Of David Cronenberg's films, Shivers (also known as They Came From Within, The Parasite Murders and - my personal favourite, so much so that you'd think it was Italian - Orgy of the Blood Parasites) was the first one I ever saw; caught late one night on TV. To say that it blew my mind would be a slight understatement, and it started my love affair with Cronenberg's films that has remained to this day. When Nick complains about my taste in films I even use Cronenberg as a defence, pointing out all the films of his that he's actually enjoyed - The Fly, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone... Which was also convinced him to watch Shivers with me this weekend.
Set in a luxury high-rise apartment building - Starliner Towers - that's built on its own island, Shivers is pretty claustrophobic right from the start, and this feeling is emphasized further by the opening scenes advertising these luxury apartments being intercut with scenes of a young woman in a school uniform (we're later told that she's 19, but that and later information about her past makes things even more creepy) being attacked by an older man. He kills her, tapes her mouth shut and then proceeds to cut her abdomen open and pour acid into it before cutting his own throat. The building's resident doctor is called in to investigate, and as the day progresses he slowly discovers the truth of what has gone on. The girl was in fact a guinea pig for the older man's experiments, which were supposed to be about creating "benevolent" parasites to replace human organs, but became, well, sex parasites that wanted to infect everybody and turn the world into one giant happy orgy. The problem is that the girl had made several male friends in the building as well before she died, infecting them all, and so the parasites begin to spread...
Obviously, Shivers is all about sex, sexual politics and the like. It can also be seen as a film about the dangers of STDs or even HIV/AIDS (which makes it very prescient as AIDS wasn't recognised and classified until 6 years after the film was released). It's also something of a zombie movie, however - once the parasites get into a person's system, all they care about is having sex and infecting other people, preferably at the same time. Near the end of the film there are two scenes that particularly stand out to me as homages to Night of the Living Dead as well - one where our estwhile protagonist has to fight his way through a narrow basement corridor while dozens of the infected reach out and try to grab him through wooden slats in the wall, and one where he finally thinks he has escaped the apartment building, only to see the infected slowly coming towards him, arms outstretched, from over a hill. They might not be zombies in the most traditional sense, but zombies they are.
The body horror aspect of the film obviously comes in the form of the parasites - particularly in the way they seem to "nest" and grow in the abdomens of several of the men that "Patient Zero" had been sleeping with. We only really follow one of these men, however - the man on the DVD cover above, whom Nick and I dubbed "70s Ross Geller" because he really did have quite the resemblance in the film. As the film progresses he starts off with stomach pains and a little bit of blood from the mouth, to vomiting parasites onto people from 15 stories up, to eventually having his stomach burst open to release the mass of squirming parasites within (and yet still be able to wander around happily). At one point he all but names the lumps and swellings we can see moving about in his torso, and yes, that's pretty body horror-y.
Another character to note is Betts, played by film and horror icon Barbara Steele. Betts is a lesbian and the scene in which she is infected struck me as somewhat... awkward even when I first watched it at 15. Betts is in her bathtub, relaxing with a glass of wine, when one of the parasites forces its way up through the plughole and heads straight for her via her spread legs. It's pretty clear what happens to Betts then as she screams and thrashes and the water turns red with blood, and I have to wonder why they couldn't have come up with a different way for her to be infected as most people get infected via oral means, as this way seems a bit... uncomfortable, given the circumstances.
Continuing with my best efforts to be at least partially objective, I will admit that the film does start off slow and ramp up the tension slowly at first., and that the effects aren't all that great, it being the 1970s. The parasites, in fact, look far more like animated turds than anything else, which leads to equal parts humour and disgust in several of the scenes we see them in (the disgust I think was deliberate; the humour less so). The film also once or twice implies that children are infected by the parasites as well - nothing untoward is seen and I personally think it adds to the darkly disturbing nature of the film, but some people may have issues with those scenes.
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