Royer, The Spectacle of Isolation in Horror Films (New York: Haworth Press, 2005) 55.
5
Shivers. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. Paul Hampton, Joel Silver. Cinepix, 1975.
6
Shivers
7
William Beard, The Artist as Monster (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) 29.
8
Beard 29.
9
Beard 29.
10
Shivers.
11
Ernest Mathjis, The Cinema of David Cronenberg: From Baron of Blood to Cultural Hero (London:
Wallflower Press, 2008) 32.
12
Shivers.
13
Mathjis 31.
14
Mathjis 31.
15
Beard 45.
16
Beard 33.
17
Royes 53.
18
Mathjis 30.
19
Beard 202.
20
The Brood. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar. MGM Video & DVD,
1979.
21
Cronenberg 84.
22
Cronenberg 84.
23
Mathjis 79.
24
The Brood.
25
Mathjis 81.
26
The Brood.
27
Beard 204.
28
The Fly. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis. 20th Century Fox, 1986.
29
The Fly.
30
Beard 32.
31
The Fly.
32
Beard 220.
33
The Fly.
34
Beard 202.
35
David Roche, “David Cronenberg's having to make the word be flesh,” Post Script Winter-Spring
2004, 4.
36
Andrew Hultkrans, “Body Work,” Artform International March 1997, 1.
37
Cronenberg 144.
38
Beard 248.
39
Dead Ringers. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold. Warner Home Video,
1988.
40
Michael Grant, Dead Ringers (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 1997) 3.
41
Dead Ringers.
42
Dead Ringers.

22. 43
Crash. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. James Spader, Holly Hunter. New Line Home Video, 1996.
44
Royes 71.
45
Crash.
46
Beard 410.
47
Hultkrans 10.
48
Eastern Promises. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts. Universal Studios,
2007.
49
Roche 5.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1. Beard, William. The Artist as Monster. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2001.
2. Cronenberg, David. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. London: Faber & Faber, 1997.
3. Custance, Arthur. "Cartesian Dualism: Mind and Brain Interaction." Doorway Papers. April 10,
2009 <http://www.custance.org/old/mind/ch2m.html>.
4. Grant, Michael. Dead Ringers. Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 1997.

23. 5. Hulkrans, Andrew. "Body Work." Artform International 1 (March 1997): 1-12.
6. Mathjis, Ernest. The Cinema of Cronenberg: From Baron of Blood to Cultural Hero. London:
Wallflower Press, 2008.
7. Roche, David. “David Cronenberg's having to make the word be flesh.” Post Script (Winter-
Spring 2004): 1-14.
8. Royer, Carl. The Spectacle of Isolation in Horror Films. New York: Haworth Press, 2005.
FILMOGRAPHY:
1. Shivers. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. Paul Hampton, Joel Silver. Cinepix, 1975.
2. The Brood. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar. MGM Video & DVD,
1979.
3. The Fly. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis. 20th Century Fox, 1986.
4. Dead Ringers. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold. Warner Home
Video, 1988.
5. Crash. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. James Spader, Holly Hunter. New Line Home Video,
1996.
6. Eastern Promises. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perfs. Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts. Universal
Studios, 2007.