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Children of the New Flesh: The Early Work and Pervasive Influence of David Cronenberg
Children of the New Flesh is a wide-ranging compendium of reflections on the enduring impact of David Cronenberg, one of the most significant filmmakers of all time. Focusing on a series of short films that Cronenberg directed in the 1960s and 70s, many of which have rarely been seen, this book considers the legacy of these works in their own right, as well as their relationship to future masterpieces like Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, and eXistenZ.
Much more than a work of tribute, Children of the New Flesh is a meditation on the nature of influence itself. It teases out the undercurrents in Cronenberg's films, obsessed as they are with secret signals, sinister experiments, and mental viruses, and shows how these ideas resonate in our own paranoid, sickened, hyper-networked times.
Featuring original fiction and essays from luminaries such as Brian Evenson, Blake Butler, Michael Cisco, Graham Rae, Joe Koch, Gary J. Shipley, Tobias Carroll, and Charlene Elsby, and interviews with figures such as Kathe Koja, Patrick McGrath, Tim Lucas, and Bruce Wagner—not to mention an exclusive interview with Cronenberg himself—this book is at once a study and a living example of the singular power of hybrid forms. It's an invitation to seek undead materials in the dark recesses of the past, and to use them as a means of tuning into the freakish wavelengths of the present.
"Do not overemphasize Cronenberg's love affair with the physical body; that does a disservice to his deep, abiding, passionate interest in the energy body, the ethereal body, the body double, the cosmic body. in the end, he is a consummate philosopher of the spirit." – Bruce Wagner, author of Dead Stars, Maps to the Stars, and The Marvel Universe
"Children of the New Flesh is a must-read for film fanatics and fans of David Cronenberg. Edited by Chris Kelso and David Leo Rice, this collection explores the dark peripheries of Cronenberg's influence and early work, examining a world of strangeness and mystery." – Brandon Hobson, National Book Award Finalist and author of The Removed
“The living legend of eccentric cinema begets weird new progeny in Children of the New Flesh” – Rue Morgue magazine
Much more than a work of tribute, Children of the New Flesh is a meditation on the nature of influence itself. It teases out the undercurrents in Cronenberg's films, obsessed as they are with secret signals, sinister experiments, and mental viruses, and shows how these ideas resonate in our own paranoid, sickened, hyper-networked times.
Featuring original fiction and essays from luminaries such as Brian Evenson, Blake Butler, Michael Cisco, Graham Rae, Joe Koch, Gary J. Shipley, Tobias Carroll, and Charlene Elsby, and interviews with figures such as Kathe Koja, Patrick McGrath, Tim Lucas, and Bruce Wagner—not to mention an exclusive interview with Cronenberg himself—this book is at once a study and a living example of the singular power of hybrid forms. It's an invitation to seek undead materials in the dark recesses of the past, and to use them as a means of tuning into the freakish wavelengths of the present.
"Do not overemphasize Cronenberg's love affair with the physical body; that does a disservice to his deep, abiding, passionate interest in the energy body, the ethereal body, the body double, the cosmic body. in the end, he is a consummate philosopher of the spirit." – Bruce Wagner, author of Dead Stars, Maps to the Stars, and The Marvel Universe
"Children of the New Flesh is a must-read for film fanatics and fans of David Cronenberg. Edited by Chris Kelso and David Leo Rice, this collection explores the dark peripheries of Cronenberg's influence and early work, examining a world of strangeness and mystery." – Brandon Hobson, National Book Award Finalist and author of The Removed
“The living legend of eccentric cinema begets weird new progeny in Children of the New Flesh” – Rue Morgue magazine
- GenresHorrorNonfictionFilm
356 pages, Paperback
First published June 30, 2022
5 people are currently reading
198 people want to read
About the author
Chris Kelso
72 books205 followersChris Kelso is an award-winning genre writer, editor, illustrator, and musician from Scotland. His work has been published widely across the UK, US and Canada.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 29, 2022
FULL REVIEW
Children of the New Flesh is an excellent examination of the work of David Cronenberg, my own favorite director who I believe is one of the most fascinating directors still working. The essays are insightful and entertaining, while the fiction and poetry take the themes of Cronenberg’s work in unique directions. I believe that not just fans of Cronenberg will get a lot out of this, but fans of cinema and outré literature as well.
