Before David Cronenberg gave us talking typewriters, flesh guns, and gynecological nightmares, he dipped his scalpel into the primordial ooze of 1970s Canadian horror with Shivers—a film that asks, “What if the real disease was repressed horniness?” Released in 1975 and partially funded by the Canadian government (your tax dollars hard at work, eh?), Shivers is Cronenberg’s first foray into body horror that actually feels like a movie instead of a thesis paper scribbled in blood and Vaseline. It’s also the cinematic equivalent of a venereal disease pamphlet left on your windshield in the rain—cheap, confusing, and oddly sticky.
The plot, and I use that word generously, centers around a luxurious Montreal apartment complex called Starliner Towers, where the residents are wealthy, sterile, and as sexually repressed as a priest at a nudist colony. Enter science. Enter horror. Enter a parasitic slug that turns its hosts into sexually ravenous maniacs. It’s basically Invasion of the Body Snatchers if the snatchers were all trying to get laid and left a trail of goo in the jacuzzi.
The story kicks off when a creepy doctor murders a teenage girl and then cuts open her stomach with a scalpel. Not your typical meet-cute. Turns out this doctor was experimenting with a synthetic parasite that could replace diseased organs but also happened to unleash uncontrollable sexual urges. You know, science stuff. Naturally, the parasite escapes into the apartment building’s water supply, infecting residents faster than a bad Tinder date, and what follows is an orgy of chaos—literally. Old men, young women, maintenance workers, and even a grandmother or two begin pawing at each other like the orgy scene from Eyes Wide Shut got rewritten by Roger Corman and shot in a Holiday Inn.
Let’s get this out of the way: Shivers is sleazy. It’s unapologetically sweaty, grimy, and drenched in goo, in every sense of the word. But for all its exploitative imagery and rampant toplessness, there’s an intelligence lurking under the skin. Cronenberg isn’t just making a sex-zombie movie—he’s asking what happens when the flesh rebels against the mind. What happens when society’s carefully constructed boundaries of monogamy, class, and cleanliness get flushed down the toilet and replaced by one giant, writhing, slime-covered Freudian mess?
That said, it’s not exactly subtle. The dialogue feels like it was written during a hangover, and the performances range from “community theater audition” to “porn star trying not to blink.” Paul Hampton stars as the bland, clean-cut doctor trying to contain the outbreak, and he delivers every line with the emotional range of a mannequin wondering where his lunch break went. Lynn Lowry, playing a fragile resident who descends into parasite-induced lust, gives a memorably strange performance—part dreamy seductress, part deer-in-the-headlights. She’s either acting or dissociating, possibly both.
The real star of the show, however, is the parasite itself—a little brown turd-shaped slug that looks like a sausage casing filled with lube and regret. These things slither out of bathtubs, down throats, and into orifices with all the subtlety of a frat party gone nuclear. At one point, one of them launches out of a man’s mouth and attacks someone’s face like a spaghetti noodle with a grudge. It’s disgusting. It’s hilarious. It’s very Cronenberg.
Visually, the movie is a mixed bag. The film was made on a shoestring budget—around $179,000—and it shows. The lighting is often flat, the sets look like they were borrowed from a real estate ad, and the camera movement ranges from “sedated” to “comatose.” But despite the technical limitations, there’s a weird charm in its cheapness. Cronenberg turns sterile hallways and beige living rooms into breeding grounds for moral collapse. He finds horror in elevators, kitchens, and bedrooms—not the supernatural, but the all-too-human.
As the movie rolls toward its climax, it stops pretending to be a slow-burn medical mystery and embraces full-blown sexual apocalypse. By the third act, the entire building is in the grip of an orgiastic parasite-fueled meltdown. One woman is attacked in a bathtub (classic), another gets jumped by her own infected husband (awkward), and eventually the remaining uninfected characters are overwhelmed by a sea of moaning, half-naked neighbors who look like the worst swingers party ever thrown in a gated community.
By the end, there’s no heroic last stand. No cure. No military intervention. The parasites win. The infected residents pile into their cars and drive off into the night, presumably to spread their slimy gospel to the rest of polite Canadian society. It’s a bleak, nihilistic finale that suggests not only is the flesh weak—it’s downright treacherous.
So where does that leave us? Shivers is neither good nor bad. It’s gross, it’s goofy, it’s occasionally smart, and it definitely leaves a mark (possibly a rash). It’s too amateurish to be great, too bold to be ignored. Cronenberg fans will see the seeds of his future masterpieces—The Brood, Videodrome, The Fly—while the average viewer may wonder if they just watched a sex ed video made by Satan’s AV club.
It walks a fine line between horror and satire, exploitation and art. It’s also one of the only horror films where a character says the phrase, “Everything is erotic, everything is sexual, even digestion,” with a straight face, as if reading from the Holy Bible of Horny Biology. You don’t get that in Halloween.
Final Thoughts:
Shivers is David Cronenberg’s cinematic equivalent of puberty—awkward, messy, full of strange urges, and possibly contagious. It’s not his best work, but it’s a vital stepping stone. A warm-up act with parasites, breasts, and enough slime to fill a Nickelodeon soundstage. Watch it if you’re curious about where body horror was born—or if you’ve ever looked at a slug and thought, “What if that thing was horny?”
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 writhing bathroom slugs.
Better than a cold shower, worse than actual sex. Still very, very Canadian.
