Marilyn Chambers has a needle in her armpit, and I’m supposed to feel things.
Rabid is what happens when you cross a medical horror film with a porno in denial and then shake it like a snow globe full of blood, Canadian snow, and sexual panic. David Cronenberg’s 1977 follow-up to Shivers is slicker, meaner, and more confident. It’s the moment where the mad doctor behind the camera sharpens his scalpel and starts carving out the genre he’d come to own: body horror. And yet, at its twitching core, Rabid is a movie about one very attractive woman who becomes a biological weapon with boobs.
Let’s talk about Marilyn Chambers.
Yes, that Marilyn Chambers. The one from Behind the Green Door. The Ivory Snow box girl turned hardcore adult film legend. Cronenberg casts her here as Rose, a motorcycle crash victim who undergoes experimental plastic surgery and wakes up with a stinger in her armpit that drains blood from unsuspecting victims and spreads a rabies-like infection across Montreal. And, yes, she’s hot. Her face says “damsel in distress,” but her eyes say “I’ve seen some sh*t,” and her body does a lot of heavy lifting in a film that wants to explore science, sensuality, and the slow erosion of societal order—while also giving you something to ogle between the gore.
It’s undeniably compelling. But once you Google her—once you know—you start watching the movie differently. That dreamy soft-focus scene where she seduces a guy in a sauna? Suddenly it has the emotional weight of a 2-for-1 VHS special from 1982. The hot nurse routine takes on an ironic edge. It’s not her fault—Chambers is genuinely good in this. She’s vulnerable, terrifying, and weirdly innocent for someone who feeds off people like a sexy mosquito. But once you realize you’ve seen more of her on the internet than her doctor probably has, it’s hard not to feel like Cronenberg cast her with one eyebrow permanently raised.
But hey, exploitation is part of the charm, right?
Visually, Rabid is a major leap forward for Cronenberg. Gone are the static shots and dead-eyed extras of Shivers. This time the camera moves with purpose. There’s tension. There’s rhythm. The snowy streets of Montreal feel cold, bleak, and claustrophobic—a petri dish ready to rupture. The scenes of infection are well-paced, escalating from intimate encounters to full-blown chaos. One guy gets bit on a subway and starts frothing like a broken cappuccino machine. Another woman gets infected in a mall and triggers a shootout worthy of a zombie western. It’s absurd, intense, and genuinely unnerving. The movie plays like Cronenberg watched Night of the Living Dead and said, “But what if it was sexually transmitted?”
The true brilliance of Rabid lies in how it weaponizes desire. Rose doesn’t stalk her victims. She lures them. She cries, she trembles, she asks for help—then she strikes. She’s both predator and prey, a beautiful woman driven to feed by something implanted in her without consent. That armpit stinger is pure Cronenberg—equal parts sci-fi and body horror, a phallic inversion hidden in a soft, warm place. Every time she uses it, the screen feels like it’s gasping. It’s not subtle, but it’s effective.
And let’s be honest: the body count in Rabid is impressive. The disease spreads like chlamydia at a music festival, turning infected people into rage-filled, foaming lunatics who attack without warning. Cronenberg stages some great set pieces—an infected Santa Claus gets gunned down in a mall, a cabbie goes berserk in traffic, and the city descends into martial law. It’s apocalyptic, but in that slow, Canadian way—like if 28 Days Later had been sponsored by Tim Hortons and universal healthcare.
The film’s underlying message is classic Cronenberg: science will screw you, but it’ll look very professional while doing it. The experimental surgery that saves Rose’s life ends up turning her into Patient Zero. The doctors, of course, never accept responsibility. In fact, they disappear from the narrative entirely once things start going sideways—leaving the infected to die and the government to clean up the mess with rifles and garbage trucks.
Let’s also not ignore how Rabid works as a kind of twisted feminist parable. Rose becomes a monster not because she was born evil, but because something was done to her. Her sexuality, once passive and romantic, is now weaponized. She can’t stop what she’s become. She’s both ashamed of it and trapped by it. She’s raped by her own body every time she feeds, and she feeds only because she’s desperate to survive. There’s a sadness to her character—one that Chambers sells surprisingly well beneath the horror makeup and the pulsing prosthetic lodged in her armpit.
But make no mistake—this is still a B-movie. There are moments when the budget shows its cracks. The rabid extras chew the scenery (and each other) like they’re in a community theater version of Dawn of the Dead. The acting from the supporting cast is mostly passable, though the male lead is about as memorable as a glass of skim milk. And the ending, while haunting, feels a little rushed. Rose’s tragic fate is delivered with all the ceremony of a shrug, but maybe that’s the point. In Cronenberg’s world, the human body is a fragile, treacherous thing. The heart gets no curtain call.
Final Thoughts:
Rabid is where David Cronenberg stopped dabbling and started mutating. It’s slicker than Shivers, sharper than Stereo, and filled with the kind of uncomfortable questions that stick with you like the taste of blood on a kiss. It’s about sex and disease, yes, but also about loneliness, consent, and the terror of losing control over the one thing we’re all trapped inside—our bodies.
It’s also the only horror movie where a porn star plays a walking STD and manages to out-act half the cast of The Walking Dead. Once you know who Marilyn Chambers really is, it might dull the eroticism—but it doesn’t dull the impact.
Rating: 4 out of 5 infected Canadians.
Hot, horrifying, and way more intelligent than it has any right to be. But to the uninitiated, don’t Google Marilyn until after the credits roll.
