We're all so icked out by our bodies that, really, anything that seems to violate "the flesh" is going to illicit a reaction. I did a short film called "The Amniote" a few years ago where you see a guy's fingernail get ripped out. Man, did that ever get a jump from the audience.
David Cronenberg has a well-deserved reputation for being sort of the king of body horror, at least early in his career. This is in evidence right up front in his first film, "They Came From Within" (also known as "Shivers," 1975), and he kept hitting that button pretty consistently all the way up through "Crash" (1996) and "eXistenZ" (1999). The earliest films (particularly "They Came From Within" and "Rabid") were fairly unsophisticated, using the body horror mostly for cheap shocks and not really exploring anything deeper ("They Came From Within" and "Rabid" are also pretty gratuitous ripoffs of "Night of the Living Dead," by the way).
But even back then, you could see the seed of where he was going to go. Just check out this clip from "They Came From Within." It manages to disturb on a level that most of the rest of the movie just can't reach, and it lays the groundwork for what would become Cronenberg's main obsession over the next two decades — corrupted, violated flesh as a vessel for eroticism and the degradation of identity.
He would most artfully explore these topics several years later in things like "The Fly" and "Dead Ringers" — the latter of which takes these fascinations in a singularly unpleasant direction. The whole thing about "gynecological instruments for surgery on mutant woman" is shudder inducing, and I find this scene in particular to be more haunting than just about anything else in American cinema over the last 50 years.
"The Brood" was kind of a transitional film for Cronenberg, where he was starting to figure out how to take these ideas and use them to plunge deeper into the recesses of the reptile brain than he was able to with the B-movie thrills he had been serving up just prior. It's not his best body horror film, but it's the one where the body horror started to develop its own sick life, to corrupt itself into something vicious and horrifying in a way that was is more primal and fundamental.
"The Brood" is a story about a psychologist (rendered with surprising subtlety by the great Oliver Reed) who develops a technique where patients are able to express their emotional trauma and repressed emotions through phsyiological changes, and how one woman (Samantha Eggar) is able to use this process to create a murderous "brood" to take vengeance on those who she feels have wronged her (her ex husband, his new girlfriend, even her daughter). Some of the imagery is absolutely horrifying, and — typical to Cronenberg — it's all rendered in a flat, uninflected way that makes everything you see even more disturbing. There's a coldness to Cronenberg's work, similar to that of Stanley Kubrick, that can almost border on sociopathic at times. We don't know what to feel about anything we see because we get absolutely no sense that he feels anything. He presents us with truly shocking stuff, but we get the idea that he's studying it all with the mild, academic interest of a scientist studying a slide.
The artfulness you find in some of his later work is not really in evidence here. "The Brood" still has a lot of the B-movie shoddiness that mars his first two films. This, somehow, makes it even more upsetting (not as upsetting as "Dead Ringers," but a close second). We don't have the safety of feeling like we're watching an art film. Rather, there's an odd, brute force that propels this thing towards a horrifying conclusion, and you leave feeling like you just got throttled by an oddly placid maniac.
This isn't going to be for everybody. But if you've enjoyed(?) some of Cronenberg's more celebrated work, this is an interesting glimpse at where it all started.
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