The Brood

Cronenberg's most personal film, written during his own bitter custody fight. A woman undergoing a radical psychotherapy that externalises trauma as physical change begins producing deformed, murderous children who act out her rage. It is a horror film about divorce, and it is upsetting.

Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed commit fully, and the final revelation of what the therapy has produced is one of Cronenberg's most grotesque images. Bleak, angry and unmistakably felt.

The birth scene (spoilers). In the climax, Frank pretends to make peace with Nola so Raglan can fetch their daughter Candice, and he watches Nola give birth to another of the brood through an external womb. She licks the newborn clean, notices Frank's disgust, and the brood wakes up, kills Raglan, and goes after Candice. Frank ends it by strangling Nola, and the brood dies with her.

The licking was Eggar's idea. She had about eight dogs at the time and pointed out that animals lick their young the moment they are born. US distribution demanded cuts for an R rating and the licking went. Cronenberg's complaint was that the cut made it worse: he had shot a long, loving close-up, and without it "a lot of people thought she was eating her baby. That's much worse than I was suggesting." The misreading stuck, and Leonard Maltin's two-sentence review still has Eggar eating her own afterbirth. The original uncensored version reached DVD from MGM on 26 August 2003.

Eggar shot her scenes over three days with a crew of about seven. She later told Cronenberg it was the strangest and most repulsive film she had made.