If you’ve ever thought, “What if The Devil Wears Prada but everyone slowly turns into weaponized meat puppets?” then Rabid (2019) is basically your oddly specific wish granted.
The Soska Sisters (Jen and Sylvia), notorious lovers of gore, latex, and deeply unwholesome body autonomy issues, take Cronenberg’s 1977 cult classic and remake it as a glossy, blood-slicked feminist nightmare set in the fashion world. It’s mean, stylish, and completely unapologetic about the fact that your skin, your face, your body, and your career are all… negotiable.
And if you’re squeamish about needles, flesh, or mouths where mouths shouldn’t be—fantastic. That’s exactly the energy Rabid feeds on.
Rose Miller: Patron Saint of Extreme Glow-Ups
Our tragic protagonist is Rose (Laura Vandervoort), a talented but insecure fashion designer working under a human cartoon of haute-couture cruelty: Gunter, the designer who speaks exclusively in insults, metaphors, and cigarettes. Rose is shy, self-conscious, especially about her appearance, and pines for professional recognition while quietly crushing on the hot photographer, Brad (Ben Hollingsworth).
Then life says, “You know what you need? Trauma.”
After a genuinely nasty traffic accident leaves Rose’s face and body severely disfigured, the movie hard-swerves into body horror. Her injuries are shown with unflinching detail: sunken features, scar tissue, the kind of medical reality you can almost feel in your teeth. It’s brutal—and effective. The fashion world, obsessed with beauty and image, becomes the worst possible backdrop for her recovery.
Enter Dr. William Burroughs (Ted Atherton), who radiates “I definitely violated several medical ethics boards before breakfast” energy. He offers Rose an experimental stem-cell-based skin and tissue graft at his isolated, deeply suspicious clinic. As always in horror: if your doctor has a Gothic surgical spa in the woods and talks about pushing the boundaries of humanity, you should probably just buy a nice mask and go home.
But Rose is desperate. She wants her face back. She wants her life back. She wants to walk into a room without people recoiling. So she agrees.
The treatment works. Oh, it works.
Rose emerges from her surgery not just healed, but leveled up: flawless skin, radiant health, newfound confidence, and a wardrobe that says “I read my own rebirth clause and chose violence.” Her coworkers suddenly notice her. Gunter starts treating her less like a burden and more like a muse. Brad floats back into her orbit. Rose’s life is back on track.
Except for the minor side effect where she grows a fleshy parasite proboscis out of a new orifice in her body and starts turning people rabid.
Tiny detail.
Rabid, but Make It Runway
One of the best things about Rabid is the way it mashes up glamour and gross-out. The Soskas play the fashion world for satire: everyone is shallow, vicious, or oblivious, which makes it deeply satisfying when the infection starts ripping through the scene like a biologically transmitted middle finger.
Gunter, the flamboyant designer, decides that Chelsea (Rose’s best friend and model) is the perfect face to launch Rose’s collection. Chelsea supports Rose, cheers her on, and in return gets front-row seats to bioengineered doom. This is what you get for being a good friend in horror: trauma and a death scene.
The infection spreads in bite-sized increments—literally. Rose goes out, loses control, attacks people in spasms of primal hunger, and then acts confused and horrified afterward. Her victims transform minutes or hours later into rage-fueled, feral carriers, spreading chaos in streets, studios, and backstage corridors.
It works both as literal horror and metaphor: Rose has finally become the devastating force the fashion world always wanted—just not in the way they expected. She’s a walking PR disaster with a body count.
Meanwhile, the authorities try to contain what is essentially couture rabies, leading to urban panic, violence, and a growing sense that whatever Burroughs did is not only out of control, but evolving.
Dr. Burroughs: “Trust Me, I’m Definitely Not a Supervillain”
Ted Atherton’s Dr. Burroughs is a delightfully evil little puzzle: calm, courteous, clinical, and clearly out of his mind. He speaks about his experimental work in the same tone one might use to describe an exciting new skincare line, except his version of retinol is a parasitic organism fused into Rose’s nervous system.
