David Cronenberg
In 1975, Shivers marked an early entry in a filmmaking career that would come to be associated with a particular and distinctive mode of cinema. That film, alongside Scanners, Videodrome, and The Fly, remains among the works most closely linked to David Cronenberg's name.
Born on March 15, 1943, in Toronto, Cronenberg attended North Toronto Collegiate Institute and Harbord Collegiate Institute before going on to study at the University of Toronto. A Canadian citizen working in English, he built a career that extended across multiple roles — director, screenwriter, producer, editor, and actor — a range of functions that gave him sustained involvement in the shape of his films. He is recognized as a principal originator of the body horror genre. Alongside his work behind the camera, he also appeared as an actor in both film and television productions.
The four films with which he is most closely associated span roughly a decade. Shivers appeared in 1975, Scanners in 1981, and Videodrome in 1983, each arriving in sequence through the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Fly followed in 1986. Together, these works form the core of how his career in that period has been identified and discussed. His activities were not confined to directing alone; his credits as screenwriter, producer, and editor speak to a broad engagement with the craft of filmmaking across its various stages.
His contributions have been recognized through several formal distinctions. He received the Officer of the Order of Canada, the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, and a place on Canada's Walk of Fame. The Horror Writers Association awarded him the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, a recognition that situated his work within a tradition of genre storytelling reaching back well before his own career began. That award, given for work accumulated over decades, remains one of the more concrete markers of how his output has been received and acknowledged.
Quotes by David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg's insights on:
You're seeing me develop, not only as a filmmaker if you've seen my earlier films, but you're seeing me kind of learn how to be a human, how my philosophy has evolved.
To me it’s very obvious there are huge cultural differences between Americans and Canadians. But a lot of what we are is American.
Or was it a more sinister thing? Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn’t turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self – garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?
For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It’s impossible to do.
At a certain point the audience shouldn’t worry about catching every word and understanding every twist and turn, because at a certain point that’s pretty much impossible.
I have learned the password of two of my neighbors’ wireless home networks, so you can use theirs if you like. Be a parasite on their network. Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism. Connect to anywhere in the world you like.
I have a real aversion to ghosts because I don’t believe in them. I think ghosts are actually a religious concept, because it means you believe in an afterlife. And I don’t.
So not only can you not imagine dying, you can’t really imagine existence before you were born.
The artist’s duty to himself is a combination of immense responsibility and immense irresponsibility. I think those two interlock.
The warrior priests worship insects as sacred beings, and believe that the ingestion of insects ennobles man and keeps him from descending into bestiality.