Children of the New Flesh is an excellent examination of the work of David Cronenberg, my own favorite director who I believe is one of the most fascinating directors still working. The essays are insightful and entertaining, while the fiction and poetry take the themes of Cronenberg’s work in unique directions. I believe that not just fans of Cronenberg will get a lot out of this, but fans of cinema and outré literature as well.
June 2, 2024
Delightful tasting menu of fiction and non. Cronenberg fans rejoice!
August 19, 2023
In the quest for influences and masters among a new wave of artists and writers wishing to tap into a heritage of darkness and cerebral legitimacy, you could do worse than to position yourself in the riptide behind the strange, cool director David Cronenberg. Cronenberg is that rare artist who has managed to veer into commercially viable, relatively mainstream success while still staying true to his bizarre obsessions and themes. Cronenberg’s iconography has stood out from hordes of other lesser horror and sci fi filmmakers as something otherworldly, disturbing, phantasmagorical, and sexy — if you consider bodily transfiguration and the incursion of foreign inhabitants into your mind to be sexy.
A new book has come out from cutting edge indie publishers 11:11 Press which pays tribute to Cronenberg’s influence on writers in the here and now. Editors Chris Kelso and David Leo Rice have organized a host of other writers to offer up their takes on Cronenberg’s work, with a focus on the early, lesser-known short films of the Canadian auteur. Fittingly for the often biomechanical crossbred subject matter of the movies, the book consists of a hybrid admixture of non-fiction essays and fictional homages which manages to unsettle the reader while providing crucial information.
The seven short films discussed here span from the late 60s to the mid 70s and make up the early corpus of Cronenberg which I have not seen. I am one of those people who with the videotape revolution really only saw his movies from the 1980s onward, such as Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Crash. I have seen some of his newer pictures, which seem more psychological than based in body horror, and I liked them, especially Maps to the Stars. From the descriptions in the book (the whole middle section is short essays describing the early shorts followed by responses), these little-known shorter films, like the later movies, perhaps with the exception of 2022’s Crimes of the Future, to touch on abnormal psychology, parapsychology, horrors of the mind. Perhaps their more meager budgets in the 1960s and 70s did not enable the special effects which came later in Cronenberg’s career, allowing for the mutations, gore, and violence which became his peculiar bread and butter in the 80s.
The brainpower on display in the book’s writings is staggering and head-exploding, but the critical high-point of the book for me came in the form of David Leo Rice’s essay near the beginning titled “Long Live the Heroic Pervert: On Seeking Live Flesh in an Undead Age.” Rice is a perceptive, intelligent critic capable of insights into the contemporary relevance of what might otherwise seem like a niche director making money off curiosities of genre horror and sci fi. The full array of critical light Rice shines on Cronenberg, technology, modernity, and art will need to be explored by those who read the book and the essay for themselves, but Rice hits a sensitive, fresh wound when he talks about 2022, a year which lurks through the book like the scariest monster taking a new shape — the involutions and folds of the Internet — that is impossible to deflect:
“We believe we’ve dodged a bullet by, so far, avoiding mass implantation or a literal ‘Rise of the Machines,’ but we are more networked and abstracted from our own autonomy than we would be if we simply had bionic body parts, or lived inside mech-suits—at least in that case we could fantasize about taking them off…The fact that this new evolutionary step was accomplished willingly, by promising to satisfy our own narcissism, loneliness, insecurity, ambivalent horniness, longing for the void and need for convenience makes it seem as though no act of violence was perpetrated, which in a sense is true, and yet the result of this willing transfer of body and mind into the ether may be more violent, by many scales of magnitude, than anything art can encompass.”
Cronenberg’s art about mental abnormality, new mutations, and cursed societies has much to prophesy about the present moment in which we are, as a widespread collective of social media addicts, tapped into the vast fear machine network that is running at full speed.
The selections from other writers are plentiful and varied, and the editors chose some doozies. I found that in the large middle section taking its cues from the older Cronenberg films, I preferred the often lyrical fictional works to the more academic essayistic writing. Standouts to me included Joe Koch’s “Invaginies,” Gary Shipley’s “Tendrils,” and Evan Isoline’s “Corpusplex,” a frightening, clinical collision of -ologies that was banana-cakes, rendered in grammatically unmoored fragments which put me in mind of Cronenberg’s corporate surgical theaters or telepathic group-therapy chambers.
