They Came From Within
a PAL-Trans American release written and directed by David Cronenberg produced by Ivan Reitman
stars: Barbara Steele, some other people who are probably dead by now rated: R for gore, violence, rape, nudity, intense situations
availabilty: Vestron Video (out of print, I would assume - probably rentals only) recommended: very highly
(c) 1998 Doug Mosurak
"They Came From Within" is a rough, untidy little horror film which marks one of the first recognized feature-length appearances by cult Canadian writer-director David Cronenberg, last heard from for his controversial adaptation of J.G. Ballard's "Crash" (1997). There are actually quite a few things in common between the two films: the recurrent sex-equals-death theme that's so prevalent in many of his films (especially "Rabid", "Dead Ringers", and "Videodrome"), scenes well-paced and designed to shock the audience out of their skins, and heavy Ballard influences (while "Crash" comes directly from a Ballard work, "Within" appropriates a good number of settings and plot devices from Ballard's 1973 novel, "High-Rise").
Watching "They Came From Within" in 1998, it really becomes evident that Cronenberg was designing a film that's as much of an homage to the sci-fi and horror films of the '50s as it is to the conventions he brought to the genre himself. It's also one of his most watchable films, and avoids a lot of the dreariness that many of his later films, like "Crash" and "Naked Lunch", were chided for.
"They Came From Within" takes place on Starliner Island, a state-of-the-art apartment complex outside of Montreal which offers its tenants all of the conveniences of city life, without the hassle of other people. From the get-go, it becomes perfectly clear that, even without the presence of the malevolent parasites that do indeed come from within, living in this building is a pretty warped place. Marriages are flat, lifeless affairs that are punctuated by hot sex with teenage girls. Nearly everyone in the complex is completely dispassionate towards life in general, and from the few glimpses of the tenants we see, it can easily be alluded that the excesses of '70s "modern living" in the wake of '60s free love are clearly in effect. The security guards at the front desk even carry guns "because all the other ones do". The building is a closed system, stagnating on the line between depravity and contempt.
The early scenes are comprised of a slideshow of the apartment's many features, which is a fairly effective device for getting the basic elements of the story out of the way. In one of the film's most intense sequences, Cronenberg juxtaposes a young couple entering the building with a fierce struggle between an older man and a young girl in a school uniform. It's unclear as to why the struggle is going on, or who indeed is the aggressor, but in the end, the man knocks the girl unconscious, rips off her clothes, and proceeds to cut her open with a scalpel and pour sulfuric acid into her body cavity. He then slashes his throat and is heard hitting the floor. It's a really effective, masterful sequence that equates a gender battle with freakish, clinical behavior, thus setting the pace for the rest of the film.
As it turns out, the man who gutted the girl is a researcher and biologist who was working on a new breed of parasite that could duplicate the functions of human organs. Hey, at least it sounds like a plausible idea. But of course, the parasites are really nasty creatures that do all the things that parasites do (slowly destroy their hosts while replicating inside of them), and do in a very gory fashion. The parasites also cause their hosts to engage in extremely compulsive and violent behavior. The girl was the test subject and got busy with several men on Starliner Island. Before you can say "tapeworm", residents are exhibiting strange and dangerous mannerisms and are vomiting blood all over the white porcelain sinks of their bathrooms. One character chucks up a parasite (which looks like a cross between a penis and a turd) off the balcony, which hits an old woman's umbrella in a particularly humorous sequence (she thinks it was a bird that bounced off the building). Soon the parasites are in the building's sewage system, and making their way inside several of the people dwelling there. And it's up to Dr. Hobbs, the facility's medical examiner, to try to figure out what's going on before it's too late.
This simple plot device gives Cronenberg the leeway to make an exceptional low-rent horror picture and in turn exploit just about any perversion you could think of. With this nasty bug going around, along with it comes numerous sexual assaults (my favorite is the woman who looks like Divine who attacks a bell boy, saying "I'm hungry ... hungry for love!"), excessive violence (Hobbs beats a handyman with a crowbar; some super-gory car crashes follow), incest, some gay and lesbian situations, and two naked women on leashes barking like dogs, which Hobbs walks away from in a very funny sequence in a stairwell. It's obvious that Cronenberg is trying to put the audience on edge throughout the film, but by erasing each step with semi-humorous situations, he's able to desensitize viewers and push them even further. In creating an almost comical compulsion in the infected characters, Cronenberg also strikes a chord of the limits of human nature, and illustrates a phallocentric society that blurs primal behavior with regular human interactions. As a parasite makes its way out of a bathtub drain and between actress Barbara Steele's legs, this parallel cannot become more clear.
Cronenberg makes use of some excellent source material, using the film to pay homage to Don Siegel's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead", and "Village of the Damned" (as there seems to be some sort of unified mind between the infected characters). In fusing these films with the art-porn he created in films like "Stereo" (1969), Cronenberg ups the ante for levels of sex and violence in films up to that point (a process that had already begun with the advent of the '70s hardcore porn industry, and the works of folks like Sam Peckinpah, Tobe Hooper, and Sean Cunningham). In keeping with most of his films, there is not a happy ending (or maybe there is, depending on which team you're on), but the complete downer rush of films like "Rabid" (in which Santa Claus is blown away by National Guardsmen) and "Videodrome" (in which the protagonist kills himself in the end) isn't all that present here.
If you can stomach the gore and aren't offended by the numerous sexual situations in the film, I'd say peep it - it's a very good introduction to the bleak views of human nature as presented by Cronenberg throughout his body of work. Hopefully this film (and many of the other gaping holes in the American-International film library) will make its way back onto video sometime really soon.
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