Videodrome’s James Woods Helped Craft the Horror Movie’s Ending

Woods said Cronenberg had written multiple endings for “Videodrome,” and was still unsure as to how the film should end, even during production. The 1997 Faber & Faber book “Cronenberg on Cronenberg” reveals an ending wherein Max, Nicki, and Brian O’Blivion’s daughter Bianca (Sonja Smits) appear inside the Videodrome set, sprout new sets of genitals from their midsections, and have an orgy with them. That ending wasn’t clicking, though, and Woods talked about the new ending, saying:

“I loved working with David and so on, and it was a prescient movie as it turned out, but at the time he offered me that movie, we only had 70 pages of the script! I literally called David up and said ‘what do you think of the ending?’ and he said ‘I’m not crazy about it.’ I said ‘I’ve got some ideas,’ and he said ‘come on up, we’ll shoot some more.’ So I flew up to Toronto to shoot another ending. We shot three endings. I didn’t even tell my agent!” 

The final ending of “Videodrome” was pretty bleak. Warning: spoilers follow. 

Max had been employed by a shadowy organization to commit strange, supernatural assassinations, and a gun had become organically fused with his hand. After committing his murders, Max fled to a derelict ship wherein a TV sits glowing. Nicki appears on the screen and tells him to shed his old flesh and praise the New Flesh. This requires the taking of his own life. Which he does. Woods said: 

“I think the final ending of ‘Videodrome’ was my idea, that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy that he’d just explode, or implode essentially. And he said ‘yeah, I think that’s what we’re trying to say.'”

Cronenberg found the ending organically with his actor.