ABCs of Horror 3: “A” Is for Antiviral (2012)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

For years after seeing 2012’s Antiviral for the first time, it felt destined to me to be one of those odd films I would be unsuccessfully attempting to convince others to watch for the rest of my life.

I’m not really sure where that viewer reticence seemed to come from, in the mid-2010s. Antiviral had a built-in selling point for genre geek curiosity, after all: It was the feature film debut of Brandon Cronenberg, the filmmaking son of legendary body horror auteur David Cronenberg. One would think that the nepotism alone (another Cronenberg, Caitlin, just made her feature debut with 2024’s Humane), and the seeming similarity in genres for a debut narrative film, would pique the interest of horror geeks, and yet Antiviral seemed to come and go with barely a ripple in the collective horror/sci-fi consciousness, never to be mentioned again. Every time I tried to bring it up, friends shrugged their shoulders in indifference. Years passed and my admiration for it remained, but it seemed that Brandon Cronenberg as an artist had disappeared from the scene just as quickly as he seemingly emerged. By the late 2010s, I’d just about given up on seeing anything more from him, and I considered that a shame.

Then came 2020’s Possessor and 2023’s Infinity Pool, thrusting the budding sci-fi horror auteur in his own right back into the limelight, and with those significantly more exposed and critically acclaimed films, we’ve finally circled back around to the proper reassessment of Antiviral that this film deserved all along. And what a uniquely disturbing, visceral vision it is of one loathsome possible future, a world where society has lost both its collective mind and any respect it once might have maintained for human dignity. The world of Antiviral is what happens when all forms of self-respect and individuality are forgotten, and parasocial relationships are the only ones that remain. The Cronenberg family has gifted us with some pretty fucked-up “what ifs” over the years, but this might very well be the most grim and soulless of them all.

The world of Antiviral is a near future dystopia, in which it quickly becomes clear to us that the healthy functioning of an independent society is teetering on the brink. Somehow, we’ve let pretty much every form of artistic expression, popular culture, fine arts, music, even sports slip to the wayside. All familiar forms of entertainment have withered on the vine, as society redefines itself through its relationship with a sole obsession shared by absolutely everyone: Celebrity worship. This whole world effectively revolves around fandom and stan culture, to the point that it makes the internet’s modern treatment of the likes of Taylor Swift look positively disinterested in comparison. People in this world eat, drink and breathe nothing but celebrity intrigue, defining themselves through their slavish devotion to people they’ll never interact with in any real way. And it’s because they’re so desperate for this interaction that horrifying industries have sprung up to service it, to simulate the connection they can never have. The resulting vibe can’t help but be one of pathetic desperation and hopelessness, at times evoking a similar critique of possessive fandom as seen in a film like Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue.

But where Perfect Blue depicted the soulless entertainment world through the eyes of a pop idol attempting to break free from those who would control every aspect of her life, Antiviral plunges us into the experience of the enablers in much grimier fashion. Our viewpoint character is Syd, played by the always disconcerting Caleb Landry Jones, a mid-level employee at a boutique biochemistry clinic that specializes in the ultimate experience to bring you and your chosen celebrity symbolically closer together: shared illnesses. But it’s not just a matter of going out of your way to catch an STI because your celebrity idol has one–in the world of Antiviral, you can actually pay to be infected by the very same genetic strain of the herpes virus as your favorite cinema starlet, because those pathogens have been harvested from their very bodies in order to sate your fantasy. You can feel the disease coursing through your body, and know that you’re truly sharing your idol’s life in some small way. Mostly the diseased part.

The late Anthony Bourdain once actually imagined a somewhat similar fictional dystopia in his comic book Get Jiro!, a story about a world where all forms of entertainment and culture had been replaced with an obsession with cuisine and haute celebrity chefs, but Bourdain–noted cynic though he so often was–never would have known how to twist the knife as diabolically as Brandon Cronenberg does in Antiviral. The writer-director peppers the world of his setting with details so creatively distressing that it invites the viewer to grim speculation on just how this version of our society could have slipped into such profane behavior. Look no further than the celebrity meat market where Syd sells illegally harvested and replicated pathogens to the black market. Here, you can swing by the near future equivalent of a butcher shop to buy samples of meat artificially grown from celebrity cell samples, to then fry up at home. There’s a throwaway line in there about how, in the eyes of the government and thanks to some bureaucratic legalese, this is conveniently not regarded as cannibalism in the eyes of the FDA. So don’t worry!

But Cronenberg’s smartest thought isn’t the mere existence of such a revolting meat market in the world of Antiviral, it’s the apathy this society shows toward it. Celebrity steaks? They’ve apparently been available in this setting for a while now, and the novelty obsessed consumer, ever fickle, has already grown tired of this vat-grown taste treat delight that allows them to gnaw on chunks of their favorite actor or singer. Celebrity meat is old news here, playing second fiddle to the pathogens that Syd’s company can now provide. But doesn’t the way we use up those novelties, only to discard them, portend the same thing for this latest degradation of human dignity? If celebrity meat quickly became passe, then how long until the consumer tires of celebrity viruses? And dear god, what will be next when they do?

Antiviral gets a ton of mileage out of the impending horror of that question, capturing us as a species long after we’ve lost our footing and tumbled down the slippery slope, speeding toward some certain hell of our own making. It may move with the stuttering steps of a first narrative feature from a relatively inexperienced director, but its ideas are so perfectly revolting that it indicated the perverse fruit hadn’t fallen far from the family tree.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.