David Cronenberg would not be unhappy to see the term “body horror” retire. The film-maker is perfectly fine with plain “horror” and has often wondered why fellow practitioners, such as John Carpenter, shy away from describing themselves as artists.
“Great horror films have always been art,” he says, citing Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf. As long ago as Shivers, his breakthrough feature, from 1979, the Canadian auteur, whose films do indeed do harrowing things to the human form, used the description “experimental physical fiction”.
Regardless of the phrasing, it’s a subgenre he is more responsible for than any other director. For decades the king of venereal horror, or godfather of cyberpunk – both terms bemuse him – has probed the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of transformation, whether through disease, desire or video recorder.
His carnally focused disciples Julia Ducournau and Coralie Fargeat, along with the younger moviemaking Cronenbergs – his children Caitlin and Brandon – are part of a recognisably Cronenbergian style of film.
“Brandon’s writing is so different from mine,” he says about the director of the recent Infinity Pool. “I think he’s a wonderful screenwriter. He and Cate have been on my film set since they were babies. Who knows how much that has influenced them? I don’t even think they know.
“On the other hand, they make movies that I would not have made and are unique to them. Brandon was resistant to being a film-maker just because of my presence. He wanted to develop as an individual. Eventually, he caved. His films go somewhere different from mine.”
He laughs. “Are there similarities? I’ll leave that to you.”
Decades after Shivers, cinema’s most provocative and intellectually rigorous film-maker continues to explore the nexus between biology, technology and identity.
In Dead Ringers, twin gynaecologists (played with compelling froideur by Jeremy Irons) spiral into drug-fuelled madness, sharing women and surgical delusions. In The Fly, Jeff Goldblum’s DNA is pureed with that of the titular insect. In Crash, car-accident survivors eroticise their wounds and restage famous fatal accidents as sexual rites. In Crimes of the Future, set in a world where people grow extra organs and performance artists perform surgery as live art, the key mantra is, “The body is reality.”
That and “experimental physical fiction” are easily applicable to The Shrouds. Cronenberg’s 23rd feature concerns Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel), an affluent tech entrepreneur who is consumed by grief four years after the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), from cancer. He pioneers GraveTech, a system that uses “shrouds” embedded with mini‑cameras to stream the visual decay of the dead to screens in their gravestones.
The deeply personal film, which was inspired by the death of Cronenberg’s wife Carolyn, in 2017, follows Relikh’s fragile, obsessive mourning as it spirals into conspiratorial thinking.
Cronenberg calls it a “perverse elegy” to his partner of 38 years.
“I had the need to somehow deal with that death in my heart,” he says. “I wasn’t sure for many years that I actually did want to do that, but eventually I did.
“My reactions to her death surprised me; they were very intense. One of them was the feeling that I wanted to get into the coffin with her. I couldn’t stand being separated from her, even though she was dead. Her body was there, and I wanted to be with it.
“I thought, well, that’s an interesting thing. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s ever experienced that feeling.”
The idea of the body as “all we’ve got” has roots in Cronenberg’s secular Jewish identity. The grandson of Lithuanian Jews peppers The Shrouds with cultural markers, including matzo‑ball soup and pastrami sandwiches. A subplot involves grave vandalism and defaced Star of David headstones. Cassel’s grieving hero justifies his macabre tech with a version of Jewish belief about death: the soul lingers around the body after death, reluctant to depart fully until decay makes separation inevitable.
“The Jewishness was not by accident,” Cronenberg says. “My wife came from a family with an Orthodox Jewish father, which had a huge influence on her, even though she wasn’t really religious. So I had to deal with that in the film. What kind of burial? What kind of spiritual resonance?
“I don’t believe in a soul, not in the religious sense. But, metaphorically, the Jewish idea of the soul being unwilling to leave the body is very beautiful and emotional. That’s really what started that element of Jewishness in the movie. It added layers I hadn’t initially planned.”
Like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, The Shrouds was originally conceived for television. In 2022 Cronenberg pitched it to Netflix as a 10-part series, with each episode to be set in a different country.
The streaming platform commissioned him to write the first two episodes but reportedly decided that Cronenberg’s novelistic, global structure was not what they “fell in love with in the room”.
“I was disappointed The Shrouds didn’t become a series,” says Cronenberg. “I was intrigued by the idea of a streaming format – a new cinematic form. A series can be more like a novel, whereas most films are more like novellas or short stories. I would have liked to explore that.
“If Netflix had gone ahead with the series I’d probably still be shooting it now. But I liked what I had written so much that I decided to make it a feature film. Whether it was better as a feature I’ll never know, but I don’t regret it.”
Many reviewers have seen Cassel’s character as Cronenberg’s Doppelgänger. The director is not convinced.
“How boring would it be if my characters were just me?” he says. “I want them to be new creatures. You could say every character I write has a bit of me: male, female, dog, cat. But that’s not the same as trying to replicate myself.
“To make the dialogue interesting and specific, it’s like I’m acting the role of that character as I write. That’s different from being a surrogate. I want my characters to surprise me, to resist me. When they come alive and say or do things I didn’t plan, then I know I’m on the right path.
“I think film is an experiment where you get to play with human beings and see what happens: wilful human beings who are excited to experiment with you and push you around.”
Though heartfelt and inspired by grief, The Shrouds has not been cathartic for Cronenberg. But it did enable him to articulate profound sorrow.
“I had the need to somehow deal with that death in my heart. I wasn’t sure how for many years,” he says. “I had many, many strong emotions, and that surprised me. Honestly, I could make two or three more movies based on all of those feelings.
“But in The Shrouds I created a character who’s a high-tech entrepreneur. His ‘solution to God’, so to speak, is rooted in the fact that he can’t get into the coffin with his dead wife – because, of course, he would die too ...
“So the next best thing, for him, is to use his technology, his particular art form, his equivalent of a religion or a spiritual practice, to create something that brings him closer to her.
“After that point you’re creating fiction. It’s no longer talking about yourself; it’s no longer autobiography. Even though the impulse came from your actual life.”
Between making his own films, Cronenberg has carved out a niche as an actor, often playing cerebral, enigmatic or morally ambiguous outsiders. He’s the mystery man posing as the Hollywood producer who will whisk Nicole Kidman’s murderer away to stardom in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For. He’s the Methodist minister who takes pity on the title character of the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. More recently, he’s Dr Kovich, a mysterious 32nd-century Federation official, in Star Trek: Discovery.
“I never got to wear the uniform, unfortunately,” he says. “They said that Kovich was a special character who would dress relatively normally. Initially he was called Dr Kovich, but later he suddenly became Commander Kovich, which suggests he had a special function – one I can’t reveal.
“Star Trek: Discovery is a huge production in Toronto. My pitch as an actor has always been: I’m cheap and I’m available. That’s why I’ve taken on a lot of roles when I’m in town between directing projects. It’s really lovely. I start to miss being on set, and acting gives me a way to stay connected to that world.”
He’s now more than a veteran.
“I’m often greeted by crew members who are the sons and daughters of people I worked with in the past. It keeps the rhythm going.”
The Shrouds is in cinemas from Friday, July 4th
