''Shivers'', also known as ''The Parasite Murders'' and ''They Came from Within'', and, for the French-Canadian distribution, ''Frissons'' ( ; French for "chills" or "shivers"), is a 1975 Canadian
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...
body horror
Body horror or biological horror is a subgenre of horror that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body. These violations may manifest through aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, ...
film written and directed by
David Cronenberg and starring
Paul Hampton
Paul Hampton (born August 20, 1937) is an American actor, singer, lyricist and writer. He is listed as one of one hundred major architects of American rock and roll in the British rock journal "Footsoldiers and Kings." While he was a sophomore ...
,
Lynn Lowry, and
Barbara Steele
Barbara Steele (born 29 December 1937) is an English film actress known for starring in Italian gothic horror films of the 1960s. She has been referred to as the "Queen of All Scream Queens" and "Britain's first lady of horror". She played th ...
. The original shooting title was ''Orgy of the Blood Parasites''.
Plot
At Starliner Towers, a luxury apartment complex outside of
Montreal
Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple ...
, Dr. Emil Hobbes murders a young woman named Annabelle. He slices open her stomach, pours acid into the wound and then commits suicide. Nick Tudor, who has been suffering from stomach convulsions, finds their bodies but leaves without calling the police. The two bodies are found by resident doctor Roger St. Luc, who calls the police. Hobbes' medical partner, Rollo Linsky, tells St. Luc that he and Hobbes had been working on a project to create "a parasite that can take over the function of a human organ".
After suffering more convulsions, Nick leaves work early. He vomits a parasite over the railing of his balcony. The parasite slithers back into the apartment, where it attacks a cleaning woman in the basement, attaching itself to her face. His wife Janine tries to care for him, but he ignores her and prefers to talk to the parasites undulating in his abdomen. At the clinic, Roger sees a sexually active middle-aged resident who has been suffering from stomach convulsions. Roger speculates that his condition might be an
STD that he caught from Annabelle.
Linsky calls Roger from Hobbes' office downtown to tell him that Hobbes had developed a parasite that was "a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease that will, hopefully, turn the world into one beautiful mindless orgy". Hobbes believed modern humans had become over-intellectual and estranged from their primal impulses. Hobbes' ambition with his parasitic invention was to reassert humanity's unbridled, sexually aggressive instincts, and he used Annabelle as his guinea pig. Linsky warns Roger not to approach anyone who is behaving in a strange manner.
Nick tries to force Janine to have sex with him, but she recoils in horror when one of the parasites crawls from his mouth. She rushes to the apartment of her friend Betts, who was infected by one of the parasites while taking a bath. Betts seduces Janine and as they kiss, passes a parasite to her. Meanwhile, other residents, including a little girl in an elevator with her mother, who are assaulted by a deliveryman, become infected with the parasite, attack other residents and continue to spread the infection. Soon the hallways are full of people sexually assaulting or fighting one another. Roger combs the complex looking for the parasites while Forsythe—his nurse and lover—tends to an elderly couple who were attacked by one of the parasites.
Linsky arrives at Starliner Towers and goes to the Tudor apartment, as Roger had identified Nick as someone Annabelle might have infected. He finds Nick lying in bed, parasites crawling on his abdomen. When Linsky examines him more closely, one of the parasites latches onto his cheek. Linsky tries to pull it off with pliers, but Nick kills him and swallows the parasite. Forsythe tries to flee the complex in her car but is attacked by the infected security guard. Before he can rape her, Roger arrives and kills him, and the two hide in the basement. Forsythe tells Roger of a dream that mixed eroticism and death, then vomits up a parasite. Roger knocks her out and tries to carry her to safety, but they are attacked by a horde of infected sex maniacs. Roger is separated from Forsythe and is forced to flee as she is overwhelmed by the infected.
Roger kills Nick in his apartment, then tries to escape the complex, but is thwarted at every turn. He finally makes it to the swimming pool area where he encounters Janine and Betts swimming fully clothed. The two walk to the edge of the pool and smile seductively at him as he finds a door to the outside, but the infected block his path and he is pulled into the pool by Janine and Betts. The rest of the infected, including the little girl from the elevator, plunge into the pool fully dressed or otherwise and swim towards Roger to hold him down. Roger is eventually surrounded and finally infected by Forsythe.
Roger, Forsythe and the other Starliner residents drive out of the building's garage. Early the next morning, news reports encourage listeners not to panic as police investigate an epidemic of sexual assaults in Montreal.
Cast
Production and response
''Shivers'' was filmed over fifteen days at Tourelle-Sur-Rive, a 1962 apartment building designed by
Mies van der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd ...
, on Rue de Gaspé,
Nuns' Island
Nuns' Island (officially Île des Sœurs; ) is an island located in the Saint Lawrence River that forms a part of the city of Montreal, Quebec. It is part of the borough of Verdun.
History
Originally called Île Saint-Paul in honour of the f ...
. It was Cronenberg's third
feature film
A feature film or feature-length film is a narrative film (motion picture or "movie") with a running time long enough to be considered the principal or sole presentation in a commercial entertainment program. The term ''feature film'' originall ...
, and the most profitable Canadian film made to date in 1975, but was so controversial that the
Parliament of Canada debated its social and artistic value and effect upon society, because of objections to its sexual and violent content.
