Shivers

AKA: The Parasite Murders
AKA: It Came From Within

Dr. Hobbes, a scientist living in an isolated, luxury apartment complex, gets the bright idea to use genetically engineered parasites as a cheaper alternative for organ transplants, an idea which many of his colleagues feel is creepy and icky enough all on its own. But, the guy is a genius when it comes to conning people out of money, so they’re not surprised to find out he’s been funded and has already started his experiments. What they don’t realize however, is that Hobbes is also a certified FREAK who thinks humanity has become too intellectual. So he’s engineered his little worm creatures to be “a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease” with the intention of turning “the world into one beautiful, mindless orgy.” All against their will, of course. Fun. That sounds like just the kind of crap that could happen because some num-nut didn’t bother to read the fine print on some creepy, kinky old dude’s grant application….

Anyway, it turns out Hobbes experiments perhaps worked a smidge too well, even for him, because he strangles his test subject and tries to bury the evidence of his experiments by dissolving them with acid, and then offs himself, in one final, bloody hurrah in the name of Science!. But unfortunately he’s too late to stop whatever it is he’s started, because the parasites have already begun to spread to other people in the apartment complex. So now it’s up to the complex’s resident physician and Hobbes’ colleague (who did manage to read the fine print) to try to contain the infestation before it gets out of hand.

Damn useless doctors…

Shivers is a Canadian Sci-fi/horror film from 1975, and is the third film from bloody horror auteur David Cronenberg (but only his first to be feature length). Which, for horror fans, is very exciting. But if you hear Cronenberg’s name and go into this film thinking “Woo Hoo! Scanners! The Fly! Videodrome!” you’re going to probably walk away a little disappointed. Because while this is still a Cronenberg film, you must remember that this is an early Cronenberg film, so it very much feels like Cronenberg-lite. Like, you can see a lot of the same recurring themes and disturbing imagery he often likes to use, it’s just that it’s all done on a much smaller scale, because, unsurprisingly, he had a much smaller budget. So it’s still something you’d expect from him, just maybe not to the extent you might expect if you’re at all more familiar with his latter films.

It’s probably best to temper your expectations of Shivers by thinking of it as a low-budget production….Because that’s what it is, and it contains all the flaws and eccentricities associated with such a film. I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s still fine for what it is, but you can easily tell that this was a film done on the cheap. And it’s not anything truly egregious, just a combination of a lot of little things that make it obvious. Like, the creature effects are creepy, gooey and disturbing, just like you’d expect from a Cronenberg production, but if you pay close attention you can also probably spot some of the string-work used to make them move. There are also times when the sound sometimes ends up being a little muddled, or the framing of certain scenes looks hella awkward. And the acting is also kinda all over the place, with the film being cast with several unknowns, as well as familiar faces like the lovely Barbara Steele.

But the thing that makes the movie’s low-budget-ness really stand out is the scenery. Part of the film’s premise is that these are supposed to be luxury dwellings, and while the initial still-frames you’re shown look to match up to that claim, what you actually end up with on screen looks like a lot of empty units that hastily had furniture thrown in right before production. Most of the walls are barren, nothing matches, and overall the few furnishings that are there just look altogether cheap…even by 1970s standards. Absolutely nothing about the place screams “luxury” to me. If anything it looks like they borrowed all their furniture from poor college students. Which, you know, is fine under the circumstances. When you’ve got less than 200k at your disposal you just gotta work with whatever you can get your grubby little mitts on. I get it, I do. It just would have been nice if they had at least, I don’t know, found a way to somehow spruce things up or unify their design concept with all their slap-dash decor.

But I can forgive those issues because they’re mostly money related. What actually irked me the most about the movie revolved around how the parasites themselves were implemented. Not physically, but story-wise. Because absolutely nothing about how these little buggers work is in any way consistent. And I know that you can argue that the randomness adds to the horror in some way, but instead of finding it scary I honestly found it a bit annoying. The movie starts off by explaining that the parasites affect how the brain functions and are transmitted through sex, which would be scary enough on its own, considering this is an isolated community in the 1970’s, so I assume half the complex was already banging the other half and 90% of the place was already infected with something before the movie even started. But then suddenly people are also spitting up the parasites, or they’re bursting out of abdomens (and then miraculously crawling back in and healing the wounds? I don’t know…), and suddenly the little buggers are inching around, burning people’s skin, and infecting people like hellish crawl worms that ooze skin-irritating acid. Which also begs the question: if just touching them sears your skin like a second degree burn, how on Earth are these things not also liquifying your internal organs while they’re wriggling around in there? But that’s a complaint for another day. Point is, there’s no consistency.

And just how they end up affecting individual people on a case-by-case basis turns out to be even more random. Some people turn into the equivalent of sex-obsessed zombies in a matter of moments. For others, the reveal of their contamination is saved for the end, presumably to invoke maximum shock value. Some people seem to turn into nothing more than mindless horney-toads, while others appear to retain their strategic intellect in order to trick and/or trap more people into being infected. There’s just no rhyme or reason to it, and I think the narrative would have felt stronger, and wouldn’t have felt quite so jumbled, if it had just had some more concrete  “rules” to follow regarding what was going on.

Complaints aside though, Shivers still ends up being a fun and disturbing horror movie, it’s just that it’s not a particularly well polished one. The creatures look good, but they’re rudimentary. The acting is sufficient, but nothing stands out. And the story is highly disturbing, but the pacing is a little wonky and there are some irritating plot inconsistencies. But all in all it’s not bad as far as feature debuts go. You can certainly see all the potential Cronenberg had, and you can also pinpoint several themes and even bits of imagery he would come back to in later films. For Cronenberg fans this is a must see, and while it might not be as great or as well known as his later work, for general horror fans it’s still disturbing and interesting enough to be worth at least one viewing.

Shivers is available on a variety of streaming services.

Shivers is also available on Bluray.

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