David Cronenberg Claims He’s Done With the Horror Genre

Thanks to films like The Brood, Scanners, and The Fly, David Cronenberg is one of the most lauded directors in the horror world, though he may be leaving the genre behind for good. With his last straightforward horror film being Spider in 2002, the director revealed that so many horror projects feel repetitive that he might not return to the genre for future projects.

“Probably not. I’ve never really resisted that. I’ve been offered many projects and so on, and they just seemed to be a repetition basically of what I’d done already, so that’s not interesting,” Cronenberg shared when he was asked about returning to horror by Entertainment Weekly. “I think the reason that I started to evolve away from straight horror was just because, instead of being liberating, which it was in the beginning, and it’s a genre that really is capable of delivering a lot more than just scares if it’s done by really talented people, but I think I found that it was becoming restrictive rather than liberating. So I think in all my films there is still the texture of that underneath everything, but I don’t really see myself going back to that. But you never know, you never know.”

One of the reasons Cronenberg has built such a massive following among movie fans is that his films so rarely fit into one genre. While a film like The Fly undeniably focuses on horror and sci-fi themes, there are also strong romantic components that ground the story in reality. In that regard, it’s possible that the filmmaker might connect with source material that some find horrific, even if it isn’t a full-blown horror film.

In recent years, the filmmaker has begun exploring storytelling in other mediums, which might mean he’s leaving the world of cinema behind indefinitely, regardless of genre.

“I’ve written one novel (2014’s Consumed) and I really quite enjoyed that,” the filmmaker explained. “I think that there are things you can do in the novel that you cannot do on a movie. I just came back from the Venice film festival, and I was on a panel with Spike Lee and some others, talking about the future of cinema. There was a lot of discussion about Netflix, and streaming series, and so on, and I was saying that I thought that was the future of cinema, and that it was really an interesting idea, the idea of doing a TV series, a streaming series.”

He continued, “Whether I end up doing something like that is a whole other thing. Obviously, it would be a huge commitment of time and so on. To do eight hours of TV is a lot. [But] once again, the idea of a series as being more novelistic than a movie. When you compare the two, a movie is really more like a short story than a novel, and the complexity that you can get into in a series is really quite interesting.”

Stay tuned for details on David Cronenberg’s filmmaking future.

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[H/T Entertainment Weekly]