In 1975, David Cronenberg’s debut feature film, Shivers (aka They Came With From Within, aka The Parasite Murders), was trashed by his Canadian countrymen. Writing under a pseudonym, the esteemed Canuck literary critic Robert Fulford wrote that Shivers was “the most repulsive movie [he’d] ever seen.” More galling to Fulford than the “perverted sex and violence” (in Shivers, a parasite, passed on by sexual contact, turns its victims into zombies) was how the film had been funded: It was bankrolled by government grants, meaning that Canadian taxpayers had footed the bill. (To drive home the point, the review was titled “You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All, You Paid For It.”)
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