“Death to Videodrome. Long live the new flesh.”
Where to begin with Cronenberg’s 1983 psychological horror Videodrome? At once a prescient prediction of our modern state and a warning of horrors still yet to come, Videodrome defies categorisation from the start. Our ‘hero’ is Max Renn, CEO of soft-core channel Civic TV, who discovers a mysterious transmission of what appears to be - but surely can’t be - people being tortured and killed. Of course, it’s perfect fodder for Max's seedy channel, but what kind of person watches this kind of material anyway? And, perhaps more importantly, what power is it capable of exerting on its viewers? Videodrome is a paranoid, hallucinatory trip into the new media landscape that threatens to colonise even our dreams. Join Nick and Johanna as they attempt to make sense of it all and to come to a conclusion on the question of ethics in this final episode of the 'Meta-Horrors' series. Expect a host of unusually eclectic conversational topics ranging from Lacanian theory to the manosphere; from interpellation to the ethics of pornography.
