Second Reel

This chapter examines some of the themes of David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975). Cronenberg's impetus to make horror films had initially come from his recognition of mortality in the ageing process. His identity had been bound up with a youth-identified culture; on some level, losing youth meant a loss of identity. If the bourgeois stability of Starliner Tower was not appealing to him on some level, it would not be a tomb he could imagine being sealed up in — Shivers' fear of Starliner life is a kind of claustrophobia. Meanwhile, the film's later scenes of rape, paedophilia, and incest, however blackly comic, all evoke the audience's horror and acknowledge the taboos they transgress; Cronenberg's awareness of the gravity of his visions is not in doubt. The chapter then looks at the comedy of Shivers.

Fourth Reel

This chapter describes David Cronenberg's use of step-printed slow motion in Shivers (1975). The process entails a loss in image quality — rephotographed by an optical printer, the frames gain grain — and results in a staccato motion quite different from the smooth progression achieved by shooting at high frame-rates. It is a technique which prevents viewer immersion; where conventional slow motion creates the feeling of a dream or altered consciousness, step printing foregrounds the mechanical nature of motion pictures, rupturing the illusions of continuous motion and transparency upon which the illusionist cinema depends. The chapter then studies how Cronenberg builds the eerie sense of emotional displacement in some of the film's scenes. It also considers the staging of rape scenes in Shivers.

Fifth Reel

This chapter reviews the final scenes of David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975). In a character's description of her ‘very disturbing’ dream where she found herself ‘making love to a strange man’, the original line was supposed to be ‘making love to Sigmund Freud’. Cronenberg made the last-minute decision to change ‘Sigmund Freud’ to ‘a strange man’ in post-production. To make Freud the speaker would have been too blatant an intellectual reference, and would have implied that the film's scenario is explicable in Freudian terms, reducing its power. Martin Scorsese's description of Cronenberg's films in terms of ‘Jungian culture shock’ is particularly apt in the case of Shivers; throughout the film one notices hints of something less rational, with less pretence to scientific thinking, than the ostensible cause-and-effect narrative has accounted for. Cronenberg is a modern, and modernist, filmmaker, and requires a solid empiricist runway for his flights of fancy, but he is a filmmaker of the irrational, of dreams that become nightmares. It is for this reason that his works of fantastique are closer to horror than to the science fiction they often resemble.