David Cronenberg says there is 'no such thing as body horror'

When EW spoke with David Cronenberg in 2018, the Canadian filmmaker said it was unlikely he would return to the "straight" horror movies of his early career, like 1977's Rabid, 1979's The Brood, and 1986's The Fly, all of which found grotesque things happening to the human form.

"Probably not," said the auteur, whose more recent credits include 2005's A History of Violence, 2011's A Dangerous Method, and 2012's Cosmopolis. "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... 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."

Taylor Hill/FilmMagic David Cronenberg

Never say never. Four years on, Cronenberg has returned after a near-decade long break from directing with a new movie, the just-released Crimes of the Future, set in a world where there is no pain or infection. The film stars longtime Cronenberg collaborator Viggo Mortensen as a performance artist who grows new types of internal organs which are then removed for the pleasure of an audience by a character played by Léa Seydoux. The film's other jaw-dropping sights include the autopsy of a murdered child and a character whose body is covered in ears. So why did Cronenberg change his mind and make this return to the body horror arena?

"There is no such thing as the body horror arena," insists the director. "You have to accept that. For critics and fans [it exists], but creatively it doesn't exist for me. It totally doesn't. So what I was probably saying to you then was that I thought I wasn't going to make any more movies basically. It wasn't really specific to the so-called arena. Every movie is the same to me in terms of what I do. It's getting the dialog to work, casting it properly, lighting, all of that stuff. For me, the genre differentiation is more a marketing question or a critic's question, but for me, creatively, it doesn't give me anything. I ignore it basically. For me, this movie is another movie. It's no different from A Dangerous Method or Cosmopolis to me."

Everett Collection Viggo Mortensen in Crimes of the Future

Cronenberg was prompted to return to filmmaking by producer Robert Lanton who encouraged him to dust off his Crimes of the Future screenplay.

"He phoned me up and he said, 'You haven't been making movies, there's a really great script, you should read it, it's your own script," recalled the director.

The film's cast also includes Kristen Stewart and Scott Speedman, who agrees with Cronenberg that Crimes of the Future should not be regarded as a "body horror" film.

"I think it's an evocative, fascinating, hypnotic movie, rather than being a 'body horror' movie," says Speedman. "That throws me off because that's never the movie that I thought we were making."

Watch the trailer for Crimes of the Future below.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Related content:

• David Cronenberg expects walkouts in 'first 5 minutes' at premiere of Crimes of the Future with Kristen Stewart

• Cannes review: David Cronenberg's glossy, inscrutable Crimes of the Future skates on style