A History of Success

It’s hard to tell if David Cronenberg is crying, but it’s clear the room is witnessing one of his proudest moments.

“Just to hear you say my name is a huge inspiration to me,” he says to Ken Russell, the prolific U.K. filmmaker handing him a lifetime achievement award.  Countless diehard fans surround Cronenberg, but his eyes are transfixed on one of his own heroes. The legendary director is eerily starstruck.

“It’s a pleasure to present you with this well-deserved award,” Russell responds. The already-standing crowd erupts into emphatic applause.

Such is the magic of beautiful late-August in Toronto at Fan Expo — The expo now remembered for filling the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to the point of leaving thousands, many in elaborate, intricate costumes, stranded outside, waiting in line for hours. It was a true testament to the event’s standing as Canada’s mecca for fans of the horror, fantasy, comic and video game industries.

The Toronto-born, internationally revered Cronenberg has been honoured before and extravagantly at that, receiving a Légion d’Honneur, the French government’s top accolade, last year. But this time is different. It’s one thing to be accepted by mainstream audiences, but entirely another to be cherished by the subculture you call your own.

“Obviously you have an amazing body of work, but on top of that you’ve also made yourself accessible to talking about this work,” says the event’s host and Rue Morgue magazine editor-in-chief, Dave Alexander. “You’ve helped build a film culture not just around the genre, but around Canadian film — that’s very important to all of us — and at the end of the day you made being horror and sci-fi fans pretty [expletive] cool.” 

Cronenberg’s rise to the A-list has culminated after more than 30 years. Horror’s cool-factor skyrocketed after Cronenberg’s most notable horror hit, The Fly, in 1986. The Oscar-winning film, starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, introduced audiences to Seth, a mad scientist attempting to invent a teleportation device. When he tries it on himself, the intervention of a housefly gradually and horrifically turns him into a six-foot insect. A visually and psychologically disturbing thriller ensues.

Evidently, “cool” can come from the most unassuming of places. Growing up, Cronenberg says he played classical guitar and was — no surprise — a bug lover with an astute interest in science. In fact, he started in the science department as a student at the University of Toronto, but later switched to literature. He credits his natural curiosity about the human condition as his push into literature and, soon thereafter, horror.

“The human body is the first fact of human existence; that’s what we are,” Cronenberg says. “To not observe it, to me, you’re evading looking at something that is of the essence of what it is to be human.” 

After bursary support from the Canadian government and various film-related apprenticeships, Cronenberg quickly reached cult status in 1975 with Shivers, gained popularity with 1981’s Scanners and exploded in 1985 with The Fly. His notoriety was nourished the next decade with critically acclaimed, non-horror flicks like Naked Lunch (its source novel by William S. Burroughs was often called “unfilmable” beforehand) and Crash.

One of Cronenberg’s greatest strengths is his aptitude for coupling horror with psychological thrill. However, the latter quality took nearly exclusive prominence in those ‘90s titles and has continued into recent ones like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.  Still, his legacy remains in venereal horror and, despite the recent trend, he says horror isn’t dead to him.

“I’m older than I was then so my interests have shifted a bit, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t do a horror film,” Cronenberg says. “The fact that it was a horror film certainly wouldn’t stop me from doing it if it was a terrific, unique, exciting thing.”

He says that, right now, he literally gets scripts sent to him that are remakes of his own movies.

“Why would I want to do that?” he asks. A bold question in a movie landscape laden with remakes and sequels. There was one of The Fly, but Cronenberg had no affiliation with the film.

One script that did catch his eye has manifested itself into his next film, A Dangerous Method. It examines Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud during the birth of psychoanalysis, with particular attention to one patient, Sabina Spielrein. Freud is played by Viggo Mortensen and Spielrein is played by Keira Knightley.

Originally a patient and lover of Jung’s, Spielrein left him to study with Freud. The new relationship with Freud did not involve an affair, but Cronenberg says, to Jung, “it was worse than if she had just slept with Freud — it was the intellectual and spiritual betrayal.”

“It’s really quite dramatic and interesting. It’s a strange ménage à trois,” Cronenberg says. “They were very passionate, articulate, hyper-intellectual people at a very interesting stage of European culture, and I found it irresistible to do.”

There was hope Cronenberg would have the film ready for the Toronto International Film Festival in September, but its release is slated for next year. That’s not to say, in his stardom, Cronenberg has snubbed the city he once called his own. Even with his international fame, connections and capabilities, he still lives in Toronto.

“I do live here. People say ‘Thanks for flying into Toronto,’ well I never left so…” he says, amused. “One of the things I like about Canada is… we don’t have a theory of how you should live that we try to impose on other people  — that sort of impulse to imperialism, the desire to make everybody be like us, the desire to impose our way of life on other people. That’s not really a very Canadian thing. I love that about Canada. To me that is a strength and not a weakness.”

It’s easy to see why Cronenberg feels that way. Uniqueness has been another great strength of his over the decades and defined his sensational career. The uncommon is exactly what delineates his genre and attracts his most passionate fans. He doesn’t search for popular praise. Seemingly, in the depths of blood and guts, we have one of our truest Canadians.

It’s incredibly strange. But, as Alexander said, Cronenberg was the cavalier who made strangeness cool. No easy feat.

Actually, it’s the feat of a lifetime.•

To the Outer Limits and Back

Canada’s reigning king of horror has an impressive film repertoire to reflect this well-deserved title. Here are Lifestyle’s favourite Cronenberg-directed thrillers:

Eastern Promises (2007)
A History of Violence (2005)
Spider (2002)
eXistenZ (1999)
Crash (1996)
Naked Lunch (1991)
The Fly (1986)
The Dead Zone (1983)
Scanners (1981)
Shivers (1975)