One of the more gloriously gruesome examples of David Cronenberg’s early work, 1977’s Rabid focuses on a woman whose mutation leads to a pandemic across Canada. Jen and Sylvia Soska are now remaking the film for 2019, and we’ve just seen a trailer for the body horror-themed movie. From what we can tell, the Soskas have nailed the gruesome effects and dread of the original.
The remake explores the life of Rose, an introvert whose dreams of becoming a fashion designer are ruined by an accident. A radical stem cell treatment restores her health and grants her beauty, but Rose soon finds that the experiment had unintended consequences. Laura Vandervoort plays the aforementioned woman, with wrestler CM Punk in a supporting role.
The trailer opens with a creepy-looking medical facility and scenes of Rose being bullied at a fashion show. We also see glimpses of Rose’s motorcycle accident, her subsequent disfigurement, and the beginning of the treatment that will transform her into the carrier of a deadly strain of rabies. Along the way we catch glimpses of some more homages to Cronenberg, too, most notably surgeons that look a lot like the twins in Dead Ringers.
The Soska Sisters have an impressive reputation for horror, having turned out low-budget fare such as Dead Hooker in a Trunk, See No Evil 2, American Mary and ABCs of Death 2. We’re definitely fans of their work, and the sisters are certainly not backing down from the bloodier end of the horror genre with Rabid. Based on the original Cronenberg story and the Soskas’ filmography, it also seems that there will be strong feminist themes to their new movie.
Rabid will premiere at this year’s FrightFest in the UK over the weekend of August 26th. We should then hopefully see it get a limited theatrical release and online distribution via A71 Entertainment and genre specialists Shout! Studios. For now though, the trailer’s enough to whet, or rather dampen, our appetites for this new take on Cronenberg’s classic movie.