With a string of horror hits early on in his career – including Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone and The Fly – David Cronenberg established himself as a master of horror throughout the ’70s and ’80s, but he has mostly left the genre behind in recent years with films like A History of Violence, Eastern Promises and Maps to the Stars.
You could say that Cronenberg has reinvented himself as a filmmaker, and he tells Entertainment Weekly this week that he has no current plans on ever going back to horror.
“I’ve never really resisted that. I’ve been offered many projects and so on, and they just seemed to be a repetition basically of what I’d done already, so that’s not interesting,” Cronenberg told the site, promoting Beyond Fest’s upcoming retrospective of his career. “I think the reason that I started to evolve away from straight horror was just because, instead of being liberating, which it was in the beginning – and it’s a genre that really is capable of delivering a lot more than just scares if it’s done by really talented people – but I think I found that [horror] was becoming restrictive rather than liberating.”
He added, “So I think in all my films there is still the texture of that underneath everything, but I don’t really see myself going back to that. But you never know, you never know.”