Freethought of the Day

David Cronenberg

On this date in 1943, filmmaker David Paul Cronenberg was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the son of middle-class, progressive Jewish parents. He graduated from Toronto University with a degree in literature but in college had discovered filmmaking. He is known as one of the originators of what's known as the "body horror" genre.

His films include Shivers (1975), The Brood (1979), Rabid (1977), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), Stephen King's The Dead Zone (1983) with Christopher Walken, The Fly (1986) with Jeff Goldblum, Dead Ringers (1988) with Jeremy Irons, Naked Lunch (1991), Crash (1996), eXistenZ (1999) with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law, Spider (2002), A History of Violence (2005), Eastern Promises (2007), Cosmopolis (2012) and Maps to the Stars (2014), the same year he published his first novel, Consumed.

He married Margaret Hindson in 1972 and they had a daughter, Cassandra, before divorcing in 1979. He was married to film editor Carolyn Zeifman from 1979 until her death in 2017. They had two children, Caitlin and Brandon. In a New York Times Magazine interview Sept. 18, 2005, he said: "I'm an atheist, and so I have a philosophical problem with demonology and supporting the mythology of Satan, which involves God and heaven and hell and all that stuff. I'm not just a nonbeliever, I'm an antibeliever. I think it's a destructive philosophy."

"I'm simply a nonbeliever and have been forever."

—Cronenberg interview, Esquire magazine (February 1992)

Compiled by FFRF; photo by Featureflash / Shutterstock.com

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