RABID OVER YOU

Recovering from Covid with David Cronenberg and Marilyn Chambers

We should have seen the warning signs. After Emily Schultz and I were given a chance to revisit The Blondes as a feature script we spent most of this July in a haze of Red Bull, bodega takeout, and 14-hour writing shifts. It was only moments after typing “Fade out” last week that we looked at each and both said, “I kind of feel like shit.” The irony of getting Covid after returning to a story of fictional rabies that afflicts blonde women was not lost on us. A little high on Claritin and Aleve, we decided a method viewing of David Cronenberg’s Rabid was in order.

We already covered one of Cronenberg’s greatest triumphs—not killing us—and we covered the origins of the Canadian Tax Shelter era, but never one of Cronenberg’s films from that time. Rabid is his second feature film and tells the story of Rose, who survives a motorcycle crash then receives an experimental skin graft that turns her into a vector for a zombifying form of rabies that devastates 1977 Montreal. (Echoing the city’s recent real world political turmoil.)

The film stars Marilyn Chambers, then the most famous adult performer in world. Chambers is quite good in one of her few crossover roles and the way Cronenberg mutated the George Romero formula to investigate gender, bodies, and power proved early on that he was not going to be just another splatter director.

Of course Schultz had watched Rabid when she first wrote her novel and this fevered rewatch allowed us go back and talk about where characters come from, and the difference between being inspired by something and ripping it off. — BJD

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BRIAN J DAVIS: That is the most Canadian DVD menu ever. A still image with a choice of English or French. Rabid or Rage!

EMILY SCHULTZ: It’s playing the French version. What if we just started doing the whole commentary in French?

BJD: I’d be at a disadvantage compared to you.

[It turned out the DVD is so old that it was malfunctioning so we switched to Cinema Dirtbag’s approved streamer, Tubi]

BJD: What are your symptoms right now?

ES: Oh, congestion, diminishing sense of smell, body aches. Fatigue.

BJD: I’m not too bad, really, in comparison to the first time that we had Covid, isolating at the decaying Millennium Hotel of Buffalo.

ES: Eating takeout with no sense of taste or smell.

BJD: So, this is actually one of my favorite Cronenberg’s. It’s epic filmmaking on a small budget that a lot of people wouldn’t even try with this kind of zombie outbreak narrative. It’s also one of the few Cronenberg movies that has conventional pacing.

ES: Sometimes I don’t know if I like-like these Canadian horror films or if I just like seeing a familiar landscape on screen.

BJD: The Canada of the ’70s is pretty close to the Canada of the ’80s and your childhood.

ES: I’m nostalgic.

BJD: And if we’re being honest, if one country was going to develop a strange armpit mutant virus, it would be Canada.

ES: There are a lot of meetings at the beginning of this film.

BJD: The thing about everyone in an early Cronenberg movie is they all look like they could be a prime minister. And here, about to collide with Marilyn Chambers is a draft dodger and his family!

ES: See, there’s that sense of familiarity. Actually, he also looks like he could be a Canadian poet.

BJD: Now they’re using experimental skin grafts on her.

ES: What could go wrong? Wow. Margarine yellow was such a big color in the ’70s. Everything in this office scene is yellow. His T-shirt is yellow. The equipment is yellow.

BJD: Despite all immense screen violence I’ve seen in my entire life, the skin graft scene still kind of gets me where I flinch a little.

ES: Another meeting?

BJD: This is Cronenberg figuring out how is he going to make his version of genre-movies—which he had no burning desire to make. He set out to be a novelist and was diverted into experimental film. I should say that the original title of this movie was Mosquito.

ES: I think the producers made the right choice. Why on earth was it called that?

BJD: You’ll recall it in a minute. She has this phallic proboscis that comes out of a new orifice in her armpit.

ES: Yes! And her new appendage seems satisfied after draining the doctor’s blood.

BJD: She wants to try some new things in the relationship. Again, I want to underline this for all readers in America learning this for the first time. What we’re describing—it was all government funded. In 1977 my dad was a welder in Canada, working high steel. He’d have a near death moment every week. He had money taken out of his paychecks, and it went to fund a movie about mutant armpit phalluses. I am beyond proud of that.

ES: Other Canadians probably complained?

BJD: Only journalists did!¹

ES: I love the blood on the abstract art. And they don’t even notice it. They just pass right by it.

BJD: I have to steal that.

ES: Why isn’t she wearing a hospital gown, though? They just have her naked and bandaged.

BJD: This is Marilyn Chambers.

ES: And they cast her over Sissy Spacek?

BJD: It was still the height of porno chic. A hip couple could expect to have an omelette dinner with guests Susan Sontag and George Plimpton, then they’d all go watch Behind the Green Door.

ES: That's a rather large...

BJD: Mutant appendage?

ES: I was going to say large bin of carrots that the animals haven’t decided to eat. What is with this bucolic barn set all of a sudden?

BJD: This film’s producer, Cinepix, had created the first commercial film industry in Canada with Quebecois porn, and it was usually set on dairy farms. And by the way that company eventually became…Lionsgate!

ES: He doesn’t notice that her lips are covered in blood after she makes out with his cow?

BJD: I think the drunk randy farmer does not care. So it's interesting that as I watch Rabid more and more, I think this movie is less a reinvention of a zombie movie than a subversion of softcore narrative.

ES: Tell me about that.

BJD: She seduces people at all these cliched locations: a barn, a hot tub. She drains them, they spread the disease from there. It’s both exploitation and a critique of it.

