Every major horror movie and every major horror director has their blatant imitators—except for David Cronenberg. Nobody knows how to imitate him. He’s too weird, too unique. He’s not a product of Saturday matinee horror fandom or a lover of trash. His films are intense and bizarre, but always under complete control, a mad invention carefully crafted to work perfectly. No matter how disgusting they get, Cronenberg’s films are always more about brains than blood—and the rip-off artists don’t know what to do with that. Cronenberg’s singularity makes his films play decades later as still alien experiences, uncomfortable and strikingly relevant.
The technology in Videodrome is outdated, but nothing else about it is. The characters in this film tote video cassettes, use cathode ray tube televisions and lead actor James Woods runs a gutter-level broadcast station desperate for attention way down the analog dial, but it’s a small leap to recognize the connection to contemporary times. Yesterday’s television is today’s internet. Both are life viewed through a screen. The screens talk to you, engross you, titillate you and change you. We love our screens so much that, like all things that we love, they could be our great vulnerability.
In this story that involves snuff videos laced with a subliminal signal that causes intense, life-destroying hallucinations for the viewer (Cronenberg’s usual creepy doctors are replaced here with creepy TV tech heads), we see how something sinister can happen when people can be lead to not trust their own eyes. That swindle might be easier to accomplish than we think. Ever go out to hear live music and notice the people watching the show through their phone cameras? Technology can replace our senses, if that’s what we really want. And some of us seem to really want that. Today’s smartphones are all but a new human appendage, like James Woods’s stomach vagina/VCR and his slimy gun-hand here, executed with some of the best and most ambitious gore effects in movie history (practical effects genius Rick Baker worked on this).
I like to see classic movies in theaters and it seems like every old horror movie I see gets laughs over its effects and its technique and anything in it that seems dated.
Videodrome does not get laughs. It still makes the room uneasy. It’s a queasy classic.