David Cronenberg is one of the last original “voices” of cinema still going strong. The man knows how to do commercial films while still retaining his artistic senses and not completely selling out. This is also stemming from the fact that he has not done a “horror” movie in a long time. Last thing you could count in there would be A History Of Violence. This is not a knock on the man, as it’s good to see him branch out and be extremely successful at it too.
No stranger to television* he’s bringing an adaptation of a novel called “The Knife Man” to the small screen which will be called Knifeman. Read on for the details.
[Knifeman] centers on the trials and triumphs of a radical, self-educated surgeon delivering a visceral portrait of the extraordinary and unorthodox lengths he will go to uncover the secrets of the human body.
The story on the novel is that it’s about a real 18th Century surgeon named John Hunter. This is really intriguing as we’ve never really seen exactly how modern medicine and medical techniques first came about. There has got to be a lot of trial and error that we don’t know about that happened, and this is stuff that Cronenberg could and should cover in this tv series. It will provide us with a lot of accurate and wince inducing procedures that will make us all thankful to be living in a world with advanced medical treatments.
*I’ve recently been watching Friday The 13th: The Series on dvd, and I saw a season 1 episode called “Faith Healer” that he directed it. It was fairly gruesome, and I was very surprised to find out it aired on network tv back in 1987. It reminded me a lot of Videodrome/The Brood if that’s any indication of the kind of body horror that went on in the episode. It also starred early Cronenberg regular Robert A. Silverman. Check it out if you can. You won’t be disappointed.
source: collider