Shivers Delivers the Chills

For a low-budget Canadian splatter flick from the 70s, David Cronenberg’s Shivers is a remarkable accomplishment. Not only is it a chilly, twisted take on the birthing of a zombie holocaust, it is a startling, early indictment of the modern cult of materialism. Perhaps most interesting, though, is how precisely it foreshadows the rest of Cronenberg’s distinguished career as horror filmmaking’s most thoughtful and cold-blooded auteur.

Like many of Cronenberg’s films, including last year’s A History of Violence and his classic brainy gorefests Scanners and The Fly, Shivers parallels civil breakdown with physical and psychological deterioration. Taking place almost entirely within the confines of a gleaming new high-rise condominium, the movie follows the spread of a parasite that drives its hosts to commit violent sexual assaults (and thus further spread the virus). As the parasite spreads, more and more of the residents become sexually ravenous zombie attackers, alternately stalking the unaffected and engaging in manic orgies. As is the case in nearly every Cronenberg film, society is stripped of its cleanly scrubbed veneer to reveal its innermost animal nature; to no one's surprise, the results are not pretty.

Beginning with a slideshow sales-pitch for the apartment building’s modern wonders, Shivers quickly segues into a ghastly, blood curdling struggle between an older man and a younger woman. The sexual undertones are apparent; typically, Cronenberg’s movies conflate acts of sex and violence, displaying them with an odd blend of clinical iciness and repulsion. Here, though, the generic, shallow consumerism of urban moderns is added to the mix: shopping, living, screwing, and killing—for Cronenberg, there is little that distinguishes these activities.

Like most Cronenberg films, the acting and dialog feels eerily removed, affecting the flat manner of automatons performing a soap opera. The disaffected tone amps up the creep-factor; by keeping the emotional pitch relatively flat, he creates a tone both bland and otherworldly.

The film’s haunted finale makes the whole thing seem like a warm-up to both Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, both of which also play on the lifeless monotony of urban life, analogizing it to the zombified routines of consumerism. Later Cronenberg films would play down the consumerism motif (though it can still be seen in Dead Ringers and Crash), but further persue the imagery of psychosexual transformation and societal deterioration. In a strange way, Cronenberg acts as an underhanded proponent of original sin. We hear much these days about the necessity of allowing man to act according to his nature; in Cronenberg's ghoulish worldview, however, man's nature--selfish, violent, sexually domineering, shallow, petty--is scarier than any blood-stained gross out.