As a young director financing his own small films in Toronto, Ontario, in the 1970s, David Cronenberg established a directorial style he would often return to throughout his career one that eschewed typical horror melodrama. Instead of making prototypical slasher films, he interspersed real-world psychological antagonism with body horror that, while often depicting gore and mutilation in otherworldly ways, also maintained an uncanny realism. In The Brood, there are no monsters only monstrous human beings who harness a version of ‘psychoplasticity,’ an idea from science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft’s prose.