David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds harkens back to his early body horror obsessions with a poet’s tone, retaining the connective tissue that embodies him.
Religion and spirituality bring many people comfort for those nagging existential questions they confront as they age. Chiefly, our demise and the visceral pain of watching those we love perish into an oblivion we can only access once we expire… perhaps. As David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds conveys, the jury is still out on any of those tidy little stories wrapped in cute bows and biased, reassuring platitudes.
What people can gather about death, visually that is, is that the brain stops functioning once the heart and lungs give out. The slow decay of the flesh leads to the exposure of the bones, and as time bleeds into eternity, lifeless dust drifts through the winds stirred by a chaotic earth.
As we all continue to consume here in the West, the corporate commodification of every aspect of emotional resonance that technology can latch onto becomes the newest enslavement that the powerful pour their resources into. The masses lap up these shiny new gadgets and gizmos like ravenous canines programmed only to extract anything that can fill the hole of despair and pain gnawing at the soul. David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds turns the focus of tech marrying the human psyche to the final terrain we cannot easily erase with an app: death.
Vincent Cassel plays Karsh Relikh, a grief-consumed tech guy who creates a tombstone called “GraveTech”, which allows those grieving to watch their loved ones decompose in real time via a smartphone application. This is achieved with shrouds laced with 3D cameras inside the coffin that let the viewer witness oblivion have its way with their beloved. A thriller of sorts unfolds, but it’s not the typical plot device we all have come to know with that genre — it’s the thrill of pain ripping the marrow out of bones to find meaning for why loss happens.
Along the way, several classic Cronenbergian themes pop up. Sexual gratification gets screen time, humanity’s primal urges battling the restraint centuries of intellectualism bound to the brain, and of course, decomposition. The director of Rabid (1977) and Crash (1996) has never quite been this overtly philosophical before, but that is part of the beauty of the Cronenberg canon.
Critics have noted The Shrouds as one of Cronenberg’s most personal films, with NPR describing it as “a deeply morbid and sad, but also disarmingly funny’ exploration of grief.” The film also dives into the sting of time, ravaging the things we all hold sacred with just as much brutality as Brundlefly acidifying Stathis Borans’ hand in his 1996 body horror film, The Fly. The grief of The Shrouds impales the viewer with as much force as Rose’s (Marilyn Chambers) infected phallic appendage in Rabid, while the echoes of ghostly longing permeate throughout his canon.
Early Body Horror and the ‘Industrial Age‘
The human body has long been a secondary vessel by which humans navigate the world. The brain and the mind, in the philosophy of dualism, define the essence of a person and dictate their decisions, while the body and corporeality play a largely supporting role. For David Cronenberg, logic and critical thinking do not commonly correspond to the body; he focuses on the fragility of flesh and the existential horrors that come with decay. His metaphysical underpinnings of how human meat and blood relate to industrialization, disease, and even a warped view of sexuality regularly dance with the mind and the organic matter that ultimately fails it.
In terms of cult horror cinema, Cronenberg is the pioneer of the now oversaturated subgenre, body horror. His canon of films perfectly exemplifies transgressive style and symbolism because the director accepts no compromise in capturing a disturbing and, surprisingly for many, moving artistic vision.
With William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Vladimir Nabokov as his literary influences, Cronenberg began writing screenplays in the 1970s that aligned with his fascination with the physical body’s fragility. 1975’s Shivers explores the dangers and fear of both penetration and infection with parasites that inhabit people and then spread to others during sexual acts. Rabid and The Brood (1979) continue this trend of paying biological prices for nonstop pleasure, almost as a cruel bellwether for the generation-defining grief HIV/AIDS would soon unleash on millions as the 1980s progressed.
Disease, Decay, Virtual Worlds, and the Erotic Machine
Cronenberg’s 1986 film The Fly made him a household name among horror aficionados. It earned widespread critical praise for its unsettling ability to force viewers to watch a likable character physically unravel before their eyes. Seth Brundle’s (Jeff Goldblum) metamorphosis into a grotesque human-insect hybrid is unforgettable not only for its viscerally nauseating effects but also for its allegorical potency. As HIV/AIDS left hundreds of thousands of gay men hoarse from the primal screams of grief and agony, the film resonates as an expression of contagion, anxiety, and bodily collapse.
