# What is the best David Cronenberg film?

> Early low-budget shockers sit beside polished crime dramas and adaptations of Burroughs and Ballard. Pick the one that got under your skin.

*By YPB Team · Published November 3, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-david-cronenberg-film*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Fly** — score 1000/1000
   A 1986 remake starring Jeff Goldblum as a scientist fused with a fly during a teleportation experiment; it won the Academy Award for Best Makeup.
2. **Dead Ringers** — score 855/1000
   A 1988 psychological thriller with Jeremy Irons playing identical twin gynecologists in Toronto.
3. **Rabid** — score 778/1000
   A 1977 horror film starring Marilyn Chambers as a woman who develops a blood-feeding organ after experimental surgery.
4. **Cosmopolis** — score 754/1000
   A 2012 adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel, with Robert Pattinson as a billionaire crossing Manhattan in a limousine.
5. **Shivers** — score 754/1000
   Cronenberg's 1975 commercial feature debut, in which a parasite spreads through a Montreal high-rise apartment complex.
6. **Videodrome** — score 728/1000
   A 1983 film starring James Woods as a Toronto TV executive who stumbles onto a broadcast signal that causes hallucinations.
7. **Maps to the Stars** — score 728/1000
   A 2014 Hollywood satire for which Julianne Moore won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.
8. **Fast Company** — score 538/1000
   A 1979 drag-racing drama starring William Smith and Claudia Jennings, set on the North American racing circuit.
9. **eXistenZ** — score 538/1000
   A 1999 science-fiction thriller with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law inside an organic virtual-reality game.
10. **Spider** — score 538/1000
   A 2002 psychological drama starring Ralph Fiennes as a mentally ill man revisiting his London childhood, adapted from Patrick McGrath's novel.
11. **Eastern Promises** — score 455/1000
   A 2007 crime film set among the Russian mob in London, which earned Viggo Mortensen an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
12. **Crash** — score 455/1000
   A 1996 adaptation of J. G. Ballard's novel about people aroused by car crashes; it received a Special Jury Prize at Cannes.
13. **The Shrouds** — score 359/1000
   A 2024 drama starring Vincent Cassel as a businessman who invents a technology to watch the dead decompose in their burial shrouds.
14. **The Dead Zone** — score 359/1000
   A 1983 adaptation of Stephen King's novel, with Christopher Walken as a man who wakes from a coma with psychic visions.
15. **A Dangerous Method** — score 245/1000
   A 2011 drama about Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein, starring Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortensen and Keira Knightley.
16. **Crimes of the Future** — score 245/1000
   A 2022 science-fiction film with Viggo Mortensen as a performance artist who displays his newly grown organs, sharing only its title with Cronenberg's 1970 film.
17. **The Brood** — score 245/1000
   A 1979 horror film with Oliver Reed as a psychotherapist whose experimental treatment of Samantha Eggar's character has monstrous results.
18. **M. Butterfly** — score 245/1000
   A 1993 adaptation of David Henry Hwang's play, with Jeremy Irons as a French diplomat in love with a Peking opera singer.
19. **Scanners** — score 0/1000
   A 1981 science-fiction thriller about telepaths with destructive powers, known for its exploding-head scene.
20. **Naked Lunch** — score 0/1000
   A 1991 adaptation of William S. Burroughs's novel, starring Peter Weller as an exterminator drawn into the hallucinatory Interzone.
21. **A History of Violence** — score 0/1000
   A 2005 thriller with Viggo Mortensen as a small-town diner owner whose past surfaces after he kills two robbers.

Tags: movies, directors, horror, sci-fi, canada, david cronenberg