The weird world of David Cronenberg’s early shorts
Whenever we talk about the most important pioneers of horror cinema, it’s impossible to leave David Cronenberg out of the conversation. Revered by fans worldwide, Cronenberg’s masterpieces, such as Videodrome and Dead Ringers, completely revolutionised the way in which filmmakers approached the notoriously difficult subgenre of body horror. Through his works, the Canadian auteur challenged the frameworks of horror as well as modernity.
Although he had taken a significant hiatus from body horror, Cronenberg returned to the subgenre last year with Crimes of the Future. Set in a dystopian world where human evolution is taking unexpected turns, the film focuses on the director’s recurring obsession with the human body and its potential to transcend its own limitations. While Cronenberg’s features obviously get the most attention from film fans, his short works are just as interesting.
From a very early age, Cronenberg was fascinated with science fiction and actually entered the Science programme at the University of Toronto. However, he eventually moved to the Literature programme as he became increasingly interested in the arts. It was during the 1960s that Cronenberg also started experimenting with short films after hanging out at camera rental houses which piqued his interest in the craft of filmmaking.
He started his career with two 16mm short films, which definitely differ from the polished visions of his later works. During a conversation at an exhibition, Cronenberg said: “These movies work better if you’re really stoned. This was the sixties, after all.” The director started out with the 1966 work Transfer, a strange little short about a psychiatrist who conducts a session with a needy patient in the middle of nowhere.
Cronenberg developed a reputation for crafting a well-developed framework for body horror, but these early shorts obviously feel amateurish in comparison. The second addition to his student film corpus was the 1967 short From the Drain, presenting a bizarre premise involving two men sitting in a bathtub. Although one of them is anxious about the eventual draining of the tub, the second is mostly unperturbed by the impending apocalypse.
For Cronenberg, the ’60s ended with Stereo – a sci-fi work which mocks the structure of sex education videos. It follows a group of volunteers who are interested in developing telepathic powers through a dangerous experiment which inevitably gets derailed. Among his early works, Stereo is the most interesting because it examines the tense relationship between the human body and technology – a thesis he would keep developing throughout his career.
The director explained: “It was an experiment for me. I structured the film around the architecture, the faces of my friends and the limitations of the Arriflex 2C camera… The emptiness allowed me to completely see this structure in an abstract way, because they were not inhabited yet by human beings. That attributed to the tone — the loneliness, the smallness of human beings… The relationship of technology with human beings has always interested me, and you have to think of architecture as an expression of technology.”
Watch the films below.
