PROMOTIONS
David Cronenberg is joined by a number of esteemed guests, as well as several of his closest collaborators past and present, to introduce numerous screenings for our complete retrospective of his vastly influential oeuvre, featuring several new prints and restorations commissioned especially for this programme.
Films in From Within: The Films of David Cronenberg
- Dead Ringers
- David Cronenberg
- Jeremy Irons gives a pair of remarkable performances as twin gynecologists whose symbiotic bond leads them towards mutual self-destruction, in one of Cronenberg's most sophisticated fusions of the physical and the cerebral.
Thursday October 31 6:30 PM 
Sunday November 17 4:00 PM Tuesday November 26 9:45 PM Sunday January 19 7:00 PM
- Dead Ringers introduced by Jeremy Irons & David Cronenberg
- We are honoured to welcome Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons to introduce our screening of his first collaboration with David Cronenberg.
Thursday October 31 6:30 PM
- Naked Lunch
- David Cronenberg
- David Cronenberg fused episodes from William S. Burroughs' notorious (and notoriously unfilmable) novel with elements from the writer's biography and his own unique imaginings to create this surreal, shocking, hilarious, poetic, conceptually and visually striking masterpiece.
Friday November 1 9:00 PM Sunday November 24 7:00 PM Sunday December 8 7:30 PM Monday December 23 8:45 PM Sunday January 12 6:30 PM
- Naked Lunch introduced by Jeremy Thomas and David Cronenberg
- David Cronenberg and Naked Lunch producer Jeremy Thomas introduce their ambitious adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel.
Friday November 1 9:00 PM
- Scanners
- David Cronenberg
- A powerful telepath (a.k.a. "scanner") finds himself caught in the middle of a war between a sinister weapons firm and a scanner renegade, in David Cronenberg's slick (and memorably gory) sci-fi thriller.
Saturday November 2 1:00 PM Tuesday November 19 9:15 PM Sunday December 22 5:45 PM Saturday January 18 7:00 PM
- M. Butterfly
- David Cronenberg
- A French civil servant (Jeremy Irons) in Mao's China falls in love with a beautiful opera singer (John Lone) — not realizing that "she" is both a man and a spy — in Cronenberg's adaptation of the acclaimed stage play by David Henry Hwang.
Saturday November 2 3:30 PM Sunday December 1 7:00 PM
- M. Butterfly introduced by Denise Cronenberg
- Costume designer Denise Cronenberg introduces Cronenberg's ambitious historical drama.
Saturday November 2 3:30 PM
- The Fly
- David Cronenberg
- David Cronenberg's remake of the fondly remembered 1950s creature feature — about a brilliant, eccentric scientist (Jeff Goldblum) who finds himself undergoing a hideous transformation following a botched teleportation experiment — is one of the signature films in his oeuvre.
Saturday November 2 7:00 PM Saturday November 23 7:00 PM Thursday January 16 9:00 PM Sunday January 19 1:00 PM
- The Fly with Stephan Dupuis
- The Academy Award-winning special effects and prosthetics designer discusses his work co-creating the memorably gruesome effects for David Cronenberg's brilliant remake of the 1950s creature feature.
Saturday November 2 7:00 PM
- Fast Company
- David Cronenberg
- One of Cronenberg's most uncharacteristic films, this action-packed drag-racing drama attests to the director's gearhead fascination with cars and machinery.
Sunday November 3 2:00 PM
- Videodrome
- David Cronenberg
- A mysterious pirate station lures a cocky Toronto cable entrepreneur (James Woods) into the reality-warping world of the "new flesh," in David Cronenberg's prescient and vastly influential vision of a media age run amok.
Sunday November 3 4:30 PM Sunday November 24 4:00 PM Friday January 17 9:00 PM
- Shivers
- David Cronenberg
- A sluglike parasite transforms the swinging residents of a Montreal condo into a legion of sex-crazed zombies, in David Cronenberg's controversial first professional feature.
