A couple months back, I posted some interesting comments from Clive Barker, in which he took a shot at the current state of the horror film genre. Along similar lines, another 1980s shock-meister, David Cronenberg, had some things to say on the subject in an interview with Wired yesterday.After churning out a series of horror classics in the big-hair decade that included Scanners, The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers and The Fly, Cronenberg left genre fans in the dust to pursue crime dramas like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises to even greater mainstream acclaim. But D.C. doesn't rule out a return to fright flicks, provided "something came along that was intriguing and challenging." According to Wired, however, the director is somewhat less than enthusiastic about the rash of so-called "torture porn" that has arisen over the past decade. In fact, Cronenberg goes so far as to intimate that the sub-genre is nothing more than a pale imitation of the "body horror" subgenre he pioneered a quarter century ago:
"'Body horror' was not my term. It was a term someone used to describe what I was doing, so it is not a category in my head that I use to make films. And I think, without trying to sound egomaniacal, that my movies have been picked apart piece by piece, and recycled quite a bit. But that's the nature of the film business, or creativity in general: We are all feeding off of each other. There's no question about that, so I guess it's not a surprise that I'm moving somewhere away from all of that."Cronenberg argues that he still has the same mission, which is to shock and horrify audiences. However, in a world where images of violence are so much more a part of our everyday life, he now chooses to do it sans the gore with which he made his name:
"We're in a very bizarre era right now, where snuff porn that never really existed before is now available. If you want to see beheadings or stonings, you can see them any time you want on your computer. And it's low-tech, too: not the internet, but a woman being stoned to death."