The Brood, shot in 1979, was David Cronenberg‘s third ‘mainstream’ horror film, following the success of Shivers and Rabid, where he had taken the body-horror ideas of his pioneering experimental films Stereo and Crimes of the Future and grafted them to more commercial exploitation forms. The Brood seemed a further step forward for him – while the previous two films had channelled the style of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and – more significantly – The Crazies, this was a quieter, more intimate study of mad science and martial breakdown, complete with actual movie stars in the main roles. It was a film that divided audiences and critics – for some, the horrors on display struck a very personal nerve that the other films hadn’t, and the critics that hated the film really hated it on a visceral, emotional level. It’s not hard to see why – and the film still packs a bunch beyond the graphic horrors on display. This is a film that gets under your skin and makes you feel uncomfortable.
It’s a multi-layered, astonishingly bleak story, based around The Somafree Institute of Pyschoplasmics, where patients are undergoing a radical form of psychotherapy, being encouraged to externalise emotional traumas as physical afflictions – what scientist Dr Raglan (Oliver Reed) refers to as ‘the shape of rage’. In the middle of this, Frank Carveth (Art Hindle) fights to save his daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds) from his estranged and deranged wife Nola (Samantha Eggar), who has been externalising her own rage by creating psychopathic ‘brood children’ who reflect her emotional state – when she feels threatened – by her parents, a possible love rival or even her own daughter – the mutant children attack the cause of the distress. These moments of shocking horror are all the more unsettling because of how restrained they are – this is a bloody film, but nothing like the previous Cronenberg films. Instead, it has short moments of grotesque and uncomfortable nastiness, including one scene that has been continually misunderstood, perhaps because critics have been so blinded by their own rage that they see what they want to see – a pivotal scene at the film’s climax has been described as foetal cannibalism as if the movie is Anthropophagous The Beast. In fact, it’s a moment that is arguably more confrontational than that – but I won’t spoil it for anyone who has yet to see the film.
The Brood was – despite the strange and disturbing story ideas – something of an autobiographical film for the director, whose divorce and subsequent custody battle had been both stressful and messy. Not quite as mad as seen in the film, but maybe not far short – in real life, Cronenberg had been forced to ‘kidnap’ his own daughter when his wife announced that she would be taking the child to live in a Californian religious community – Cronenberg has referred to the film as his version of Kramer vs Kramer – the tedious, Oscar-winning divorce drama that had been released a year earlier. Cronenberg’s film has rather more drama and sincerity than that dull movie managed. In The Brood, Art Hindle strives to save his daughter from Samantha Eggar,
Given a bigger budget than he had on his earlier films, Cronenberg could afford to cast a few name actors. Oliver Reed was a major international superstar, but by the end of the 1970s, was more famous for his drinking bouts and bad behaviour than his actual acting. Often wasted in films that he clearly had little interest in, it’s easy to forget that Reed was always a first-rate actor, and The Brood features one of his finest performances. Equally impressive is Samantha Eggar, an actress who – like Reed – had often been wasted in poor roles. She apparently had an instinctive understanding of where Cronenberg was coming from with the film. “She told me the script reminded her of things from her childhood”, Cronenberg would tell Cinefantastique. “She never got more specific than that.” It’s interesting, in retrospect, that for several years after this Cronenberg was still criticised by some critics for not being an actor’s director – watching this film again, it’s clear just how far off the mark that is. Reed, Eggar and Hindle all give excellent, subtle, honest performances that could only come from a strong and sympathetic direction.
Beyond the qualities it has as a film, The Brood now seems to be a transitional movie for Cronenberg, showing that he was a cut above his horror contemporaries and capable of making unique and unsettling movies that stood outside the horror mainstream. It feels closer to the films that Cronenberg would start to make a few years later – The Dead Zone and Dead Ringers are possibly the closest comparisons in his horror career. And while we might expect horror films to lose their shock value over the years – what was once extreme now seems commonplace and over-exposed – The Brood is remarkable in that it hasn’t lost any of its potency in almost half a century. In fact, in many ways, it might even be more taboo now with its scenes of children exposed to violence and horror, its disturbed sexuality and a finale that is one of the most uncomfortably and unforgettably twisted moments in cinema history. It’s no wonder that the critics who hated it felt the film to be a very personal punch to the gut – anyone with young kids and anyone undergoing marital discord might still find the film almost unbearable. The raw, emotional assault that the film delivers is astonishing – this is not horror cinema as escapism, but rather a gut-wrenching study of human frailty. It’s not remotely comfortable or easy viewing and you might not want to watch this all that often – but it is a masterpiece.
DAVID FLINT
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