The Fly also probed the fear of aging, the destruction of the primal chase/ conquer/ reward system most humans play, be it in the bedroom or the boardroom. Here, his signature imagery—grotesque, repulsive, and eerily intimate—finds its most devastating emotional clarity. Seth Brundle’s transformation is played not just for shock, but for pathos. We watch him decay in real time, his teeth falling out, his skin mottling, his selfhood slowly dissolving into the bacteria-laden residue found on fly swatters at suburban barbecues. In one unforgettable moment, he refers to himself as “Brundlefly”—a name that signals physical mutation and psychological disintegration.
In one of The Fly’s most harrowing scenes, Ronnie (Geena Davis) visits Seth and finds herself unable to reconcile the creature before her with the man she once loved. As Brundlefly vomits acidic bile on a box of donuts and casually loses an ear in the process, Cronenberg captures a rare cinematic emotion: the unbearable collision of revulsion and grief. Ronnie is horrified—but she is also heartbroken. The audience, too, oscillates between pity and nausea.
Eventually, the insect instincts fully take over. Seth becomes predatory, animalistic. When Ronnie becomes pregnant, the stakes escalate: she fears giving birth to a mutant child and seeks an abortion. Brundlefly, in a final act of desperation and madness, abducts her and attempts to fuse their bodies (and the unborn baby) in a teleportation pod, hoping to create a unified hybrid organism.
The plan fails. The experiment backfires. In the end, what remains of Brundlefly, now fused with a machine, begs to be killed, similar to the silent yearning of cathartic interjection people yearn for today in a world of bot-projected comfort and illusion.
Perhaps more bluntly than any of Cronenberg’s other films, The Fly reveals the fundamental fragility of the human body, the grotesque aspects of grief, and the limits of scientific control. For the filmmaker, the body is not just meat. It is also a memory. It is a tragedy. And it is, inescapably, entropy.
Despite his atheism, Cronenberg’s vision provokes deep philosophical questions: What defines personhood when the body fails? What ethical lines are crossed when technology becomes an extension of grief, desire, or control, as we see in The Shrouds? Whether it’s the grotesque intimacy of The Fly or the immersive hallucinations of 1999’s eXistenZ, Cronenberg’s work speaks to the same truth: the body is not a stable container. It’s a site of negotiation between biology, identity, the eternal loss of personhood, and the technologies we create to transcend them. We may try to upload, digitize, reprogram, or re-engineer ourselves, but Cronenberg’s films remind us that the flesh has a memory of its own. And it rarely forgets.
In hindsight, The Fly is less an anomaly than a keystone: a crystallization of Cronenberg’s enduring vision, which continues to thrive in cult and critical circles to this day. What makes that vision so transgressive, particularly within the cult horror space, is the way Cronenberg treats sex, not just as a narrative theme, but as a biological and existential force of nature humankind cannot tame.
His films often dwell on that precarious boundary between pleasure and pathology since the body, for Cronenberg, is not a neutral vessel for experience but a volatile site of infection, transformation, and collapse. Sexual intimacy frequently triggers physical mutations, as if desire itself, no matter how great it feels, carries a latent potential for the annihilation of that smidge of brain functionality that separates us from what we deem “basic animals”.
In the 1999 interview with Richard Porton for Cinéaste, shortly after the release of eXistenZ, Cronenberg remarked that “sex can be both aesthetically philosophical and existential all at the same time.” That film strips away the fear of sex-as-disease and instead locates anxiety in virtual immersion in the years right before social media arrived. It’s fleshy game consoles—organic devices surgically inserted into the spine—literalize the merger of body and machine. Players no longer just interact with reality through digital means; they absorb it and interface with it at the level of skin and nerves. Conventional ethics and physical laws no longer apply once the mind and body are fully inside the machine.
The Abstract Anatomy of Loss
Cronenberg’s existential preoccupation with bodily fragility—and our inability to outwit or transcend decay—is not confined to flesh alone. It takes on more abstract, psychological dimensions in Scanners (1981) and Naked Lunch (1991), where mental instability, pharmaceutical intrusion, and psychic projection rewire the body from within.