Sunday November 3 9:30 PM Friday November 15 8:45 PM Wednesday December 25 9:00 PM Tuesday December 31 6:00 PM Saturday January 11 6:30 PM
- Rabid
- David Cronenberg
- Porn star Marilyn Chambers stars in David Cronenberg's second feature as a young Quebec woman who undergoes an experimental plastic surgery treatment that transforms her into a blood-lusting, sexually insatiable disease-spreader.
Friday November 8 6:30 PM Thursday December 19 9:00 PM Monday December 30 9:00 PM
- Crash
- David Cronenberg
- Cronenberg's masterful, icily fascinating adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel was one of the most lauded and controversial films of his career.
Friday November 8 8:45 PM Saturday December 7 1:00 PM Sunday December 29 4:30 PM Saturday January 4 6:30 PM
- The Dead Zone
- David Cronenberg
- Adapted from the Stephen King bestseller, Cronenberg's first Hollywood feature stars Christopher Walken as a mild-mannered schoolteacher who awakens from a coma to discover that he can see the future of anyone with whom he makes physical contact.
Saturday November 9 2:30 PM Friday January 3 9:00 PM
- The Brood
- David Cronenberg
- An emotionally disturbed woman materializes her rage as a swarm of sexless, murderous children that take vengeance on those who have wronged her.
Saturday November 9 7:30 PM Sunday December 1 1:30 PM Thursday January 2 9:00 PM
- A Dangerous Method
- David Cronenberg
- The personal and professional relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) is put to the test by the arrival of a beautiful, troubled young patient (Keira Knightley), in Cronenberg's ambitious drama about the heroic age of psychoanalysis.
Sunday November 10 1:00 PM Saturday November 23 2:00 PM Sunday December 8 1:00 PM
- Stereo with David Cronenberg's Short Films
- Filmed in black and white on the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto, Cronenberg's first short feature announced the arrival of a powerful new cinematic imagination.
Saturday November 16 2:00 PM
- eXistenZ
- David Cronenberg
- Cronenberg reboots Videodrome for the virtual age in this sci-fi thriller about a video-game designer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her would-be protector (Jude Law) who plunge into the reality-warping dimensions of her new gameworld.
Saturday November 16 7:00 PM Saturday January 18 1:00 PM
- eXistenZ with Carol Spier
- The Genie Award-winning production designer discusses creating the surreal gameworld of Cronenberg's virtual-reality thriller.
Saturday November 16 7:00 PM
- Christine Ramsay on Dead Ringers
- Film scholar Christine Ramsay explores the cultural significance of "the double" and the ways in which it has informed the archetype of the twin in David Cronenberg's masterpiece Dead Ringers.
Sunday November 17 4:00 PM
- A History of Violence
- David Cronenberg
- One of Cronenberg's greatest and most complex works, this combination of searing psychological thriller and ingeniously subtle social allegory focuses on a small-town Everyman (Viggo Mortensen) who finds his hidden past catching up with him after he brutally foils an attempted stick-up.
Friday November 22 9:00 PM Saturday December 7 7:00 PM Wednesday January 8 9:30 PM
- Piers Handling on Videodrome
- In his introduction to this pivotal film in the Cronenberg canon, TIFF Director and CEO Piers Handling considers how the role of the Cronenberg protagonist changes as they began to wrestle with issues of control over their lives.
Sunday November 24 4:00 PM
- Cosmopolis
- David Cronenberg
- Cronenberg's ambitious adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel follows a billionaire New York financier (Robert Pattinson) as he traverses a rapidly crumbling city in the backseat of his limousine on the way to a fateful (and perhaps fatal) appointment.
Thursday November 28 9:00 PM
- Spider
- David Cronenberg
- Released to a halfway house on the seedy side of London, a mentally disturbed outpatient (Ralph Fiennes) finds the ghosts of his traumatic past rising before him, in Cronenberg's moody adaptation of the novel by Patrick McGrath.
Saturday November 30 1:45 PM Sunday January 5 6:30 PM
- Elijah Siegler on The Brood with David Cronenberg
- Religious Studies scholar Elijah Siegler considers the place of religion and its felt absence in Cronenberg's oeuvre prior to the screening of The Brood, and will be joined by the director himself for an onstage dialogue following the film.