The list of short movies themselves will serve as a helpful guide for those cinephiles wishing to round out their diet of Cronenburgundian poisons (to utilize interviewee and Cronenberg collaborator Bruce Wagner’s punning adjective). Of the seven movies, the most enticing to me seem to be “Stereo” (1969) and “The Italian Machine” (1976), the latter being a tale of motorbike enthusiasts setting out to steal a particularly sexy and sleek rare motorbike from a show-room collector who has no intention of riding it — the eroticized relationship between man and machine that would return like an obsessive dream with the director’s Ballard-adaption Crash from the 1990s.
The book is rounded out with a series of interviews with writers of freakout books, movies and non-fiction, on the subject of Cronenberg’s influence and interaction with the culture, such as Tim Lucas, Mick Garris, Kathe Koja, and the aforementioned Bruce Wagner, a favorite writer of mine. These interviews open doors to the behind the scenes blood-and-guts of the moviemaking process that Cronenberg has had to operate within. This is followed by an illuminating (and somewhat unsurprisingly demystifying) interview with David Cronenberg himself, where he sheds some of the artistic and critical exoskeleton that has been imputed to him over the preceding pages. The reader isn’t quite as thwarted as he might be by the dissatisfying lack of ornamentation found in fellow directorial icon David Lynch’s gnomic interviews and comments on his own work. Yet Cronenberg is careful to deflate some balloons that may exist in the minds of worshipful interlocutors, as seen in his own disavowal of the popular nomenclature “body horror” and/or the failure of any attempts at goading him into an amplifying reflection on his “vision”: “I don’t have a vision,” he says, adding later, “I don’t have a list of things that must be in my movies or a philosophical statement of intent.”
Bursting with unsettling cerebral meditations and perceptions, the book Kelso and Rice have expended such effort at pulling together should justly stand the test of time as an essential work of criticism and homage to one of the most idiosyncratic and stimulating cinematic artists of the past fifty years. Readers — particularly artists and writers working in the unusual, the outré, the weird, the disturbing, the apocalyptic — who seek a media context in which to place themselves that stretches from the recent video-infused past into the malevolent contortions of a potential Internet yet to be envisioned should pick up this fearful book and be changed.
A new book has come out from cutting edge indie publishers 11:11 Press which pays tribute to Cronenberg’s influence on writers in the here and now. Editors Chris Kelso and David Leo Rice have organized a host of other writers to offer up their takes on Cronenberg’s work, with a focus on the early, lesser-known short films of the Canadian auteur. Fittingly for the often biomechanical crossbred subject matter of the movies, the book consists of a hybrid admixture of non-fiction essays and fictional homages which manages to unsettle the reader while providing crucial information.
The seven short films discussed here span from the late 60s to the mid 70s and make up the early corpus of Cronenberg which I have not seen. I am one of those people who with the videotape revolution really only saw his movies from the 1980s onward, such as Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Crash. I have seen some of his newer pictures, which seem more psychological than based in body horror, and I liked them, especially Maps to the Stars. From the descriptions in the book (the whole middle section is short essays describing the early shorts followed by responses), these little-known shorter films, like the later movies, perhaps with the exception of 2022’s Crimes of the Future, to touch on abnormal psychology, parapsychology, horrors of the mind. Perhaps their more meager budgets in the 1960s and 70s did not enable the special effects which came later in Cronenberg’s career, allowing for the mutations, gore, and violence which became his peculiar bread and butter in the 80s.
The brainpower on display in the book’s writings is staggering and head-exploding, but the critical high-point of the book for me came in the form of David Leo Rice’s essay near the beginning titled “Long Live the Heroic Pervert: On Seeking Live Flesh in an Undead Age.” Rice is a perceptive, intelligent critic capable of insights into the contemporary relevance of what might otherwise seem like a niche director making money off curiosities of genre horror and sci fi. The full array of critical light Rice shines on Cronenberg, technology, modernity, and art will need to be explored by those who read the book and the essay for themselves, but Rice hits a sensitive, fresh wound when he talks about 2022, a year which lurks through the book like the scariest monster taking a new shape — the involutions and folds of the Internet — that is impossible to deflect:
“We believe we’ve dodged a bullet by, so far, avoiding mass implantation or a literal ‘Rise of the Machines,’ but we are more networked and abstracted from our own autonomy than we would be if we simply had bionic body parts, or lived inside mech-suits—at least in that case we could fantasize about taking them off…The fact that this new evolutionary step was accomplished willingly, by promising to satisfy our own narcissism, loneliness, insecurity, ambivalent horniness, longing for the void and need for convenience makes it seem as though no act of violence was perpetrated, which in a sense is true, and yet the result of this willing transfer of body and mind into the ether may be more violent, by many scales of magnitude, than anything art can encompass.”
