This week’s episode is a discussion of the films of David Cronenberg and how his unique style of reality-bending body horror has influenced us and our games.
If this doesn’t happen to you at least once, you’re not playing one of Scott’s games
While we go through most of Cronenberg’s back catalogue, we focus on three of his films: Shivers (AKA They Came from Within), Scanners and Videodrome. Videodrome in particular has seeped into all our brains, changing them forever.
This is how we develop all our games now
So please join us in a celebration of the wild imagination and startling imagery of one of the most distinctive film-makers of our age. Your new flesh awaits!
This episode is also available as an MP3
PS And as Paul just reminded me…
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Good fun, thanks. The thing I find strangest about Cronenberg is how many “non-Cronenbergy” films he’s done — compare someone like John Carpenter, starting a few years earlier and working in similar genres. Carpenter may sometimes come up with absolute garbage, but you’re never in any doubt that it’s a Carpenter film; whereas with several of Cronenberg’s post-eXistenZ films you might well not even notice who had made them.
Glad you liked it!
There still seem to be hints of some of the themes that obsess him in his later works. Even when he’s not writing his own screenplays, he appears to pick ones that fit into his body of work. A History of Violence and M. Butterfly, for example, play with his interest in the nature of personal identity, albeit in a less direct and visceral way than The Fly or Shivers.
The one I find it hardest to relate to this is Eastern Promises. It’s a wonderful film and a very effective thriller, but it seems the most anonymous of the films of his that I’ve seen.