Age: 83
male
David Paul Cronenberg (born 15 March 1943) is a Canadian film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He is a principal originator of the body horror genre, with his films exploring visceral bodily transformation, infectious diseases, and the intertwining of the psychological, physical, and technological. Cronenberg is best known for exploring these themes through sci-fi horror films such as Shivers (1975), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), and The Fly (1986). However, he has also directed dramas, psychological thrillers, and gangster films. Cronenberg's films have polarized critics and audiences; he has earned critical acclaim and sparked controversy for his depictions of gore and violence. The Village Voice called him "the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world". His films have won numerous awards, including the Special Jury Prize for Crash at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, a unique award that is distinct from the Jury Prize as it is not given annually but only at the request of the official jury, who in this case gave the award "for originality, for daring, and for audacity". From the 2000s to the 2020s, Cronenberg collaborated on several films with Viggo Mortensen, including A History of Violence (2005), Eastern Promises (2007), A Dangerous Method (2011) and Crimes of the Future (2022). Seven of his films were selected to compete for the Palme d'Or, the most recent being The Shrouds (2024), which was screened at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Description above from the Wikipedia article David Cronenberg, licensed under CC-BY-SA, is a full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Set in 1981 Manhattan, the story follows Grace Ripley, a beautiful executive who counts herself among a secret group of exiled aliens, some morphed to human form to live among us, while others remain in their original guises, waiting to die on the backward planet Earth. Her secretary Marty doesn't know of Grace's origins, nor does Marty's friend Spider O'Toole, a one eyed beauty disenfranchised from society and floating from job to job. Frogner, an alien disguised as a human salesman, discovered Grace's alien identity while trying to make a deal. He tells this to Harry Sloane, head of the Manhattan Grief Clinic, a front for the alien hideaway known as the Corridor, where any manner of extraterrestrial is stuffed into cubicles to live out their useless lives. Sloane desperately wants to find John Taiga, an alien who may have developed a way to leave Earth. Sloane will stop at nothing to find and kill Taiga, including enlisting Grace to go on her own search that leads to New York's seedier recesses and the Corridor's darker secrets. Anxiety kills these beings, while sex can either be a savior that rescues them from morphological breakdown, or it can kill both the alien and the chosen human mate in a life-draining cocoon.
