“Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos,” David Cronenberg once said. With his latest film the Hollywood-eviscerating Maps to the Stars arriving on VOD and in theaters this weekend (read our review from Cannes), we’re taking a look back at a decade-worth of his early “experiments” from short films to television work to his first features.
First up we have is 1967’s black-and-white From the Drain, which he created while in film school and follows a conversation between two men in a bathtub that ends in a Cronenbergian fashion. Following that, we have his first true feature Stereo, which arrived two years later and is already a noticeable leap forward in style. Here he mixes two elements the director will come to greatly explore — sex and death — as the story tells of sexual occurrences leading to telepathic abilities and unintended consequences.
A year later he had his first foray into color with Crimes of the Future, which dives into his depiction of the strange world of dermatology. While we’ve already covered it previously, we’re also featuring his 1972 made-for-TV short Secret Weapons, produced for the Programme X TV series. Written by Norman Snider – who later collaborated with Cronenberg on the thriller Dead Ringers – the voice-over and dialogue heavy short depicts a dystopian America six years in the future. With the country in the midst of a civil war, a man invents a drug that purports to increase fighting ability among those who take it.
Around the time of his first collaboration with Ivan Reitman for Shivers, the Canadian director also made a couple of of TV episodes. We have one of two Peep Show episodes he director, 1975’s The Lie Chair, along with the Teleplay episode, The Italian Machine. Lastly, there’s the second film Reitman produced for him, Rabid, which follows a woman who gets into a motorcycle accident and the doctors give her a phallic stinger in her armpit in which she uses on her victims. While the director has come to own his label of body horror master, it’s fascinating to see him explore these themes in his early work. Check out everything below.
From the Drain (1967)
Stereo (1969)
Crimes of the Future (1970)
Secret Weapons (1972)
The Lie Chair (1975)
The Italian Machine (1976)
Rabid (1977)
What do you think of David Cronenberg’s early work?