The Brood

The Brood is a thoroughly sickening and repellent horror experience — but not until the climax and conclusion of the picture. It hovers over brutal, gory killings performed by seemingly child-like mutant dwarfs in little white suits. These are the minions, or so it seems, of psychiatric cult guru Dr. Raglan, played with subtle undertones of high menace by the late, great Oliver Reed. (Curiously, upon watching the film, we learned that co-starring lead actress Samantha Eggar — who also did a turn in the regrettable Mexican demon-possession flick Demonoid (1981), which is utterly forgettable but does have a great movie poster image of a bluish-black, sword-wielding demon with big-time horns — total eighties cheese heavy-metal album cover image — had literally died the week before. And they say there’s no greater structure to the Living Universe.)

Moving right along, Psychoplasmics is the Scientology-like cult of therapeutics attracting many neurotics to the Somafree campgrounds, which seem situated somewhere in the frosty, gray, terminally depressing winter wonderland of Manitoba. Or maybe it’s Ontario. I can’t remember now.

Art Hindle plays a man with the unlikely sobriquet of “Frank Carveth” (Carveth? Carveth what, one wonders) who has a little five-year-old daughter named Candice (Cindy Hinds), who is the eerie foreshadow of Heather O’Rourke in Poltergeist, which came three years later. Both films share a propensity to have short, bloody scenes that utterly gross out the viewer — which, as Stephen King once noted, was the purest, if bottom-level, form of horror. “There’s terror, and below that, a slightly grosser emotion, is horror [...] I go for terror,” says Big Steve, “but if I can’t get terror, I’m not proud. I go for the gross-out.”

Not word-for-word quote, mind you, but close enough. You get the picture (here literally). But I wildly digress.

Frank’s wife Nola (Samantha Eggar) is one of the true believers of Raglan’s therapy cult and has secreted herself, and her daughter, away at the compound — away from the prying eyes of estranged husband Frank. Frank, upon gaining custody of his little girl, realizes she’s bearing marks of abuse he believes Nola is responsible for — and quite likely correct, we might add.

Meanwhile, mutant troll dolls in white wind jumpers run around eighty-sixing unsuspecting NPCs and leaving a trail of blood and grue in their wake. Cronenberg began his career by making edgy, avant-garde films that hinted at depraved depths but presented themselves with the same clinical detachment that J.G. Ballard — whom Cronenberg eventually adapted with Crash in 1997 — affected. He went full-bore splatterpunk before shifting, once again, to the avant-garde. His last film, the 2022 Crimes of the Future (which has only a slight relation to his 1970 student film of the same name), features grotesque mutation and surrealistic juxtapositions of bodies exploding outward, and their symbiosis with biomechanical flesh. In short, he presents deep levels of disturbing grue, but not mindlessly. There’s a method to the madness, a huge intellect working behind the veil of cinematic shock.

He is, was, and forever shall be, a bona fide GENIUS.

Here, he doesn’t push the envelope, really, until the very end. And when he does, I’m guessing it was enough to leave some audience members literally gagging up their extra-buttered buckets of old-fashioned movie theater Jiffy Pop. Hideous and revolting would be putting it mildly. I won’t give it away to anyone who has yet to see it, but I’ve never seen a scene quite so sickening. (The possible exception of Ray Liotta unknowingly eating a slice of his own brains, buttered and fried in a wok by none other than Anthony “Hannibal the Cannibal” Hopkins in Ridley Scott’s 2000 horror thriller extravaganza Hannibal. That scene literally had me worrying I was going to have to run to the men's room to puke. )

The performances here are stellar. Robert A. Silverman — whom Cronenberg has utilized in various movies and television programs, such as an episode of "Friday the 13th: The Series" he directed — plays a cancerous former patient of Raglan with a tumor growing out of his throat and a grudge. But he’s still likable, and completely authentic. Reed continues with his slow, seething, underplayed sense of menace, and Eggar is a hysterical and indignant woman, one teetering on the verge of madness. Hindle is adequate as Frank.

All told, the film doesn’t really deliver until the final scenes, in which the body-horror disgust Cronenberg is so well known for bursts out in shocking and vomitous revelation.

So, what are you left with? Something in which to — well, forgive us — BROOD over.

The Brood (1979) Horror starring Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar. Directed by David Cronenberg.

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1:

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My Book: Silent Scream! Nosferatu. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels. (Writing as C. Augustine)

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