While casual moviegoers today may be most familiar with director/writer David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, Cosmopolis, or his most recent film, Maps of the Stars, there was a time not so very long ago he was known for creating some very edgy horror films.
These same casual moviegoers may recall his 1986 remake of The Fly, a movie made very near the end of his “horror” producing phase…
While he would go on to make the chilling psychological horror-themed Dead Ringers (1988), Mr. Cronenberg’s subsequent films tended to move away from the horror genre from that point on.
If you found The Fly intriguing and were curious to see Mr. Cronenberg’s earlier horror efforts, you should begin with 1975’s Shivers and 1977’s Rabid.
It was the success of these two early horror films that gave Mr. Cronenberg the clout to make the next step in his directing career: Create larger budgeted movies featuring veteran and sometimes very well known actors. And so his next feature, 1979’s The Brood. is arguably the start of this phase which continued with Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Dead Zone (1983) and finished off with either The Fly or Dead Ringers.
Featuring starring roles for veteran actors Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar, The Brood is a great example of David Cronenberg’s disturbing brand of horror. Having said this, watching the film the other day was a curious experience. I recall first seeing it when either when it was originally released or shortly thereafter and finding the entire experience terrifying.
Watching the film now, however, I found most of the graphic material not quite as chilling but the movie nonetheless presents a very deep and (here I go using this word again) disturbing vision of a family breakdown. Today, the movie’s horror is therefore more psychological than graphic, though the film’s most graphic scene, presented toward the film’s end, retains its power even today.
The movie’s plot goes like this (and I will try to avoid major spoilers):
“Every-man” Frank Carveth (Art Hindle) shows up at a remote psychological retreat run by Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) to pick up his daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds). We find that Frank’s wife, Nola (Samantha Eggar) is in therapy with Dr. Raglan and, while their marriage is crumbling and she is isolated while in therapy, she has visitation rights.
We further find that Dr. Raglan’s brand of therapy is very much “out there”. It involves a great deal of theatricality, role playing, and outbursts of rage. Dr. Raglan’s ideas fall on almost Lovecraftian lines for the rage he forces his patients to unleash, he has discovered, sometimes manifests itself physically.
After Frank takes Candice home, he discovers she has bruises and cuts on her body. He is outraged by this and knows his wife is responsible for this abuse. However, as she is in isolated therapy, he cannot see her and is forced to confront Dr. Raglan about this abuse. He demands the visitations be discontinued. Dr. Raglan notes that Nola has the right to see her daughter and rejects as harmful terminating the visitations.
Thus rejected, Frank leaves Candice with her grandmother -Nola’s mother- and visits a lawyer. He finds that terminating visitations is a tricky thing and could work against him.
However, while he’s away, Candice finds and goes through old photographs of her mother and grandmother. She finds that as a child, Nola was often “sick” and hospitalized. Further, we find her grandmother is a heavy drinker and the implication is clear: The grandmother abused Nola as a child, just as Nola is doing the same now.
And then things get very strange…
Something appears in the grandmother’s kitchen and tosses plates and food onto the floor. The grandmother goes to investigate and is attacked by what appears to be a Candice doppleganger, a blond child with deformed features. This creature viciously kills the grandmother but leaves Candice alive, and the mystery begins…
As I said, I don’t want to go into too many spoilers (other than what I’ve just mentioned above) but the most fascinating element of The Brood is that while it is a horror story, at its heart it is about familial dysfunction.
Oliver Reed delivers a terrific performance as Dr. Raglan. He is a calm, cool character who nonetheless can act out in therapy sessions to bring out the rage in others. By the time the film’s over we realize he’s essentially a modern day Dr. Frankenstein, a man who pushed the limits of science and decency and, ultimately, must pay the price for his hubris.
Even better is Samantha Eggar as Nola Carveth. She is equal parts frightening, pitiful, enraged, jealous, and protective. Make no mistake: Ms. Eggar had a very tough role to play in this movie and I doubt many other actors could have done what she did here. In this movie conveys so many different -and at times paradoxical- emotions, sometimes within the very same scene. Despite her monstrous nature, in the end we can’t help but feel pity for her as she’s very much a victim of her abusive upbringing and inner madness rather than some crazed monster that needs to be “taken down.”
While The Brood likely won’t make your heart race like it did when originally released, it remains a startling journey through psychological horror made real. If you can handle the film’s slower pace, you’ll be treated with a very deep disturbing film.
Highly recommended.