Videodrome

The most apparent inspiration to me is Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, which posits that our media-saturated world has replaced genuine human interaction with our relationship to commodities, fueled by mass-media images curated by the capitalist class to serve the interests of consumerism and the continued growth of capital. "Being" has turned into "having" which becomes merely "appearing," and reality is eventually indistinguishable from appearances of it in media, which both reflects and infects daily life. The Spectacle is pervasive - every part of our lives is influenced by images which have been engineered to both perpetuate capitalist social relations and to further isolate us, until our bodies become literal tools of the state. This is the same philosophy that influenced Andy Warhol as well as Beaudrillard and The Matrix, though this is more coherent than The Matrix imo Analysis of culture is some of the more interesting parts of Marxist theory to me, and Cronenberg's take on this stuff (as well as the other themes he tackles like transhumanism, BDSM, etc) is as thought-provoking as it is alluring. And the special effects are very ahead of their time