Shivers

Cronenberg's first commercial feature, funded with Canadian public money, and it caused a debate in Parliament about whether taxpayers should have paid for it.

A parasite designed as an organ replacement escapes in a modernist apartment tower on an island outside Montreal. It is spread by contact and its effect is total disinhibition.

The building does the work. Cronenberg shot in a real complex sold on the promise of self-contained modern living, and the film's argument is that the promise was always a trap: a sealed environment with a swimming pool and a laundry room and nowhere to run.

He films it with complete clinical calm, no score stings and flat institutional light, which is the technique he used for the next thirty years.

Robert Fulford wrote a review titled with the question of whether you should pay for this, and Cronenberg lost his apartment over it.