In 2017 Carolyn Zeifman passed away. Married to renowned Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, the director has frequently mentioned how, during this devastating period, the only thing that he wanted to do was crawl into her coffin to be near her again. This being the basis for The Shrouds (2024), it is not remotely surprising that the film opens with a dream sequence of the central character Karsh (Vincent Cassel) watching the slowly decaying body of his deceased wife Becca (Diane Kruger) as he is visibly screaming in anguish with the sound of his mournful pain muted. Karsh is the owner of a company that sells panoptical shrouds for the dead, allowing the bereaved to view the corpses of their loved ones–decomposition and all–from the convenience of their phones and other devices. Of course, his late wife is the patient zero of his obsessive project: her dead body haunting both his dreams and waking life. Needless to say, this film is an extremely personal work from Cronenberg, but that does not necessarily mean that it’s bereft of the techno-psychological and body-horror elements traditionally associated with his name as he continues his surreal filmic study on humans and their relationship with ever-advancing technologies.
This is not the first time that Cronenberg has incorporated his marital life into his idiosyncratic style of storytelling. His 1979 horror film The Brood focuses on a man struggling to get custody of his children while his ex-wife lives with an artisan psychologist on his secluded estate, which is of course in response to his then recent divorce from Margaret Hindson. Whereas The Brood is visceral and grisly, and very much horror oriented, The Shrouds takes a much tamer and sporadically compassionate approach. The Shrouds does eventually morph into a paranoid psychosexual thriller, in true Cronenberg fashion, but its approach to bodily horror is not quite as crass as in The Brood; the latter approaching it with more shocking elements to evoke a sense of repulsion, while the former utilises it to capture Karsh’s despair. In his dreams, Karsh shares a bed with his maimed wife, bruised and disfigured from her intense cancer treatment: his loving strokes to her flesh result in winces of immense discomfort.
Karsh’s voyeuristic product is not necessarily met with complete acceptance. One of his assets is a graveyard (fitted with its own onsite restaurant), which is vandalised by, who Karsh suspects, an opposition group. His enterprise operates firmly in a moral grey area, and raises many questions about bodily autonomy, on top of environmental concerns over the actual product itself and a pending extension proposal to purchase a plot of land in Iceland. Again, Cronenberg is not unfamiliar with marrying philosophical and topical themes with his work. Is granting grieving individuals the ability to view the decomposing and unconsenting corpses of their loved ones whenever they please a violation of their bodily integrity? And, is this the natural progression of a society infatuated with surveillance? (Dash-cams, Ring doorbell cameras, and the ever looming possibility that an unsuspecting stranger could be filming you for social media purposes on the street: all symptoms of a society obsessed with watching). Videodrome (1983) raises similar concerns with the public’s viewing habits, albeit in a more explicit manner, as it revolves around a violent and prurient pirate television broadcast that induces psychosis on its perverted audience. The Shrouds may not take things to the extremities that Videodrome does, or contain any scenes as strikingly outlandish as James Woods having VHS tapes inserted into a vaginal shaped hole in his chest, but it still reflects on our ever growing voyeuristic nature. At a glance, the genre of body-horror is one that appears quite petulant–and make no mistake, the genre does not have a shortage of juvenile splatter-fest grotesqueries that are best viewed with your brain left at the door upon entry–but the medium can be used quite effectively to reflect on any pressing social issues, or to exploit cultural fears. This is, of course, a staple of Cronenberg’s cinematic oeuvre, irregardless of the severities of the contents. After all, what could be more political than the human body?
Body-horror is certainly an extension of the genre that’s in vogue, from the multitude of releases over the last few years that have received both box office success and critical acclaim. Coralie Fargeat’s oft grotesque and blood soaked The Substance (2024), a blunt study on beauty standards inflicted upon women, proved to be extremely popular during its festival and theatrical run, and even the less commercially successful films like Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), which utilises the style of horror in a more subtle way to display issues regarding bodily autonomy and gender expression, have garnered an audience. It is a horror variant that has more leverage than perhaps meets the eye, as its films can exploit either end of the extremities spectrum; whether they approach their subjects in insidious and unassuming ways, or take a more conspicuously disgusting and gory path. Cronenberg’s style has definitely undergone many metamorphoses over the years, particularly with his later works as they diverge from his traditional ‘Cronenbergian’ horror. Even Crimes of the Future (2022), which marked his return to body-horror, takes a more refined approach to mutilation and body modifications than perhaps the director would have in his early career. His work may no longer be as explicitly repulsive as his oozing rendition of The Fly (1986), but David Cronenberg shows no signs of halting his thought-provoking and poignant filmmaking as he ages and continues to prod the current technological and psychological zeitgeists, with his finger firmly on the transmuting pulse of our society.
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