Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) is being treated for severe psychological problems at the Somafree Clinic managed by Doctor Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed). This eccentric psychiatrist uses a revolutionary technique of his invention called Psychoplasmics, which consists in pushing his patients to express their inner anger in the form of outer physical manifestations (pustules, bruises and other more severe disorders). Nola's husband, Frank Carveth (Art Hindle), refuses to bring their daughter (Cindy Hinds) to see her mother on weekends since he noticed that she had been beaten. Nola's therapy implying complete isolation from the outside world, Frank cannot discuss this situation with her as she is entirely under Raglan's authority and so he wishes to sue the psychiatrist. Candice lives a traumatic experience when she finds her grandmother savagely murdered by a very strange creature. In spite of Frank and Nola's father's protesting, Raglan refuses to let them see Nola and carries on with his psychosomatic experiences uniquely on her. This leads to the most surprising and pessimistic conclusions.

The following quotes from David Cronenberg are a perfect tool for beginning a study on this film as they reflect the importance that The Brood had on the director's personal life and career, on the subject but also on its global environment (quotes are taken and translated from the excellent book of conversations between David Cronenberg and Serge Grunberg, published by the Cahiers du Cinema):

"Writing The Brood was an experience like I had never lived before. I had no intention of writing an autobiographic subject but I found myself at that time in the torments of divorce and was living one of the toughest periods of my life. … I wrote intensely, very affectively, it had to be written before the rest, I had to write it straight away … it was really a unique experience for me. The most interesting is the fact of course that usually this kind of urge comes for the writing of a first novel … But for me, writing had nothing to do with that. Even in the most humble pieces of writing I had done, I had always privileged the fantastic dimension, the invention. … It was therefore the closest experience I had to the youth autobiographic novel, with a sort of unique compulsion that I have never known since."

One can easily see on reading these statements that twenty years after the interview for the release of the film, David Cronenberg is still as vivid when he talks about the film. The Brood holds a very particular place in the director's works, he who had made to that date shorts and medium length films which dealt with his characteristical obsessions (fusion between mind and flesh, infections and viruses, sexuality), TV films, 2 original and striking movies (Shivers, 1975 and Rabid, 1977) as well as a commissioned film (Fast Company, 1979, his only work not treating of his usual environment).

Thanks to a more consequent budget for The Brood, Cronenberg had at his disposition a more experienced team of technicians, he could employ well-known and talented actors (Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed) and obtained shooting delays that allowed him to make this movie in professional conditions far from those that he had known before (Shivers was filmed in his own living place).

The relative amateurism from his first films has disappeared at this stage and here the director decides to deal with a subject quite common at first view (a couple on the verge of divorce and fighting over a child) but on an original approach, blending all at a time a classical drama (a family splitting up), a police investigation (who are the murderers?), a social critic (he shows the dangers lying in new psychiatry and idolatry) and also a radical treatment of his customary fantasy and personal themes (psychosomatics, internal rage). Again, The Brood is a unique piece of work in Cronenberg's filmography. Its subject is a fairly classical family melodrama but with which he shares a violent relation, which makes him declare:

"But it was a very passionate thing, pure vengeance; a very emotional and personal way of attaining a catharsis. That explains my words, now famous, about "my version of Kramer vs. Kramer". … That's precisely the kind of film I did not want to make. … i[I'm really going through a 3rd class melo. And I hate it!" "... I decided to stage the situation in a fantasy mode rather than naturalist. "

He consequently deals here with a common subject in his own particular way whereas usually, he is rather attracted to topics with a fantastic conceptual tendency. The only other film that one can compare with this approach is The Fly, which as a matter of fact is a tragic love story where one of the partners is incurably ill. Cronenberg decided here to develop the love story to make it the center of his film whereas in the original version (this is a remake of The Fly by Kurt Neuman, 1958) it was simply a stylistic device set by the genre.

The autobiographical aspect of this film is an essential point, unique in Cronenberg's career, and it appears clearly all through the film. The character of Frank, obvious alter ego of the director, does all in his means to avoid his daughter from going back to see her mother at the Somafree Clinic and will go to the extreme case of murder to free his daughter from her mother's hold. One can easily imagine David Cronenberg planning this kind of action when he declares, about the conditions that made him write this film:

"… Living this whole situation with my ex-wife and worrying about the groups she was involved with and that could possibly have sects. Finally it turned out to be wrong. … I admit it roused a genuine ferocity inside me: a possessive instinct and a desire to protect my daughter … I ended up kidnapping her and doing all my possible so that she wouldn't be taken to California. … I didn't think my wife capable of taking care of a child because of her own condition, because of the tremendous efforts she had to make to look after herself. … This whole story made me strongly want to analyze those kinds of things through a film. In this material, there was a real vengeance content. …"

