By Keri O’Shea
“Even dying is an act of eroticism.”
The name ‘Cronenberg’ may be synonymous with a particular brand of warped body horror these days, but it wasn’t always so. Still, those of us familiar with his work now will have a fair idea of what to expect; one can only imagine what effect a film like Shivers had on its first audiences. His first commercial feature, Shivers is a demented piece of work. By turns innovative and outlandish, it must have been a challenging proposition for the first to see it – and actually, it’s retained a fair amount of that impact now, as at last it gets a Blu-ray release from the good folk at Arrow.
We start out at the prestigious Starliner Apartments, located on their own private island just outside Montreal. This des-res is the height of sophistication, and reserved for the great and the good (not to mention the obscenely fucking rich). However, for all of its mod cons, it seems that there’s something weird going on. In one of a number of scenes which would just plain never get the go-ahead these days, we’re soon shown an older man breaking into one of the apartments, and attacking a young, school-uniform clad girl – whose bizarre attempts to flirt him out of his murderous rage are just the tip of the iceberg. This being Cronenberg, it quickly gets weirder; why is the man so keen on taping up the girl’s mouth? Just what is he looking for?
It appears that this girl – Annabelle – is especially popular with the men of Starliner Tower, so she’s soon missed by one of them, Nick (the deeply eerie Allan Kolman). Nick seems to have issues of his own, possibly relative to whatever-it-was that the man was looking for in Annabelle. He’s spending a lot of time heaving and spitting up blood. He seems cold, distant, and distinctly unaffected by his frequently-weeping wife Janine. What we can guess, though, is that whatever Annabelle had seems to be spreading…
The film is well-known as a creature feature unlike any other, but it plays its cards close to its chest for quite a while, generating an escalating sense of paranoia which works nicely alongside the eventual batshit insane reveal of just what is going on. The tension comes on slowly, with some odd behaviour here, a trickle of blood there, which is more effective and involving than a gorefest would be: even at this early stage in his career, Cronenberg clearly knew that patience was a virtue. You don’t immediately think of Shivers as a subtle film, but yet it is, for a good proportion of the time. Of course, things don’t stay this quiet, and as it ramps up, it manages to stamp all over a series of taboos as it layers unsettling scene upon unsettling scene, as the people of the apartment block begin to act in a very strange way. To our delicate modern sensibilities, a lot of the sequences involving children might seem particularly troubling. Still, the whole rationale for the strange behaviour of the Starliner residents is a headfuck on many levels – not an extra-terrestrial onslaught, which the safe money would probably be on, but something else altogether.
At the heart of the film of course is sex, only here transfigured into something pretty ghastly and repellent. The research which created the critters (sex slugs?) may have been broadly benevolent in its aims, but the resulting parasitism is hardly love’s young dream. Sex is represented as something which spreads contagion, it’s associated with mind control and these sex slugs care not a jot for informed consent. That all said, it’s a film in which we don’t actually see any sex at all. It just lurks on the periphery as something to fear, and this is compounded by the fact that a lot of the residents (Lynn Lowry and Barbara Steele very much notwithstanding) are mesmerisingly unappealing to look at.
The acting on offer is generally very good, with Kolman to my mind an unsung hero of the horror genre; his blank expression and demeanour have stuck in my mind for years and he makes for a very effective boogeyman. Shivers seems like an odd proposition for Barbara Steele, and she has a very small role here, but it works somehow. Never mind some tatty plot threads; you can suspend your disbelief to just enjoy the ride.
A strange beast from a distinctive director and one which has had notable influence on the films which followed it, Shivers is a real original and I’ll always have a soft spot for it. As for the package itself, well, it feels for all the world like I’m cutting and pasting here as I say it every time, but this is another superb release from Arrow; it looks and sounds fantastic (those 70s interiors really pop off the screen thanks to the quality of this transfer) plus it has a host of extras – including Parasite Memories, a diverting documentary all about the making of the film. You can also enjoy a gallery and the film’s original trailer.
Shivers will be released by Arrow Video on 13th October 2014.