Videodrome

Both films are about a body invaded and rebuilt by machinery, filmed as physical horror rather than as metaphor, and Cronenberg's is the earlier of the two by six years. What Tsukamoto's film shares is the central image: metal entering flesh and the flesh accepting it, photographed close, wet and practical. Cronenberg opens an organic slot in a man's abdomen and feeds a videocassette into it; Tsukamoto drives scrap through skin until the character is more machine than man. Tetsuo's own register is different, shot in high-contrast monochrome at stop-motion speed, but the body-horror line it is working in is the one Videodrome had drawn.

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.