Body horror king David Cronenberg is back with his erotic sci-fi thriller “Crimes of The Future” which is screening at the Cannes Film Festival soon and NEON releases it domestically on June 8. And while Cronenberg gets a lot of credit for his own work that made it on the big screen, there are a handful of popular sci-fi projects that Cronenberg seemingly had a direct/indirect hand in helping develop–especially their body horror elements.
Cronenberg recently spoke with Le Video Club/Konbini (see below), where the Canadian filmmaker claims that the late “Alien” writer Dan O’Bannon admitted to enjoying his 1975 film “Shivers,” and then gives the impression that O’Bannon may have lifted elements from his film for the biology of the beloved xenomorph.
“Apparently, I was told by [director John Landis] that Dan O’Bannon said that he was very impressed by what he called ‘the Canadian movie’ which was ‘Shivers.’ And I thought that was interesting and then I saw ‘Alien’ and in ‘Alien’ there are some things that are exactly like my very low-budget film ‘Shivers’ which was a parasite that lives in your body and comes out of your mouth and jumps onto someone else’s face and goes down their mouth. Of course, it’s a different structure in ‘Alien’ but that specific thing is very similar to ‘Shivers.’ [In a joking tone] I have no proof but I assume Dan O’Bannon totally stole my idea and he owes me hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
O’Bannon has always claimed that “Alien” was simply a mature grounded version of his 1974 satirical sci-fi film “Dark Star” which was helmed by a young John Carpenter but the deadly alien creature, a trope of many films before the 1970s, was very different from the xenomorph that had a creature design based on the work of Swiss artist H.R. Giger that also worked on the production team building the set for “Space Jockey” sequence.
After his remake of “The Fly” in 1986, Cronenberg was approached to helm “Total Recall,” a feature film based on a story from famed cyberpunk author Philip K. Dick (“Blade Runner“). That film was eventually released in 1990 and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger (“Terminator“) as a brainwashed construction worker who may or may not be a spy enlisted to save the people of Mars from a brutal dictator. Cronenberg was replaced by “RoboCop” director Paul Verhoeven.
The director explains why he ultimately left the project after working with “Alien” co-writer Ronald Shusett on multiple drafts of the script. And it sounds like the producers’ idea of making it an action-adventure film similar to “Raiders of The Lost Ark” wasn’t his cup of tea, so Cronenberg simply walked away. Funny enough, O’Bannon and Gary Goldman would end up finishing the script with Shusett.
“I had done some work with [producer Dino De Laurentis] and he at that point was going to do ‘Total Recall’ with Ronald Shusett; he was producing and he was writing. It was based on a Philip K. Dick story. I was very excited to do that and I wrote several versions, twelve drafts, of ‘Total Recall.’ At a certain point, Ronald Shusett said to me ‘Well, you’ve known what you’ve done, written the Philip K. Dick version’ and I said ‘I thought that’s what we’re supposed to do’…He said: ‘No, we want this movie to be like ‘Raiders of The Lost Ark’ goes to Mars’ I said “Okay, well, I’m not doing that movie’ so I said ‘goodbye.'”
Luckily, for the production, “Total Recall” was a box office hit and even earned an honorary Oscar statue in 1991 for its achievement in special effects.