David Cronenberg

Nicknamed the "Baron of Blood" for his fluid-drenched horror films, writer and director David Cronenberg has explored the graphic limits of psychological and physical terror for decades. In the 1970s, Cronenberg's disparate interests in scientific experimentation and filmmaking converged, helped along by Canadian government funding. His early productions explored conventional horror themes of parasitic infection and zombie infestation as a commentary on societal breakdown, and provided the commercial and critical pathways for Cronenberg to explore a new genre of "body horror," in which the subversion and degeneration of the human body is the film's raison d'etre. Whether reveling in the psychic destruction of the self (Scanners, Videodrome, Dead Ringers) or exploring the tenous connection between reality and madness (Naked Lunch, Spider), Cronenberg's movies are startlingly celebratory about the way chaotic and horrifying events can lead to psychological breakthroughs. In The Fly, Jeff Goldbum's obsessive scientist becomes a heroic bundle of confused genes, while the car-wreck fetishists in Crash use their traumatic experiences to explore new realms of sexuality. Cronenberg's later films, most notably A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, shy away from the overt horror of his preceding work, but are no less exacting in their examination of casual brutality.