About

Shivers is a paranoid nightmare about sex and science in which the inhabitants of an isolated luxury apartment complex are slowly infected by a parasitic organism that turns its victims into brain-dead nymphomaniacs. A deranged doctor conducts medical experiments on a young teenage girl, injecting her with a parasite to test its effects on the human libido. When he realizes the parasite also causes violent urges, he kills both the girl and himself, unaware that the girl had previously been sexually active with other members of the apartment and that a plague of infected bodies is already in motion. Transmitted through kissing and through the building's drainpipes and air ducts, the apartment soon becomes a panorama of sexual deviance and madness. The unfolding orgiastic plague articulate anxieties about the consequences of the sexual revolution and modern medicine, David Cronenberg providing a prophetic metaphor of fears of sex and disease that prefigures the panic and paranoia associated with the spread of HIV/AIDS and controversies surrounding stem cell research.

R18+