The body is reality: Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg on mortality and making movies – National [Video]

For nearly his entire career, David Cronenberg has been considered a trailblazer of the ‘body horror’ subgenre — and it’s easy to see why.

The renowned Canadian filmmaker is behind Scanners, Videodrome and the 1986 remake of The Fly — just some of the highly influential sci-fi and horror classics he’s made throughout the decades. Many of the films share a focus on disturbing and graphic violations of the human body.

Yet the 82-year-old Torontonian has only reluctantly accepted that title — or allowed others to connect the phrase ‘body horror’ to his films.

“I’ve never used that term to describe my own work,” Cronenberg says in an interview with Global National’s Eric Sorensen. “But it has stuck, and I’m stuck with it.”

Personal connections

For the average moviegoer, Cronenberg’s latest work, The Shrouds, won’t necessarily help with his defence. The film is all about a tech entrepreneur inventing a machine that monitors corpses as they decompose inside their graves …