The 'body horror' auteur who never left the city he grew up in
David Cronenberg's Toronto
Born and raised in Toronto, David Cronenberg built a decades-long filmmaking career largely shooting in and around the city that helped define the modern Toronto film industry.
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David Cronenberg was born in Toronto in 1943 and studied at the University of Toronto before moving into filmmaking, directing early low-budget horror features including Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), shot cheaply around the city and its suburbs. Those films established the visceral, body-focused style critics later dubbed "body horror," a genre Cronenberg is widely credited with defining, and his career went on to include The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), and later prestige work such as A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007), the latter two shot substantially in Toronto.
A hometown film industry
Unlike many Canadian filmmakers of his generation who relocated permanently to Los Angeles, Cronenberg kept Toronto as his home and production base for most of his career, and his consistent use of local crews and locations is often cited as part of what helped build Toronto's modern film and television production industry into one of the largest in North America. He remains one of the most internationally recognized directors to have built his entire career from a Toronto base.
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