Max Renn, a cynical director of a cable TV channel specializing in violent content, discovers the pirated program Videodrome, which shows young women tied up and frustrated. These apparently unsimulated scenes of torture cause him powerful hallucinations: his body undergoes atrocious metamorphoses and hybridizations, and gradually becomes the instrument of a plot beyond his understanding.
“Videodrome is in all respects the 'manifesto' of Cronenberg's cinema: a paradigmatic, multi-layered and shocking film. Shocking like a hallucination, lucid and dense like a theoretical essay on the mass media world in which we live. Cinema has rarely led to such in-depth reflection on itself, on its own meaning, on its relationship with other media and with the body of spectators” (Gianni Canova).
David Cronenberg was born in 1943 in Toronto. He became interested in cinema during university, producing two short films, Transfer and From the Drain. In 1975 he directed his first commercial feature film, Shivers, then The Brood in 1979, followed by Scanners. Videodrome (1983) was hailed by Andy Warhol as "the A Clockwork Orange of the 1980s". In 1996 he won the Prix Spécial du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival with Crash. He presented three other films in competition at Cannes: Spider (2002), A History of Violence (2005) and Crimes of the Future (2022). A pioneer of the body horror film genre, which explores the terror of humans when faced with the mutation of the body, he has currently finished filming The Shrouds, which is scheduled for release in 2024.
