Screened: October 30, 2007
Format: DVD - Criterion Collection (2004)
Horror Fest 2007
Canadian David Cronenberg has established himself as one of the most credible and visionary directors working in film today. His 1983 feature, Videodrome, is often regarded as his first work of true genius. Until the late 1980’s, his films were typically labeled as horror, but even Cronenberg’s early work defies genre conventions and categorization. Prior to Videodrome, his films—including Rabid, The Brood, and Scanners—highlighted his innovation and his shrewd instincts for getting under his audience’s skin. With Videodrome, Cronenberg revealed not only his own mastery of the medium, but a modern nightmare that remains disturbing and relevant in the twenty-first century.
As in many of his films, Cronenberg exhibits a reserved, almost understated hand in his direction of Videodrome, preferring to let his images speak for themselves. His actors deliver their lines in a flat, uninterested manner. For all the grotesqueries of Videodrome’s techno-organic special effects, the mundane sets and props seem almost banal. James Woods, the archetypical Intense, Fast-Talking Sleazy Guy, seems out of place at first in the lead performance. That is, until we begin to witness his mental—and perhaps physical—transformation under the influence of Videodrome. Then the genius of his casting becomes apparent, as a masculine, aggressive, scenery-chewing character actor is subjugated to the will of the electronic signal.
Videodrome contains elements of science fiction, thriller, and avant-garde film, but it is undeniably a work of unsettling and repulsive horror. Specifically, it addresses the horror of the Television Age, which is itself a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. Motifs from both the literate science fiction tradition and urban legend surface in the film: subliminal messages; electromagnetic waves that can inflict disease or kill; snuff films; flesh that transforms into machine, and machine into flesh; brainwashed assassins; vast political and corporate conspiracies. And most of all, the tattered but eerily persistent notion that electronic mass media represents Something New, an evolution not just of the social order, but of the individual. If you find yourself wondering whether particular scenes or shots in Videodrome are real or a hallucination, ask yourself, “Does it matter?†If it is a hallucination, would the reality underneath be any less horrifying?