David Cronenberg provokes SHIVERS from within with his feature film debut on Blu-ray from Lionsgate's Vestron Video line.

The entirely self-sufficient Starliner Towers high-rise apartments on Starliner Island becomes a human Petri dish when promiscuous, barely-legal resident Annabelle Brown (Cathy Graham) is brutally murdered by her estranged husband Professor Emil Hobbes (Fred Doederlein, SCANNERS). The building's new clinic doctor Roger St. Luc (Paul Hampton, LADY SINGS THE BLUES) and Hobbes' research partner Rollo Linsky (Joe Silver, DEATHTRAP) – along with Roger's sexy nurse (Lynn Lowry, CAT PEOPLE) – start looking into his experiments on creating a parasite to take over the functions of faulty human organs. Delving deeper into the professor's private notes, they discover the professor's real experiments to create a parasite that is part aphrodisiac/part venereal disease – having found that humanity has lost touch with their instincts and senses – to turn the world into "one beautiful, mindless orgy" and that he was using Annabelle to incubate the creatures. Roger realizes that Hobbes was not able to destroy the parasites since medical records reveal four Starliner male residents with unexplained moving abdominal growths. By the time Roger and Rollo form a plan of attack, they may be too late since the parasites have started infecting the residents of the Starliner Towers – among them rental agent Merrick (Ronald Mlodzik, the star of Cronenberg's shorts STEREO and CRIMES OF THE FUTURE), lesbian Betts (Barbara Steele, BLACK SUNDAY) who is infected in her bathtub, frazzled Janine (Susan Petrie, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SEXY) and her husband Nicholas (Allan Kolman, SE7EN) who is suffering from a very special kind of infection from his dalliances with Annabelle – as leaping, oversize inchworms and in the form of violent sexual attacks by infected hosts since "disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures."

A landmark Canadian horror film – although not actually the first since producer Cinepix ("the Roger Corman of Canada") had expanded from softcore "maple syrup porn" to horror with the lukewarm SATAN'S SABBATH – SHIVERS finds David Cronenberg attempting a more commercial treatment of the "body horror" themes of his experimental films in a scenario that vaguely anticipates J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel "High Rise" (which later Cronenberg producer Jeremy Thomas had been nursing as a Nicolas Roeg project, finally filmed in 2015 by Ben Wheatley). The Joe Blasco (RUBY) puppet parasites and some gore effects are hampered by the budget but still gruesome in conception, but there is something blackly comic about this early attack on pre-pandemic socially-distanced community living where people either do not know their neighbors or become uncomfortably entangled with them in a scenario that would always be a Petri dish for some kind of disease. The attacks are violent and sexual in nature but the victims who suffer most horribly are those who resist; and, in spite of that, one is left feeling ambiguous about whether mankind is better or worse off becoming "one beautiful, mindless orgy." The film's low budget is evident throughout – including producer Ivan Reitman (GHOSTBUSTERS) supervising the needle-drop soundtrack – but some touches are oddly suited to Cronenberg's aesthetic like the functional photography of Robert Saad (DEATH WEEKEND) and the grainy post-production optical slow motion that underlines the climactic moment the disease conquers humanity.

Released theatrically by Trans American Films as THEY CAME FROM WITHIN and on a dark and grainy VHS under that title by Vestron Video, the Canadian tape transfers from Astral and CIC were not much better while a Japanese laserdisc sported an improved transfer but was an expensive option. Things perked up in 1998 when a newer, colorful, fullscreen transfer – also released in Canada – appeared on laserdisc and DVD from Image Entertainment along with a green clamshell cassette edition from Anchor Bay Entertainment (anamorphic widescreen editions followed in the UK, France, and Germany). Arrow Video's Region B Blu-ray from 2014 was licensed from Cinepix owners Lionsgate and derived from a Cinematheque Quebecois restoration; however, that effort was faulty having been a composite of Canadian and American materials (note the MPAA logo on the end credits) that contained the R-rated cutting of some gore footage from late in the film and was not remastered until 2016. Stateside, the uncut master appeared on some streaming services with the Lionsgate logo but there was no sign of a Blu-ray edition until the company's latest Vestron Collector's Series Blu-ray edition. As with the Arrow release and the streaming master, the 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC Blu-ray is framed at 1.78:1, trimming dead space off the top and bottom of the open-matte DVD transfer while also possessing more vibrant colors and truer blacks (the darkest scenes threatened to solarize at a couple points on the DVD transfer). The film will never look as slick as Cronenberg's later works but it should not. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track is very clean, revealing how spare the sound design is throughout the film and the varying quality of the library music tracks. English, English SDH, and Spanish subtitle tracks are also provided.

Fangoria's Chris Alexander moderates a pair of brand new audio commentaries. On the first, Cronenberg draws some parallels with the current pandemic, reveals that he thought he was going to have to find funding in the United States – visiting Los Angeles where he met Steele through director Jonathan Demme who was directing her in CHAINED HEAT – only to return and discover that Cinepix had convinced Telefilm Canada to fund the film. He confesses his total naivete about professional film production in his first days of shooting, being initially uncertain whether he was cut out for directing mainstream films after seeing the first rushes, and learning on the job from Reitman and sound supervisor Danny Goldberg (DIRTY DANCING). He also discusses the adventures of open casting, living in empty apartments at the Nun's Island development, the found production value of shooting in various inhabited apartments, and the anecdote about Petrie needing him to slap her for her crying scenes and Steele's reaction to witnessing such treatment. On the second track, co-producer Don Carmody (WHISPERS) recalls working as assistant production manager on THE GIRL IN BLUE, running the rushes between director George Kaczender and Cinepix, leading to his being hired by the company and SHIVERS being his first producer credit. He chimes in on some of Cronenberg's comments while also shedding more light on the contributions of Reitman and Goldberg, and also revealing that his own ER nurse mother was the film's technical consultant for Hampton's doctor character and would serve the same role on RABID. He also reveals that when he initially went to Cinepix in search of work as a young man, he was offered a bit as an extra in the orgy scene of their earlier nudie horror effort SATAN'S SABBATH.

"Mind Over Matter" (12:01) is a new interview with Cronenberg that is not entirely superfluous since he focuses a bit more on the conception of the film and his attempts to find funding in the United States, including a meeting with Roger Corman at New World Pictures and learning that Cinepix approached Demme behind his back about directing the film even though he told them they could not have the script without him in the director's chair. Lowry appears in "Good Night Nurse" (16:54) in which she recalls her nude scenes and friction with the producers over how much they wanted her to show, her famous monologue, actually stabbing Cronenberg who doubled for Vlasta Vrana (ETERNAL EVIL), conceding that Hampton's aloof behavior towards her in the film was the right choice even though she resented it at the time, and being called back to shoot the pool climax after wrapping. In "Outside and Within" (12:55), special makeup effects creator Blasco enthusiastically discusses the effects for the film, noting that the first shot of one of the parasites crawling through the grass was actually a make-up test shot filmed in Los Angeles that he disliked and did not realize they were going to use in the film. He recalls accepting the film – after likening the script to a porno film – upon learning that Steele was going to be in it, and recalls the inexperience of the film crew as well as his DIY bladder effects work.