This strong analogy gives a particular impact to the character of Frank Carveth, which Cronenberg took care to characterize very differently from his own personality. In spite of its relative transparency, this character remains very interesting in the way that he is a sort of referent to the viewer while being a fictional transposition of the director. Art Hindle plays Frank in a neutral mode but very convincing and natural, he has nothing of a Super Dad, which concords with the "realism" of the film, primordial factor in its coherence. The fact that this character was written for a precise function rather than to express and share emotions with the spectator as a human being reveals the "conceptual nature" of the film. This is another aspect to be taken in consideration when understanding certain options chosen by Cronenberg whilst writing the characters and situations. This a "film of ideas" that doesn't look to depend on psychologically very developed characters but instead to create solid heroes who will be representative of a state of mind and have a precise function in the film. Thanks to that, Cronenberg can graft his own set of themes on a curve which, as stated earlier, belongs to a proper genre: the family melodrama.

In The Brood, Cronenberg seems mostly interested in using the melodramatic thread of his screenplay to develop a radical and pessimistic reflection on family and its complex psychological knots and internal struggles. Here we are indeed in front of a complete autodestruction of the family unit. This darkness and radicalism in tone are clearly to be connected with the cathartic aspect of the creative experience for David Cronenberg:

" This whole story made me strongly want to analyze those kind of things through a film. In this material, there was a real vengeance content; I remember perfectly the scene where one of the creatures beats the grandfather to death. Shooting this scene was an intense moment of catharsis for me. It stayed something very intimate, nobody knew except me but deep down I had really associated the character of the grandfather with my ex-wife's own father …".

These words help us to clearly understand why The Brood is his only film with nearly no humour, which is usually an essential element in his films. This remark can seem surprising when one talks of Cronenberg but humour is an integral part of his work, often a ferocious humour, always well-tuned but rarely put forth as such. Humour comes in slight touches, appropriate hints, no scenes of broad-joking or comical situations.

In this way, the very dark and desperate humour in The Fly (scenes where Jeff Goldblum loses bits of his body), Videodrome (James Woods as a human video recorder, the film), more grostesque and excessive in Naked Lunch (the insect typewriter which has an anus for mouth) or Existenz (the "cook's special" in the chinese restaurant, the "gristle gun" made of bones and tendons and shoots teeth for bullets), allows Cronenberg to put into form the most extravagant graphical and conceptual ideas, to also lighten the film and insist on its critical view.

This lack of humour is partly imputable to the fact that shooting a film on an autobiographical subject just experienced and resolved doesn't make one inclined to laugh. The only character that appears to lighten the film, Jan Hartog, another victim of Raglan's techniques, ends his introductory scene by unveiling his impressive excrescences of flesh, annihilating the comical effect of his little gym exercises, restricting humour to a sort of pause in the middle of a big ocean of pessimism and trauma. Thus the film's seriousness is the element that gives it an outstanding effect on its viewers, deprived of a certain irony allowing them to protect themselves emotionally by staying at a distance. This reinforces the conceptual aspect of the film which doesn't care to entertain it's audience but rather seeks to make it feel an unpleasant situation, even though quite common nowadays, by diverted means tending to make the audience reflect on how they would act in such a situation (independently from the fantasy context of course).

The darkness and pessimism of the film leads inevitably to a raw and striking representation of violence, which confirms The Brood as the most outstanding film in Cronenberg's works. Some of his films are much more graphic and openly gore but as usual, never without motivation. Shivers, Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly or Naked Lunch employ many special effects which are often quite remarkable but without giving an impression of cold violence as strong as in The Brood.

As from the very first scenes, extreme tension can be felt in the fascinating exchanges between Dr Raglan and Michael, his patient. This tension will increase along with Frank's discoveries (his daughter's bruised back, his discussion with Raglan followed by his visit to the lawyer) and will be released with the first murder sequence. Here Cronenberg acts in an unaccustomed manner by proceeding to an "exercise de style" based on a building up suspense. The sensation of brutality that comes from this scene is preponderant to establish an atmosphere of fear and anxiety for the viewer. These are more classical means than those usually adopted by Cronenberg in his filmography and they correspond here to his desire to integrate the professional and commercial circuit. In our idea, Cronenberg is giving a go at some "stylistic compositions" but not without rearranging them in his own way.

The series of shots on objects being ejected, without apparent reason, from cupboards in the grandmother's kitchen is rightly efficient and when the "monster" jumps on the grandmother, the tension is at its utmost even more because we have already seen it grabbing an object that conveys a strong underlying violence (potato masher).

