Shivers

Shivers (The Parasite Murders ,They Came from Within)

1975

Director- David Cronenberg

Cast- Paul Hampton, Lynn Lowry, Joe Silver, Alan Migicovsky, Susan Petrie, Barara Steele, Ronald Mlodzik, Barry Boldero, Cathy Graham, Fred Doederlein

From Canada

          

  

   The story opens, alternating between two scenes, one wholesome, one disturbing.  A young couple, looking for a home, is being shown around an apartment building by a broker, extolling the virtues of the apartment complex. Meanwhile, in one of the apartments, a middle aged man is brutalizing a young girl in a school uniform. He incapacitates her, strips her, and then starts performing surgery. After he’s done, he slits his own throat.

            

   The story takes place over the course of a day in a luxury apartment building on an island in Canada. The apartment is a self-contained community with shops, recreational areas, and its own medical facilities. Roger St. Luc (Peter Hampton) is the doctor at the clinic, attended by his nurse/ girlfriend, Forsythe (Lynn Lowry, who couldn’t have been sexier if she had tried). He becomes aware, though various intersecting circumstances, of a potential outbreak.

            

    The middle aged man that we saw at the beginning of the film was Dr. Hobbs. He was working on a breakthrough procedure for people with organ failure. Rather than a transplant, they would receive a special parasite. This parasite would make its way to the failing organ, and replace it. As it turns out, Dr.Hobbs may have had some other plans for the parasite as well as it is contagious, spread through sex, and has aphrodisiac powers. The girl he murdered was his test subject, and sex partner, Annabelle. The parasite apparently turned up Annabelle’s sex drive because she infected several men in the apartment complex before Hobbs could kill her.

            

    One of the men she infected was Nicholas (Alan Migicovsky, who looked so much like David Schwimmer that I kept thinking it was him though the whole film). Nicholas seems to have become a breeding factory for the parasites. He vomits them up and they scurry through the building, infecting new hosts. One of the people that gets infected is a single lady (played by horror legend Barbara Steele) who seems to have the hots for Nicholas’ wife.

            

    The contagion spreads geometrically through the building turning each person into a lust driven maniac capable of rape and murder. The apartment complex degenerates into a violent orgy. Meanwhile Roger and Forsythe try to get a handle on what’s happening while trying to avoid infection themselves.

            

    David Cronenberg is the patriarch of the body horror genre. Shivers was not the first film in the genre, but it was the first film to explore the ideas so effectively and thoroughly. The idea of infection is pretty standard in horror today thanks to the Romero zombie, but Shivers was ahead of its time, predating public awareness of HIV, Ebola and all of the micro-organisms that fuel our subconscious fears of contamination. The real genius of this film is making the infection an STD. Sex brings in religious and moral elements not associated with other infections. By turning the infected maniacs into rapists, violation is added to the contamination.

           

   Though the film was financially successful it was panned by critics and denounced by members of the press and the Canadian Parliament for its sex and violence. Not only did this make it harder for Cronenberg (initially) to get funding for future films, his landlord kicked him out of his apartment! Well, the joke is on all of them because now Cronenberg is a respected elder statesman of horror and has directed many influential films (the most influential probably being his remake of The Fly).

Fun fact: Outside of acting, Paul Hampton, the film’s protagonist, had a very successful career as a song writer. His most famous song is “Sea of Heartbreak” (heard at the beginning of the Clint Eastwood movie, Heartbreak Ridge).

Fun fact #2: This was not Lynn Lowry’s first “infection” movie, it was her third! She also starred in I Drink Your Blood in 1970 and George Romero’s The Crazies in 1973.