ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines four films directed by David Cronenberg: The Brood, Scanners, The Fly, and Dead Ringers. She discusses these films in pairs, considering first the mental horrors of Scanners and Tlte Brood and then the broader horrors about personhood that are central to The Fly and Dead Ringers. Cronenberg's films are variations on the continuing and central themes of mad science in relation to monstrous flesh. The performance of horror and monstrous flesh come together in the sequences of Cronenberg's films that display horror and treat our own interest in it as an issue by highlighting internal audiences for this horror. The horror is not presented discursively or through dialogue but rather immediately through its effects on the sick woman and through the emotional tonalities of the film, particularly its unnerving sounds and eerie lighting. Barbara Creed treats the film as a case of a more general pattern in horror films depicting monstrous females.
