Murders in the Zoo (1933) and Shivers (1975)

About this event

Murders in the Zoo opens our new season in fine style, with one of favourite villains (the suavely incomparable Lionel Atwill) playing an insanely jealous big-game hunter who plots to ‘dispose’ of his beautiful but unfaithful wife’s lovers. And he just happens to own a private zoo… This is one of those dark ‘pre-Code’, anything-goes horrors that we love at the Gothique, with no less a critic than Leonard Maltin calling it “astonishingly grisly”! Following that opener, we are delighted to present our main feature ‘partly’ on 35mm, courtesy of the Cinema Museum’s extensive film collection: ‘partly’ because one of the 35mm reels is missing, so the ‘gap’ will be filled by a digital copy. But it’s still lovely to wheel out the ‘old technology’ from time to time! Shivers (also known as The Parasite Murders) was celebrated director David Cronenberg’s first foray into feature production, following a series of largely experimental short films. It heralded his fascination with ‘body horror’, with a scientist experimenting, in an up-market apartment complex, with the use of genetically-engineered parasites as organ transplants. But the parasites combine aphrodisiac with VD… and, as a suspicious doctor begins an investigation, residents start showing signs that they are spreading rapidly, in an extremely unpleasant manner.