Sunday December 1 1:30 PM
- Noah Cowan on Crash
- TIFF Bell Lightbox Artistic Director Noah Cowan considers the intertwining of evolution, desire and contemporary science fiction in his introduction to Cronenberg's envisioning of the notorious J.G. Ballard novel.
Saturday December 7 1:00 PM
- A History of Violence with Peter Suschitzky
- The Genie Award-winning cinematographer introduces Cronenberg's searing psychological thriller.
Saturday December 7 7:00 PM
- A Dangerous Method with Panel Discussion
- David Cronenberg and four of his longtime collaborators — costume designer Denise Cronenberg, editor Ron Sanders, composer Howard Shore and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky — take the stage following the screening of A Dangerous Method to discuss this ambitious vision of the heroic age of psychoanalysis.
Sunday December 8 1:00 PM
- Naked Lunch introduced by Howard Shore
- Academy Award-winning composer and longtime Cronenberg collaborator Howard Shore introduces our screening of Naked Lunch.
Sunday December 8 7:30 PM
- Crimes of the Future
- David Cronenberg
- A research scientist searches for his mad mentor after a plague triggered by cosmetics eliminates all sexually mature women and hideously mutates the surviving men, in Cronenberg's eerie, conceptually ambitious second independent film.
Thursday December 12 9:15 PM
- Eastern Promises
- David Cronenberg
- Cronenberg reunited with his History of Violence star Viggo Mortensen for this pungently seamy, London-set underworld drama.
Thursday January 16 6:30 PM
Note
Though David Cronenberg has always preferred the original title for his first professional feature (Shivers) to the title applied to the film for its US release version — They Came From Within — the latter is nevertheless an uncannily apt descriptor of the themes that Cronenberg would continue to explore throughout his works. Where the majority of artists of Cronenberg's generation who were drawn to science fiction sought to explore the mysteries of time and space, Cronenberg has continually been drawn to those of body and mind — to the uncharted territories within the human, psychological, biological and sexual. Whether working within the more explicitly genre-based framework of his earlier period, or merging his distinctive vision with those of other ambitious and acclaimed artists (Burroughs, Ballard, DeLillo), Cronenberg has remained both remarkably consistent and remarkably fluid in his thematic concerns. Beginning "from within," his oeuvre traces a journey that moves steadily without, to the social and political world in which those inner drives manifest themselves in ever more complex and interconnected ways.
Comprising several newly struck 35mm prints and newly prepared digital presentations created by TIFF especially for this series, this full retrospective of Cronenberg's films constitutes one of the pillars of The Cronenberg Project.
—Piers Handling & Noah Cowan
Comprising several newly struck 35mm prints and newly prepared digital presentations created by TIFF especially for this series, this full retrospective of Cronenberg's films constitutes one of the pillars of The Cronenberg Project.
—Piers Handling & Noah Cowan
FROM WITHIN: THE FILMS OF DAVID CRONENBERG
October 31, 2013 – January 19, 2014
PSYCHOPLASMIC PANIC: Cronenberg and the Rise of Body Horror
November 2 – December 21, 2013
Colin Geddes traces the emergence of the body horror genre in the work of such Cronenberg contemporaries as Brian De Palma, Ken Russell and John Carpenter, and recent films by some of Cronenberg's fearlessly transgressive cinematic offspring.
Films in Psychoplasmic Panic! Cronenberg and the Rise of Body Horror
- Altered States
- Ken Russell
- A brilliant research scientist (William Hurt) attempting to explore new levels of consciousness undergoes a terrifying series of evolutionary (and devolutionary) transformations, in Ken Russell's wildly psychedelic sci-fi drama.
Saturday November 2 10:00 PM
- Tetsuo: The Iron Man
- Tetsuo
- Shinya Tsukamoto
- Shinya Tsukamoto wild cyberpunk tale channels Kafka's The Metamorphosis, David Lynch's Eraserhead and the collected works of David Cronenberg in its vision of a world where flesh and metal have begun to horrifyingly merge.
