SOURCE: “Canadian Horror Made Flesh: Contextualizing David Cronenberg,” in Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, Vol. 18, No. 2, Winter, 1999, pp. 37–51.

In the following essay, Lowenstein defines Gothic films, shock horror films, science fiction films, and art films. He compares and contrasts Cronenberg’s Shivers and Crash, and also situates them into the horror genre.

David Cronenberg has playfully suggested that the characters who inhabit Crash (1996) might actually be the parasite-infected condominium dwellers from Shivers (1975), his first commercial feature (Smith 17). Despite an interval of over twenty years between the two films, Cronenberg’s comment seems more accurate than outlandish. Indeed, perhaps the sole cinematic context that finally suits Crash is the niche carved out by the director’s previous work, a body of films marked by a thematic resemblance as powerful as their ability to confound any tidy classification—particularly with regard to genre or national character. In...