David Cronenberg, who is contributing a short to next week's Toronto Film Festival Prelude Series, is probably Canada's most accomplished auteur. While known throughout the world for his horror cycle (films like Rabid, Shivers and The Fly), literary adaptations (think about shooting up bug spray in Naked Lunch) and his sensationalist shockers (remember how the Brits didn't even want Crash showing in their country?) The films I like the best are David Cronenberg's early head trip flicks. The psychological movies where Cronenberg takes your brain to a crazy place no brain has gone before. Here's a sampling of a few to whet your cinematic whistle:

The Brood follows Samantha Eggar, a woman with serious anger issues, who's tossed into the medical slammer. To deal with her rage, her psychiatrist decides to try out some radical psychotherapy. Suddenly strange demonic little kids appear in town chopping people up into little bits. Where did the children come from, and what do they want?

"She's their real mother. They're her children. More exactly, they're the children of her rage."

The power of psychological anger also fuelled Scanners. This 1981 cult classic is about a group of genetically altered misfits under the care of yet another evil doctor and his nefarious institute. Trained to read people's thoughts, the Scanners begin to realize their own potential. If they concentrate hard enough, they can literally blow the heads off an opponent's shoulders. It sounds gross, but the premise is intriguing. Intriguing enough to spawn three sequels.

With a mind as inventively warped as Cronenberg's, it's hard to imagine he'd ever need another muse. But in 1983, the director went Hollywood with his white- knuckle adaptation of Stephen King's The Dead Zone. Christopher Walken is scary-sexy as Johnny. A car accident victim who wakes up after five years in a coma, afflicted with the unwanted gift of second sight. One day he stumbles across a demented politician; a charismatic glad-hander who plans to control the world. From here things pinwheel in and out of a psychodramatic hellscape. This is a place where you can't tell the difference between reality and illusion, friend and foe, past and present.

While these films may sound like nothing more than Late Saturday Fright Night Cinema, a closer look reveals a true auteur at work. While Cronenberg's thematic considerations weave their way through all three of the films examined today, they also dovetail nicely with the rest of the director's ouevre. David Cronenberg is more than a guy who simply makes gross-out movies. While viscerally challenging, Cronenberg's films are thoughtful examinations of life in the latter part of the 20th century. A period when we became painfully paranoid about disease, more aware of psychological malaise, and we began to genuinely feel the alienating sting of technology. What do you think? Are you a fan or a foe of David Cronenberg's work?