Sex and Zombies, AKA, the worst combination ever, in Cronenberg's Shivers (1975) (It's Zombie Time Part 6)

David Cronenberg. The director whose films I hate to love. Watching Shivers makes me queasy, and in a way vastly different from how I feel watching Romerian zombies chow down on stray femurs. Shivers is entirely set in a massive apartment complex, just outside of Montreal, which offers its residents a paradisal escape from the world outside. But inside, shit is raw as hell.

At the outset, while an innocent young couple prepare to see an apartment, we cut to an older man—styled to look like Sigmund Freud—chasing down a teenager in a school uniform in his apartment or office. He brutally throws her onto a couch, and proceeds to strangulate her. As this happens, her skirt lifts, and we see her panties: the sexual violence of the scene is in full play, even though we do not see this old murderer rape the young woman. He then tapes over her mouth after she’s died. He carries her to a table, setting her down very roughly, and violently tears open her button-down top, revealing her breasts. Soon, he has removed his own shirt, and the rest of his young victim’s clothes (except her panties), and he proceeds to perform an autopsy on her. He floods her abdomen with some kind of liquid that makes her flesh smoke and burn. It’s a brutal, cruel scene. Finally, he scalpels himself in the neck, opens his own throat, and dies. On first viewing, the strong implication is that he had impregnated this young woman, sought to kill her and destroy the fetus, and then to kill himself.

Meanwhile, we see intercut scenes from inside another apartment, occupied by a man named Nick who retches at the sink, and palpates his abdomen as though he’s in pain. We also see him behave with stunning indifference to his sweet and thoughtful wife Janine as he prepares to go to work. She appears frightened and lonely. It turns out he is not on his way to work quite yet; instead, he’s on his way up to the 15^th floor, to visit his paramour Annabelle—the young woman who was just murdered and sliced open on the table. He sees her, is shocked, and leaves abruptly, presumably afraid of being implicated in the murder.

We see Janine talking to a friend about how Nick is ill, and has some kind of nodule or cyst somewhere on his body. Putting two and two together, it’s starting to seem like maybe Nick has contracted something from this young woman, and that the old doctor man who offed her knew something about it all.

This old doctor man turns out to be Dr. Emile Hobbes, a university scientist. Specifically, he was a professor of urology and venereology. Shocker. This Dr. Hobbes was apparently working on biomedical research to find an alternative to organ transplant. Here was the idea he had cooked up with his collaborator: to “breed a parasite that can do something useful,” like replace a nonfunctional organ. We learn that Hobbes convinced an organ transplant company to finance the research he’d designed to put them out of business. So, a rapey, violent, cruel, murderer, but someone who could work the system. What system, precisely? Not the military-industrial system, but the medical-industrial system. Cronenberg’s film has mainlined Romero’s anti-establishment politics, but reconfigured them not as anti-government or anti-military, but as anti-medical establishment.

Now, this kind of anti-medical establishment energy wasn’t unique to Cronenberg’s horror film. Quite the contrary, The Exorcist, which had come out only two years earlier and had redefined the limits of violence and sexuality in American horror, had centrally featured a blazing critique of the medical establishment. Only five years prior to that, of course, Rosemary’s Baby had done the same, satirizing and literally demonizing the world of male dominated obstetricians. Both prior films had used the bodies of young women—Rosemary and Regan—as testing grounds for medical and/or Satanic experimentation. This film is smack dab in the same tradition. The difference, of course, is that in this film, the profit motive underlies Hobbes’ evil deeds, rather than some anti-theological ideology. He’s not trying to impregnate Annabelle with Satan’s baby, nor to gaslight a young mother about her daughter’s possession. Instead, he’s trying to line his coffers with green.

The other difference—and an important one—is that Hobbes’ secondary gain from his experimentation was sexual access to very, very young girls. We learn that Hobbes got into trouble for having examined young Annabelle’s breasts in the faculty lounge at her school when she was twelve years old. Evidently, their “relationship” continued for quite a while, until he murdered her. So we have collusion between the profit motive and the sexual violence motive.

He who trafficketh in parasites for profit is oft a parasite himself.

Meanwhile, Nick is becoming rapidly sicker—vomiting blood into bathtubs and toilets—and Janine goes to visit the apartment complex’s resident physician, Dr. Roger St. Luc, to get his counsel. She asks him to make a housecall that night. But, from an epidemiological standpoint, it’s too late: he’s puked some kind of vaguely lobster-like organism off his balcony where it crawls into a grate that extends under the apartment building, whence it makes its way into the building laundry room, only to attack and somehow stun a woman. Infestation situation!

And by two avenues, no less. Because Dr. St. Luc also sees an old man, who has acquired cystic lumps in his abdomen—much like Nick. The old man believes he contracted them from Annabelle, up on the 15^th floor. So now it appears that Annabelle was engaging in sexual activity with a wide array of nasty, predatory old men. It appears there may be a bit of an STD epidemic going on, where the STD in question is some kind of crustacean parasite.