In Scanners, Cronenberg imagines a world in which certain individuals possess telepathic and telekinetic powers— “scanners” whose abilities make them both valuable and dangerous. A military-adjacent private company, ConSec, recruits scanners for clandestine state-sanctioned purposes, only to find itself in conflict with a rogue agent: Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), who wages a violent campaign against them. His adversary, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), becomes a reluctant weapon in the effort to stop him.
While best known for its showstopping head-explosion effects, Scanners is ultimately a film about the corruptive allure of institutional power. It critiques corporate militarization, government surveillance, and the totalitarian impulse in a fleshy aesthetic, much like The Shrouds embraces organic rot as not grotesque but voyeuristic bereavement.
The mind is a weapon, but the body is still where the damage mutates. That destabilization becomes even more interiorized in Naked Lunch, Cronenberg’s boldest literary adaptation. Loosely drawn from William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel, the film is less narrative and more of an alcohol hangover mixed with the haze of a heroin comedown: a surrealist drift through Interzone, a dreamlike space where language disintegrates, meaning morphs, and the body responds to impulse without explanation.
Cronenberg’s imagery in Naked Lunch pushes revulsion and abstraction to new limits. It is not horror in the conventional sense, but a meditation on the disintegration of identity—an incoherent suicide note of sorts, where the act of fading away reminds the viewer what it must feel like for a cockroach before it inhales insecticide. As characters slip in and out of Interzone’s hallucinatory geography, we witness a collapse of fixed categories: man and woman, straight and queer, real and imagined. In this world, societal constraints dissolve, and with them, the illusion of control.
Bill Lee (Peter Weller), the film’s central figure, navigates these spaces as both agent and observer. Grappling with the murder of his wife, his drug use, his unspoken sexuality, and the unreliability of memory, Lee embodies a kind of existential spectator who is adrift, haunted, but still searching for something legible in the static.
Naked Lunch is distinct in Cronenberg’s canon because its horror resists literalism. The grotesque becomes metaphorical, refracted through Burroughs’ prose into mutations of self-image and grief, but with the spacey allure of intoxicants to heighten the targeted emotions long enough to feel something beyond the haze. Here, Cronenberg’s imagery is used as a visual cipher for psychological truths we often can’t name.
Rupture to Release
David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) traffics in subversive desires born out of fear, violence, and an embrace of pleasure with crippling pain and possible death bringing about a sexual climax. There is an intensification of the characters’ inner affective world in a way that is as horrific as it is sensual. Grief is sexualized as the film explores a seemingly incomprehensible fetish related to erotic stimulation through car wrecks.
Working from J.G. Ballard’s 1973 cult novel, Crash is cold, clinical, detached, and emotionally flat. The inner textures and tones of the characters take on an otherworldly mythos defined by orgasmic splendor as metal rips into flesh. Crashes fuel carnal lust within them, but it also seems as if the violence and near-death experiences are a metaphor for craving extremism to escape the mundane and the conformity that society demands from individuals, which we have apps for today.
For many, it is impossible to imagine that such people exist in the world, something akin to a personality trait that scores lower than one percent of the overall population. Cronenberg here creates a film specifically for that negative one percent. Some characters get aroused from simply touching the cold metal objects inside a car or lying across its exterior. Others engage in self-harm to create open wounds for phallic penetration while lying inside a vehicle. Metal is born from a violent and chaotic molecular exchange of elements, and these characters want to experience that evolution in any way that they can before they fade to black.
The violent, flesh-ripping car crashes are stand-ins for physical differences, be they birth defects, injuries from accidents, or the changes that come with aging. Car collisions lead to either mental or physical scars, sometimes both, and we never forget the experience of the jolt as we lose control of our physical safety.
For the characters in this Crash, the scars from vehicular impact represent the internal fears that we all have about just how fragile living can be. Perhaps if many in our society explore and acknowledge these transgressions a bit more, they can at least begin to understand and accept how our differences are sacred and beautiful, since we all have a date with destruction, no matter what we believe.
The Shrouds‘ Mourning App
After eXistenZ, Cronenberg left the symbolism-rich allure of bodily decomposition in favor of more metaphorical mediations on other types of rot. Cosmopolis (2012) and Maps to the Stars (2014) examined the moralistic decay of capitalist consumption and celebrity, respectively. In 2017, he lost his wife of decades, Carolyn Zeifman, to that real-life parasite that hunts and consumes the bonds of love like a tentacled monster from the scariest depths of eternity: cancer. The purveyor of gory realism later said that “grief is forever”. It could very well be.
