Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg was BOTD in 1943. Born in Toronto to a progressive middle-class family, he showed an early interest in film, citing Disney films Bambi and Dumbo as formative influences. He began directing horror films in the 1970s, turning heads (and stomachs) with sci-fi horror Scanners. His next film Videodrome, a terrifying drama about a TV news channel broadcasting snuff movies, eerily predicted the 24-hour news cycle and the explosion of internet porn. He found mainstream success with Kafkaesque sci-fi horror The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum as a shape-shifting scientist, and the psychological thriller Dead Ringers with Jeremy Irons playing pervy twin gynaecologists. By the 1990s, he was one of the most influential auteurs in cinema, credited with inventing the “body horror” genre. Notable work includes an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel The Naked Lunch; M Butterfly, again starring Irons and based on David Henry Hwang’s play about a gay relationship echoing the plot of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly; and eXistenZ, a labyrinthine drama about virtual reality gamers lost in their invented universe. His 1996 film Crash, based on J. G. Ballard’s novel about people who stage car crashes for sexual arousal, was highly controversial and banned in several cities, though won a prize at the Cannes Festival. In the 2000s, he began a long working relationship with actor Viggo Mortensen, making the (relatively gore-free) crimes dramas A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, and A Dangerous Method about rival psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. His 2014 film Maps to the Stars starred Julianne Moore in a macabre satire of Hollywood. He returned to orifices, gore and body transformation in Crimes of the Future (again starring Mortensen) with the soundbite “surgery is the new sex”. Cronenberg’s 2024 film The Shrouds, inspired by the death of his second wife Carolyn, follows a widower who installs a web-cam in his wife’s coffin to monitor the decomposition of her body. Married twice and with three children, he earns Honorary SuperGay status for his fearless re-imagining of sexuality and his willingness to (cinematically) probe every known bodily orifice and invent a few new ones.