ABSTRACT
With these words, the most iconic and prolific actress of 1960s horror cinema quit the genre, sick of being typecast in baroque tales of castles, crypts and bygone centuries. But Steele returned to horror with Shivers (1975), an aggressively contemporary film about sexually transmitted parasites in a luxury tower block. The director, David Cronenberg, shared her impatience with period settings. He looks back on his early work as ‘part of bringing horror into the twentieth century’: ‘At the time I started to make Shivers, there was already Night of the Living Dead. But for the most part horror was gothic, distant, not here’ (Rodley 1997: 60).
