New Review of Film and Television Studies, 04/2017, Volume 15, Issue 2
This essay examines David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) alongside Maps to the Stars (2014) to argue that we should resist the impulse to which many critics succumb when faced with Cronenberg’s bewilderingly heterogeneous body of work: dividing his career into distinct periods, usually separated by genre labels. Instead, we need to recognize the formal and thematic discourse that has characterized his cinema from the beginnings to the present: the need for a therapy that works alongside the impossibility of ever fulfilling that need.

Posits that Cronenberg's engagement with a specific mode of viewer confrontation linked to the modern horror film necessitates more consideration of the "Canadianness" of his films. Juxtaposes Cronenberg's "Crash" and "Shivers" to illuminate how perceptions of his relation to the charged oppositions of Canada/Hollywood and genre/art challenge an understanding of their points of contact.

The 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, directed by Samuel Bayer, is indebted to Wes Craven's 1984 original as well as other predecessors for its horror effects-but it avoids the exploration of community and politics that made the earlier films compelling.

The art film Naked Lunch (1991) may have marked a turn away from the horror genre for David Cronenberg, but it also features both monsters and monstrosity. Protagonist Bill Lee wanders passively through a surreal landscape populated with fantastical creatures feeding him orders that correspond to the impulses he does not recognize within himself. By Cronenberg’s own description, these monsters are projections, excusing and externalizing Lee’s internal, unacknowledged anxieties. Since these monsters are embodied outside himself, Lee never has to confront his internal conflicts as such. Engaging with writings on horror and monsters by Julia Kristeva, Noël Carroll, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, this essay uses Naked Lunch to develop a Cronenbergian theory of monstrosity. Monsters objectify the abject, but in doing so evade the sources of abjection. Cronenberg, a filmmaker constantly exploring abjection and monstrosity, for the first time in his filmography articulates this problematic relationship between them explicitly in Naked Lunch.