The 82-year-old veteran’s films – icky, sticky works like The Brood, The Fly and Naked Lunch – have almost single-handedly coined the phrase ‘body horror’ over the past five decades. But this throwaway line in The Shrouds was never a deliberate nod to his own flesh-draped canon.
“I mean, we photograph the human body. That’s the most photographed thing in all cinema. What else is there? There’s landscape. Unless you’re making a documentary about the desert – and there have been some good ones – you are photographing the human body. That’s your subject matter.”
In The Shrouds, Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, the owner of a unique hi-tech cemetery in Toronto, with video camera feeds inside coffins that allow mourners to watch the decomposition of their late loved ones in real time. Among those buried with such tech is Karsh’s own late wife Becca, who died several years earlier of cancer.
Back in 2017, Cronenberg’s own wife Carolyn passed away of cancer. They had been together for 43 years and – understandably – his grief was all-consuming. He wanted to be with her still, he says. “I wanted to get into the coffin with this dead body.” And so he began to write The Shrouds as a way of processing his raw feelings.
View oEmbed on the source website“I really think that we have to understand that as soon as you start to write the script, it stops being about you and your wife. It starts to be about these fictional characters, and you want that.”
Confronted with his own corpse, he then proceeds to tenderly caress it. The idea came to him after acting in Canadian TV series Slasher, which required a lifelike prosthetic model to be made of him. The special effects team then let him use it.
While he says the short didn’t immediately feed into The Shrouds, it’s not hard to look at it as one of his most personal. The very fact that Diane Kruger plays the late Becca (in flashback) and her sister Terry, who becomes embroiled with Karsh, immediately recalls 1988’s Dead Ringers, with Jeremy Irons playing twins.
While some critics have mistaken the Kruger-played siblings as identical, Cronenberg denies this, suggesting he thought of them as “sisters who resembled each other”. Nevertheless, he’s very familiar with the idea. “I have many identical twins in my family... and it is spooky and it is intriguing.”
“In my case, as I’ve said often, for me, art is not prophecy, and being a prophet of what’s coming in the future is not my goal in art. It’s really to examine the human condition as we live it now. So if I’ve ever anticipated certain things, as I did in Videodrome and eXistenZ, it’s really by accident.”
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it anymore. I wasn’t sure after my wife died [if] I’d have the heart for it – however that works emotionally. And then there was COVID, which, of course, made filmmaking more difficult. But then I did some acting, just to reconnect with being on a film set, and also to see how awkward it was to shoot a film.”
Hs first return behind the camera was 2022’s Crimes of the Future, featuring Viggo Mortensen as an underground performance artist living in a world where pain has all but been eradicated and biotech body modification is all the rage.
Adapting novels like William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and JG Ballard’s Crash in the past always gave him the feeling that “movies are more like a novella or short story”, he says, but a TV series “could be like a novel”.
Cronenberg even chatted with Steven Zaillian and Alfonso Cuarón about their recent forays into streaming, when they directed, respectively, the mini-series Ripley and Disclosure.
That hasn’t stopped Cronenberg considering another feature – an adaptation of his one (and to date only) novel, 2014’s Consumed, the story of a photojournalist couple who globetrot in pursuit of unusual subjects.
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“I’m not worried about it. It’s just of interest. I mean, honestly, in the film business, we’ve been using AI for years at various levels of sophistication. To me, it’s a useful tool in the toolbox of filmmaking. You use it when you need it, and I’ve used it many times for adjusting things in a frame and on a face that moves.
Unsurprisingly, Cronenberg is fascinated by the advance in AI, just as he has been with so much other tech. “Its flaws are already well-known. Whether they will be eradicated or not is something else. I use ChatGPT all the time. I don’t mean to write my scripts, but I use it as an information-seeking device,” he explains.
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