Now and for ever it will be known as that scene. It is that rare cinematic moment when a single stand-out scene is executed with such unerring precision and has such a dramatic impact that it becomes wholly emblematic of the movie that surrounds it. Think of the ear-slicing scene in Reservoir Dogs,the pottery-based love scene in Ghostor the final weepy monologue in The Blair Witch Project. To that list we must now add the bath-house scene in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises.

Here, at the climax of a masterful movie about London’s Russian mobster community, we get a brutal fight in a deserted public bath-house between the entirely naked bodyguard Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen) and two fully-clothed knife-wielding Chechen assassins. Up to this point Luzhin has been a key player in the movie’s two intertwining narrative strands, namely the retrieval of an incriminating diary from maternity nurse Anna (Naomi Watts) on behalf of Nikolai’s vicious sex-slaver boss Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), and the covering up of a hasty murder committed by Semyon’s wayward son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). The scene is executed with such aplomb – bones crack, heads crunch, blood spurts and Mortensen’s perilously exposed genitals regularly whiz across the screen – that it will have most audiences screaming out with instinctive hysteria.

“That’s just a nervous reaction,” says Cronenberg in his deadpan Canadian drawl. “What they are reacting to is the outrageousness of killing. I don’t believe in an after-life, so killing someone is an outrageous thing to do, and therefore I show it all, unflinchingly, and that provokes that kind of reaction.”

The award-winning 64-year-old film-maker, happily married with three children, adds that the scene is mainly about the vulnerability of being naked, and nothing else. Its effectiveness, he says, has a lot to do with Mortensen’s bravery and commitment as an actor in a world where full-frontal male nudity is still a huge taboo for Hollywood stars.

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Background

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• Naomi Watts wows on opening night

• Tony Leung is in the mood for lust

• Pretty boy Brad Pitt grows up

• Brothers grim

Background

• Eastern Promises

• Viggo Mortensen joins the underworld's cast

• Michael Moore's healthy scepticism

• Are you kidding?

• Laura Linney, accidental screen queen

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• LFF listings

Critics have already spotted in Eastern Promises a resurgence of so-called “Cronenbergian” obsessions such as body horror, birthing anxieties and the nature of fractured identities. “I’m much too concerned, on the day, with things like camera lenses and shooting locations to think about body horror,” he chuckles.

Most obvious, though, is the claim that this new commercially palatable movie, set in a criminal milieu similar to Cronenberg’s previous critical and commercial hit A History of Violence, represents the final establishment of the former iconoclastic horror director ( Scanners, The Fly) as a mainstream genre movie-maker. “It would be great if my career worked that way,” he scoffs. “But, really, I just make movies based on the scripts that I read. And if I see the movie playing in my head when I’m reading it, I know I have to make it.”

The son of a musician mother and writer father, raised in a middle-class Jewish household in Toronto, he burst on to the horror-movie scene in 1975 with his gory “sex analogy” thriller Shivers. Here, a mutant parasite, looking like a free-roaming penis, terrorised a suburban tower-block, penetrated victims, turned them into brainless sex fiends and eventually burst bloodily out of their bodies. This penchant for primal imagery has persisted throughout his movies and recurs in a whole plethora of vagina-themed horrors – the vagina in the armpit in the zombie movie Rabid; vagina as stomach scar in Videodrome; and vagina as human cyber-porthole in eXistenZ.

It’s no wonder then that Cronenberg’s films tend to be seen as disturbing paeans of Freudian anxiety that question the very roots of reproduction, of existence and hence of identity. It’s hardly surprising either that mainstream Hollywood has mostly shied away from this complex film-maker. Or that the Cannes Film Festival, so keen to embrace the industry’s esotericists, last year awarded Cronenberg its lifetime achievement gong, the Carrosse d’Or.

And yet Cronenberg himself remains remarkably quiet, even enigmatic, on the subject of what his films are “really” about. When pushed, he will concede, however elusively, that his movies begin and end with the human body. “The body is the first fact of human existence. And because I feel that death is the absolute end, then the existence of the body becomes the existence of the individual. So the focus on the body seems totally obvious to me.”

He says that he tries not to look back at his 30-year career, but will concede nonetheless that he’s pleased to be where he is now. Does that mean that he has no demons left to exorcise? “I never really had demons to begin with,” he says (tongue dug deeply in cheek). “My obsession was always the human condition. And I don’t think there are demons in that. Are there?”

Eastern Promises shows at Odeon Leicester Square, Oct 17, 7pm; and OWE2, Oct 18, 4pm

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