From Horror to Body Transmutation in The Cinema of David Cronenberg
Shivers | 1975 - Rabib | 1977 - Scanners | 1981 - The Brood | 1979 - Videodrome | 1982 - The Fly | 1986 - eXistenZ | 1999 - Crash | 1996
Xavier Brito Alvarado

Universidad Técnica de Ambato

Abstract

The presence of diseases, viruses, sex, violence and the fusion between flesh and inorganic matter have been the constant narratives of David Cronenberg’s cinema, creating a physical and psychological metamorphosis of the characters. These films present visceral imagery where the horrifying and macabre are present. Cronenberg explores the fears towards the body, the transgressions from inside-out, which materialize with technologies, which intrudes us into the dark labyrinths of the degradation of the anatomical mass mixed with metals and dirt. Cronenberg’s cinema, and perhaps its greatest virtue, is that it allows us to connect a critique to the condition of fragility of the biological body in the face of technoscientific advance, however, it also becomes a battlefield, that stage of the abject, from where binary oppositions are answered, and the vehicle to express all types of metaphorical, allegorical, metaphysical and abstract concepts, which dismantles all Cartesian dualist narrative. This last idea allows us to build a debate about a metamorphosis not only of the biological body, but also of the psychic one that the human species is going through; This being the main objective of this essay.

Keywords: Film industry | film director | corporality | terror

This article is, for the time being, only available in Spanish: Del horror a la trasmutación corporal en el cine de David Cronenberg


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