Arrow Video

Exterminate All Rational Thought!

In a career dedicated to seeing the unseeable and filming the unfilmable, perhaps only David Cronenberg could really do justice to William S. Burroughs’ controversial novel, Naked Lunch. Weaving together elements of Burroughs’ own remarkable biography with the content of the book, Cronenberg’s film steps inside the body and mind of an author to depict the dangerous act of imagination itself from the inside out.

Former junkie William Lee (Peter Weller, RoboCop) makes ends meet as an exterminator. But when he and his wife Joan (Judy Davis, Barton Fink) discover the hallucinatory properties of the powder he uses to kill bugs, they become hooked, and their world is changed forever. Insects speak, typewriters mutate and talk, interdimensional beings reveal themselves, identities fracture and blur; nothing and no one is quite what it seems. When Bill, under the influence of drugs, or the bugs that have begun talking to him, shoots his wife, he flees to Interzone, at once a place and a state of mind, where things only get stranger.

Winner of Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Screenplay at the 1992 Genie Awards and winner of the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director, the film also features a superb supporting cast including Roy Scheider (Jaws) and an astonishing score by Howard Shore (The Fly), featuring Ornette Coleman. Naked Lunch is provocative, transgressive, and surreal - a feast for the senses, where nothing is true and everything is permitted.

Product Features

• 4K restoration from the original camera negative overseen by director of photography Peter Suschitzky and approved by director David Cronenberg
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranckx

Disc 1 - Feature

• High Definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation
• Original lossless 2.0 stereo audio and 5.1 audio
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Audio commentary by director David Cronenberg
• Audio commentary by film historian Jack Sargeant and screenwriter Graham Duff

Disc 2 - Extras

• Naked Attraction, an interview with legendary producer Jeremy Thomas
• Exterminate All Rational Thought, an interview with star Peter Weller
• Peter Suschitzky on Naked Lunch, an interview with the celebrated director of photography
• Naked Flesh, an interview with special effects artist Chris Walas
• A Ballad for Burroughs, an interview with composer Howard Shore
• Tony Rayns on William S. Burroughs, an interview with the renowned writer and critic
• David Huckvale on Naked Lunch, an interview taking a closer look at one of Shore’s most unusual film scores
• A Ticket to Interzone, a visual essay by critic David Cairns
• Naked Making Lunch, archival making-of documentary directed by Chris Rodley presented in a scan from the director’s personal 16mm print and viewable with an audio interview with Rodley discussing his connection to Cronenberg and the process of making Naked Making Lunch
• Concept Art Gallery, a collection of drawings and maquettes for the creatures of Naked Lunch by Stephan Dupuis
• Theatrical trailer
• Image galleries, including stills from the set courtesy of Chris Rodley