An overlooked early film with apocalyptic proportions from Canadian body horror legend David Cronenberg.
A highly underrated gem from the early works of the Canadian king of
body horror,
David Cronenberg: a man whose films are so distinct, his name became an
adjective to describe grotesquely mutated bodies. Speaking of mutations, in
Rabid, a woman develops an orifice under her armpit following an experimental surgery that saved her life after a fiery motorcycle crash. This is no ordinary orifice that develops under one’s armpit after an experimental surgery though, no, this orifice hides a weird little phallic protuberance with a needle on the end that pokes out and sucks blood from sexually predatory men. This is no ordinary vampiric phallic protuberance that emerges out of an armpit orifice to suck blood from sexually predatory men though, no, this vampiric phallic protuberance also injects the men with a highly infectious disease that causes people to become mindless, bloodthirsty maniacs.
In a way you could say they become... rabid? Also at one point a shopping mall Santa gets machine-gunned to death, so in classic Cronenbergian fashion this movie is working on all cylinders.
Despite the insane premise, the events that unfold in the final act of this film are some of the most believable and haunting depictions of a near-apocalypse I’ve ever witnessed, and that’s always what I find so compelling about Cronenberg. He develops these absurdities that otherwise seem to exist inside a grounded reality with very human characters - characters whose reactions to these disturbing situations and horrifying transformations are often genuinely heartbreaking.
The visual design of Cronenberg’s films walk hand-in-hand with this type of storytelling as well. His aesthetic is highly stylized, but it’s not flashy or in-your-face, there’s a refined subtleness to his compositions that slowly but surely reel you into these ordinary worlds where extraordinary events unfold. The man is truly a marvel. I mean how many filmmakers can you name that are so influential and so thematically consistent that they birth their own subgenre?
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