Cronenberg Blogathon: The Brood (1979), or David Cronenberg Presents: MurderBabies

by John Eno

[Delimited Liminality's John Eno finds reason to think Cronenberg's ideas sometimes outpace his execution, especially in The Brood.]

David Cronenberg was pegged early on as a horror director, albeit a director of horror films that didn't fit well in the genre as it had been established up to that point. A lot of this was due to his interest in particularly visceral horror, especially that which affects the body from within rather than from without. Even before I'd seen anything he'd directed, I knew him by reputation as a director of horror in which the monsters aren't any kind of external force but rather come from within, in the most literal way. (That the title of his first feature film is, well, They Came From Within is telling.)

Seventies Cinema Revival: The Brood (1979)

by Tony Dayoub



Is there a more terrifying sequence in the last 40 years of cinema than the climax of David Cronenberg's chiller, The Brood? In it, Oliver Reed—that handsome rake who (according to Derek Armstrong) once received 36 stitches in the face after one of his numerous bar fights—walks into a dormitory full of sleeping, monstrous, children to help another traumatized innocent escape her captors. And as the evil little devils begin to wake up, and jump down from their bunk beds to surround Reed (Tommy), it is he who we are afraid for.