The Sixth Night of Halloween

ON THE SIXTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I re-watched David Cronenberg’s first proper feature film, Shivers (1975).

I love this movie.

Its incredibly efficient opening-- a serene promotional video for a self-sufficient, pseudo-luxurious apartment high-rise-- is one of the greatest stage-setting sequences ever. For the viewer who already knows Shivers is about an infestation of mind-control parasites, this opening sets up dozens of narrative traps that will each spring gruesomely over the coming hour.

After this clinical introduction, though, Cronenberg demonstrates his genius for horror filmmaking by taking the least obvious but most rewarding path forward. Rather than a clockwork progression of building chaos, as seen in other infestation movies from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Gremlins, Shivers lurches messily and unpredictably in fits and starts, from a baffling murder-suicide to cinema verité scenes of uneasy placidity to an eruption of intestinal slugs and back to incongruous domestic bliss. This leaves the viewer in the dark, with a more naturalistic worms-eye perspective, so that there is never a full picture of the current status of the parasites’ takeover or the greater ramifications of their biology. And this anxious state of ignorance about a blossoming pandemic delivers a more potent and paralyzing psychological horror than what can be achieved by the rational birds-eye view of other infestation movies.

Of course, Cronenberg’s most (im)famous innovation on the mind-control parasite involves his version's explicit exploitation of the human libido: it turns its hosts into sex-crazed maniacs who spread its offspring through compulsory public orgies.