Cronenberg’s First Finger Chop-Off
The Toronto Star has conducted an interview with David Cronenberg in anticipation of the premiere of Eastern Promises at the Toronto International Film Festival. This time around the director takes on the recent spate of torture movies, with considerably more sense than anyone who throws around the utterly useless term “torture porn”.
“When I see what’s out there, it’s not new. It’s not new stuff to me. I alluded to it in Videodrome, which was like, 30 years ago. What is new is the Internet, where we’ve been outgored by Muslim extremists. There’s the accessibility, anytime of day or night, that you can have this, and there have been attempts to legitimize it.”
There’s more where that came from, including Cronenberg’s playful reminiscence of Rabid, the suggestion that his obsession with the body hasn’t abated despite his movement away from horror, and Viggo Mortensen’s cock and balls. Don’t ever change, David Cronenberg.
September 5th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
I don’t think “torture porn” is a useless term at all, utterly or no, and I make my argument here:
http://www.alltooflat.com/about/personal/sean/2007/09/in_defense_of_torture_porntowa.html
September 5th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
I love that he won’t do supernatural horror because it would be an endorsement of religion. He’s not against it as a subgenre (or a bunch of ‘em, whatever), but he’s the rare atheist that represents.
And for me, “The Fly” is right up there with “The Thing” when it comes to special effects-laden body horror reimaginings of black & white classics that surpass the original but have a really distracting scene involving a computer that works in a way no computer ever has and probably won’t for decades yet to come.