Art & Creativity Quote by David Cronenberg

Cronenberg is taking a genre people love to patronize and daring them to admit what they use it for. Calling horror “art” isn’t a plea for respectability; it’s a reframe of the whole transaction. Horror, in his hands, is less about being scared than about being implicated. “Confrontation” is the key word: it suggests the audience isn’t a customer buying a roller-coaster jolt, but a participant being pushed toward material they’d rather keep tasteful, distant, or unspoken.

The subtext is a rebuke to the cultural sorting hat that labels some movies “serious” and others “guilty.” Cronenberg’s career - from Shivers and Videodrome to The Fly and Crash - is basically an argument that bodies, technology, sex, illness, and desire are where the real philosophical mess lives. Horror earns its artistic status by refusing to launder those anxieties into polite metaphors. It puts the mess on-screen, often literally. That’s why his films feel clinical and intimate at the same time: the camera becomes a diagnostic tool, and the viewer becomes the specimen.

There’s also a strategic humility here. He doesn’t claim every horror film is art; he claims the medium allows it, and the stigma is lazy. The final line is a quiet manifesto against critical snobbery: craftsmanship and ideas don’t stop at the genre border. Horror just has the decency to admit we’re already afraid.