Cinépix Inc.In the early ‘70s, David Cronenberg had a handful of short films and two tiny indie features — Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970) — under his belt when he realized it was time to take the next step towards becoming a professional filmmaker.Stereo and Crimes were avant-garde experiments, shot for under $20,000 apiece and with Cronenberg doing virtually everything except acting. While they captured some of the essence of what he would accomplish, it was his first true feature, the 1975 Canadian production Shivers, that established the style and template that turned him into one of horror's leading auteurs.Produced by, of all people, fellow Canadian Ivan Reitman — the late producer-director who gave us Ghostbusters, Stripes, and Dave, among many others — Shivers was an early dive into biological horror that laid down some of the genre markers that would define the iconoclastic filmmaker’s work, and that still manages to shock on the 50th anniversary of its release. Shivers is set in a luxury high-rise apartment building called the Starliner Tower, which stands on an isolated island outside Montreal. It’s there that a scientist, Emil Hobbes (Fred Doederlein), murders a young woman named Annabelle (Cathy Graham), slicing open her stomach and pouring acid inside before cutting his own throat. Hobbes, feeling that society had become too repressed, had been working on a venereal parasite that he hoped would lower human beings’ sexual inhibitions. But as the parasite is passed from person to person across the entire complex, the residents violently act out their basest impulses. It’s up to the on-site doctor (Paul Hampton) and his nurse and lover (Lynn Lowry) to somehow stop it before it reaches Montreal and beyond. Cronenberg’s macabre fascination with the body began here. | Cinépix Inc.Cronenberg presented his script, originally titled Orgy of the Blood Parasites, to Cinepix, a low-rent Canadian distributor that specialized in softcore skin flicks and other cheap exploitation titles. They were interested in producing it, but were unsure about Cronenberg, who had no experience directing a professional feature, helming it himself. It was three years before Cinepix procured funding (180,000 Canadian dollars) from the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC), which initially turned it down due to its content.Although Cinepix had initially gone behind Cronenberg’s back to the then-obscure Jonathan Demme (who’d been toiling in Roger Corman’s B-movie factory), Cronenberg held fast to his position that he had to shoot the film himself. With a 15-day shooting schedule, Cinepix asked Reitman to oversee the production and keep an eye on Cronenberg, who had never worked with a professional film crew before. “Suddenly I had 15 days to learn how to make a movie,” Cronenberg told interviewer Chris Rodley in his book Cronenberg on Cronenberg.Whatever he did in those 15 days, it worked. Shivers is undoubtedly a movie of limited means (the only notable actor was Barbara Steele, legendary star of horror classics like Black Sunday and The Pit and the Pendulum), but it’s an enormously confident film. Right from the gruesome murder-suicide that starts the film, Cronenberg indicates that he’s willing to not just bump up against taboos, but crash right through them.You might want to consider a different apartment. | Cinépix Inc.The film is gory, the parasites look like crawling, slimy turds (the makeup effects were done by Dick Smith and Joe Blasco, both pioneers in the field), and the whole notion of humans infecting each other through sex wasn’t just a sly poke at the sexual revolution of the ‘60s, but the first of many films in which Cronenberg investigated his preoccupations with the transformation of the human body through artificial means — a theme that would later crop up in Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, and his masterpiece, The Fly.Shivers, which was also released under the titles The Parasite Murders and, in the United States, They Came from Within, was not immediately heralded. Several Canadian film critics blasted the CFDC for bankrolling “filth,” despite the fact it made $5 million globally, paying back the investment and then some. The American release was also marred by cuts to avoid an X rating. But it got the ball rolling for the director, whose next film, the equally intense Rabid, cemented his reputation as the king of body horror.Some 50 years later, David Cronenberg is universally acclaimed as one of the most singular independent filmmakers of his time. He’s taken many different paths since then, although his recent films Crimes of the Future and The Shrouds have circled back to his more macabre roots. Shivers remains the movie in which Cronenberg not only realized he could be a filmmaker with his own unique sensibility, but that first exposed the world to that vision, which remains as unsettling and uncomfortable as it was then.