Release
''Shivers'' opened theatrically in the United States under the alternate title ''They Came From Within'', with regional showings beginning in
San Antonio, Texas
("Cradle of Freedom")
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, map_caption = Interactive map of San Antonio
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name = United States
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, subdivision_t ...
on September 26, 1975. The film was released in
Montréal
Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple-p ...
on October 10, 1975 where it was distributed by
Cinépix.
The film was released in Canada as ''The Parasite Murders'' and in both Canada and the United Kingdom as ''Shivers''.
Home media
The film was released on
DVD
The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...
by
Image Entertainment
RLJ Entertainment (formerly Image Entertainment) is an American film production company and home video distributor, distributing film and television productions in North America, with approximately 3,200 exclusive DVD titles and approximately 34 ...
on September 16, 1998 and is currently
out of print.
On September 15, 2020,
Lionsgate
Lions Gate Entertainment Corporation, doing business as Lionsgate, is a Canadian-American entertainment company. It was formed by Frank Giustra on July 10, 1997, domiciled in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and is currently headquartered ...
issued the film on Blu-ray in the United States as part of its
Vestron Video
Vestron Video was the main subsidiary of Vestron, Inc., a home video company based in Stamford, Connecticut, that was active from 1981 to 1993, and is considered to have been a pioneer in the home video market.
The name is now used for a collect ...
Collector's Series. This release includes, among other features, a new commentary by filmmaker David Cronenberg.
Reception
On its initial release, ''Shivers'' was not a positively-received film. Of a selection of 28 reviews from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium and France, 16 reviews are negative, six were positive and the rest could be classified as neutral. From the negative reviews, 12 of the 16 negative reviews are very negative while three of the six positive reviews were very positive. On
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
the film has a rating of based on reviews from critics, with an average rating of . The site's consensus states "''Shivers'' uses elementally effective basic ingredients to brilliant and lays the profoundly unsettling foundation for director David Cronenberg's career to follow".
Canadian journalist
Robert Fulford, writing as "Marshall Delaney", decried the content of ''Shivers'' in the pages of the national magazine ''
Saturday Night''. Since Cronenberg's film was partially financed by the taxpayer-funded Canadian Film Development Corporation (later known as
Telefilm Canada
Telefilm Canada is a Crown corporation reporting to Canada's federal government through the Minister of Canadian Heritage. Headquartered in Montreal, Telefilm provides services to the Canadian audiovisual industry with four regional offices in ...
), Fulford headlined the article with "You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it." He called it "crammed with blood, violence and depraved sex" and "the most repulsive movie I've ever seen." Not only did this high-profile attack make it more difficult for Cronenberg to obtain funding for his subsequent movies, but Cronenberg later said Fulford's article also resulted in him being kicked out of his apartment in
Toronto
Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...
, owing to his landlord's inclusion of a "morality clause" in the lease. Other Canadian critics gave the film negative reviews, such as Martin Knelman in ''
The Globe and Mail
''The Globe and Mail'' is a Canadian newspaper printed in five cities in western and central Canada. With a weekly readership of approximately 2 million in 2015, it is Canada's most widely read newspaper on weekdays and Saturdays, although it ...
'' and Dane Larnken in ''
Montreal Gazette
The ''Montreal Gazette'', formerly titled ''The Gazette'', is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Three other daily English-language newspapers shuttered at various times during the second half of th ...
''. American critic
Roger Ebert noted that while he expected ''Shivers'' to be a dismal exploitation film, since it was part of a double-bill with the faux-snuff film ''
Snuff
Snuff may refer to:
Tobacco
* Snuff (tobacco), fine-ground tobacco, sniffed into the nose
** Moist snuff or dipping tobacco
** Creamy snuff, an Indian tobacco paste
Media and entertainment
* Snuff film, a type of film that shows a murder
Literat ...
'', he instead was impressed by much of the movie and ended up giving it a two-and-a-half star rating.
The film was one of the highest-grossing English-language Canadian films of all-time, with a gross of $1 million in Canada.
[
]
Related works
The screenplay was published by Faber & Faber
Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot (an early Faber editor and director), W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel ...
in the 2002 collection ''David Cronenberg: Collected Screenplays 1: Stereo, Crimes of the Future, Shivers, Rabid.
See also
* Parasites in fiction
Parasites appear frequently in biology-inspired fiction from ancient times onwards, with a flowering in the nineteenth century. These include intentionally disgusting alien monsters in science fiction films, often with analogues in nature. Auth ...
* ''Rabid
Rabies is a viral disease that causes encephalitis in humans and other mammals. Early symptoms can include fever and tingling at the site of exposure. These symptoms are followed by one or more of the following symptoms: nausea, vomiting, ...
''
Notes
References
*
Bibliography
*
External links
*
Interview with David Cronenberg about ''Shivers''
(CBC television via TIFF)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Shivers
1975 films
1970s English-language films
1975 horror films
1970s science fiction horror films
Canadian body horror films
Canadian independent films
Canadian LGBT-related films
Canadian natural horror films
Canadian science fiction horror films
Canadian zombie films
English-language Canadian films
Erotic horror films
Films directed by David Cronenberg
Films produced by Ivan Reitman
Films set in apartment buildings
Films set in Montreal
Films shot in Montreal
Fictional parasites and parasitoids
LGBT-related science fiction horror films
1975 directorial debut films
1975 LGBT-related films
Canadian monster movies
1970s Canadian films