From The Fly to A History of Violence: our writers pick their favourite Cronenberg movies

The Brood

Cronenberg’s horror films could be described as unnerving and unsettling, or majestically gross, but they’re almost never scary in the traditional sense. The Brood is a blood-curdling exception, unleashing a small army of half-formed dwarf-children with murderous intent. Written in the wake of Cronenberg’s bitter divorce and custody battle, The Brood is a raw expression of anger and psychic distress, which manifests itself in the bodily mutations that often find their way into his work. Only here the little monsters are literally the product of broken marriage, asexual offspring that the mother, Nola (Samantha Eggar), spawns while undergoing an intensive New Age therapy.

The Brood follows Nola’s husband, Frank (Art Hindle), as he tries to gain custody over their young daughter, but they’re stalked at every turn by the girl’s freakish siblings, who are small enough to squeeze through windows and strong enough to wield blunt instruments of death. Cronenberg builds to one his most notoriously grotesque images, but the film has a pulpy intensity throughout that’s unusual for the director, tied to personal emotions that don’t feel as intellectualized as his other work. It’s a war of the heart – nasty, brutish and short. Scott Tobias

Scanners

“All right. We’re gonna’ do it the Scanner way – I’m gonna’ suck your brain dry.”

So says Michael Ironside’s evil telepath at each other. Like every kid who has tried to use the Force, their faces twitch, their arms shake, their eyes go bug out. Because this is a movie, the blood begins to spray, the flesh pulls apart, and everyone goes “ewwww”.