Since the dawn of humanity, we have known that decay is forever; an endless conveyor belt of smiles, tender moments, vulnerability, laughs, cries, lust, passion, and camaraderie—gone forever sometimes in an instant, other times after excruciating agony as the body gives out while the brain weeps for the loving bonds it is set to lose. Faces, energy, and experiences of billions of living things stretch into the expanse of oblivion as dust particles that tell a wider story we cannot yet comprehend. It deposits the echoes of eternity alongside a longing hope that we might see our loved ones again.
However, death and loss are also messy and… socially subversive. They can be varied, raw, and found in the stark randomness that Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) shows as she wipes Vaughn’s (Elias Koteas) semen across his fluid-stained car seat in Crash.
Humans are designed to consume and covet their status and righteousness, often to the detriment of what matters most, those who walk through the fires by their side. The Shrouds, like The Fly, is about the slow and brutal realization of what death ultimately means for those left behind. The Shrouds‘ Karsh and The Fly‘s Ronnie, respectively, confront the reality of demise in two ways that punch the gut: Brundlefly rots and transforms into an insect in front of her eyes, whereas Karsh watches decay with a more meditative, immersive fulfillment.
Herein lies the decades-long exercise in transcending grief that Cronenberg mastered. Whether it’s the commodification of technology, longing, and mourning coming full circle in “GraveTech’s” maudlin thunderclap of an app, or the exchange of bodily fluids only pleasurable through the release of physical collision, technology is Cronenberg’s leading player. It rips away the cobwebs that antidepressants or other emotion-suppressing substances spin over the grief and trauma of the fragmented mind.
For Cronenberg, emotion typically flows through his work with as much clinical precision as a metal scalpel ripping into flesh. He shows us the cold reality of what it means to be alive without an imaginary symphony playing elegiac background music. Something about The Shrouds maintains that arctic-clad emotional register while acknowledging the reality of the gaping chasm that grief repeatedly draws us to, the longer one lives.
David Cronenberg’s Cathartic Body of Work
David Cronenberg in 2025, like the David Cronenberg of 1977, is not about “full circle” moments; he is too smart to diminish his canon of dark emotion for performative empathy. His richly diverse, iconoclastic, scary, and perverse body of work provides no easy answers about the why of death and certainly not much hope for a heavenly reunion between stinky corpses or piles of ash.
In all his work, however, there’s a macabre ballet unfolding about the brevity of existence. In that aspect, The Shrouds does close the loop (and continues the cycle) of what Cronenberg does best: grotesque catharsis. It harkens back to the 82-year-old filmmaker’s early to mid-career body horror obsessions with a poet’s tone, retaining the connective tissue that made him who he is.
As visceral as David Cronenberg’s body horror films can be, the themes of terror, surrealism, and evocative sensuality will persist and expand. We need artists like Cronenberg who are brave enough to explore these impulses and link the abstract and the metaphysical to themes in everyday life that we can understand. We need to focus more on what it means to be human in the modern age; to look closer at our contradictions and absurdity, the horrific and violent impulses we commit or find alluring, the grotesque and the provocative we shun, unless behind closed doors. This all coalesces to define the wider ethos of the grey areas attached to psychology.
The Shrouds is Cronenberg’s essay on what it means to feel in those moments of suicidal depression that often accompany profound loss. In terms of his broader canon, and if the brain is also destroyed at death, how can an essence or spirit transcend into the sounds of trumpets heralding an eternity free from greed, carnal, hardcore fucking, defecation, acid bile liquifying food, or blood and cum-stained backseats of cars? Moreover, is this so-called heavenly plane also free from fundamentalist hypocrisy, brainwashing, capitalist violation of the mind, body, and soul, along with centuries of violent persecution in the name of deities?
Our brains are profound and singular in terms of sentient organisms, but our biology is still destined to decay. No matter how much we try to manipulate biological facts with technology or even spirituality, we still succumb to the horrors of the flesh long after the pleasure principle malfunctions, hopefully only after many years of deliriously ravenous consumption.