Like Tobe Hooper and George Romero, David Cronenberg sprang into public consciousness with a series of low-budget horror films that shocked and surprised audiences for their sheer audacity and intelligence. Unlike the former two filmmakers, Cronenberg has been able to avoid being pigeonholed into a single restrictive genre category. His works, which consistently explore the same themes, have the mark of a true auteur in the strictest sense of the word. Cronenberg's films have the unnerving ability to delve into society's collective unconscious and dredge up all of the perverse, suppressed desires of modern life. His world features grotesque deformities, hallucinatory couplings, and carnality unhinged from its corporeal moorings. The body mutates and becomes something horrific as in Rabid (1977) or The Fly (1986), psyches fuse with technology as in Crash (1996) and Videodrome (1983), and the act of sex itself is rendered bizarre and alien in Naked Lunch (1991) and Dead Ringers (1988). Underlying all of Cronenberg's work is a queasy exploration of the edges of human physiology, psychology, and sexuality.…  » Read more