The master of body-horror David Cronenberg takes on the media, technology, and their effects on humans in his highly provocative and influential 1983 social satire starring Debbie Harry in one of her first film roles.

Desperate to find a new show that draws viewers into his sleazy TV channel, Max Renn (played perfectly by one of Hollywood’s many real-life villains, James Woods) stumbles upon a pirated broadcast of “Videodrome,” a spectacle of hyper-violent acts and torture that he decides is perfect for his audience. Upon realizing the show is not all smoke and mirrors as he thought, Renn falls down a hallucinatory rabbit hole of media manipulation, sadomasochism, and extremist conspiracy theories.

In his piece for Little White Lies, “Why Videodrome feels more relevant today than ever,” Adam Woodward argues that Woods’ character “reflects both the director’s concerns over the electronic dissemination of information (especially via faceless, morally-dubious corporate entities) and his compulsion to create provocative, erotically-charged art.”