Take the Skin and Peel It Back: Halloween by Cronenberg
Screening Dates
  • October 28, 2022 8:25
  • October 30, 2022 6:30
  • November 2, 2022 8:30
New Restoration

“Bristling with the insidious, febrile energy that would become Cronenberg’s hallmark … Remains a deeply unsettling experience.”

Danny Leigh, Sight and Sound

Porn star Marilyn Chambers—fetchingly equipped with a phallus-like stinger in her armpit!—heads the cast of Cronenberg’s second commercial feature. She is Rose, a young Quebec woman horribly disfigured in a motorcycle accident. An experimental skin-grafting procedure restores her beauty but has horrific side effects, unleashing a rabies-like plague that has foaming-at-the-mouth murderers roaming the streets! In an echo of 1970’s October Crisis, Montreal is soon under martial law. Cataclysm, paranoia, body horror, overreaching scientists, mutation, intercourse linked with disease—key Cronenberg motifs abound in this shocking cult favourite that today feels like a fever dream of COVID-19 anxieties and lockdown measures.

“The best scenes are pitched ingeniously between shock and parody, never quite succumbing to farce. None of the other recent apocalypse movies has shown so much political or cinematic sophistication.”

David Pirie, Time Out
Media