Do we like David Cronenberg?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or company turned up, he has spoken up on bodily autonomy, and the only gap is how little there is on his personal conduct.
Nothing new on him lately that we could confirm. His most recent film, The Shrouds, premiered at Cannes in 2024 and he was doing interviews about it through 2025. There is chatter online about a next project, but we found no reliable report on it.
Cronenberg was born in Toronto in 1943 and came up making student and short films in the 1960s, then co-founded the Toronto Film Co-op. Shivers in 1975 and Rabid in 1977 made his name, and The Dead Zone and The Fly cemented him as the king of body horror. Later came prestige work like Spider and Eastern Promises.
The Shrouds grew out of personal loss, and he has talked about it openly. It started life as a Netflix series, but the streamer passed after reading two scripts, so it became a film. He has said it is not a lesson or a prophecy, which is very him.
On the harm test, we found nothing nasty. At Cannes in 2022 he said of the US, “We think the US has gone completely bananas,” and tied that to the threat to abortion rights, saying control of bodies is about control of people. On technology and AI he is curious rather than evangelical, and he has said the pandemic made conspiracy thinking worse.
We looked for lawsuits, court outcomes and accusations against him and came up empty. The only fights that turned up were creative ones, like his old grumbles about Hollywood credit. That is a clean record, though it also means we have few stories about how he treats crews and co-stars.
The good stuff is mostly the work and the honours. Venice gave him a lifetime-achievement Golden Lion in 2018, with jury president Guillermo del Toro praising his independence. We found no charity work, so we are not going to invent any.