Discussing his film Spider (2002) upon its release, David Cronenberg equated the film’s many expressionist variations of dingy, mouldy wallpaper to its schizophrenic protagonist’s “cerebral lining” – a phrase that captures the director’s rich meldings of the visceral and the contemplative, the physical and the metaphysical. “For me, the human body is the first fact of human existence,” Cronenberg has said, and his films accordingly suture the mind–body split. Indeed, the phrase most often attached to his movies is “body horror”, a catch-all description that variously evokes Marilyn Chambers’ armpit phallus in Rabid (1976), Geneviève Bujold sinking her teeth deep into pulpy conjoined skin in Dead Ringers (1988) and the chilly auto-erotica of Crash (1996), in which a car-accident victim’s leg wound becomes an erogenous orifice. As the revolutionaries of Videodrome (1982) would cry: “Long live the new flesh!” While the body-horror label risks trapping a stunningly dense and accomplished oeuvre in the ghetto of genre, it also implies the excitement and astonishment that Cronenberg’s transgressive projects so often inspire.

Cronenberg’s icy first featurettes show a young director already sure of his fecund thematic territory, investigating the convergence of fringe medicine and outlaw sexuality in Stereo (1969), wherein subjects at a sex-research institute undergo brain surgery to acquire telepathic powers, and Crimes Of The Future (1970), which arranges a bizarre interface of dermatology and paedophilia. In Cronenberg’s “venereal” first two features, Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1976), a radical form of medical treatment begets a contagion that in turn leads to mass zombie havoc. This is the classic Cronenberg scenario: a scientist – perhaps not mad, exactly, but fervently committed – makes a revolutionary advance in his field of expertise, with spectacularly unintended consequences. In The Brood (1979), Samantha Eggar undergoes “psychoplasmic” therapy – whereby mental and emotional trauma takes physical form – and produces scores of deformed, murderous children who prey upon her young (human) daughter. Made after a difficult custody battle between Cronenberg and his former wife, The Brood is perhaps the director’s most cathartic and autobiographical film.

Following the atypical drag-racing movie Fast Company (1979), Cronenberg scored his first solid hit with Scanners (1980), an action-driven telepathic thriller with an exploding head as its pièce de résistance. In the quintessentially Cronenbergian Videodrome, porn-cable station boss Max Renn (James Woods) discovers his television screen is permeable and acquires a gooey, programmable VCR in his abdomen; the film’s labyrinthine conspiracy soon gives way entirely to Max’s hallucinations. Frenzied by its ideas, its narrative boldly splintered, Videodrome marked a creative watermark for the director, who would not make another film from his own original material for seventeen years.

Yet Cronenberg’s movies always carried his imprimatur. The Dead Zone (1983), in which Christopher Walken wakes from a long coma with newfound psychic powers, was one of the best in a contemporary glut of Stephen King adaptations, and The Fly (1986), a loose remake of the 1958 Vincent Price classic, managed to be at once a gruesome shocker (boasting state-of-the-art special effects) and a tender love story. Despite, or because of, its uncompromising horror quotient and philosophical rigour, The Fly remains far and away Cronenberg’s biggest commercial hit, though its success hardly nudged the director towards profitable complacency. Financing for Dead Ringers (1988) proved difficult, given its tragic, lurid narrative of drug-addicted, co-dependent twin gynaecologists (played by Jeremy Irons in an astonishing double performance), and Cronenberg faced predictable moral opprobrium for his graphic adaptations of epochal “obscene” books: William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1991) and J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1996). In between was his flawed but underrated M. Butterfly (1993), adapted from David Henry Hwang’s gender-bending hit play.

Cronenberg returned, however briefly, to original-screenplay work with the crafty virtual-reality adventure eXistenZ (1999), which glistened with spinal bioports and sticky-icky “game pods”. Released around the same time as The Matrix, the movie appeared as the smarter, scrappier arthouse cousin to the self-important blockbuster. Spider dared to immerse itself in skewed subjective reality, here in service of an empathic, daringly unsentimental depiction of mental illness. Cronenberg won rapturous reviews for his studio-funded neo-Western A History Of Violence (2005), continuing a twenty-year roll that’s perhaps unrivalled among English-language directors for challenge and consistency.

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