Saturday November 9 10:00 PM
- Beyond the Black Rainbow
- Panos Cosmatos
- First-time director Panos Cosmatos creates a truly original science-fiction vision with this Cronenberg-meets-Tarkvosky fever dream.
Sunday November 10 7:00 PM
- In My Skin
- Dans ma peau
- Marina De Van
- Writer-director-star Marina de Van announced herself as one of the strongest and most intriguing female voices in contemporary horror with this shudder-inducing tale of a beautiful young PR rep whose experiments in self-mutilation begin to spiral into full-blown madness.
Saturday November 16 10:00 PM
- Body Melt
- Philip Brophy
- A new vitamin pill causes some unfortunate side effects in the residents of a small town — including mutation, melting, and exploding — in this gleefully disgusting Australian atrocity exhibition.
Sunday November 17 7:15 PM
- Possession
- Andrzej Zulawski
- A spurned husband (Sam Neill) discovers the gruesome truth of his wife's (Isabelle Adjani) adulterous secret, in this outrageous cult film from Polish provocateur Andrzej Zulawski.
Saturday November 23 10:00 PM
- Slither
- James Gunn
- Elizabeth Banks, Michael Rooker, and Firefly's Nathan Fillion star in this hilariously gross horror comedy about a small town invaded by an army of mind-controlling space slugs.
Saturday November 30 10:00 PM
- Sisters
- Brian De Palma
- A beautiful young model (Margot Kidder) tries to conceal the bloody handiwork of her murderous twin in Brian De Palma's stylish Hitchcock homage.
Saturday December 7 10:00 PM
- Society
- Brian Yuzna
- A Beverly Hills teenager discovers the bizarre truth about his upper-crust family, in Brian Yuzna's twisted and transgressive allegory about how the rich feed off the poor (here, literally!).
Saturday December 14 10:00 PM
- The Thing
- John Carpenter
- Released in the summer of E.T. to resoundingly poor box-office and critical reception, John Carpenter's big-budget remake of Howard Hawks' 1950s sci-fi classic has since been reclaimed as a modern masterpiece of the genre.
Saturday December 21 10:00 PM
Note
From the grotesques of Lon Chaney to Tod Browning's Freaks to the many adaptations of Jack Finney's landmark novel The Body Snatchers, fear, revulsion and unease about the human body has been a primary theme of horror cinema. It was the work of David Cronenberg, however, that gave this strain a generic label of its own: "body horror," which focuses on the transformation, mutation, decay or mysterious inner workings of the body and the psychological turmoil that accompanies them. Eschewing the supernatural, Cronenberg holds up a mirror (or a microscope) to the horrors that already pulsate and ooze within us, revealing how that dark biology is intimately linked to the deepest of our desires — and how attempts to tamper with or reshape the body can unleash those repressed forces, often in destructive and nightmarish ways.Parallel with Cronenberg, a number of other directors were pushing the same boundaries in the horror genre's relation to the body. Following his Hitchcock homage Sisters, Brian De Palma would go on in Carrie and The Fury to explore the links between bodily change and psychic rage that Cronenberg would elaborate on in Scanners, The Brood and The Dead Zone; Ken Russell took a break from his string of psychedelic historical pageants to tell, in Altered States, the story of a scientist whose experiments with consciousness spark a terrifying series of evolutionary (and devolutionary) transformations; John Carpenter upped the body-snatching ante with his legendarily gruesome remake of The Thing; and Polish maverick Andrzej Zulawski realized one of the most repulsive sexual encounters in screen history with the outrageous cult film Possession. In this sidebar to our retrospective From Within: The Films of David Cronenberg, we showcase both Cronenberg's body-horror contemporaries and those later filmmakers who were powerfully influenced by his unique vision. From Shinya Tsukamoto's original cyper-punk masterpiece Tetsuo to the disturbing self-mutilation opus In My Skin, from the gleefully gross Slither and Body Melt to the slyly satirical Society and the dystopic future of Beyond the Black Rainbow, this series both looks back to Cronenberg's roots and forward to the fearlessly transgressive offspring he has spawned.
— Colin Geddes
— Colin Geddes
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