8. Eastern Promises (2007)

The 2000s have seen Cronenberg veer away from body horror towards what some have argued to be an aggressive Oscar campaign. Yet Eastern Promises doesn't soften its story of human trafficking and cultural collision for an awards-show audience. Viggo Mortensen occupies the screen like a prosthetic effect from a previous film. He's imposing in his conversations with Naomi Watts and brutal in the film's famous fight scene, when he faces off against two Chechen hitmen while completely naked. It's one of Cronenberg's most inventive and visceral setpieces, and he makes you feel every punch, stab, slice, and thumb in the eyeball.

7. Shivers/They Came From Within (1975)

Shivers opens like a '50s creature feature, with a wormlike parasite turning people into zombies. Rape zombies, actually. As one character explains, it's "a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease." Though Cronenberg explored some of these ideas more fully in later films, rarely did they have the power of Shivers' final scene, in which the last uninfected human is attacked in an outrageous orgy. Cronenberg shoots it like he knows the predicament will both horrify and entice his audience. (Amazingly, Shivers is out of print on DVD. Get to work on that, Criterion.)

6. M. Butterfly (1993)

In the early 1990s, M. Butterfly seemed like an anomaly from the man who directed Videodrome: a quiet love story based on David Henry Hwang's Tony-winning play, full of sweeping vistas and a carefully staged courtroom scene. But Cronenberg examines Chinese culture with the same rigorous eye for detail and contradiction that he brought to North American racing subculture, and he locates some of his favorite themes in the source material: the fluidity of sexuality, the mutability of the body, and the collision of cultures that proves as potentially violent as the collision of bodies or cars. The film is heady, but Jeremy Irons and John Lone invest their scenes with an appropriately operatic sense of tragedy.

5. The Brood (1979)

The late 1960s and 1970s were the heyday of motherhood horror, as Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, and even Alien all plumbed the terrors of pregnancy and motherhood. It's, ahem, fertile territory for Cronenberg, who's always been fascinated by the transformative effects procreation can have on the body. There's a big reveal involving Samantha Eggar that will have even the most hardened viewer recoiling, but the real stars are the brood of deformed kids who terrorize Toronto — tiny maniacs in matching snowsuits. The classroom murder scene is spectacularly creepy, and the presence of real children, whose whimpering doesn't sound like acting, only makes it all the more unsettling.

4. Crash (1996)

Probably Cronenberg's most notorious film, Crash was banned in several countries and criticized for its coldly voyeuristic sex scenes. Certainly it can be glacial at times, both in tempo and tone; you could drive a car through some of the pauses in dialogue. But Cronenberg locates so much significance in the parallels between sex and car crashes that the movie never comes across as mere spectacle. Each offers an escape from the physical body — in other words, different forms of death. James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger act dead already, even while fucking, but Holly Hunter plies her mischievous smirk and Elias Koteas steals the movie with a fearlessly omnisexual performance. And Cronenberg shoots stylishly and confidently, using still photography as a means of evoking the tactile qualities of human bodies and sleek automobiles, both twisted into barely recognizable shapes.

3. The Fly (1986)

Cronenberg's remake of the 1958 Vincent Price flick foregoes the original's campiness for a more real-world tale of synthesis and mutation. The story is familiar: possibly mad scientist Jeff Goldblum accidentally combines his DNA with that of a housefly, which naturally complicates his relationship with Geena Davis. Often touted as an AIDS allegory, The Fly plays more like a story of addiction and consequence — how the highs make you feel invincible while they destroy your body. There are some ingeniously gruesome effects, but what truly puts the movie across is the bittersweet chemistry between Goldblum and Davis, who have never been better.

2. A History of Violence (2005)

William Hurt really should be in every movie. He's only onscreen for about ten minutes at the end of Cronenberg's adaptation of John Wagner and Vince Locke's graphic novel, but his grotesquely over-the-top performance takes A History of Violence to a new level. He's the polar opposite of Viggo Mortensen, who gives a studied, reserved performance as a family man with some dark secrets. These two actors represent the two moral extremes in this thoughtful, restrained, even moving film. There are some obvious Cronenberg flourishes, including a violent staircase sex scene and a frontyard stand-off that's as suspenseful as the Eastern Promises fight scene, but it's the quieter last shot that stays in the mind.

1. Videodrome (1983)

Cronenberg is a master of translating complex ideas into startling, often disturbing visuals. In that sense, Videodrome remains his best and most adventurous film, a noir mystery complete with a shadowy conspiracy, a femme fatale, a hard-luck protagonist, ominous clues, and a television set made of flesh. There's a morbid humor in Cronenberg's odd images, and James Woods observes them with a bemused smirk; he's the most capable stand-in for both the director and the director's audience. Videodrome not only contains some of Cronenberg's most indelible images, but it makes the best and most imaginative use of them, audaciously rewriting decades of film theory into its darkly entertaining — even soulful — story of old fears and new flesh.