David Cronenberg is considered the master of body horror. He films a lot of orifices, cavities, and diseased flesh. He had bodies fall apart, or be taken apart, in The Fly, Scanners, Dead Ringers, The Brood, etc. Body horror is a label that’s been affixed to him like a skin graft. But now that he’s been a filmmaker for 30 years, if you step back and take a broader view from his gaping body holes, you’ll see that his interest in the body is mostly about how the mind ruins it—because it’s always seeking more. More stimulation, more prestige, and ultimately, more separation from the body itself.
His newest film, Maps to the Stars, is about how a place can ruin the body because it stirs up the idea of the unattainable, and makes people do horrible things to each other, and to others. The place, in this film, is Hollywood. It’s an easy target, and many films have been made about the rotting nature of “the industry,” because it’s the gaping orifice that filmmakers get to see up close. But zoom out and you begin to see that Cronenberg isn’t picking at the surface scab. He’s seeing generations of nepotism, turning naturally into incest and if that trend goes even further, Hollywood will breed itself completely out of existence. As it is right now, it’s the land of freaks and ghosts.
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