Cronenberg’s art about mental abnormality, new mutations, and cursed societies has much to prophesy about the present moment in which we are, as a widespread collective of social media addicts, tapped into the vast fear machine network that is running at full speed.
The selections from other writers are plentiful and varied, and the editors chose some doozies. I found that in the large middle section taking its cues from the older Cronenberg films, I preferred the often lyrical fictional works to the more academic essayistic writing. Standouts to me included Joe Koch’s “Invaginies,” Gary Shipley’s “Tendrils,” and Evan Isoline’s “Corpusplex,” a frightening, clinical collision of -ologies that was banana-cakes, rendered in grammatically unmoored fragments which put me in mind of Cronenberg’s corporate surgical theaters or telepathic group-therapy chambers.
The list of short movies themselves will serve as a helpful guide for those cinephiles wishing to round out their diet of Cronenburgundian poisons (to utilize interviewee and Cronenberg collaborator Bruce Wagner’s punning adjective). Of the seven movies, the most enticing to me seem to be “Stereo” (1969) and “The Italian Machine” (1976), the latter being a tale of motorbike enthusiasts setting out to steal a particularly sexy and sleek rare motorbike from a show-room collector who has no intention of riding it — the eroticized relationship between man and machine that would return like an obsessive dream with the director’s Ballard-adaption Crash from the 1990s.
The book is rounded out with a series of interviews with writers of freakout books, movies and non-fiction, on the subject of Cronenberg’s influence and interaction with the culture, such as Tim Lucas, Mick Garris, Kathe Koja, and the aforementioned Bruce Wagner, a favorite writer of mine. These interviews open doors to the behind the scenes blood-and-guts of the moviemaking process that Cronenberg has had to operate within. This is followed by an illuminating (and somewhat unsurprisingly demystifying) interview with David Cronenberg himself, where he sheds some of the artistic and critical exoskeleton that has been imputed to him over the preceding pages. The reader isn’t quite as thwarted as he might be by the dissatisfying lack of ornamentation found in fellow directorial icon David Lynch’s gnomic interviews and comments on his own work. Yet Cronenberg is careful to deflate some balloons that may exist in the minds of worshipful interlocutors, as seen in his own disavowal of the popular nomenclature “body horror” and/or the failure of any attempts at goading him into an amplifying reflection on his “vision”: “I don’t have a vision,” he says, adding later, “I don’t have a list of things that must be in my movies or a philosophical statement of intent.”
Bursting with unsettling cerebral meditations and perceptions, the book Kelso and Rice have expended such effort at pulling together should justly stand the test of time as an essential work of criticism and homage to one of the most idiosyncratic and stimulating cinematic artists of the past fifty years. Readers — particularly artists and writers working in the unusual, the outré, the weird, the disturbing, the apocalyptic — who seek a media context in which to place themselves that stretches from the recent video-infused past into the malevolent contortions of a potential Internet yet to be envisioned should pick up this fearful book and be changed.
July 1, 2023
A focus on Cronenberg's early (read: mostly pre-Shivers) films, with analyses on how they fit with his overall oeuvre and short stories inspired by each film. If Videodrome and The Fly aren't directly addressed those films are at least talked about in relation to the shorter films. The last quarter dedicated to extra material wasn't especially interesting, but the main bulk of the book was largely good (though I haven't seen the films in question so I have no idea if the analyses matched what was going on) and the short stories were largely well done.
September 1, 2022
Not bad. Much of the fan fiction is great, and I wish there had been more poetry.
However, the critical essays in this book are repetitive and borderline sycophantic. And yes, of course, this is a book by and for fans of Cronenberg, but I was hoping for a little more investigation as to maybe WHY the man himself doesn't even care to remember his early films.
The interviews are good, and will take the reader down paths to further interesting work.
However, the critical essays in this book are repetitive and borderline sycophantic. And yes, of course, this is a book by and for fans of Cronenberg, but I was hoping for a little more investigation as to maybe WHY the man himself doesn't even care to remember his early films.
The interviews are good, and will take the reader down paths to further interesting work.
September 21, 2022
My review of this book was too long to copy/paste into Goodreads. You can read it here: http://dailygrindhouse.com/thewire/de...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews