Years ago, before the age of home video (shortly before - let's not make myself seem older than I actually am) and when I had a lot more free time, I used to go to the cinema several times a week. I was at film school then, and there were a lot of screens in the immediate area and a wider range of films on offer than there are at mainstream cinemas now. Of course there were also fewer wankers in the audience - before the days of mobile phone proliferation you could actually sit the whole way through a film without having some self-centred twat take a bloody call and yell into their glowing handpiece: "I'm in a cinema!" I particularly loved horror films, and in the late 1970s there were a new breed of horror directors, dedicated to the genre and working miracles on tiny budgets, creating works where ideas and imagination counted far more than expensive effects. Every year, on my birthday, I made a point of seeing a horror film - it was my present to myself. In 1978 that birthday film was Rabid.

By this point in my viewing career I had developed my own personal hierarchy of horror directors, based on a throwaway remark I had read in a Time Out review of Tobe Hooper's Death Trap. Those who had made their mark on the genre in some small way were the High Priests of Horror, but those who had proved themselves on several occasion were the Horror Gods. Some directors became Horror Gods on the basis of just one film if it was life-changing enough - Tobe Hooper for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a prime example - but most had to earn their deification through a body of work. A couple of years earlier I'd seen a film called Shivers, which the press had dismissed as lurid and ludicrous but that had filled me with glee. It was disturbing, intelligent, funny and apocalyptic. I knew Rabid was directed by the same man, so my hopes were high. I was not disappointed. David Cronenberg had firmly established himself as a High Priest of Horror and took a sizeable step closer to being a Horror God. Little did I know then that this man was to become one of the greatest Horror Gods of all.

Some plot. Following a motorcycle accident, young, attractive Rose is taken to a nearby plastic surgery clinic, where an experimental skin grafting technique is used to treat her injuries. The initial success of the operation masks the biological change her body has undergone, creating a need for blood that she extracts from her victims via a spiked protrusion under her armpit, which contaminates them with a rabies-like disease that they spread by biting others.

Rabid was Cronenberg's fourth feature (after Stereo, Crimes of the Future and Shivers) and his second to receive widespread distribution, and it is certainly not as polished as many of his later works, lacking their dialogue complexity, strong central performances and visual slickness. This will no doubt prompt many younger genre fans who have discovered Cronenberg via his more recent films to be dismissive of Rabid's comparative primitivism. Not me, matey. For those who grew up with the stark, low-budget urgency of 1970s horror this aesthetic is very much part of the film's appeal. Ask a more mainstream-orientated horror fan about their favourite Cronenberg films and they will tend to chose The Dead Zone and The Fly, but ask a fan of Outsider cinema and they'll choose Shivers, Rabid, The Brood and Videodrome every time. For us, those rough edges and technical imperfections add to the immediacy, even to the authenticity, of the experience.

That said, Rabid is certainly a little lacking in areas where Cronenberg was soon to show considerable skill. The script is short on the sort of intellectual banter that was to mark many of Cronenberg's most fascinating works from The Brood onwards, and the music score includes a few too many loudly trumpeted crescendos during the sequences when Rose lets her armpit do the talking, effectively shouting OH MY GOD at the audience in an uncharacteristically unsubtle way. The lack of a composer credit on the film (executive producer Ivan Reitman is credited as 'Music Supervisor') and the similarity of the oft-repeated creepy piano tinklings to those used in William Fruet's 1976 Death Weekend suggests the use of stock music here.

But this is still a very smart and often technically accomplished film and a lot more than the simple exploitation genre piece it was taken for on its first release (and is too often dismissed as today by the CGI crowd). Working almost as a companion piece to Shivers, the film allows Cronenberg to once again explore the relationship between sex and disease in a way that can't help but be seen as prefiguring the spread of AIDS, but also throws in a critique of experimental surgery techniques that he himself now sees as being reflected in present-day stem cell research. His fascination with the corruption of the body is taken a step further from his previous film with the new organ that develops under Rose's armpit, a spiked phallus buried in an anus-like opening that can't help but come across as a deadly metaphor for dangers of sexually transmitted infections. This also ties up with the film's vampiric element, Rose's need for human blood (the blood of a cow and regular food make her physically sick) and the sexual nature of the encounters that lead to the feeding (here a reversal rape in which the male is penetrated by a female phallus) being traditional elements of this sub-genre, but Rose's condition is medical rather than supernatural, and her 'bites' do not create new vampires, but spread a disease she herself is immune to, a modern-day Typhoid Mary.

Performance-wise the film is a mixed bag, and if Frank Moore appears to have had a charisma bypass as Rose's boyfriend Hart, then porn star Marilyn Chambers, in just about her only 'straight' role, does a sterling job as Rose, her physicality as a performer especially evident when she is suffering pain. Many of the support roles are little more than efficient, but sometimes rise above that, with Joe Silver in particular gruffly sincere as Hart's intriguingly named friend Murray Cypher. There are also a couple of familiar faces lurking at the back, with Gary McKeehan - the shining light of the Cronenberg short The Italian Machine and later to take a memorable small role in The Brood - popping up as truck driver Smooth Eddie, and making his first brief appearance in a Cronenberg film is the wonderful Robert Silverman, later to play a succession of affected eccentrics in The Brood, Scanners and eXistenZ.

Although camera placement and editing are largely functional (in particular, one key operating theatre scene is broken up by splicing in a dialogue-free shot of Hart and Murray driving to the clinic and is clearly only there for that very purpose - to break up the scene), Cronenberg works small miracles with minimal resources once the virus is loose, creating a very convincing feel of a city in panic and under martial law. The make-up effects are also surprisingly effective, the close-ups of Rose's under-arm protrusion having a rather nicely yucky feel to them, while the most wince-inducing moment - a nurse's fingers being cut off with scissors - is actually hidden under surgical gloves and probably the cheapest effect in the film.

In many ways Rose is a typical Cronenberg protagonist, an innocent drastically affected early on in the narrative by something that will cause them considerable mental or physical change, and from that moment on they are ultimately doomed. Like Jeff Brundle in The Fly, Beverly Mantle in Dead Ringers and Max Renn in Videodrome, the seeds for Rose's destruction are sewn early on, and the journey there will ultimately inevitably pull others down with her. Like those films, Rabid is downbeat in tone, but as the infection spreads it has a more apocalyptic feel that the more personal dramas that Cronenberg was later to concentrate on, aligning it with George Romero's The Crazies and Dawn of the Dead, Jeff Leiberman's Blue Sunshine and, of course, Cronenberg's previous film Shivers, where a single apartment block effectively stood in for society at large. It is this sense of scale, together with the 1970s low-budget edginess, that marks it apart from the director's later works.

I would have to say that I think Cronenberg has certainly made better films than Rabid, films that are more technically accomplished, more intellectually and emotionally engaging, more daring and more dangerous. But despite all that, Rabid remains one of my favourites. At art school I always preferred sketches to finished paintings, as to see something taking shape was always more exciting to me than a complete work, and I often prefer the films in which you can see a cinematic style developing - sometimes hesitantly, sometimes boldly, often unevenly but always excitingly - to the more polished later works when that style is perfected (despite the brilliance of Scorsese's Goodfellas, for example, I still prefer the explosive energy and leap-off-the-screen vibrancy of Mean Streets, and give me Oliver Stone's Salvador any day over Nixon or even JFK). Rabid is not as slickly done or as deep as Cronenberg's most acclaimed achievements, but a cinematic sketch and a slice of 70s horror it is energetic, inventive and involving. And despite the generally dark tone, it is also - as reflected in the small moments that pepper the film (the runner sporting the 'Jogging Kills' t-shirt, the gleeful killing of Santa, the scientist who offers the safety advice: "Don't let anyone bite you.") - a great deal of fun.

Sound and Vision