Recommending Cronenberg To My Family

Originally from February 15th 2023

Since childhood, the way my family bonded was through film. Be that going to the cinema or rewatching the same VHS tapes over and over. When I think of my family sat together, it is never around a dinner table but on the sofa watching a historical epic or whatever we could agree upon at Hollywood Video.

My father has a very dad taste in movies. He has seven in rotation, the lineup has hardly changed, it’s most recent member being from 2010. I can tell you the exact films too: 13 Days, 13th Warrior, Apollo 13 (he has a thing for movies with 13 in it, idk), Das Boot, Gladiator, Last of the Mohicans, and the most recent addition, Centurion, because he has a new found love for Michael Fassbender. 13th Warrior is the one he watches the most and despite it being the biggest box office flop of all time, he will never understand why. I often notice myself adopting my father’s film watching habits, I am collecting a selection of films I will watch over and over. The yearly Lord of the Rings rewatch perhaps falls more into nerdom than something learned from my father. But then I find myself putting on The Witch or The Descent for the tenth time and wonder if I’m just like him. I just seek a different tone of violence. Wondering how these things are distinct from one another.

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Perhaps I was destined to become a horror fan despite being easily scared due to the violent films I grew up watching. I think having Bands of Brothers on the telly while doing maths homework is bond to do something to ones psychology. And going to a school that was heavily against children watching television or movies of any rating made it all the more thrilling for me when I watched Russel Means gut Wes Studi before pushing him off a cliff (Last of the Mohicans). I was living an incredibly sheltered life and the violence of movies told me there was a lot more out in the world. That things were grotesque and ugly and what fascinated me the most: bizarre. Watching a solider try to push his guts back in as a child, I didn’t realise bodies could do that. It was strange new world. One I wanted to go back to more and more.

At some point in my early 20s I became interested in horror movies. It started with the film It Follows, a film about a woman who is cursed by a creature that simply follows her. Only issue is once is catches up it’ll kill her. Something about the tone of the film, it felt so different from anything I’d seen. By that point in time I was already complaining about modern movies editing techniques, not allowing the scenes to breathe. It Follows let the moments play out, let the tension build. Nearly a decade later, I still haven’t seen anything quite like it. Prior to It Follows, the only horror movies I’d really watched were low budget video store slop my friends and I would grab for sleepovers or the PG-13 ones in the cinema, i.e. Paranormal Activity. The torture porn genre which was at it’s peak in the 2000s was never of much interest to me, I understand those who like it, I think it has its place, but that’s all horror was to me in my teens: A series of more and more convoluted Saw sequels all sepia toned. The movies as ugly as sin and I think fans of the sub-genre would agree.

After watching It Follows, I watched Rec, perhaps the best found footage horror movie (I know the Blair Witch is a big deal, but Rec is the better movie). It’s about a news crew trapped in a building with a zombie-like virus. I will never watch it again. It’s great. These two films showed me there was a whole genre to explore, decades of amazing movies for me to watch. It’s a bit like when I first got into reading, rather than be intimidated I was excited knowing how much great stuff was out there.

This new love though was a lonely one. As easy as it was to convince my family to watch a violent, horrible historical war drama, it’s a lot harder to convince them to watch something scary. Only last year did I get them to watch The Witch and I was surprised my parents actually quite liked it, my siblings on the other hand were more annoyed believing I tricked them by saying it wasn’t scary (much like spice tolerance, horror tolerance is difficult to gauge in others). I wonder what the difference really is with these genres. Both play with suspense and the psychological, both are fairly violent, both can be cruel.

I was thinking about all this because yesterday I was telling my father about Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, which I had just watched for the first time. He asked if I would recommend it, though reluctant at first, I said to give it a try. I can see it going either way for him, but Jeremy Irons might give it the boost it needs for him to like it. We then got onto the topic of David Cronenberg’s filmography and while I easily told my dad he’d quite like Eastern Promises I could hardly tell him to watch Scanners (a film primarily known for a head explosion). We’d seen Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method in the cinema with my siblings (had I known what the film was about prior I would never had gone, and yes, it was an uncomfortable drive home) but that was the only one my dad had seen. I told him about The Fly remake and how much I hate A History of Violence (that could be a whole essay on its own), and despite my strong dislike of the latter film, my dad was more interested in watching it than The Fly. I wondered where the line was drawn, where was the point he decided a film about mans ego and the concept of “crimes against nature” done in wonderfully terrible detailed special effects was less enticing than a film so confused in it’s messaging it ended up arguing against itself rather than for it. I hardly described it in any way that would sell it as a worth while watch. Maybe he just doesn’t like Jeff Goldblum that much.

It made me think about how we try to connect with one another. Through trinkets, stories, images. A friend I haven’t spoken to in months but a consistent exchange of memes gives the illusion that yes, we still talk. A childhood friend had a baby, finding out via the grapevine. Vague connections that stem from deeper ones, fractured by time and growth. I think of how my family watched so many movies together, going to the cinema then Barnes & Noble in Campbell where we saw In Bruges and in the first five minutes two people walked out, or maybe Camera 12 in downtown San Jose then go to the Thai restaurant next door. On rare occasions we’d go to the AMC theatre in Mountain View. We were connected by a love of stories. Yet now are parted, split up by continents and only talk on occasion. We give status updates rather than speak. I wonder if our changes in taste has heightened the divide. I still watch some movies on the basis that it looks like something my dad would like. On his recent visit we watched Black Death with Sean Bean and Eddy Redmayne, a very bleak medieval witch hunt film, that despite it’s darkness my dad liked. It’s finding the balance. I suppose I’ll have to do more research on horror-adjacent historical movies, a genre I imagine is full of low-budget trite. But what genre isn’t?

Cronenberg is an interesting director because I feel like he simultaneously has a movie for everyone and no one. But maybe he is the director my dad and I can meet on the middle about, some violent dramas for him, some body horror for me. Now if only he would make a historical film….

We still struggle to see eye to eye about contemporary films, we’re no longer limited to a VHS collection and with streaming it’s easy for us to watch whatever we want without bothering anyone. I will argue the death of the DVD has made birthdays and Christmas 1000% more needlessly difficult. We live in different countries, our tastes have changed after decades of new movies, I’m no longer a kid watching whatever dad decided to put on before falling asleep in his chair. But when I am visiting, I might ask if he wants to watch 13th Warrior and he will always say yes.

Thank you for reading.

-Enya xx

Favourite things I saw this week:

Told Slant, Parking Lots, 8/17/12

I made Mario and Peach, but Luigi is a Zombie by North of the Border