Being British and therefore living in a country that is officially rabies-free (bats in Scottish caves don't count, apparently), the rabies virus has always held a kind of morbid fascination for me. Growing up, the only time I saw anything rabies-related was when we would go on holiday and I would see the rabies awareness posters everywhere, complete with angry, snarling dogs and "DANGER!" in big red letters. It's safe to say that my imagination ran rather wild as I tried to imagine what kind of horrors rabies could inflict on a person. So when, years later, I discovered that David Cronenberg had made a film called Rabid, I just knew that I had to see it.
Rose and her boyfriend Hart are involved in a motorcycle crash where Rose is seriously injured. Luckily for her, their crash happened right outside a cosmetic surgery clinic who take her in and treat her using a new skin grafting technique they've been developing. Things seem to go well and Rose recovers after several weeks - except that the grafting as caused her to develop a phallic-esque, retractable "stinger" in her armpit and a thirst for blood to go with it. Even worse, all those that Rose attacks and feeds off develops a form of rabies which causes them to attack others and infect them, and so on. As Montreal falls into panic and martial law, Hart tries to find Rose, who is completely unaware that she has become a new Typhoid Mary...
Rabid was David Cronenberg's next film after his debut Shivers, and it continues some of the same themes as that movie. Specifically, it once again deals with the ideas of sexual freedom gone bad and fears about the spread of STIs (and this was still four years before AIDS was first clinically observed in 1981) that could result from that. Unlike Shivers though, Rabid also focusses more specifically on the idea of female sexuality and power, as Rose is a very attractive young woman who isn't afraid to use her sexuality to get what she wants (ie. blood). It also might not be too far of a stretch to read something into Rose's sexual aggression being linked to the very phallic stinger she has developed...
Having Marilyn Chambers in the role of Rose certainly helped with the sexuality of the film as well. In the 1970s Chambers was known for two things: being the Ivory Snow girl and for starring in porn film Beyond the Green Door. Rabid was Chambers' first mainstream movie role but she hadn't been the first choice for Rose - Cronenberg had originally wanted Sissy Spacek, but producer Ivan Reitman suggested Chambers instead after Spacek was vetoed because of her accent. Personally I think this was a good choice - I can't really see Spacek having the same impact on the film as Chambers did, especially as Carrie had been released so recently as well. It would have given the character of Rose a much different feel and thus changed the whole dynamic of the film as well.
The people in Rabid infected with the mutated form of rabies are described as "zombies" in most reviews and discussions of the film. They're not actually zombies, of course, as they're still alive when they're rabid and attack people, but this is far from the first time zombies have been misidentified as such in film and it's not going to be the last, and so there's no point in my being pedantic about it (much as it might annoy me). What is interesting in the film is that, unlike most movies that deal with scenarios of this nature (28 Days Later and Night/Dawn of the Dead spring to mind), the epidemic doesn't lead to an apocalypse scenario. The government's response to the crisis is quite reasoned and sensible for the most part, and by the end of the film they seem to have gotten on top of the epidemic. Of course, there's still scope for individual scenes of panic, such as the shopping mall scene where a panicking officer ends up shooting dead a mall Santa in front of a group of children - a scene which, despite its obvious shock and horror, never fails to make me giggle at the extreme absurdity of it.
Rabid contains many of the ideas that feature in most of Cronenberg's work - medical science gone wrong, transformation and the choice of whether to reject or accept the change and of course body horror with people growing new orifices and phallic appendages - and you can see the refinement of those ideas developing on from Shivers. It might seem slow and understated in places, but its almost "everyday" feel also helps with the atmosphere of the film and its creeping horror as the infection spreads. Apparently the Soska Sisters are planning on remaking Rabid, and while I am normally against remakes I'm interested to see their take on the film, especially from their feminist perspective.
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