As far as predicting our media-obsessed contemporary culture, David Cronenberg’s unsettling and socio-politically important body horror masterpiece “Videodrome” is almost as significant and prescient as Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet’s masterpiece “Network.” Basically, if you want to experience the anti-TV and anti-media-saturation messages in “Network” in a less expositional and more visceral way, and if you require stomach vaginas from your complex and intelligent features about the destructive qualities of modern media, then “Videodrome” is your movie.
Recently shared by Dangerous Minds, this brief 8-minute original documentary about the making of “Videodrome” has writer/director/turning-non-sexual-parts-of-the-human-torso-into-vaginas-and-anuses-enthusiast David Cronenberg and star James Woods trying their best to distill the surreal batshit imagery of the film into more easily digestible intellectual descriptions that might attract a more mainstream movie audience.
Just like David Lynch, another visceral director who’s not a stranger to disturbing imagery, David Cronenberg is famous for being a soft spoken, calm, and collected person, the exact opposite of what his brash and insane imagination have been bringing to movie screens for the last four decades. Woods has a lot of fun describing his shock upon meeting Cronenberg after reading the screenplay for “Videodrome,” and having trouble believing this mild-mannered family man was responsible for writing the most messed-up story he’d ever read. This short featurette, directed by Garris, was included on The Criterion Collection edition of “Videodrome,” and is a decent entry point for the film.
However, if you’d like to get some perspective into the state of American horror cinema during the early ’80s, I wholeheartedly recommend Garris’ 25-minute interview with Cronenberg, John Carpenter, and John Landis, titled “Fear on Film.” This great short documentary can also be found on the Criterion edition, or you can watch it right here. But first, watch the original making-of documentary about “Videodrome” above.
