Villian(s)  Parasites

Actor(s):  Paul Hampton, Lynn Lowry, Barbara Steele, Cathy Graham

Brief Description  Shivers (1975)—also released under the titles The Parasite Murders and They Came from Within—is a foundational Canadian sci-fi horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg. It is widely celebrated as the movie that established Cronenberg’s career and launched his signature "body horror" subgenre, which explores the terrifying intersection of science, disease, human flesh, and psychological transformation.

Plot:
The story takes place entirely within Starliner Towers, an isolated, self-contained, luxury high-rise apartment complex located on Nun's Island near Montreal. The film opens with an eerie contrast: a promotional slide show pitching the utopian comfort of the high-rise alternates with a violent scene inside one of the apartments. An elderly scientist, Dr. Emil Hobbes, brutally murders a young female student, cuts her open, pours acid into her stomach cavity, and then slits his own throat. The complex's resident physician, Dr. Roger St. Luc (Paul Hampton), and his assistant, Nurse Forsythe (Lynn Lowry), investigate the tragedy. They discover that Dr. Hobbes had been conducting unauthorized, bizarre biological experiments.

Hobbes believed that modern humanity had become overly intellectual, sterile, and detached from its natural instincts. To fix this, he engineered a phallic, slug-like parasite designed to act as a combination of an aphrodisiac and a venereal disease. The organism was intended to override the human brain, strip away societal inhibitions, and force humanity back into a primal, purely physical state. Before his death, Hobbes's young victim had become infected, and the parasite quickly begins to spread floor-by-floor through the building’s residents.

The slug-like parasites travel inside the human body, burst out of orifices, and leap onto new victims. Once a person is infected, the creature acts as a violent stimulant. The hosts turn into mindless, erotically obsessed maniacs who possess an uncontrollable urge to sexually assault others. Because the parasites are transmitted through sexual contact, the apartment building rapidly devolves into a claustrophobic nightmare of hyper-sexual violence and chaos. Dr. St. Luc desperately tries to contain the infection and find a medical solution, but the sheer speed of the outbreak overwhelms the building. One by one, the uninfected tenants are hunted down and turned. Eventually, even Nurse Forsythe is infected.

In a famous, haunting monologue, she describes a dream where she realizes that "disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other" and that everything in existence is inherently sexual. St. Luc is eventually cornered in the complex's swimming pool by the entire infected population of the building. He is pulled into the water and infected by Forsythe. In a chillingly subversive finale praised by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, the film offers no rescue or cure. As dawn breaks, the residents calmly pack their belongings, get into their cars, and drive out of the Starliner complex together. The final shot implies that they are headed into the main city of Montreal, poised to spread the parasite globally.