Finest hours: Debbie Harry as the kinky therapist in Videodrome

Video literally kills the radio star in David Cronenberg’s audaciously icky body-horror thriller Videodrome (1983). Hypnotically surreal and viscerally gory, this kinky cult classic co-stars Blondie singer Debbie Harry as a sadomasochistic radio therapist with a fatal attraction to a creepy, clandestine TV channel broadcasting extreme sexual and violent content. Despite shocking critics and baffling audiences on release, it is now widely regarded as a visionary prophecy of internet celebrity, virtual reality and multi-channel media psychosis. Andy Warhol called it “a Clockwork Orange of the 1980s”. In the future, everyone will be notorious for 15 minutes.

Working with taboo-breaking Canadian auteur Cronenberg on his first major studio-backed project was a left-field gamble for Harry, but it paid off. Videodrome stands up today as the high point of her scattered film career. Mixing psychosexual horror, science fiction and darkly satirical commentary on escalating moral panic about screen violence, this proto-Lynchian trip into the Twilight Zone was not the Blondie diva’s screen debut. But it was her first role since becoming a chart-topping pop superstar, and her neo-noir femme fatale character figured prominently in the film’s promotional campaign.

Harry plays Nicki Brand, a strikingly beautiful psychotherapist with a keen interest in BDSM, while James Woods stars as Max Renn, a sleazy TV boss searching for increasingly sick content to keep his viewers hooked. Brand seduces Renn, luring him into a shadowy netherworld of military-industrial conspiracies, biomorphic weapons and lurid Freudian hallucinations. Rick Baker’s brilliant, disturbingly erotic production designs are key to the film’s nightmarish power, from the pulsating Betamax cassettes that Renn inserts into a portal in his stomach to the heavy-breathing, screen-bulging TV set apparently possessed by Brand’s ghostly spirit. Long live the New Flesh.

Harry turns her limited acting experience to her advantage in Videodrome, underplaying Brand with poise and mystery, her coolly controlled aura providing dramatic counterpoint to Woods’ jittery, kinetic, combustible alpha-male energy. The singer later described her sultry screen siren as “a question mark”, a purposely blank enigma, possibly even a figment of Renn’s feverish imagination. Tellingly, Cronenberg would not even let her see daily rushes to help fine-tune her performance, keeping her in the dark along with the film’s audience.

All the same, Harry took agency over the character early, turning up to the Toronto shoot in October 1981 with naturally auburn-brown hair rather than her trademark peroxide punkette cut. The brunette switch ensured a sharper distinction between actor and musician, but Cronenberg had pictured Brand as a postmodern Hitchcock Blonde. “He was shocked and disappointed,” Harry told Vulture magazine in 2023. “For me, it really was just something to help me do the performance. I had been so firmly entrenched in the Blondie persona. In a way, I’d created the character of Blondie, so this was another person. It worked out in the long run, but there were a few sticky moments.”

Emerging from the pulp-friendly, trash-culture aesthetic of New York City’s downtown music scene, Harry was a good fit for the occult future-shock weirdness of Videodrome. In Blondie and beyond, she has a long history of using sci-fi imagery in lyrics and videos, working with Alien (1979) production designer H.R. Giger and cult cyberpunk author William Gibson. Before her breakthrough Cronenberg collaboration, she read for the role of Laura/Yori in Stephen Lisberger’s groundbreaking computer-game thriller Tron (1982), a part that went to Cindy Morgan. Blondie commitments also prevented her from playing renegade replicant Pris in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), losing out to Daryl Hannah, one of Harry’s greatest career regrets.

Videodrome was released in February 1983 to mixed reviews. Many were positive, praising Harry’s subtle performance. Others were outraged by Cronenberg’s stomach-churning, sexually charged body-horror excesses. In promotional interviews, Harry appeared to relish these scandalised reactions, but downplayed her co-starring performance. “Nicki doesn’t carry the story,” she claimed. “She doesn’t have enough screen time to make a difference.” In later years, she came to appreciate the character’s pivotal importance, likening Brand to Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), another relatively slender but dramatically crucial role.

Initially a box office flop, Videodrome has since acquired cult classic status elevated by much scholarly analysis over the decades. Though she continued to treat acting as a sideline to music, Harry later played memorable roles for John Waters, Peter Greenaway, Isabel Coixet, James Mangold and others. In an interview last year, she told me that film work has become much scarcer in later life, but this 80-year-old icon remains open to offers. “I can’t really compete in the industry because of my age,” she said. “But I would like to be M in James Bond, or something like that.”