There's been much buzz around a viciously violent fight scene in David Cronenberg's new film Eastern Promises, mostly because it takes place in a bathhouse and involves a nude Viggo Mortensen. Anyone familiar with Cronenberg knows this is only his latest foray into testing his audience's shock response.
Exploding head
Though he could do better with today's special effects, the exploding-head sequence in Scanners (1981) - which looked like an imploding watermelon more than anything - was disturbing enough to create lots of talk around this film about people with telepathic abilities. Before he meets his fate, the explodee explains to a small audience that "... the scanning experience is usually a painful one, sometimes resulting in nosebleeds, earaches, stomach cramps, nausea, and sometimes other symptoms of a similar nature."
Bad medicine
In Dead Ringers (1988), one of the twin gynecologists - both played by Jeremy Irons - pulls out and places on a table the handmade tools he's designed to advance his profession. The mangled steel creations look more like sadistic art sculptures than medical instruments, leaving some critics - and many female viewers - wondering whether they should be simply shocked by the character's misogyny, or be offended by Cronenberg himself for imagining such a thing.
Romance, Cronenberg-style
Following the principle that it is better to show than to tell, in Crash (1996) we find out that James (James Spader) and Gabrielle (Patricia Arquette) are turned on by their car accidents in a scene in which James gets it on with a scar on Gabrielle's leg.