The epidemic appears to have a fast pace, because Nick is whelping little lobster thingies in substantial numbers. It also appears that the parasite has colonized his mind somehow: as he stares down at his abdomen, which we can see is crawling with little creatures (film history side note: I’m pretty sure Alien took its visual vocabulary for the chest-burster scene from this prior film), he starts talking to them, saying he’ll befriend them, encouraging them to hatch out of his body. He's a proud mama, not a terrified victim. Because the disease has taken over his mind and made him into a sex zombie. As Hobbes’ collaborator Rollo Linksy later reveals to St. Luc: Hobbes hadn’t really been interested in organ transplant, but in a radical remake of the human race. He had engineered a “combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease,” which would “hopefully turn the world into one beautiful mindless orgy.” He was using Annabelle as a guinea pig, implanting her with the parasite. Guess we know why she was sleeping with everyone: she had a parasite that was trying to get her to sleep with anything that moved. The organism Hobbes had made would make people do “any kind of bizarre sexual thing” in a “compulsive” way. Linsky warns St. Luc: “you gotta get at them. And fast.”

Terrifying idea! Impossible! Beyond the scope of nature!

Mais non. It turns out that this kind of thing is actually relatively common in nature. There is a fungal infection that affects cicadas, taking over their brains and turning them into “sex zombies” so that the fungal spores can spread and reproduce.[1] This isn’t unique to cicadas; there are ant and other bug species that carry analogous fungal infections, which induce the bugs to mate at tremendous speeds and spread the infection. Fungal infections using insect hosts and their sexual reproduction to propagate their own species. Horrifying! And common. Evidently, what keeps humans relatively safe from such infestation by fungus is that the human body temperature is simply too hot for most fungi to take up residence in. Scientists warn, however, that as global warming induces fungi to become better adapted to hotter temperatures, the human species might indeed find itself at risk of fungal-hijacking, much as the series The Last of Us would have it. Indeed, cordyceps, the fungal bad guy in that TV series is one of the types of fungus known to create sex zombies in the animal world.[2]

So, just in case 2025 wasn’t scaring you badly enough on its own terms, I present sex zombie fungus.

Good luck sleeping tonight. Cronenberg isn’t called the father of body horror for nothing.

Back to Shivers. So we’ve got humans being subjected—by a malign and crazed scientist—to the kind of interspecies takeover that’s usually reserved for tiny insects. Nick’s wife Janine’s one friend in the building gets raped and infected by one of the parasites as she takes her bath—we see the tub filling with blood, and then we see her walking insensible over broken glass after the parasite has established itself in her body as its new host. At this point, all hell breaks loose. Male residents of the apartment building start trying to rape female residents, transmitting the infection to them. Little freeroaming parasites start attacking old women in walkers. Waitstaff start assaulting mothers and children. It’s ugly. Through and through. All told, it’s one of the more upsetting zombie films I’ve ever seen.

Honestly, I do not recommend it. The grossness far outweighs the art. Having said that, though, it does occupy kind of an important position in the history of zombie films.

The final scene is of the sex-zombies driving out of the complex in their cars, all dolled-up and party-ready, to infect the general population. There is a voiceover radio report—very Night of the Living Dead-esque—as the credits roll, informing us that there’s been a wave of violent sexual crimes all around the city of Montreal, presumed to originate in the Starlight apartment complex. End of film.

So here’s a question: does this really qualify as a zombie film? The people do appear to go through sort of a latency phase, that at least looks like death. But it’s not at all clear that they’re really ever dead. And, I mean, technically, parasitic infections are supposed only to affect the living, right? Because the parasite relies upon the host for things like oxygen supply, nourishment, and motility. Now, in all the other zombie movies, the zombie is indeed a dead person who has come back. Many of them are said not to have a heart beat or to breathe, though it’s true that the vast majority of post-Romero zombies do eat—and the sex-zombies in Shivers are seen eating a few times, though they appear to be eating regular food, not human flesh. But the larger question remains: are the sex-zombies in Shivers actually dead or undead people, or are they living people who have been taken over by the parasites? Because of the latency period of the infection, it’s hard to tell. But I think that’s the point.

One of the philosophical questions Cronenberg poses to us in this film is at what point a human becomes a nonhuman. Are these sex-zombies—who retain their voices and their memories complete and intact—still the people they were, just with a raging parasitic infection? Or are they zombies, in the sense that their soul has either been removed or entirely destroyed within them? Cronenberg equivocates: on the one hand, these sex-zombies’ higher functioning is clearly impaired, in that they can no longer make even the most basic moral choices. They are pure libido. What’s really scary in this film—apart from the parasite itself, which I’ll get back to in a minute—is the idea that the parasite doesn’t eradicate the host person, but merely gives the host person some kind of carte blanche to act only on the strength of their libidinous wishes, with no regard for sociality whatsoever. That, in fact, was exactly, precisely Dr. Hobbes’ goal: to return people to a state of nature, absent the constraints of social norms. To desocialize them, in effect, through the parasite’s implantation within them. What the film proposes is that humanity’s, well, humanity is precarious, fragile, and fleeting. We are not categorically different from cicadas or ants that get taken over by exogenous infection, and turned into sex zombies.

Now, as to the scariness of the parasite itself, this film clearly inaugurates the horror sub-genre of the sexually-transmitted-infection horror. The best-known recent example of this genre is It Follows (2016), but Contracted I and II (2013 and 2015) are closer in temperament to Shivers, being clear zombie films. We’ll turn to those two next week.

So take some pepto on Thursday night.

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[1] See this terrifying short film from Reuters:

[2] Check out this horrifying reporting on NPR: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/30/1151868673/the-last-of-us-cordyceps-zombie-fungus-real#:~:text=Ophiocordyceps%20unilateralis%2C%20otherwise%20known%20as,will%20let%20the%20fungus%20reproduce.