The president of a titillating tv channel thinks he’s found a hit when he discovers an under the radar program broadcasting torture and murder. When his girlfriend disappears to audition, he struggles to maintain his grasp on reality as he vows to find the show’s source.

Following the success of his mind-blowing hit Scanners, Canadian body horror legend David Cronenberg gave us VIDEODROME (1983), a darkly sexual sci-fi thriller cautioning us of the dangers of media consumption. Real life sleaze ball James Woods and Blondie’s Debbie Harry star in a transgressive tale about technology’s corruptive influence that proved to fit snuggly alongside Cronenberg’s subsequent legacy of techno-horror features to come.

Max Renn runs a low budget TV cable station that features salacious late night content. In his search for provocative new material, he is shown a snuff program called Videodrome that he believes would drive ratings for its realistic violence. Aroused by the show, Max’s girlfriend Nicki is drawn to audition but never returns. Max experiences surreal hallucinates that his body is mutating. His stomach develops a vagina of sorts, his hand a cancerous gun and Nicki begins speaking to him through the television.

He struggles to maintain his reality and his naive efforts to seek out the creator of the show unveils a company’s conspiratorial efforts to deliver malignant brain tumors directly to their immoral audience through Videodrome’s broadcast.

Forty one years later, this movie is still considered one of Cronenberg’s greats and maintains a sort of prescience about society’s complicated and ever evolving relationship to mass media and its effects on our consciences.