I’ve written here before about the films of David Cronenberg, and how they’re sort of hard to talk about while separating the film from the filmmaker. I try to keep my focus on the film itself as a finished product, since I think it’s easy for horror fandom - like any fandom - to pay more attention to the personalities behind a film than to the film itself. But as I’ve said before, it’s really difficult to do this with David Cronenberg’s films because there’s such a clear thematic through-line to his early work, and it’s in service of a vision that isn’t really like anything else in horror film. You sort of have to talk about his horror films not as horror films, but as David Cronenberg films.
I’ve looked at some of his early work here already - Shivers, The Brood, and Videodrome - and now, having seen Rabid, I think it’s probably best described in context as sort of a transitional film. It’s not one of his stronger films, in that it suffers from some of the same narrative shortcomings as Shivers (which preceded it) but doesn’t quite have that film’s audacity.
We open on a young couple - Rose and Hart - getting ready to go for a motorcycle ride in the Canadian countryside. All seems to be well, but they come around a bend and suddenly there’s a bickering family in a van stalled out across the middle of the road. They go over the hood of the van, Hart is thrown clear and Rose is trapped under the wreckage of the motorcycle.
Elsewhere - not too far down the road - is a plastic surgery clinic run by Drs. Dan and Roxanne Keloid. They’re meeting with Murray, their business partner, who’s trying to interest them in the idea of franchising their clinic, turning plastic surgery into a mass consumer product. Dan is very resistant to the idea - he doesn’t relish the idea of being thought of as the “Colonel Sanders of plastic surgery,” but before anything can get settled, they’re informed of the accident by one of their recuperating patients, who saw the accident play out while they were outside getting some fresh air. Dan orders the clinic ambulance to provide aid, since the nearest full-service hospital is about three hours away in Montreal. Hart’s injuries are serious, but not life-threatening, so he’s triaged to get sent to the nearest hospital. But Rose is in a bad way - severely burned along one side of her body and losing a lot of blood. Dan makes the decision to perform surgery on Rose at his clinic, since she wouldn’t likely last long enough to make it to the city.
Once she’s stabilized, Dan and his assistant start in on an extensive series of skin grafts. He decides that they’re going to use an experimental technique in which the grafts are reverted back to what he calls “neutral field grafts” - that is, the cells of the graft become unspecified, so that they’ll take on the properties of whatever part of the body they’re grafted to. It’s an untested technique, but Dan’s confident that it will work. Flash-forward about a month, and Rose has been kept in a medically induced coma at the clinic to facilitate healing. She wakes suddenly, panicked and disoriented. When someone comes to check on her, she grabs him and…something…snakes out from underneath her arm and attaches itself to him.
Apparently, some of the cells decided to become something…new.
As it turns out, Rose now possesses an entirely new organ - a stinger-tipped sucker - that retracts from inside a puckered hole in her armpit. As it also turns out, Rose is now entirely dependent on human blood to survive. Animal blood doesn’t work, as she discovers the hard way. And as if that weren’t bad enough, this new organ of hers has some nasty side effects, including memory loss in the person affected, an inhibition of their clotting factor, and…oh yeah, the rapid onset of a rabies-like virus that leads to extreme aggression, then coma, then death. And it’s easily spread via saliva. So there’s really two stories here - there’s Rose and her new, increasingly untenable situation, which is a somewhat novel spin on vampirism, and the rapid spread of the rabies-like virus. Rose is sort of a Typhoid Mary, spreading the virus when she feeds, but not suffering its effects herself. Either one of these could have been enough to carry a movie on its own, but the problem is that combining them into a single narrative means neither gets explored or developed to the degree they could be.
The epidemic piece is the more evocative of the two, ramping up in the background as the film goes on and making for some striking individual moments (especially toward the end, which is pretty much a punch in the gut), but I think epidemic stories really need to have an observable progression to really work - think about the scenes from a film like Contagion that illustrate the ease with which a disease can spread, showing how all it takes is one person in the wrong place to start an exponential growth in cases, and here that’s never really clearly charted. At a certain point in the movie, all of a sudden there are people in the middle of a major city showing symptoms without a clear indication of how it got there, given that everything started in a small clinic hours away. It’s emphasized that the virus incubates in a matter of hours and people suffering from it have a diminished capacity (and go comatose and die pretty quickly) so it’s tough to see how it just crops up someplace when we never really see how it travels there, or how it’s able to spread so quickly when the hosts don’t live for all that long. Rose spends most of the film confined to the clinic, so that’s where most of the cases crop up, but then enough time passes that the people from the clinic who get it should already be rabid and/or dead before they even make it to the city. It happens off-screen to enough of an extent that when it’s clear that it’s reached Montreal in a big way, it seems like it came out of nowhere.
Rose’s story is likewise underexplored, and suffers from inconsistent characterization. Rose wakes up from her coma unable to subsist on anything except human blood, and over the course of the film she bounces back and forth between someone who’s confused and afraid, a cool, calculating predator, and someone in denial about what she’s doing and what effect she’s having on the world around her. It’s not really a progression, it just alternates as is necessary for any particular scene, and apart from it feeling disjointed, it’s all very much just a collection of scenes - she’s over here, now she’s over there, and pretty much every scene she’s in boils down to her infecting someone, so it doesn’t take long to become sort of predictable. That Rose doesn’t really exhibit much in the way of horror or regret or disgust or confusion in those moments, slipping instead into predator mode, doesn’t really help - for a good chunk of the movie she’s less of a character than a plot device.
Her story is pretty much a monster story, but unlike Cronenberg’s later film, the remake of The Fly, we don’t get much insight at all into her feelings about what she’s become apart from some denial at the end. The mechanism of her vampirism is the most novel thing here, and it’s of a piece with Cronenberg’s particular view of biology as articulated in his other films, but it’s never explored the way it even is in Shivers, and apart from the analogy to sex (penetration, a sense of satiation), it’ not nearly as audacious as how Shivers reduced sex to a mechanical impulse, devoid not just of intimacy but also of conscious will, how The Brood used the idea of birth as an actualization of unresolved rage and trauma, or Videodrome’s cold, clinical look at the intersections of flesh and technology. There’s some of that here with the experimental plastic surgery, but that’s an angle that goes largely unexplored - people willing to go under the knife over and over again to reshape their flesh to increasingly specific requirements seems like it’d be fertile ground, but it barely matters here.
It does have its moments, mostly around the steadily worsening epidemic in Montreal, which is evocative in some ways of Night of the Living Dead, and things like being required to carry around vaccination cards certainly hit different now than they would have even three years ago, but they’re isolated moments. The film itself suffers throughout from the same choppiness that Shivers had, fragmented into a collection of discrete scenes that don’t really flow together. The end result is that a routine starts to develop, where scenes about Rose alternate with scenes about the epidemic, and its most interesting ideas go unexplored enough that really all you end up with is a vampire movie with a somewhat novel spin on how the vampirism works. It was only his second feature-length film, and like Shivers, the pieces are all here - the malleability of biology, amoral appetites, technology and modern living having unintended consequences, threatening to separate us from our humanity - but out of all of Cronenberg’s work, they’re at their least realized here.
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