OVERVIEW
After a motorcycle accident leaves her near death, Rose Miller (Marilyn Chambers) is taken to a rural Quebec plastic surgery clinic, where an experimental skin graft procedure saves her life and leaves her with an unwanted one: a retractable stinger beneath her arm that feeds on human blood, spreading a rabies-like contagion through Quebec and into urban Montreal. Written and directed by David Cronenberg, Rabid is part vampire film, part outbreak horror, and belongs alongside Shivers and Romero’s The Crazies in the grimy, politically charged body horror wave of the mid-1970s.
BACKGROUND
Rabid arrived as Cronenberg’s second consecutive film for Cinépix, the Montreal-based exploitation outfit that had backed Shivers two years earlier. That film had sparked a national controversy when journalist Robert Fulford attacked the CFDC for funding what he called a disreputable horror picture, and the fallout made financing Rabid genuinely difficult. The CFDC eventually came through, but routed the money through cross-collateralization with another project to keep its fingerprints off it. Cronenberg himself nearly walked away. “This woman grows a cock thing in her armpit and sucks people’s blood through it. It’s ridiculous. I can’t do this,” he told producer John Dunning. Eventually, he came around. He had wanted Sissy Spacek for the lead after seeing her in Badlands, but Dunning passed, and it was executive producer Ivan Reitman who suggested Marilyn Chambers, then best known for her role in Behind the Green Door. Cronenberg had not seen that film but was impressed by her audition. Shot in Montreal over five weeks in late 1976, Rabid opened in Canada in April 1977 and grossed over $7 million internationally, making it one of the highest-grossing Canadian films of its era.
THE REVIEW
Cronenberg returns to the outbreak structure of Shivers, once again building body horror through contamination that spreads fast and without mercy. The most notable difference is scale: where Shivers confined itself to one apartment building, Rabid expands the disease across all of Montreal. It is a bolder film in almost every way, and for its first 30 minutes, a significantly better one.
It feels like a real step up for the Canadian director, who seems much more assured here. The camera work is more confident, the pacing more deliberate, and if the occasional stiff performance still sneaks in (Chambers, while committed and surprisingly sympathetic in the role, does have a few stilted deliveries, especially in the film’s latter scenes), the whole thing now feels like a proper theatrical film rather than a genuinely inventive, yet not-quite-there-yet student project.
For a while, it all feels propulsive and consequential: the young couple’s incident, rushed surgery, first attacks, until the contamination eventually spreads beyond the hospital, each event feeding the next with a momentum Shivers rarely achieved, while also giving truly memorable set pieces and images (the frozen girl in the film’s poster and the attack at the diner). There is also real melancholy in these early scenes, aided by Brian Bennett’s “The Hideout,” a creepy yet tender stock library track that gives Rose’s transformation and the death of her first victims genuine sadness (as with Shivers, the budget didn’t allow for a composed score).
Had Cronenberg stayed contained in the clinic, building dread there while exploring the institutional arrogance that caused Rose’s transformation, Rabid might have become his first great film. Taking the sickness out into the whole city is a bold choice, but it dilutes the film’s grip.
To his credit, Cronenberg builds the spread convincingly, from the way the sickness passes from person to person to the TV reports that convey its growing scale. Every time an unrelated character appears in safety far away, you know the catastrophe will eventually reach them. Yet by efficiently conveying the scope of the infection and how quickly it spreads, it oddly decreases the urgency of the situation as a whole. Shivers‘ confined apartment building felt smaller with every new infection; the exits kept shrinking, and contamination could be anywhere. In Rabid, the world gets increasingly larger and, paradoxically, less threatening.
The thematic explorations suffer from a similar problem: Cronenberg opens several interesting conversations and abandons each one before it can develop. A reckless doctor reshapes a woman’s body without her consent, and the film never returns to the ethical implications of that choice. Rose needs to feed, cannot stop, and hates herself for it, but the addiction never deepens beyond the pattern of attack and regret. There is a recurring, subversive setup in which men approach Rose with predatory intent only to have it inverted, her body turning the act of exploitation back on them, but Cronenberg treats it as a plot device rather than exploring what it means. Once the outbreak takes over the narrative, the film shifts its focus from Rose’s interior experience to the city’s collapse; it never fully returns, and, as a result, it becomes less interesting as it goes on. Rose, who starts the film as a person, ends it as a device, and the film suffers for it.
Rabid remains a showcase for a young Cronenberg who extracts remarkable filmmaking from a tiny budget, but it still feels like a promising voice sharpening his instincts rather than someone who has arrived.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Nearly everything that would define Cronenberg’s career as a body horror master is already visible in Rabid: the body as a site of betrayal, the institution that causes the damage it claims to prevent, the horror that begins with a medical procedure and ends with society unraveling. He would refine all of these in The Brood, Videodrome, and The Fly, with the control and thematic discipline that Rabid reaches for but doesn’t yet have. What this film does have is a first act strong enough to prove he was heading somewhere worth following.