We eventually learn that this all started with his wife, the tragic prototype. She had cancer. He “saved” her. Her body is now a mindless shell of living tissue, providing the so-called stem-cell material being used in treatments. So if you’re wondering whether the clinic’s bio-ingredients are ethically sourced, the answer is: absolutely not. They’re wife-sourced.
Burroughs doesn’t just want to heal people: he wants to unlock immortality. Rose, with her parasite, is the key. He’s not bothered by the plague of violent, rabid carriers; that’s just the messy beta stage. He’s in full “This is how progress looks” mode, which is exactly what you’d expect from a man who treats his spouse like a permanent organ donor.
By the time Rose and Brad head to his clinic to figure out why her graft is acting like a fleshy USB drive for murder, it’s clear they’re not patients—they’re lab animals.
Parasites, Knives, and Really Committing to the Bit
One of the film’s best body horror beats is Rose’s relationship with the parasite. It’s disturbingly intimate: emerging from her as a proboscis she can’t fully control, feeding on others, leaving her disoriented and ashamed afterward. It’s not subtle, and it’s not meant to be. The Soskas lean hard into themes of consent, infection, and the horror of your own body betraying you.
Brad, trying to save Rose, learns the truth about the parasite from Burroughs—and still stands by her. Which, in fairness, does make him top-tier boyfriend material. “In sickness and in… extraneous face tentacle” is not in most vows.
In the final confrontation, Rose chooses to reclaim her autonomy in the most visceral way possible: she uses Brad’s knife to cut her parasite off. It’s brutal, self-mutilating, and deeply cathartic. She’d rather risk death than continue as someone else’s experiment, someone else’s monster.
Both she and Brad appear to die in the aftermath. For a moment, it feels like the story has reached its grim but thematically consistent end.
And then Rose wakes up.
Burroughs, unfazed, announces he’s cured the rabies epidemic and plans to keep Rose captive for further research. It’s a beautifully nasty beat: even your heroic self-sacrifice doesn’t matter to a system that sees your body as intellectual property. Rose fought her own biology and won, only to lose to capitalism and a lab coat.
Honestly, that might be the most realistic horror element in the entire movie.
Gore, Glamour, and the Soska Signature
As a remake, Rabid doesn’t try to out-Cronenberg Cronenberg. Instead, it feels like a sibling to the Twisted Twins’ earlier work—especially American Mary: a woman mutilated, reassembled, exploited, and calling bloody dibs on her own autonomy.
The practical effects are appropriately gooey: infected victims convulse, foam, and rip into others with sickening fervor. Rose’s transformation—from disfigured recluse to seductive vector of death—is handled with both sympathy and black humor. There’s a constant tension between empowerment and violation: How much of Rose’s “new self” is her, and how much is the parasite? And who benefits from which version?
The cast fully commits. Vandervoort sells Rose’s arc from fragile to feral to defiant. Hanneke Talbot’s Chelsea is a genuinely likable friend, which makes her fate hurt more. Mackenzie Gray’s Gunter is the kind of fashion ghoul who deserves to be attacked by something eventually, and the movie is happy to oblige. CM Punk shows up as Billy, and if you’ve ever wanted to see a wrestler in a horror movie that’s not ashamed of being one, you’re in good hands.
Final Diagnosis: Rabid, Ridiculous, and Weirdly Sharp
Rabid (2019) is not a subtle film. It’s not trying to be. It’s bloody, loud, camp-adjacent, and occasionally messy. But under the gore and the designer fabric, it’s doing something smart and vicious: skewering beauty culture, medical exploitation, and the way women’s bodies get treated like public projects instead of personal property.
Is it perfect? No. The pacing wobbles. Some side characters feel like stylish cannon fodder. But the movie has a clear personality: angry, playful, and dripping with body horror that actually means something.
If you like your horror with:
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👗 Runway drama
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🧬 Mad science
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🩸 Creative parasites
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🧠 Actual thematic content under the splatter
…then this remake is absolutely worth your time.
Just maybe don’t watch it right before a cosmetic procedure. Or a fashion show. Or a doctor’s appointment. Or, honestly, before you look too long in the mirror and start wondering what your own skin is plotting.
