David Cronenberg was an unknown filmmaker with just two experimental features (Stereo and Crimes of the Future) under his belt when he wrote and directed Shivers (1975), a groundbreaking thriller that launched not only Cronenberg’s career but an entire Canadian horror film industry. Prior to Shivers (also known as They Came From Within, The Parasite Murders, and many other titles), Canadian horror movies were so rare that Cronenberg had to fly in an American makeup effects artist because he couldn’t find anyone in Canada who could do that kind of work; following Shivers’ commercial success, however, there was a boom […]

With Todd Haynes’s classic Safe now streaming on Criterion Channel (and seeming utterly prescient in its concerns), we’re reposting our Summer, 1995 cover story: Larry Gross’s interview with Haynes. — Editor Todd Haynes, director of Sundance Grand Prize Winner Poison and the underground classic Superstar, was inspired to make his latest feature, Safe, by his visceral response to New Age recovery therapists who tell the physically ill that they have made themselves sick, that they are responsible for their own suffering. Carol White, played superbly by Julianne Moore, is an archetypally banal homemaker in the San Fernando Valley who one […]

Some of my best conversations have been with people who weren’t there. Absent was OK—even nonexistent was OK. As long as I imagined somebody was there. I did that as a prolific letter writer, I did that as a novelist, and most recently, I did that as a filmmaker. More than 20 years after the defining trainwreck of my youth—having my teacher/mentor disappear with all the footage of a 16mm film we’d shot together—I decided to make a film that would both document the joys and perils of teenage creativity and unfurl the detective work behind the mystery of the […]

My “Recommended on a Friday” column is taking a holiday break, but in its place we’re spinning off Jim Hemphill’s picks into their own weekly series of posts. Here, Hemphill goes genre in his recommendations for Thanksgiving weekend. — SM Christmas comes early this week for horror fans with the release of one unadulterated masterpiece (David Cronenberg’s Rabid) and a trio of cult favorites (the two C.H.U.D. movies and Brian Yuzna’s underrated Return of the Living Dead 3). All four films, in different ways, embody virtues that are much rarer now than they were when the movies were released: an […]

In his latest film, Captain Fantastic, Viggo Mortensen plays Ben, a man intent on raising his children on his own terms in the wild forests of the Pacific Northwest. When he learns of his wife’s sudden death, he must uproot his family from the life they are accustomed to and try to find their own path back in civilization. The film had an incredibly successful festival run after its Sundance premiere, picking up top awards in Cannes, Deauville and Karlovy Vary. And recently, the film picked up the Audience Award at the Rome Film Fest, where Mortensen and director Matt […]

A surreal and entirely original coming-of-age tale, Closet Monster tells the story of Oscar, a gay, cinephilic high school senior who has been grappling with the implications of his parents’ divorce — and a witnessed act of gay bashing — by, among other things, conversing with his “spirit animal”: Buffy, a pet hamster voiced by Isabella Rossellini. The feature debut of Canadian writer/director Stephen Dunn, the film has drawn comparisons to the work of countrymen David Cronenberg and Xavier Dolan, but it pulses to its own unexpectedly sincere wavelength. Below, we asked Dunn about that Cronenberg connection, star Connor Jessup […]

British cinematographer Peter Suschitzky is known for his collaborations with David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis, A Dangerous Method, Eastern Promises, A History of Violence, Spider, eXistenZ, Crash, Naked Lunch and Dead Ringers). His eclectic career saw him start working in fantastical “what if” tales on It Happened Here (1966) and Privilege (1967). He worked with Peter Watkins, Albert Finney, Peter Watkins, John Boorman, Ken Russell and Warris Hussein in Britain, before Hollywood came calling. is first trip to Cannes, working on Charlie Bubbles by Albert Finney, was cancelled after the festival was stopped by the May ’68 protests led by Jean Luc-Godard. This year, I met him at the […]

Now in its nineteenth year, the Fantasia International Film Festival is known as one of the premier destinations for exciting genre cinema. With a focus primarily on horror, Asian genre fare, and more indescribable film art, this three-week Montreal festival annually takes over Concordia University and other venues to entertain in provocative fashion. And while there are many goings-on taking place concurrently within the city (such as the massive Just For Laughs comedy fest and Osheaga’s live music performances), Fantasia always seems to hold a special place in the province of Quebec. “We’re not a subtle event,” co-director Mitch Davis noted […]

The following report on five pioneering immersive media projects — a report detailing their viewership, audience engagement and creators’ best practices — appears on Filmmaker courtesy of StoryCode, where it is crossposted. Anyone creating immersive media has run into a similar challenge: people outside of the creators’ bubble are not exactly sure what you mean by “immersive”, “interactive”, or “transmedia” experiences. Producers of this new form of media often get questions like: Where is the business model? What are the audience numbers like? How engaged are users/what is the impact? Doesn’t this just distract us from good storytelling? This article […]

Before David Cronenberg evolved – or rather, in keeping with Cronenberg’s preoccupations, mutated – into a respected auteur, he rose to prominence as the purveyor of a distinct subset of genre films labeled as “body horror.” At the heart of his early tales of transmogrification, decay and disease lay an innately human fear of mortality. In Cronenberg’s latest, Maps to the Stars, the director explores a uniquely post-millennial form of mortality he has christened “pre-death.” In a culture obsessed with recording and sharing, to not be photographed is in some sense to cease to exist. That existential crisis runs through […]