The Brood

Part of the special series NACHTBLENDE

‘Rip to sigmund freud you would've loved the brood’ amaya on Letterboxd

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is considered a great of cinema in general and rightly a kind of founder of body horror. With THE BROOD, he became an auteur as early as 1979, even if he was only able to win over the mainstream and the feature pages much later.

Nola and Frank (Samantha Eggar & Art Hindle) are a married couple in crisis. The situation is not helped by the fact that Nola is being held in the ‘Somafree’ asylum run by the notorious psychiatrist Dr Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed). He uses intensive role-play therapy to externalise the repressed and unconscious in the form of physical symptoms. He calls it ‘psychoplasmics’, a seemingly scientifically sound form of therapy that he explains in a book with the euphonious title THE SHAPE OF RAGE.

When Frank notices strange injuries on his daughter Candice's (Cindy Hinds) body, he blames his mentally ill wife. But other problems soon arise, such as Candice's grandmother being beaten to death by a little person (?) with a schnitzel knocker...

It remains one of the director's very best films: frightening, resonant and a highly personal response to Cronenberg's own private life.
Josephine Botting