The fierceness with which the creature kills the grandmother is surprising for the spectator and shocking even though the scene is not intended to be indulgent or "voyeur". Here, the intention is quite other than in Mario Bava or Dario Argento's cinema (two great baroque aesthetes), whose production is based on the magnification of the murder scene. Conversely, with Cronenberg, the act of murder is ugly and flashes like lightening, the inhumanity which emerges from it being linked to the fury and repressed hatred in Nola, "mother" of the monsters. Her subconscious expresses itself through her offspring and it appears logical that their acts should be so violent and impulsive as they express the level of rage that Nola has attained. The treatment of the second murder is as a matter of fact quite revealing on this point. Nola seems to feel mostly resentment towards her mother, but her father's murder is even more violent and unbearable. This time, Cronenberg does not employ suspense since his film isn't based on this principle and he has already disclosed the evident abnormality of the killer. On the contrary, he insists on the murder act itself, which is accomplished again with an unusual object: a glass ball. This is the scene where the cathartic virtue of the film is most evident, fact confirmed by the director himself:

"… In the scene, the creature used a glass ball to smash the grandfather's head in. When my editor said to me: "We only need one or two hits", I answered: "No, no, I'm sure it needs four or five!". The scene is quite unbearable to watch, and the sounds … But it was something very passionate, pure vengeance; a very emotional and personal way of attaining catharsis.…"

We can see that Cronenberg had a revenge to take on his personal story and what better means than art to evacuate this kind of urge? This becomes a kind of "mirror image" where Cronenberg himself would be a sort of counterpart to Nola and would have his fictitious monsters do what his own subconscious might have planned at the time of the facts (in relation to his father-in-law as mentioned earlier). These revelations bring more weight to the film and create a genuine synergism between the creator and his work, all the more striking that conversely to other directors of autobiographic films, Cronenberg manages to integrate other complex themes that are for their part totally fictional and original, without affecting the autobiographical part, on the contrary.

The theme of fusion is so present in Cronenberg's allegorical world that it becomes his own way of working. He is so much in phase with his work that he ends up integrating numerous personal details in his usual subjects, which literally merge together to "give birth" to a film all at once relatively classic and totally original but without unbalance whatsoever. In our opinion, the most striking aspect in The Brood comes from the theme of somatizing and by extension, the irrefutable link between mind and flesh. Here stands one of the main subjects of Cronenberg's cinema and it is as from this film that the director's typical world takes shape. This is also the film that sees him go the furthest in this field, as the context in which his characters find themselves confronted by "eruptions of flesh" is overtly realistic and not hallucinatory as in Videodrome or Naked Lunch. In these two films, the most impressive mutations are clearly placed in a phantasmagorical context, allowing Cronenberg to put into images his most unrealistic ideas (a human video recorder, a sensitive TV set, a talking typewriter, a drug secreting E.T.).

In The Brood, the realistic environment and the conceivable aspect of Dr Raglan's theories force Cronenberg to place the frankly fantastic part (and typical of his work) at the end of the film. This helps reinforce its impact and makes Nola's transformation totally unforgettable. The fact that this physical aberration is linked with motherhood and thus sexuality (or in this case the absence of sexuality) is a subject that Cronenberg also deals with in The Fly (where the hero is reborn thanks to his teleportation). The two films can be brought together on this point as the births are in fact rather rebirths, or even more, regenerations (Brundle comes out "purified" from the egg-shaped telepods) or realizations (Nola realizing through her monsters, genuine outgrowths of flesh from her mind, the fantasies of her subconscious). Nola explains that she is in the middle of a beautiful journey that she considers far too strange to be shared with anyone. This idea of a radical physical transformation, leading to a "new flesh" and a level of evolution from which the hero cannot return, will be the main thread in Videodrome (Max Renn's leitmotiv will be: "Long live the new flesh!").

The Brood was evidently a sort of "womb" to David Cronenberg's cinema, even though its reputation is far from its real importance in the director's career. As a matter of fact, we can hear in the first scene a significant line / slogan, customary and recurrent in his films as it sums up and defines in few words the essence of Cronenberg's cinema:

Dr Raglan is in a public therapy session and exhorts his patient like a real sect guru: " Go all the way through it! Come out the other end! Don't stop in the middle! I'm watching you! I'm watching everything you do! "

This exhortation characterizes to perfection most of Cronenberg's heroes' processes. They all start off on a "bizarre journey" (mutations) in unknown psychosomatic lands and must imperatively go to the end of it to accede to their new condition (new flesh), whilst Cronenberg films these true "odysseys of metamorphosis". Nola's journey will end with death, but this scene, which could be considered a pure and simple murder, is actually a suicide by proxy that Nola imposes on her husband: "Kill me, kill me!" she says, thus taking over Frank's murderous urge. In Videodrome, Max Renn will end his journey towards a new flesh in the same manner, but he will be reborn in a hypothetical virtual world.

