Horror movies are often about materialisation in a very particular sense, the grisly acting out of fears and phobias that in daily life are kept safely (if painfully and disastrously) in the mind. No director realises this more clearly than David Cronenberg. He is best known no doubt for The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and his much vilified Crash (1996), but some of us have a soft spot, if that's the term, for his early work The Brood (1979), a classic instance of the acting-out theory. A psychiatrist prescribes rage therapy to his patients: they are to let their anger loose and thereby find a cure for what ails them. As they get into the therapy, freely thinking of how much they hate someone, for example, a small gang of dwarves with mallets marches off and beats that someone to death. This is not a metaphor.

LRB 15 November 2007 | PDF Download