That said, the last thing I want to do is make another tired argument over what counts as a horror movie. Indeed, we see a fresh example of this in the promotion and reception of his latest film-his first in eight years- Crimes of the Future (available on VOD today), despite the fact, for as horrific as many of the images and ideas within it are, it’s not really a horror movie. Certainly, and in spite of his objections, this is to be expected: more than any other director, Cronenberg has examined, in detail both coldly clinical and gleefully perverse, the ways in which psychosexual desire, trauma, and society’s increasing dependency on technology manifest in the gruesome evolution and/or evisceration of the human body. Yet, when his name is invoked, it’s usually as shorthand for body horror.
David Cronenberg is that rare filmmaker who is a genre unto himself, such that his name has become an adjective.
