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David Cronenberg, the Canadian director of Spider (2002), is one of the main exponents of the science-fictional ‘body horror’ genre of films. ‘Cronenberg's subject’, David Thomson writes, ‘is the intensity of human frailty and decay: in short, the body and its many accelerated mutations, whether out of disease, anger, dread, or hope’ (2002, pp. 189-90). Such films, which explore people's fears of bodily transformations and infections, have a special appeal to adolescents because they reflect their anxieties about the anatomical and physiological changes they experience in the course of growing up (Campbell, 2003).
Spider, however, is different from all other Cronenberg's movies. In fact, it is not (or, at least, not literally) a ‘horror’ movie at all. Spider is not about the uncanny corruptions of living bodies (like Shivers, 1975) or about a human being becoming an animal (like the remake of The Fly, 1986), but about the pathology of the mind and, in particular, its potential for extreme confusion and fragmentation.
As a result of the creative combination of Cronenberg's directorial skills, Patrick McGrath's screenplay from his own novel (McGrath, 1990), Peter Suschitzky's understated photography of working-class London cityscapes, and Ralph Fiennes's sensitive performance in the title role, Spider stands out as a most darkly beautiful, moving, as well as disturbing, filmic representation of severe psychopathology.
The protagonist, Dennis Cleg, known as ‘Spider’, is a catatonic schizophrenic man just released from a mental institution where he has been incarcerated for many years as a matricide. McGrath, the writer of the screenplay from his own novel, was himself brought up as a young boy in the maximum security hospital of Broadmoor in England — not because he was insane, but because his father was a medical superintendent. Perhaps his wandering around areas of the special hospital and coming across a tapestry of unusual characters, wardens included (not prison offi