In order to give an overview of all the themes treated in The Brood and the complexity of their entwining (a film apparently clear and that works perfectly on the first degree), we wish to offer a particular reading of the last scene. It is in our eyes one of the most successfully managed scenes in Cronenberg's career or at least one of the most representative in his world by its implacable logic and its signification when one considers its claimed symbolic intentions. Before that, it is necessary to mention one primordial point to be assimilated in order to capture all the subjacent meanings in David Cronenberg's films.

He willingly admits that thanks to metaphor, literature can easily offer the same sensations as cinema can obtain but in a far more complex and awkward way. Cronenberg's intentions are much more simple and come under an implacable logic: he must find a cinematographic equivalent to the literary metaphor so as to transpose it accurately into images. In this optic, and with the aid of strong metaphorical visual work, he tries literally to transform the word into flesh (" I have to make the word be flesh "). This explains his fondness for fantasy cinema or sci-fi which allow him to achieve his intentions, these genres making it possible to film the craziest situations without the audience losing interest.

The following assumptions are made so as to prompt a debate following these interpretations, which are not the fruit of a deep analysis but rather of an attentive observation of the scene's development, seen from a metaphorical angle.

The bungalow where Nola spends the whole film can be considered as an image of herself in which the ground floor would be her body (where she gives birth) and the attack her mind (where her subconscious lies). Her "children" are a physical manifestation of her subconscious, that Dr Raglan has brought to express itself but had firmly locked up in the attack (mind), thinking he would be able to master such a force. And yet he underestimated his patient's furious power and the broken window that he finds upstairs signifies that Nola's subconscious (her "children") has supplanted her consciousness. The monsters, physically serving her vengeance, have managed to escape and settle her score with her family (killing mother and father), her environmental dangers (killing the teacher who in her eyes could come between her and her husband) and recover that which belongs to her (by kidnapping her daughter).

Dr Raglan and Frank, the two men in her life, will try to calm Nola's anger in order to recover Candice, prisoner of her mother's subconscious (held prisoner in the attack by the monsters). Raglan, realizing that his experiment has gotten out of his control and that Frank is the only one who can appease his wife by coming back to her, assumes the risk of recovering Candice while her father keeps Nola "occupied". Frank is on the verge of succeeding when Nola challenges him to stand up to his soothing words and bear the vision of her new condition as "Queen of Bees" (as Michael, one of Raglan's other patients mentioned earlier, will call her). Surprised and then horrified by what his wife's body has become and the view of her giving birth in the way of an animal (Nola rips off her external uterus and licks the blood covering the "baby's" body), Frank loses control of the situation.

Nola, hurt by her husband's disgust, goes into a fury that wakens her "children". Raglan, who was looking to make up for his fault by recovering Candice, is quickly surrounded by the monsters coming out of their sleep by Nola's call. He decides to sacrifice himself in order to save Candice and dies under the savage attacks from the monsters, overexcited by their (psycho-) mother's fury. Nola, hearing gunshots, understands that Frank is trying to "steal" their child back and decides to kill her (" I'd rather kill Candice than let her leave with you "). Instead of running, the little girl stays petrified in front of the dreadful scene before her eyes of Dr Raglan's slaughter. Frank jumps to Nola's throat so as to stop her "children" who are now attacking Candice, who has taken refuge in a cupboard. The little girl goes through a horrifying moment where all the monsters try to kill her, breaking through the door behind which she is hiding. This scene is actually an open reference to one of the only evident references in Cronenberg's filmography: Night of the Living Dead by George Romero (1968).

These two films are based on the same kind of irrational fear and both transmit the extreme horror inherent to that kind of absurd fear through two psychologically similar characters who are in the same terrifying situation. Cronenberg pays here a discrete but vivid tribute to Romero's film.

Frank finally kills Nola before the monsters can get to his daughter, and they fall and shrivel up because they have no more incoming rage from their creator. He finds Candice quite credibly prostrated in the cupboard and he who at the beginning of the film was worried that he might have irreparably hurt his daughter psychologically, can now seriously worry all the more. They both drive away from the clinic, without a word, separated by an invisible line, closing the film on a very pessimistic vision of the family entity, all the more disturbing that it appears very coherent.

Thus the film ends on a very strong and chilling impression, as concise and clear as the first scene. The insisting close-ups on Candice's arm where pustules are now starting to grow are an implacable image of how the family system will be repeated. Cronenberg insists indeed a long time on these two growing excrescences that evidently show that Candice is repeating her mother's example, after having interiorized her distress she is expressing it. The final close-up on Candice's crying but impassive face concludes a film that was already impregnated by its protagonists' ordeals. The fade to black on Candice's inexpressive face, even though she has just lived the worst series of traumatic events, ends the film magnificently on a nearly palpable feeling of fate.

The previous text that was on-line has been modified for some themes that were just highlighted to be deepened in the second part of the text, soon to be on-line.

In the same manner, the two enclosures that existed will be turned into proper enriched texts forming part of a David Cronenberg dossier to come.



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