Maple Syrup Massacre is a monthly series where Bloody Disgusting dissects the themes, conventions and contributions of new and classic Canadian horror films.
In the last installment of Maple Syrup Massacre, we looked at how David Cronenberg helped to pave the way for genre films in Canada, a baton that was eventually picked up by Vincenzo Natali with Cube in the late 90s. Consider that piece a primer because we’re headed back to the Godfather of Canadian genre to discuss Cronenberg’s follow-up to Shivers, 1977’s Rabid.
In some ways Rabid feels like Cronenberg giving elitists and, more broadly speaking, the Canadian public (whose outrage fueled the notorious debate about Shivers) the finger. Not only is Rabid another gratuitous horror film about a viral contagion, but the lead actor is none other than famed American porn star Marilyn Chambers. If Cronenberg was courting outrage with his feature directorial debut, he was practically begging for controversy with his sophomore effort.
None of this should suggest that Rabid isn’t a great film, though. Of the famed auteur’s early “body horror” works, it tends to get overlooked in favour of heavy hitters like The Brood, Videodrome and The Fly, but Rabid is actually a perfect continuation of the personal and thematic interests that Cronenberg first explored in Shivers.
Online plot summaries are often misleading: reviews tend to fixate on Chambers’ character, Rose, because of the actress’ real life notoriety and because the character instigates the film’s outbreak. The reality, however, is that Rabid is less about a single character and more about the failed public response to the crisis (trigger warning for rampant parallels to our current lived reality).
Early in Rabid, Rose and her boyfriend Hart Read (Frank Moore) are involved in a motorcycle accident just outside of the Keloid private hospital, named after its founder Dr. Dan Keloid (Howard Ryshpan). Hart’s arm is broken, but Rose is critically injured and must undergo an experimental surgery in order to save her life. Shortly thereafter, Rose – in a kind of hungry fugue state – begins to attack and drain blood from strangers using a phallic stinger hidden inside a vaginal slit in her armpit. Her victims become sick with rabies-like symptoms, eventually falling into comas and dying; but not before they attack, bite and infect others. In this way, the illness begins to spread uncontrollably, charted throughout the film via news reports, quarantines, check points and no shortage of public attacks.
Like Shivers, Rabid is innately interested in the physical (and often sexual) nature of the transmission of the virus. In order to quench her bloodlust, Rose is often framed embracing or pulling her victims in close and the physical struggle when she inevitably strikes at them (with her doubly sexual appendage) bears a strong resemblance to coitus. This is classic, even familiar Cronenberg territory: mad scientists, boundary pushing technology/medical procedures and horrifying body modifications that cause death and destruction.
What could be more Canadian than weird sex?
Unlike Shivers, however, Cronenberg is less interested in characters in Rabid than he is about societal breakdown. Whereas Shivers chronicles primarily aggressor/victim encounters, many of which can be read as explicitly sexual, Rabid chronicles the breakdown of society from normal to chaotic, focusing on the ill-preparedness of all levels of government and individuals.
This can be construed as a callback to the mishandling of the October Crisis by the (Pierre Elliot) Trudeau government at the turn of the decade, which began when members of an extremist political group known as the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped James Cross, the British trade commissioner, as well as Minister of Immigration and Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte. Laporte was eventually killed and Prime Minister Trudeau ultimately invoked the War Measures act, resulting in the arrest and detention of 450 citizens without charge. It’s arguably one of the darkest chapters in Canadian political history.
While it is tempting to read Chambers’ Rose as a cipher for the crisis itself (or even an American threat to Canadian society), the reality is that Rose, despite being patient zero, is first and foremost also a victim herself. Unlike in the 2019 Rabid remake, 1977 Rose is an unwilling science experiment gone wrong. She did not consent to the surgery, which was okay’d by her boyfriend and performed on her unconscious body by Dr. Keloid and his team.
Even when Rose is attacking and infecting others throughout the film, in a sense her body is acting of its own accord. This plot point sets up the entire harrowing climax as Rose inadvertently dies by suicide in a misguided effort to prove to Hart that she is not responsible for the spread of the virus by trapping herself in her apartment with a man she has recently attacked. In this moment, as Hart pleads with Rose to run away before she is consumed, Cronenberg briefly hints that he actually cares about his human characters and their micro-level drama, but in reality it is the final scene that confirms his grim, nihilistic thesis. Rose’s corpse has been deposited in a back alley and picked at by a stray dog, awaiting pick-up by hazmat-suited garbage men who proceed to throw her body away like trash.
In this way, Rose embodies the classic dualism of Cronenberg’s early female characters: as William Beard outlines in his chapter on the film in The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg, Rose is both a fantasy object of desire and a sympathetic victim of men and institutions. This is partially in keeping with the gender characteristics discussed in the first entry in this series on Backcountry, where Canadian female characters have greater agency than their male counterparts. This is also evident in the character of Hart, who adheres closely to the characteristics of Canadian men: ineffectual and unable to improve the situation, despite his best efforts.
In spite of recent real life developments that have robbed the film of its escapist elements, Rabid remains both emblematic of Canadian cinema, as well as a prototypical Cronenberg film. In 1977 the genre auteur was still refining his filmmaking craft and his storytelling capacity en route to more polished productions, but the themes and character archetypes explored here (and Shivers) would dominate his later works such as The Brood, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, and The Fly.
Looking back, Rabid is a little messy in parts, but it’s a key stepping stone in Cronenberg’s evolution and an essential entry that helped to establish a genre film industry in Canada.