ES: Is this her first female victim?

BJD: Emily said excitedly.

ES: A little.

BJD: So if Covid in 2024 gave us armpit vaginas and phallic proboscises, who would we have attacked today?

ES: If we were in this rabid way?

BJD: I would have taken out the Instacart delivery guy. Who also messed up our order to be honest.

ES: Me? My son's bus driver.

BJD: Thankfully we masked instead!

ES: Blood from under the sunglasses. I thought we stole that from a French film!

BJD: We did! Juliet dans Paris by Claude Miller. And without a doubt Cronenberg did as well.²

[Emily hides during the scene the plastic surgeon goes rabid with tools]

BJD: Emily's first flinch!

ES: Yeah, I did flinch. Oh, he’s drinking blood from the finger stump now!

BJD: I think the reason Cronenberg was able to capture total chaos so fluidly was this was only about six years after a thing that Americans would never know about.

ES: Are we going to unpack the FLQ and the October Crisis and Trudeau's response? Because we spent at least two weeks on that in ninth grade history class.

BJD: I’m not that much of a dad! I can’t. I’m more interested in you writing The Blondes and this film. I recall you seeing this and you were obsessed with Marilyn Chamber’s roommate. You wondered, what’s her story?

ES: I had started The Blondes and I was maybe 50 pages in when you said I should watch Rabid. And yes, there’s something about this supporting character that made it so I could finally envision my character of Hazel. The nerd girl in glasses who is never the hero. In her knitwear sweaters.

BJD: I love the roommate sitting in her ’70s apartment and her “plants will be my friends” décor.

ES: A novel protagonist is always sort of left of the center or just slightly off from the story. And that’s different from a film’s protagonist. But again, I think it was her look and her uselessness that I took.

BJD: Until you create a character, you can't explain how it happens. Hey, we had lunch with someone and they grabbed the entire plate of biryani and didn’t share. That person is a character now.

ES: You could build an entire novel around that person. Oh that's a nice little ironic shot of Chambers walking into the adult theatre.

BJD: And here you have the biggest adult star of the decade going into a theater to hunt men. Montreal men with open-collared shirts and trimmed beards.

ES: I remember liking this subway scene a lot!

BJD: Well, this is also your luck in life. If someone is going to do something odd on a subway car, and you're there, they will make eye contact with you specifically.

BJD: My Bloody Valentine is the quintessential Canadian version of the slasher. Do you feel this is the quintessential Canadian version of the zombie epidemic movie?

ES: There's a lot of bureaucracy in this so yes. Very Canadian.

ES: So her victims are now making victims before she can?

BJD: Yes. But wait! There’s the first ever Le Château store. Forget the FLQ. Let’s talk about how Le Château spread from Quebec to rule all of Canada by the 1990s, turning mall girls into French vampires in crushed velvet.  

ES: You had to have money if you wanted to be a cool teenager and go to Le Château. I couldn’t afford it in high school in the ’90s. And it was a bold look to take on. I remember going in there once and seeing jester pants! Who would wear jester pants?

BJD: Have you been to Quebec?³

ES: Why did a mall guard have a machine gun? Oh, wait, another dead Santa Claus? It’s like a theme in Canadian movies!

BJD: Canada’s a weird place with weird people. It probably has story meetings that have never happened in America. Weird sexy armpit thing? Love it! Dead Santa? Classic!

ES: I admire how logical the storytelling is in this film. It’s methodical how the story grows out from the opening accident to her running away and spreading the virus in Montreal.

BJD: This movie is like a Canadian giving you directions. Sit down and buckle up—because it's the law. We're not skipping any steps. I will tell you every turn and exit.

ES: That’s me!

BJD: It’s interesting you mention the film’s logic. You wanted everything in The Blondes to be grounded.

ES: I did. And right here, a government fleet of garbage trucks for the bodies. That is so out of the Canadian capacity for planning. We’re gonna need something for the bodies, eh!

BJD: You don't look at Rabid and immediately think good writing, but the writing is solid.

ES: Nothing is wasted.

[Montreal is taken over by martial law with snipers killing the infected.]

BJD: Oh, I guess the Habs lost.

ES: Again, the people in the Hazmat suits cleaning off his car after the execution. Brilliant.

BJD: I've always loved the ending where she calls her boyfriend to tell him she’s locked herself in a room with one of her victims and when the victim wakes up and rages out that will be the end of the outbreak. Even as a kid that scene stood out. Not an average horror film moment.

ES: But here’s the thing. Why does she suddenly have a change of heart or a conscience? Maybe Cronenberg wants there to be some redemption for her?

BJD: Maybe. But it also really makes us feel things during this final scene where they find her body.

ES: Honestly, I’m starting to Covid-out right now. I could go to sleep.  

BJD: Emily is turning rabid. She’s at the listless stage. Vacant eyes. There will be a rabid attack by the end of this commentary.

ES: Yes, definitely.

1. Journalist Robert Fulford’s 1975 article on Cronenberg’s debut feature Shivers was titled “You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All, You Paid For It.” While it’s now trotted out with near sentimentality in every recap about early Cronenberg, the director will sometimes admit something along the lines of That goddamn article fucking sucked and that asshole nearly ended my career.

2. A delightful and kinky mash-up of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Robbe-Grillet from 1968, you can watch it on Youtube.

3. I just realized Men Without Hats’s video for “Safety Dance” qualifies as folk horror.