SHIVERS (1975)

 

(a.k.a. IT CAME FROM WITHIN; a.k.a. THEY CAME FROM WITHIN; director/screenwriter: David Cronenberg).

From IMDb:

“The residents of a high-rise apartment building are being infected by a strain of parasites that turn them into mindless, sex-crazed fiends out to infect others by the slightest sexual contact.”

 

Review

Shot in fifteen days in 1974, Cronenberg’s first feature film is a nasty, blackly humorous piece of occasionally slapstick venereal-horror work, showing the trajectories of an experimental virus that reduces people to animalistic lust as it rapidly spreads throughout a high-rise and beyond its walls. SHIVERS is shocking and boundary-pushing for an R-rated film for its overtly sexual violence (although it’s nowhere near as graphic as Meir Zarchi’s rape-revenge torturerama I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, 1978). SHIVERS was so controversial in Canada that it got Cronenberg kicked out of his apartment in real life.

Despite its gritty, carnal themes and action, there is an underlying antiseptic nature to the film that is often present in Cronenberg’s early-to-mid-career flicks. That hospital-like undertone would come to the fore in his later movies. IMDb.com notes that every scene in SHIVERS contains the colors yellow or gold.

 All the acting is suitably over-the-top, though two actors stand out: the long, raven-haired Barbara Steele (Mario Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY, 1960; PIT AND THE PENDULUM, 1961), who adds a wild card intensity to the cavalcade of messy terror; and Joe Silver, a veteran character actor whose laidback performance in this was later revisited in altered form in Cronenberg’s 1977 non-sequel follow-up RABID.

 SHIVERS is not Cronenberg’s best work, but it is all-around excellent, a bold, raw cinematic announcement of an evolving, distinctive filmmaker unafraid to ruffle a few prudish feathers.