Summer 2025 is Cronenberg Summer
Charli XCX’s prophetic Coachella performance and the body modification discourse of this season.
Summer has always been a season of horror. When the temperature rises, rats and cockroaches scuttle from the sewers, waking from their spring slumber, bringing new terror to cities across the world. Some of the most famous slasher films—like Friday the 13th—take place in a summer camp. But the real horror of sweltering heat lies in the human body: when skin burns and sheds under the sun; when makeup melts off from faces like slime after just a short afternoon outdoors; when arms and necks become sticky and flesh becomes ripe again for the mosquitos and flies to feast on. The most universal experience of summer is the terror it inflicts on the human body.
I think this is a helpful reminder when the zeitgeist this season feels a little empty: earlier this month, one viral tweet quipped that, “It’s July and we STILL don’t have a song of the summer-.” There’s yet to be a singular record or movie to guide the collective mood as the heat rises and our bodies simmer. And despite movies like F1 and new releases from Lorde and Justin Bieber—and an overly advertised Benson Boone album—I’m not holding out for any zeitgeist-y media this year, the way Brat and Barbenheimer were in the summers before. Trend reporter
explains why this is happening: “political chaos breeding a loss of mass cultural identity… complicated by the dissolution of both entertainment industries and our collective lack of a “source” for entertainment.”Without a collective source of entertainment or experience, can it still be possible to name (and understand) summer 2025?
Charli XCX did offer a new way to understand our current milieu: summer 2025 is Cronenberg summer. When heat and the terror on the body are the only universal feelings left, film director David Cronenberg becomes a fitting metaphor for our times.1 Widely regarded as the pioneer of the “body horror” film genre, Cronenberg’s works depict visceral body transformation and infectious disease, where the psychological, physical, and technological intertwine. His works like Crash (1996), Videodrome (1983), and The Fly (1986) are not for the faint of heart: you watch as flesh fuses with metal, a man turns into an insect, limbs shatter and twist, and bodies mutate, disfigure, and transform.
“The theme of transformation as a physical event fascinates me because we undergo the natural transformations that any animal undergoes, but then we interfere with it: we wear glasses, have our teeth done, our nose straightened,” Cronenberg once said in a 1997 interview with Wired. “As humans, we try to transcend the body by transforming it. For us there is no natural.”
For us, there is no natural. A slew of headlines this summer continue to highlight our very Cronenbergian urge to transcend the body through transformation. In early June, the Straits Times in Singapore declared that more young people in the Asian city “are getting Botox and collagen shots.” Since 2020, aestheticians in Singapore have been seeing a 10-20% increase in the number of 20- and 30-somethings using injectable cosmetics, “freezing” the aging process through fillers and collagen boosters. The once stigmatized practice has become routine for several young people in the city: “After Botox and fillers, the results were so good that I wanted to try more procedures,” one interview subject told the publication.
The phenomenon isn’t just growing in Singapore. As the South Korean market for cosmetic surgery matures (1,170,467 foreign patients received aesthetic treatments in South Korea last year), there are more people travelling from Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States to cosmetic surgery clinics in Seoul’s Gangnam district, report the South China Morning Post and Business of Fashion.
Across the pond, other stories published this summer show Americans pushing the envelope for body modification:
of the business newsletter Feed Me ran a reader survey on the use of weight loss drugs and found that “Far more respondents are using GLP-1s than I expected.” Over 35% reported using drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. One user says, “Love them - changed my life and would encourage anyone who is interested in changing their relationship with food and their body to try them.” Another adds, “[it’s the] same thing as taking vitamins or fancy supplements. If you want to opt in, that's your body and choice.”Maybe it’s just that attention given to appearances is at an all-time high in summertime, when heat forces us to strip down to tank tops, shorts, and swimwear. But I think there’s something deeper: there’s a unifying sense of “reclamation” happening here—reclamation of the body and of a “relationship with food”; reclamation of youthful glowing skin that wrinkles past the 20s—all in a manner that feels very Cronenbergian.
Part of the Cronenbergian impulse is to modify ourselves into who we want to be in the world. In one of Cronenberg’s most influential works, The Fly, a shy geeky scientist named Seth creates a teleportation machine, which, upon its first use, transforms him into a man of confidence, strength, and sexual prowess—a liberation (as some film scholars have argued) from the worst parts of himself. But the “liberation” goes too far, and we soon learn why the movie is titled The Fly: The teleportation machine has fused Seth’s body with an insect’s. Over weeks, his flesh melts, and he slowly transforms into a bug-man chimera.
Writer Travis Wood argues in Cinephilia Beyond that it’s stories like these that “[literalize] the forces that dominate our lives as ravagers of our flesh.” And though not horror per se, cosmetic technologies like Botox or Ozempic do make invisible forces in our lives very tangible. GLP-1s only exist because contemporary culture pushes us towards overconsumption. And Botox is just a symptom of a cultural obsession with youth. Deeper realities are tangible in these objects.
It’s true that there is no song of the summer because the world is chaotic and uncertain. But in a time like this, I think there’s nothing more human than the desire to retain the one thing we can control: our bodies.
One film critic writes that when Seth transforms from man into monster in The Fly, it “represents the grotesque embodiment of long-repressed desires and fears. The condition takes the form of a horrific physical metamorphosis, one which is associated with the most extreme otherness, loss of identity and finally with death.” It’s the visceral, grotesque consequences of failing in our pursuit of who we want to be in the world that make body horror so terrifying: like Seth, the attempt and failure to escape these “invisible forces” transform us into monsters, behemoths beyond recognition.
So when the heat finally dissipates this summer, when the flowers wither and trees shed their leaves, what new monsters will we become?
It’s also helpful that David Cronenberg has a new film out this summer: The Shrouds.