No director has chosen to base so many films on difficult, if not seemingly impenetrable, novels as David Cronenberg. He has woven story and throughline out of the hallucinatory mishmash "Naked Lunch" and found love and life in J.G. Ballard's difficult "Crash," to...

Filmmaker David Cronenberg has gained an idenity as a prominent Canadian artist through works such as 'Naked Lunch' and 'The Fly.' Cronenberg's films are characterized by a conflict against nature and the sense of omniscnience and control in his protagonists as well as a...

Hey Viggo, Vat’s Dat? Canadian director David Cronenberg—who has truly made some cuckoo movies in the past (Naked Lunch, Crash, Spider)—makes an appearance after a screening of Eastern Promises. For those of us who have nursed a crush on Viggo Mortensen since he was the...

Viggo Mortensen, who showed his junk in David Cronenberg's hit Eastern Promises, was presented with a "Rolling R" award for the best "Russian" performance by a Hollywood actor by RUSSIA! magazine. The official citation commends Mortensen for his "sensitive, multifaceted and authentic" portrayal of Nikolai,...

In the following essay, Parker explores sexuality, AIDS, and national identity in Rabid. He theorizes that the horror genre and other “narrative systems” contributed to a popular conception about the nature of AIDS and about how it is transmitted. In addition he compares the struggle for male identity to Canada’s struggle for national identity.

In the following essay, Beard discusses Cronenberg’s work in the context of the debate on what English-Canadian culture is and means. He asserts that Cronenberg’s male protagonists mostly resemble “the long line of Canadian cinematic and literary unheroes and their pattern of failure, powerlessness and hopeless waste.”

In the following essay, Haas places Cronenberg within the tradition of the gothic narrative, and compares his “monsters” with those found in films of the 1930s.