Social Distancing Gone Wrong: The early cinema of David Cronenberg

Back in early January, I’d been feeling a little freaked out about the virus now known as COVID-19, or at least the very idea of it. And so, in the interest of staring down and processing that fear, I subjected myself to some early David Cronenberg films, namely Shivers, Rabid, and The Brood. (Think of it as self-directed exposure therapy for film buffs.)

In the months since, I haven’t stopped deconstructing those films, particularly as someone who came of age in the 1980s, and who watched the AIDS epidemic emerge and grow with each day’s news cycle. There are actually many lenses through which one can view these films, but with memories of the panic and paranoia that accompanied the AIDS epidemic still fresh in my mind, it takes effort on my part not to view them as having been warning shots from the future. Shivers, especially, concerning as it does the man-made parasite that turns its human hosts into zombie-like sex maniacs who spread their contagion through sexual contact or exposure to their blood, seems to have been expressing the collective fears surrounding AIDS a full decade in advance.

Of those first three features in the Cronenberg catalog, Shivers is the most quintessential, in that it lays out the director’s career-defining themes most blatantly and ungracefully, themes that would be restated…