Daily Inspiration Quote by David Cronenberg

Cronenberg isn’t name-dropping Hitchcock to borrow prestige; he’s using Hitchcock as a foil to define his own contract with the viewer. Hitchcock’s public persona sold control: the director as puppeteer, the audience as a predictable nervous system to be poked, teased, and released. Cronenberg, by contrast, has always trafficked in a messier intimacy. His films don’t just manipulate fear; they invite complicity in desire, disgust, and curiosity at the same time. The “relationship” he’s talking about isn’t simply suspense mechanics. It’s the uneasy sense that the movie is watching you back, testing what you’ll tolerate, what you’ll enjoy, what you’ll rationalize.

The key move is the polite hedge: “seemed to want.” Cronenberg acknowledges Hitchcock’s brand was a performance - a clean, gentlemanly story about audience management - while hinting that Hitchcock’s work carried other, less marketable impulses beneath it. That small concession (“more going on under the surface”) signals Cronenberg’s respect for subtext as an artistic truth: the real film is often what the director can’t or won’t say outright, what leaks through craft.

Context matters: Cronenberg emerges in a post-60s landscape where censorship loosens and the body becomes a cultural battleground - sex, disease, technology, identity. In that world, audience passivity feels fake. His “complex” relationship is a challenge to spectatorship itself: you’re not just here to be thrilled; you’re here to be implicated. That’s why the line lands. It reframes horror not as a ride, but as a negotiation.