Burroughs’ novel presents a grotesque world of surreal terrors for Cronenberg to explore, though as ever the director confronts hellish visions with a deadpan calm that only enhances how unsettling they are.

After the box office success of The Fly in 1986, David Cronenberg’s options were wide open to command the kind of production budget that had eluded him up to that point in his career. The obvious move would have been to double-down on another effects-heavy, crowd-pleasing spectacle, and yet the project that he chose to pursue was one that had …

The term “body horror” has clung to David Cronenberg and his oeuvre like a terrible case of herpes that will never go away.

Despite a clear divergence from the director’s established aesthetic and thematic sensibilities, one Cronenbergian hallmark remains intact here: invasion.

Videodrome’s brilliance comes from literalizing the unseen culture war waging at all times underneath media messaging, giving it form and a cracked-mirror kind of stakes-raising.

Despite the film’s flaws, Cronenberg offers a cynical take on late capitalism, the pharmaceutical industry and the increasing technological connectivity of the pre-internet era.

Conceived from personal turmoil, The Brood infused a new kind of humanity into Cronenbergian grotesquery.

Fast Company feels like a total one-off oddity in David Cronenberg’s oeuvre.

Rabid feels like the director’s first work that is fully and unmistakably his.

With a concept and execution as crude and garish as suggested by the project’s working title, Orgy of the Blood Parasites, the film presents Cronenberg’s artistic sensibilities in larval form.