Saturday, October 12, 2013

OctoBOOr 1st: The Brood, dir. David Cronenberg, 1979 (Canada). 5/5 pumpkins.
“Thirty seconds after you're born you have a past and sixty seconds after that, you begin to lie to yourself about it.”


This is Kramer vs. Kramer in a horror context, wherein the family unit is no longer a safe harbor but rather a cauldron of envy, suspicion, and abuse. It’s a chilly and clinical allegory for divorce. Nearly all of the themes Cronenberg has spent the past 30+ years probing are present here – the revolt of the body against oneself, the shaky ground one’s reality stands upon, the rejection of the supernatural in favor of the speculative scientific. Cronenberg made better films later in his career, but he never again made one quite as pure as this one.


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