The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 142

COVER STORY SHIVERS (1975): In this film parasites attack tenants of an apartment complex, infecting them with uncontrollable sexual desire. The idea came to Cronenberg in a dream in which "a couple are lying in bed, and this thing, sort of like a spider, came out of the woman's mouth." The things, which in the film became oozy, blood-soaked blobs, originate under the skin of Alan Migicovsky, mm i morn Vrm left (This image was copied in the film Alien.) The inventive makeup effects were the work of Joe Blasco, a Hollywood veteran. He made an exact replica of the actor's chest out of thin foam latex and wr CT; taped it to him. The parasites were balloons placed underneath and inflated through long tubes offscreen. tin ii i m' iin i iiiiii mini alk about horror," says David Cronenberg.

'The baby was up at 3 a.m. and I have to see my accountant this afternoon." Cronenberg, the man American movie RABID (1977) Cronenberg has "no idea" what gave him the idea for this vampirish tale in which Marilyn Chambers, the porno star, grows a retractable, syringelike organ under her armpit after a botched operation. To stay alive she is compelled to suck fresh human blood with her new appendage. Her attacks cause hundreds of Montrealers to foam at the mouth and run around biting people, A as in the scene at left. The disease is brought under control only when the Chambers character is bitten by one of her own crazed victims and finally dies.

The fake foam was only Bromo Seltzer with a little vegetable coloring added, but the film touched primal fears from England to Hong Kong. will alienate the kind of audience who would go to see Dressed to Kill but not Rabid. This way they're sucked in better. We don't want to scare people away." Or break them up. The market tests also showed something that Cronenberg doesn't mention: although downtown audiences were stunned and "almost delirious" in their high ratings of Scanners, the suburban audiences burst into laughter when the head exploded Tough places, those shopping plazas.

THE POSTER SHOWS THE CORPSE of a young, seminude woman sitting upright in a freezer, her eyes staring blindly, frozen foam congealed around half-opened lips. This advertisement for Rabid (1977) was plastered in the London subway for months. The English, it seems, have an obsession with rabies, and the film, about an epidemic in Montreal, did spectacular business in the United Kingdom. It also did okay around the rest of the world a $15 million box office gross on an investment of $530,000. Cronenberg may be considered a schlock director by some critics most repulsive movie I've ever seen an atrocity, a disgrace," wrote one about Shivers), but his movies are consistently successful.

Shivers (1975), produced for $185,000, returned more than $10 million. The Brood (1979) has earned $5 million and is still in circulation. As well, Cronenberg's sanguinary vision (an actor on the set of The Brood gave him a T-shirt with his usual directorial instruction. "More blood! More blood!" written on it) has earned the respect of his colleagues. After seeing The Brood, Stephen King, author of The Shining, the movie version of which was directed by Stanley Kubrick, told a Boston Phoenix reporter, "I think Cronenberg blows Kubrick out of the water." And john (Halloween) Carpenter said in a recent interview, "Cronenberg is better than the rest of us combined" The American magazine Cinefantas-tique is equally enthusiastic.

It recently ran a cover story praising him as "a bona fide auteur," because he has both written and directed all his movies except Fast Company (1979), a film about racing drivers. "His work," raved the critics have dubbed "Canada's Baron of Blood," is sitting in a downtown Toronto editing room where he has come to attend to another urgent matter on this blustery, bone-chilling day. After years of creating horror flicks aimed at shocking the drive-in movie crowd out of its popcorn, he has decided to make abid for the mainstream with his seventh film. Scanners, a futuristic sci-fi thriller about telepathy. And market tests in San Diego and Philadelphia have shown that the opening scene the one where a man's head blows up and spills brains all over his jacket will be hard going for mainstream audiences unaccustomed to taking their horror straight up.

At the San Diego showing, an editor from one of the local papers "just fainted away in the aisle when the head exploded, and two other people had to remove her, so they couldn't watch the rest of the movie either," says Cronenberg, sounding disappointed So, only weeks before the $4.5 million Scanners opens at major theatres across North America, 80 in the New York City area alone, Cronenberg is in the editing room at Dark Horse Productions rearranging sequencea It is an uncharacteristic act for the normally uncompromising writer-director. When 37 teenage boys fainted during showings of his earlier feature, Rabid, all at the part where the surgeon has a paroxysm during an operation and cuts off the nurse's finger, Cronenberg had been pleased Horror movies are supposed to upset people. The horror genre is a collusion between the film and the audience," he says. "The audience knows what they're getting into, and they challenge you to show them something they haven't seea" But Scanners is different Movie mavens have advised him that putting the exploding head farther back in the film could mean a difference of $5 million in theatre rentals. "The feeling," says Cronenberg, "is that that first scene TODAY14.