Shivers (1975)

Shivers arrives from 1975, a Canadian body horror picture made for a sum that would barely cover catering on a modern production. It concerns a Montreal luxury apartment complex whose residents are converted into carriers of a parasitic aphrodisiac. The parasite is described in dialogue as a combination of venereal disease and aphrodisiac, engineered to strip away over-intellectualism and return humanity to its primal appetites. The Parliament of Canada debated the film's social value. This is the sort of reception a director can dine out on for decades.

Viewed through the lens of contemporary social consciousness, the film offers almost nothing to catalogue. The cast is uniformly white, and no effort is made toward inclusive representation. A brief same-sex seduction occurs between Betts and Janine, though it functions as an infection vector, a parasite passed mouth to mouth, and the film frames it as exploitation and contamination instead of anything resembling queer identity. Bodies here are sites of invasion and revulsion, which places the film at some distance from the body positivity movement. The luxury high-rise setting invites an eat-the-rich reading that the screenplay never bothers to supply. There is no racial commentary, no environmental concern, no neurodivergent representation, and no revision of the historical record. The dialogue explains the parasite's purpose, but exposition is not a sermon.

What remains is a lean and genuinely unsettling piece of filmmaking whose transgressions belong to the anxieties of its own decade. It wants to disgust and disturb, and it succeeds on those terms. It does not wish to instruct us in how to live. For that, at least, we can be grateful.