David Cronenberg’s first film, Produced by Ivan Reitman, and IMHO his first masterpiece which makes a perfect companion piece to Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead.
Shivers is the movie that Romero’s The Crazies should have been, as it has the type of underlying theme’s and subtext that made Dawn of the Dead a classic of the Horror genre. Interesting that Lynn Lowry starred in both along with I Drink Your Blood, which was also about an infection that drives people to madness. Much has been written about how DotD presented the idea of the mall representing a paradise that eventually becomes the characters prison as they are trapped by the easy virtues of materialistic possessions, causing their lives to stagnate because of the lack of challenge to survive. And everyone knows that the zombies represent mindless consumerism etc….
I see the apartment building in Shivers as a metaphor for an organism where an infection has taken place and spreads to the rest of the building. When the, now infected, population of the building leaves, it’s as if the disease has become airborne, free to spread to the general population, as it does. There is something to be said about the disease itself. Obviously the appearance of the parasites themselves give the impression of something phallic and/or excremental. But that’s just the surface appearance.
The parasites are really just the catalyst for the rampaging sexual debauchery that is unleashed throughout the building, perhaps from desires that were there all along. Cronenberg presents the people that live there as lifeless automatons, literally cut off from society (as the building is on an island), filed neatly into their concrete and metal cabinets while the building itself has all the modern conveniences that one could want. Like the mall in DotD, the environment seems to have everything one could want but not what people need.
I don’t see the infection as destructive, in fact, I see it as helping these people liberate their repressed sexual urges, no matter how degenerate they may seem to be. It’s interesting to note that one of the main characters, Tudor, the only member of the infected to commit murder, was involved in an extramarital affair. He bludgeons a man to death with a wrench, suggesting that, since he indulged in his sexual needs, that what he was really suppressing was the urge to kill.
These ideas and themes are what put’s Shivers in the same league as Romero’s Dawn of the Dead as far as I’m concerned.
