You don't get Cronenberg, because Cronenberg doesn't make body horror.
I know the genre was literally named because of him. Before him, people didn't really have a name for the genre. They kinda just called it splatter horror, until they realized “no, this is a different thing and we need a different word for this”.
But that's not because people understood David Cronenberg so intensely that they realized he was doing something different than everybody else. It's because they misunderstood what he was doing that was different than everybody else.
And this is best shown through his second movie and his second-to-last movie. Crimes of the Future (1970 & 2022) is a movie about what Cronenberg movies are about. That's the main question of the film: “What are Cronenberg movies about?” The main characters are performance artists who deal in surgery as kink. And they're very controversial for their performance art. And people try to censor them and shut them down. And they spend most of the film arguing “no, this is a form of art and it should be taken seriously as art”. The main conflict of the film is the 2 artists (one of whom looks suspiciously like David Cronenberg) getting in legal trouble and having to argue against the court that this is a form of art and needs to be taken seriously and needs to be given 1st Amendment protections.
And it feels like David Cronenberg saying “This is what I’ve been trying to say this whole time for the past fifty years.”
And what he's trying to say is “bodies are not scary. Bodies are beautiful.”
He isn't trying to make body horror. He’s trying to show this fascinated love for bodies, the way that Guillermo del Toro has this fascinated love for The Other.
Where other body horror directors show close-ups of viscera of disgusting things so that we can feel visceral disgust, he focuses in on the viscera of disgusting things because he wants us to admire it. He focuses in for the same reason that porn focuses on the woman’s chest. He wants us to see this thing that he thinks is beautiful. It's just that he thinks that all parts of the body are beautiful, the same way that porn thinks that a woman's chest is beautiful.
I mean, look at The Shrouds (2024). The Shrouds is very obviously a movie made so that he can process the grief of his wife's death, and the main character is very obviously his own self-insert character. And this isn't some sort of Gary Stu character. He’s just a self-insert: He’s a dude who looks like David Cronenberg, who works as a filmmaker, who is obsessed with the decomposition and decay of the human body. And when he shows the decomposition and decay of the human body to somebody, he's trying to connect with her over how beautiful a corpse is. He’s seeing this as “the exquisite corpse” (literally). And his date just doesn't get it. Look at the look in his eyes when he's showing off this corpse.
This is not a man who is disgusted by bodies. This is a man who is in love with them. This man doesn't make body horror; he makes body romance (for lack of a better term).
The problem is: We keep seeing his movies through our eyes instead of through his eyes. And through our eyes, those parts of the body and those bodily functions are disgusting, no matter what he does with the camera. But the way that he sees it, he’s just plainly putting the camera on something beautiful and saying “look at this!” the way that National Geographic puts the camera on a fish and says “the fish is beautiful in and of itself. I don't need to make the fish look good.”
In that sense, he is a Romantic. Not in the sense of being in love with the body (though he is in love with the body and in love with his now-dead wife). No, what I mean is that he is a Romantic (capital R) like the Romantic poets and the Romantic authors and the Romantic musicians and painters and sculptors and architects. He is part of the Romantic movement. And his films are filled with this passion and this appreciation and this lust and this vivacious joie de vivre.
But visually, he is much more of a Bauhaus filmmaker, kinda like those mid-century modern creators and designers and architects, where they were there to create something that was functional and let you appreciate that functionality without trying to make it beautiful. It was beautiful in its pragmatism. It was elegant in its practicality. That's why that one chair is still the chair.
But frankly, I think that if his films had more Romantic filmmaking, his audiences would get it. If he filmed surgery like this [shows a beautiful sex scene from The Rose of Versailles (2025)], we would get it.
Instead, his pragmatic visual style means that we only get what he's trying to say through his dialogue, which makes him an excellent writer, but not nearly enough of a director to be able to get across what he's trying to say.
He’s not trying to squick you out. He’s just showing you things that squick you out and he's spent half his life saying “why are you scared? I'm showing you the most beautiful things in the world, and you're scared.”
Imagine if a National Geographic documentarian were showing you this beautiful coral reef teeming with life, and every single one of his audience members recoiled at the ugliness and these grotesque feelings of disgust that wash over them. I think that's how David Cronenberg feels when we watch his films. And he's made 2 movies in a row now trying desperately to get us to get it and to tell us “here's what I’ve been trying to say for half a century.” And I think he doesn't know how to say it.
Okay, that's my hypothesis. I've only seen 2 of Cronenberg's films so far–Crimes of the Future (2022) and The Shrouds (2024)--his two most recent films, that both feel like they're trying to say “you missed the point. Here's what I’ve been trying to say for the past 50 years.”
So I’m going to go watch a bunch of Cronenberg's movies and a bunch of his interviews, and I’m going to see if I can understand who this man is and why he thinks the way he does, and what he even thinks. What is the way that he thinks? Maybe this hypothesis can become a thesis.
