Videodrome influenced Existenz

eXistenZ is Cronenberg returning to Videodrome's premise sixteen years later with games instead of television. Both are about a medium that enters the body, rewrites what the user believes is happening, and cannot be switched off from inside. The physical vocabulary is repeated deliberately: an organic port opened in the spine, a console that is warm and alive and behaves like an animal, and a plot in which the audience loses the ability to tell which layer is the real one at the same moment the protagonist does. Videodrome's slot in the abdomen and eXistenZ's bioport are the same idea in the same body-horror register.