David Cronenberg has made a great number of disturbing films in his career, but perhaps none more viscerally affecting than "The Brood," a horror film that aims not so much to scare you as to turn you inside-out, to make you squirm and recoil in disgust. "The Brood" is a film of tremendous physical impact. Its climactic horror scenes elicit none of the jumpy, jittery scares that most horror films resort to in order to provoke reactions, but Cronenberg's horror is no less physical, no less manipulative. It's a creeping, crawling psychological horror, enhanced by the fact that he keeps his little beasties off-screen for so much of the film, and when they finally appear, their awkwardness only accentuates their basic wrongness. These monsters are the mentally-generated spawn of Nola (Samantha Eggar), who is being counseled by the controversial psychologist Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), who believes that negative emotions can be channeled out of the body and manifest themselves in physical form. As it turns out, he's right, and Nola's anger grows into a brood of vicious "children" who respond to the vagaries of her mood by turning on the people she's angry with and killing them. The film reflects a man's fear and distrust of feminine bodily processes and the uniquely privileged mother/child relationship, which is here warped into a nightmarish mockery. The horrors of childbirth, in particular, are explored in brutal detail in the final sequence, which is one of the most bracing and stomach-turning scenes in cinema. Cronenberg admits that the film was directly inspired by a rather nasty divorce battle with his ex-wife, and consequently it's a film about the scars, mental and physical, imparted on us by our families and loved ones. This is a primal fear, a childlike horror that the ones we love the most are exactly the ones who are out to hurt us. Cronenberg makes this abstract fear terrifyingly tangible, and the result is one of his most effective and extraordinary horror films.