Shivers (1975)
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Written by: David Cronenberg
Starring: Allan Kolman, Joe Silver, Lynn Lowry, Paul Hampton
HCF REWIND NO. 210: SHIVERS AKA THE PARASITE MURDERS, THEY CAME FROM WITHIN [Canada 1975]
AVAILABLE ON DVD
RUNNING TIME: 87 min
REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera, Official HCF Critic
At Starliner Towers, a modern high-rise apartment complex on Starliner Island located just outside Montreal, prospective tenants are welcomed by the manager Merrick, while, at the same time, a doctor strangles a schoolgirl, slices open her stomach, and pours acid in before slitting his own throat. Another man, suffering from stomach convulsions, visits the murder scene but leaves without telling anyone about it. The resident doctor, Roger St. Luc, investigates and discovers that the dead man was working on a project involving: “a parasite that can take over the function of a human organ”. Soon after, another man vomits up a fecal parasite which slithers away into the undergrowth, and, in the laundry room, an old woman investigates a trail of brown slime leading from an open window to a washing machine….
A film from David Cronenberg is still always worth a look, even the odd disappointing one like Cosmsopolis: you’ll still think about it for a bit and the man clearly just makes what he wants to make. However, I can’t be the only fan who waxes nostalgically for the times when Cronenberg was called ‘The King Of Venereal Horror’, when going to see one of his films you’d not only need a brain and an open mind but also a sick bag. The Brood, Videodrome and The Fly are to me his masterpieces of that nature. Shivers, his first ‘commercial’ project [he’d made two short and two feature length experimental pictures before], is not the best-made of films – for a start, you have to put up with seriously shoddy acting, and it’s hardly good to look at – but it’s a fascinating one all the same because it already contains in abundance the themes that would dominate much of Cronenberg’s output, namely the revolution/evolution of the body, the confluence of sex and disease, and the banality and repression of modern society. What a time for horror the period it was made in was, truly the Golden Age of the modern horror movie, at least in North America, where film-makers finally felt they had the freedom to put their nightmares on screen and were fearless about doing it while throwing in a bit of social/ political commentary either. Night Of The Living Dead, The Wicker Man, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Last House On The Left, the list goes on. Shivers may not be as good as the films I’ve mentioned, but in some ways it’s just as vital, and in some ways still feels fresh, even if the level of film-making certainly isn’t the highest.
This film was inspired by a dream of Cronenberg’s in which he made love to a woman, after which a spider came out of her mouth. Cronenberg actually then spent three years trying to get his script, entitled Invasion Of The Blood Parasites, made. Nobody in his native Canada wanted to know, and he almost took it to Hollywood where Roger Corman had expressed an interest, but finally financing came through, mostly from the taxpayer-funded National Board Of Canada. Ivan Reitman co-produced and is also credited a Music Supervisor. Shot over fifteen days with a very low budget in a real apartment block [though the surrounding architecture was painted out] the result was torn apart by the Canadian press including one journalist whose article entitled ‘You Should Know How Bad this Movie Is: You Paid for It’ resulted in Cronenberg being kicked out of his Toronto apartment. The film, which was re-titled The Parasite Murders, then Shivers, then They Came From Within for the US, actually became the most profitable Canadian movie to that date. Amazingly the BBFC didn’t require cuts for the UK release, and in fact only two Cronenberg films would suffer censorship from our beloved censors.
Shivers opens with an advertisement for Starliner Tower Apartments, a modern yuppie condo situated on an island twelve minutes away from downtown Montreal. Fully equipped with modern electrical appliances, cable TV, a golf course, restaurant, and an on-premises medical clinic, Starliner’s studio apartments look very attractive for the working couple going to live there, yet the scene also somehow mamages to fill us with dread. We see the couple visiting the complex to be welcomed by the smarmy manager. However, a horrific occurrence is taking place in one apartment. A doctor attacks a schoolgirl, chokes her to death, then cuts open her stomach and pours acid down it…before cutting his own throat. In fact this scene is not quite as gruesome as it sounds, the camera preferring to observe the action from the side rather than getting in close. It’s still quite a shocking opening though, and interestingly the first part of the scene has some shakycam. It’s interesting how what was once considered poor film-making is now widely utilised and excepted. Cronenberg’s direction may be a bit clumsy at times, but it’s often livelier than normal, his style not yet having fully developed into the cool, clinical manner it would become. There is, for example, a nice long take showing the point of view of a character as she goes down some stairs and down a corridor. Rather than graceful and steady, the shot is jittery and it almost seems like we are seeing the origins of Found Footage before our eyes!
Shivers is a very fast paced film and wastes no time getting on with it as it soon becomes a serious of horrific occurrences in different apartments, the forward momentum constantly maintained by cutting back and forth from different situations. The turd-like parasites really are unpleasant to look at, and while much of the violence is not graphically shown [we only see the aftermath, for example, of a bloody beating with a rod and a gory car crash], there are some memorable queasy moments, especially when a woman [cult horror star Barbara Steele] is in the bath and a parasite squeezes through the plughole into the water and heads straight for between her legs. It eventually develops into the usual Invasion Of The Body Snatchers/ Night Of The Living Dead stuff as more and more folk turn evil, but rather than emotionless aliens or flesh-eating zombies, they are now sex maniacs. Though there is no explicit sex in the picture and not even any full-frontal nudity, some of the ‘attack’ scenes, most notably one in which a very young girl takes part, have a really disturbing edge to them. The most scandalous scene shows two young girls on dog leashes, climbing up a stair and barking. The climax – well, this film was made in the Decade Of Downbeat Endings, so don’t expect a happy resolution!
Well, unless you’re like Cronenberg, who says he identifies with the people in the film after they have transformed. You can take Shivers’s depiction of a society seemingly destroyed by rampant sexuality as a warning against unbridled lust and even as a pre-AIDS allegory, though Cronenberg doesn’t seem to exhibit much love for the cold society that his film rips apart. Scenes in which Nicholas actually talks to the parasite inside him as if it were a friend, and Nurse Forsythe telling of a dream she had about an old man saying: “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” show that Cronenberg’s peculiar obsessions were already in full flow when he made this film, even if he didn’t yet the resources nor the craft to fully realise them. His script doesn’t always makes sense – the incubation rates of the parasites seems to begin as days and becomes a couple of seconds – and there are some shoddy continuity errors which were obvious to me even though I tend not to notice that sort of thing – but you can sometimes get away with that kind of thing a bit more in a film like Shivers, as long as it’s disturbing and frightening, and those two things it certainly is. It probably goes without saying it was also hugely influential, with films such as Alien and The Hidden highly influenced by it.
The performances range from reasonable to downright dreadful. Paul Hampton is a pretty uncharismatic hero though the lovely Lynn Lowry does fine in an early role. The parts are mainly stock and the cursory scenes in which we get to know some of these people not too well written. The music score, derived from several un-credited sources, employs strange electronic sounds effects more than conventional music, but it works quite well, though some scenes would probably have benefitted from some dramatic scoring. Shivers is not a major classic but it’s definitely a minor one and essential viewing to any horror fan. This is where Cronenberg started, and he would go on to do much better, yet in a way it’s all already here, all the strange compulsions that one would soon associate with this most fascinating and single-minded of directors.
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