Doctors on a university campus experiment on mentally disturbed youths. A virus carried by cosmetic products wipes out the entire adult female population. A luxury apartment building transforms into the experimental playground for a sexually transmitted parasite. A novel strain of rabies spreads from a plastic surgery clinic to a large city.

These are the premises of the first four films made in Canada by David Cronenberg, the avant-garde Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), followed by the deliberately commercial horror of Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977). They all have a similar intent: putting North American middle­class society under a microscope, then subjecting it to sudden and violent strain, usually through the workings of an extremely contagious disease.

Cronenberg’s fusion of body horror and psychoanalytic drama created some of the most remarkable films of the last forty years, from Videodrome in 1983 to A History of Violence twenty-two years later. But his first four films remain his most extreme statements, drawing on a dialectic of carefully constructed order punctuated by sudden biological chaos.