Flying by the seat of his pants: the movie David Cronenberg called an “ordeal by fire”
Although he’s shown a knack for applying his signature style to a number of different genres, David Cronenberg will always be known first and foremost as arguably cinema’s most famous purveyor of body horror.
It clearly runs in the family based on the filmography of his son Brandon so far, but that was to be expected, seeing as he was literally cut from Cronenbergian cloth. The filmmaker was several features deep into his career before he even punctured the mainstream, but it was an ordeal to reach that point in the first place.
Cronenberg had six movies under his belt before he finally experienced crossover success, but he was already making waves on the underground circuit long before then. Early efforts, including Shivers, Rabid, and The Brood, had been making waves among the midnight crowd, but it wasn’t until Scanners that the world at large had its eyes opened to the work of the Canadian maverick.
It wasn’t often that independent features made in the country took off at the United States or international box office, but Scanners recouped its production costs almost four times over for cinemas and kicked open countless new doors for its singular writer and director. It was far from being an easy shoot, though, and it hardly got off to a rousing start when day one was described by the filmmaker as “the most disastrous shooting day I’ve ever had”.
Still, the outlandish sci-fi chiller with cinema’s single most iconic exploding head became his breakthrough hit, not that he could have imagined it that way. In fact, Cronenberg once referred to Scanners as “an ordeal by fire more than a trial,” albeit one that “turned out to be my first really successful film” and ultimately became known as one of the decade’s most notable big screen terrors.
There were difficulties securing funding, only two weeks were allocated for pre-production and Cronenberg hadn’t even written a full screenplay by then, rewrites were ongoing during filming, and brand new sequences would often be concocted on the fly and handed to the cast at the last minute, as star Michael Ironside explained to Den of Geek.
“When I was on Scanners I literally got scenes sometimes the night before, sometimes two days before, because he was rewriting the script as we went,” the actor revealed. “A very bold thing for a storyteller to do. Only somebody like David, who is so deft at what he does, so good at what he does, could do that because you can really get yourself in a hole.”
The production may have been manic, but Cronenberg’s ordeal by fire became a pivotal moment in his career, one that saw him state his case for being one of the horror genre’s most exciting talents, a reputation that only enhanced in the years to come.
