What Inspired The Film Rabid And Its 2019 Remake?

I've watched both films enough times to hear their different heartbeats: the 1977 'Rabid' is Cronenberg's fever dream about infection, sex, and the uncanny possibilities of the human body turned hostile. He crafted it out of a fascination with body horror and with pushing the limits of taste — the movie reads like an allegory for contagion, but also a commentary on how intimate and transgressive contact can be. The original's scrappy, exploitative edges make the premise feel immediate and dangerous.

The 2019 version by the Soska sisters updated the premise for a world more worried about medical experiments, stem-cell treatments, and institutional failure. They kept the core idea — a woman becomes the source of a violent, spreading condition — but swapped some of the 70s sleaze for modern medical ethics, social panic, and an exploration of trauma recovery. It’s less lurid in some ways but stings more because of its contemporary resonance; watching it, I felt that itch of recognition about how healthcare and fear can intersect.

Quick take: the inspiration for the original 'Rabid' was Cronenberg’s fixation on body horror and social anxieties about infection and sexuality, wrapped in low-budget, transgressive filmmaking that used shock to probe deeper fears. The 2019 remake takes that seed and replants it in a garden of modern worries — experimental treatments, institutional response, and contemporary gendered trauma — so the infection becomes an allegory for current medical and social failures.

Both versions riff on the same terrifying image — a person becoming the source of uncontrollable transmission — but each film’s inspirations reflect its era. I find it fascinating how a single concept mutates across decades, and both cuts still make my skin crawl in different, satisfying ways.

Caught the 2019 version on a late-night stream and then put the original on the next afternoon; it’s fascinating to see the inspiration evolve. The 1977 'Rabid' feels like it was fed by the era’s fear of invasive science and sexual panic — Cronenberg used the idea of infection almost as a metaphor for taboo desire and the breakdown of social order. He was playing with the horror of losing bodily autonomy, and he amplified that through freakish medical imagery and a gritty, exploitative aesthetic that really stuck in late-70s horror culture.

The Soska sisters’ remake pulls from that same core but injects modern worries: think cosmetic procedures, experimental drugs, the dark side of rehab clinics, and the way social media accelerates panic. Their inspiration wasn’t just Cronenberg’s filmography; it felt rooted in contemporary headlines about pharmaceutical scandals and public-health scares. Both films also riff on older mythic fears — rabies, vampirism, contagion — but the 2019 take reframes who’s at risk and who’s responsible, which makes it feel timely. I enjoyed how the remake nodded to the original while trying to widen the mythology to include our current tech-and-medical anxieties.

For me, the inspiration behind the original 'Rabid' is clear in its DNA: Cronenberg was obsessed with the body as both battleground and narrative engine. He took cultural fears — sexual anxiety, medical procedures gone wrong, the idea of something inside you changing you — and turned them into a visceral infection story that connected to older horror myths like rabies and vampirism. That gave the original a heady mix of social paranoia and personal violation.

The 2019 remake drew inspiration from that soil but replanted the seed in modern dirt: cosmetic surgery culture, biotech experiments, and the way news (and panic) spreads almost virally online. Rather than simply copying Cronenberg’s 1977 shocks, the Soska take translates the contagion into 21st-century touchstones — pharmaceuticals, rehabilitation centers, and the social-media echo chamber — which makes the whole concept feel both familiar and freshly unsettling. I like that both films, though decades apart, are really about control — who controls bodies, who controls information — and that theme still gets under my skin.

Skip ahead and then rewind: the Soskas’ 2019 'Rabid' is in conversation with Cronenberg’s 1977 original, not a straight retread. The remake opens with a grounded setup — experimental surgery, an injured protagonist, the seeds of an epidemic — which reflects 21st-century fears about medical tech, profiteering, and how institutions triage people. That modern frame alters the tone; where Cronenberg leaned into surreal body horror and sexual allegory, the remake translates it into procedural anxieties and a contagion thriller vibe. I appreciate how the Soskas nodded to the original’s imagery while choosing a different thematic lens.

If you go back to Cronenberg’s 'Rabid', you can see it as a product of its time: low-budget Canadian cinema mixed with a theorist’s curiosity about the human body and the horror of losing bodily agency. His films often explore how identity and flesh can betray us, and 'Rabid' does that via a sex-adjacent infection that spreads through contact. Together the two films map how cultural fears shift: from sexual liberation and parasitic fantasy in the 70s to modern mistrust of medicine and systemic breakdown now. I like both for different reasons — one’s a raw, mischievous nightmare, the other a sharper, socially tuned scare.

Late-night horror sessions taught me to spot what drives a movie beneath its gore, and 'Rabid' (1977) is pure David Cronenberg DNA: fascination with the body, infection as metaphor, and that creeping sexual menace. Cronenberg took his low-budget freedom and turned it into something raw — casting Marilyn Chambers, mixing exploitation energy with an intelligent freak-out about what happens when a person becomes a vector. The original grew from his obsession with bodily transgression and a desire to literalize anxiety about disease and desire; that weird parasitic appendage the protagonist develops is both shock cinema and a symbolic needle into social fears of the era.

By the time the Soska sisters remade 'Rabid' in 2019, the anxieties had modernized. Their version keeps the infection-as-horror core but recontextualizes it around experimental medical tech, the aftermath of trauma, and how institutions respond to crisis. Where Cronenberg leaned into clinical, surreal body horror, the remake leans into pandemic-era dread, the ethics of treatment, and a more feminist focus on bodily autonomy. Both films are about loss of control, but they hit different nerve endings; I find them complementary rather than identical, and I still get chills picturing that first bite and how quickly panic spreads.

Weirdly, the title 'Rabid' works on so many levels that you can feel the inspirations layering up the moment you watch it. For the original 1977 film, David Cronenberg was working right in his body-horror groove: he’d already explored parasitic invasion and social breakdown in 'Shivers', and with 'Rabid' he pushed the image of an infected body as a vector for social collapse. The literal disease imagery — the idea of a wound or altered anatomy becoming contagious — taps into old horror tropes like rabies, vampirism, and urban panic, but Cronenberg reframed them around sexuality, medical experimentation, and the fear of losing control of your own flesh.

He drew from genre touchstones (invasion and contagion narratives) and the 1970s cultural anxieties about medicine, sexual liberation, and institutional trust. The film’s low-budget, transgressive tone also nodded to exploitation cinema, which let Cronenberg mix clinical dread with sleazy, feverish shock. That blend — clinical procedure plus taboo desire — became a signature and is clearly the wellsprings of the original's inspiration.

When the Soska sisters remade 'Rabid' in 2019, they were reading those same themes through a modern lens. They kept the central idea of an infected body that spreads something uncontrollable, but recast it into contemporary fears: cosmetic medicine, biotech overreach, the pill culture, and even how social contagion spreads online. Their film borrows Cronenberg's body-horror DNA while amplifying present-day anxieties about pharmaceuticals, consent, and public health. Watching both back-to-back shows how a single premise can reflect the medical and moral panic of two very different eras — and I love how both versions bite differently at the same nerve.