At first glance, it seems like Brandon Cronenberg is following in David Cronenberg’s footsteps regarding filmmaking. Like his father, Brandon Cronenberg has dedicated his filmmaking career to body horror, exploring the terror of having human flesh twisted and turned for the most deranged reasons. However, a closer look at both filmmakers’ work shows a clear distinction in how they approach body horror. David Cronenberg is concerned about how the human body will change due to external pressures and how the environment will push humans to undergo grotesque metamorphosis. However, in Brandon Cronenberg's three feature films — Antiviral, Possessor, and Infinity Pool – body modification is not a consequence of external action. Instead, it’s a tool to be used by the wealthy and powerful to remain in power.
The Body Is Threatening for David Cronenberg
Few filmmakers can claim to have the reach and impact of David Cronenberg, the first name that comes to mind when we think about body horror. For over five decades, Cronenberg has been playing with horror and science fiction tropes to expose how the body can be either a prison for the conscious or its means of liberation. While each entry in Cronenberg’s enviable filmography has a unique goal when it comes to storytelling, it’s possible to detect some common themes that traverse Cronenberg's work. And when it comes to body horror, it seems that David Cronenberg wants to know what will happen to the human body when we lose control of our flesh, usually to unnerving results.
Going back to the early years of Cronenberg’s career, features such as 1975’s Shivers and 1977’s Rabid imagines the bizarre transformation the body can undergo when contaminated by external agents. In Shivers, a highly-contagious virus is to blame, while Rabid’s protagonist begins to change after an accident and heavy surgical procedures. In both cases, however, the body transformation doesn’t come from a choice but from uncontrollable contamination. It’s almost like the flesh was rebelling against the conscious, trying to release desires that have been repressed for far too long.
The presence of chaos as an unstoppable force is also present in some of Cronenberg’s most beloved movies. In 1983’s Videodrome, for instance, we see the body gain a life independent of the mind when exposed to wavelengths people stumble upon by chance. And the gruesome results of the scientific experiments of 1986’s The Fly underline how even the most controlled workshop of human will is not safe from inference by chance or fate. And the result is always the mutation of the body, as the human flesh twists and turns to acquire nightmarish forms.
Cronenberg’s concern with the unpredictability of the body is even imbued in more optimistic movies such as last year’s Crimes of the Future. In Crimes of the Future, we witness a new mutation of humans emerging, whose organs evolved to digest the plastic we released on the planet for so long. Even if the final result of this flesh transfiguration is the continuity of the human race, Crimes of the Future still echoes the same idea of a body that cannot be contained or controlled, shifting under the weight of extrinsic pressure. It’s curious to notice, then, how Brandon Cronenberg’s work explores the same subjects through a totally different perspective.
The Body Is a Tool For Brandon Cronenberg
Despite only having released three features so far, Brandon Cronenberg has proved he doesn’t worry about the transformation of the body itself, but with how technology will make it easier to reproduce the toxic power relationship we find nowadays in Western society. That’s why the horror in Cronenberg’s filmography is not the fruit of an accident and doesn’t escape human control. In fact, Cronenberg's movies are mainly interested in the ethical questions of what humans would be willing to do once technology evolves so much that manipulating the body becomes easy.
Looking back at 2012’s Antiviral, Cronenberg’s first feature, we realize the things that scare us the most are not the body changes of protagonist Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones). What’s truly scary is realizing that, apart from the miraculous technology Cronenberg conjures, the dystopian world of Antiviral is not so different from ours.
Antiviral’s story occurs in the near future when bioengineering advancements allow the free manipulation of tissue and cells. While these technologies could solve many problems that ravage nations nowadays, big companies take control of bioengineering to feed on the toxic celebrity culture that infests our world. That is why people can buy meat produced from celebrity’s cells and even pay to contract the same diseases that afflicted their favorite star. While there’s enough revolting imagery in Antiviral to justify its body horror title, what really sticks with us after the credits roll is how Cronenberg's cynic vision of human endeavors feels exceptionally realistic.
Cronenberg expanded Antiviral’s worries with 2020’s Possessor, a movie where technological advancements allow someone’s consciousness to be transferred to a different body. Once again, we could workshop the positive effects such technology could have on the fields of medicine. But instead, the movie reveals how possessions have become a tool for companies to assassinate hard-to-reach targets while pinning the blame for the murders on the innocent bodies they take over. Just like in Antiviral, Possessor wonders how new technology can be co-opted by commercial agents to create nightmarish scenarios.
'Infinity Pool' Sees Brandon Cronenberg Wrestle With Similar Themes
The same idea is again present in this year’s Infinity Pool, a movie about rich people finding loopholes to avoid punishment for their crimes. Specifically, Infinity Pool follows a group of wealthy tourists who make clones of themselves, memories included, who are then executed to pay for their crimes. And freed from the threat of justice, these people discover that money can allow them to do anything. That includes destroying other people’s lives for their amusement. There are deep philosophical questions underneath Infinity Pool’s deceptively simple plot, as the movie serves as a never-wrecking version of the Ship of Theseus. However, Cronenberg is primarily concerned with exploring the unbounded desires of awful people who evade punishment due to the numbers in their bank accounts.
While Cronenberg has not been making movies for as long as his father, it’s clear that he manifests different social anxieties through body horror. That’s because the body metamorphosis is not questioned in Cronenberg’s work, it’s a given fact. So, his camera proposes a different examination, shedding light on the dark corners of the human soul. The body is nothing more than a tool for Cronenberg. And his movies show that what we should truly fear is the mind.