It’s been thirteen years since Brandon Cronenberg made his feature-length directorial debut with Antiviral , a shocking, infectious medical horror that tackles fame and longing in the age of tabloid celebrity. Predating modern micro-influencer culture, where those with Instagram and TikTok know-how curate and direct their own content in order to cater to the whims of the ever-changing Algorithm, Antiviral is a time capsule into the very particular kind of celebrity culture that existed in 2012, and which was at its zenith in the early ’00s. This culture thrived on the tabloid magazine, on rumour mills and gossip sites and forming parasocial relationships with the rich and famous. It’s the culture we see caricatured at its grotesque extreme in Lady Gaga’s 2009 music video Paparazzi, where photojournalists gleefully crowd around Gaga’s broken body after a nasty fall from a balcony, most likely blocking emergency responders in their eagerness to be the first to get the scoop. It’s invasive, stalkery, obsessive… and willing to cross every line.
In the intervening years, celebrity culture has evolved. Print magazines, for one, have ceded significant ground to online content, much of which is now manufactured by the famous themselves (or their team of assistants), directly from their social media accounts. Despite this cultural shift, I would argue that in many ways, Antiviral and its themes are more relevant than ever. Parasocial relationships and obsessive desires still dictate the market, with whole industries riding on sponsorships and brand deals with influencers, whose job it is to encourage their following to imitate their lifestyle. And the migration to increasingly-online spaces has granted fans unprecedented access to their idols.
When you break it down to its crux, celebrities are brands: here to sell you the idealised version of themselves over the reality. (As it’s put in Antiviral, “Celebrities are not people—they’re group hallucinations.”) Fans copy their faves’ outfits, hairstyles, makeup; many celebrities in recent years have launched their own fashion, makeup, fragrance, and hair dye ranges to capitalise on this. In recent years, fans have been getting more facial surgeries and fillers, and while a part of that can be attributed to the predatory nature of the beauty industry at large, another significant factor tangled up in it all is the fact that it’s what the stars are doing. If you do as they do, doesn’t that bring you closer together?
Antiviral asks, what if you could get even closer, though? What if you could feel what they feel—the same sensations in your body that they experience in theirs? A biological communion, of sorts? What if you could have not just the same procedure, the same lip filler, the same scent, but the same sickness? A strain of virus that hops from their cells directly to yours?
Antiviral opens on a shot that tells the whole story: protagonist Syd March, played by a baby-faced Caleb Landry Jones, leans against a billboard, upon which the beautiful and famous Hannah Geist smiles against a clinical white background. Her mouth, a slash of red lipstick suggestive of blood. His mouth, clamped around a thermometer, checking for a fever. The way he holds the thermometer in this shot—and in several other shots throughout the film—is reminiscent of the way many a noir protagonist poses with a cigarette. Which matters greatly here, because in this universe—an alternate version of present-day 2012—sickness is as addictive as nicotine.
Syd March is a virus technician for the Lucas Clinic, famed for their exclusive brand deal with one Hannah Geist. The Clinic’s job? To procure samples of celebrity illnesses, copy-protect them so they cannot be freely transmitted from person to person, and sell these protected strains to the celebrities’ adoring fans. We see this play out in the opening five minutes of the film, as Syd administers a herpes simplex virus (the virus responsible for cold sores) on the corner of a client’s mouth. When he asks the client which side he would like the cold sores on, the client—a little overwhelmed by the fact that this is finally happening—doesn’t know. Syd recommends the left. “Miss Geist is infected here, to the right of her mouth,” he says, gesturing with a surgical-gloved hand. “If she kissed you, it would spread to your left side […] it would be like she gave it to you in person.” Enthralled by the prospect, his client readily agrees.
By day, Syd works on copy-protecting the viruses, selling them to the Clinic’s clients, and administering them with professional finesse. However, Syd has a secret: he is also actively smuggling samples of the viruses out of the lab inside his own body. Once he’s gotten the samples out, he undoes the copy protection on them in order to sell the now-transmissible celebrity viruses on the black market. Without spoiling too much, this leads to a quandary for Syd when a sample he injects into his bloodstream proves fatal to its person-of-origin. With a ticking time-limit on his hands before the virus consumes him, he’s forced to examine the ugly side of the industry he has become entrenched in.
Director Brandon Cronenberg—also for Possessor (2020) and Infinity Pool (2023)—first had the germ (forgive the pun) of an idea for this movie in 2004, when he was hit with a severe bout of the flu while studying film at Toronto Metropolitan University. He realised he was onto something watching an episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! featuring Sarah Michelle Gellar. “The former Buffy the Vampire Slayer star conducted the on-camera interview while sick, telling Kimmel that if she sneezed, the whole audience would get infected with whatever disease she had—and everyone started clapping and cheering.”
Prior to making Antiviral, Cronenberg explored its themes in a short film he made as a part of his degree, Broken Tulips. This film bears striking similarities to the opening of Antiviral, and features some characters with the same names. For a long time, there was nowhere to readily watch it, although it has recently been made available as a bonus feature on Antiviral’s new 4k re-release from Severin Films. To me, the timing of this re-release speaks to the enduring relevance of the film’s cultural commentary.
With the 2024 arrival of Coralie Fargeat’s nightmarish and incisive body horror The Substance—which simultaneously became the first body horror film ever nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars and sparked a number of movie theatre walkouts for being too gory—there has been a renewed interest in the body horror genre and the things that can be said with it. A number of Antiviral fans have drawn comparisons between the two films, both of which critique celebrity culture and its unrelenting and unrealistic beauty standards. On a thematic level, the movies dovetail nicely, but while The Substance directly explores the mental toll the beauty industry—and the pursuit of perfection, as defined by the media—can take on a woman’s psyche, Antiviral’s perspective is that of an outsider looking in, trying desperately to glimpse the person behind the illusion. Watching the two films back-to-back is a bit like taking turns standing on either side of a pane of glass.
Beyond the thematic connections, the two movies also share a lot of needles, and both spill copious amounts of blood (although Antiviral, I would argue, features less viscera). That’s one thing to prepare yourself for, if you decide to take the plunge and watch Antiviral—and I highly recommend that you do, as it’s quite fantastic.
Have you watched Antiviral? What did you think of it? What are your thoughts on the depiction of celebrity culture in the film, or in The Substance? Are there any other movie you think deserve renewed attention and study, in the era of the body horror comeback?
