{"id":11273,"date":"2016-09-11T20:00:11","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T01:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=11273"},"modified":"2016-09-10T17:19:31","modified_gmt":"2016-09-10T22:19:31","slug":"the-brood-1979-david-cronenberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/11273","title":{"rendered":"The Brood (1979, David Cronenberg)"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most mental divorce-horror films, reportedly based on the director’s own experience retrieving a daughter from an ex-wife’s cult. Made between Rabid<\/a><\/em> and Scanners<\/a><\/em>, I liked the lead actor (horror regular Art Hindle of Black Christmas<\/em> and Body Snatchers ’78<\/em>) better than any pre-Videodrome<\/em> Cronenberg hero.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It seems Art’s wife Nola (Samantha Eggar of Walk Don’t Run<\/em>) is under the psychiatric care of “psychoplasmics” weirdo Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed, lending necessary gravity to a movie about psychosomatic killer dwarfs), and there are custody\/abuse questions about their daughter, which Nola solves by sending her mutant children to kill her own parents, Art’s new girlfriend, and eventually Oliver Reed.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Family meeting:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

The outsider conspiracy theorist in this movie who clues in Art about the doctor’s bizarre studies is the same actor (Robert Silverman) who played the wise outsider in Scanners<\/em>. But it’s Gary McKeehan (of The Italian Machine<\/em>) who first mentions “the disturbed kids in the warehouse, the ones your wife’s taking care of,” casually as if everybody already knew. Oliver Reed eventually gets on board helping Art with the rescue operation, helping to redeem whatever the hell has been happening at his institute.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the extras Cronenberg mentions that after making Stereo<\/a><\/em> and Crimes of the Future<\/em>, before joining Cinepix to make Shivers<\/em>, he had to decide if he was going to wholeheartedly pursue filmmaking – “I gave up the idea of being a novelist.” Forty-five years later he’d return to that idea for the great Consumed<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Carrie Rickey for Criterion:<\/p>\n

The Brood<\/em> was released the same year as another film about a custody dispute, Kramer vs. Kramer<\/em>, which subsequently took the Oscar for best picture. In 1979, Cronenberg, himself recovering from a difficult divorce and custody contest, noted of his most personal film, \u201cThe Brood<\/em> is my version of Kramer vs. Kramer<\/em>, but more realistic.\u201d Originally, I thought he was joking.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most mental divorce-horror films, reportedly based on the director’s own experience retrieving a daughter from an ex-wife’s cult. Made between Rabid and Scanners, I liked the lead actor (horror regular Art Hindle of Black Christmas and Body Snatchers ’78) better than any pre-Videodrome Cronenberg hero. It seems Art’s wife Nola (Samantha Eggar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[400,543,135,1510,1428,54,592,1329],"class_list":["post-11273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1970s","tag-cult","tag-david-cronenberg","tag-divorce","tag-dwarfs","tag-horror","tag-oliver-reed","tag-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11273"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11371,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11273\/revisions\/11371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}