It seems hard to believe that David Cronenberg’s first full-length body horror chiller, Shivers (AKA They Came From Within), is nearly 40 years old. If you’ll excuse us, we’ll be over here feeling ancient. But now someone has decided the time is ripe to re-visit the tale with a modern spin, and Danish director Rie Rasmussen is the woman for the job.
The original saw a genetically engineered strain of parasites let loose in a self-contained luxury apartment building. Spreading quickly among the residents, the powerful bug causes anyone affected to become a mindless, sex-crazed fiend with murder on their minds. Think the Big Brother house – though perhaps not quite as terrifying.
Rasmussen and writer Ian Driscoll are looking to update the story for the digital age, focusing on a time when sexual mores are both more liberated and yet more uptight than the 1970s.
“I’m Scandinavian and am very comfortable with sexual expression as a part of a healthy, modern-day reality, and I’ve always loved the underlying social messages in a well-made horror film,” Rasmussen says in a statement picked up by Deadline. “The opportunity to reinterpret this film from today’s point of view, adding my own female intuition and life experience was a temptation I couldn’t resist.”