The ending of Rabid depends entirely on which version you’re watching. In David Cronenberg’s 1977 original, Rose surrenders herself to one of the zombie-like victims she has infected, accepting responsibility for the plague she has unintentionally created. Her body is then disposed of in a garbage truck by cleanup crews as part of society’s attempt to contain the outbreak. In the 2019 remake by the Soska Sisters, the ending is darker in a different way: Rose survives, but she is immediately imprisoned by Dr.
Burroughs, who announces plans to keep her captive for ongoing medical research. Both endings are devastating, but they tell fundamentally different stories about guilt, agency, and survival. The contrast between these two finales is not accidental. The 1977 ending emphasizes Rose’s complicity in the disaster that unfolds, while the 2019 version shifts focus to institutional exploitation and the commodification of her body. Understanding what happens in those final moments requires understanding not just the plot mechanics, but the thematic foundation each filmmaker chose to build upon.
Table of Contents
- What Happens to Rose in the Original 1977 Film?
- Body Horror and the Metaphor of Guilt in the Original Ending
- The 2019 Remake’s Radically Different Conclusion
- Comparing the Two Endings: Guilt Versus Captivity
- Medical Ethics and the Body as a Battleground
- The October Crisis and Social Breakdown
- How Each Ending Reflects Its Film’s Core Philosophy
What Happens to Rose in the Original 1977 Film?
Cronenberg’s Rose reaches the end of her story having infected countless people through the weaponized orifice created during her reconstructive surgery. The film shows the cascading horror of her condition: a stab wound that appears on her body, from which emerges a phallic, blood-stained appendage that infects anyone it penetrates. By the film’s conclusion, martial law has been declared, the streets are overrun with the infected, and society is on the brink of collapse. Rose’s final act is one of surrender.
Recognizing what she has become and the destruction she has caused, she gives herself to one of the victims—a man infected with her plague. It is not a triumphant moment or a scene of redemption through sacrifice, but rather an acceptance of culpability. What follows is clinical and almost mundane: cleanup crews dispose of her corpse in a garbage truck, treating her body the same way they might treat any biological hazard. There is no ceremony, no acknowledgment of her humanity. She is waste to be managed.
Body Horror and the Metaphor of Guilt in the Original Ending
The ending of the 1977 Rabid is inseparable from Cronenberg’s obsession with body horror and the failure of medical science. The film opens with Rose receiving emergency reconstructive surgery after a motorcycle accident. The surgeon uses an experimental technique that, rather than healing her, creates the source of the plague. The surgical procedure meant to save her becomes the mechanism of her monstrosity. When Rose surrenders at the end, she is acknowledging that her own body—modified by human intervention—has become a weapon. This ending operates as a metaphor for internalized hatred toward the body, for the guilt that emerges when the physical self becomes a source of danger to others.
Rose did not choose to become infected; the surgery was supposed to help her. Yet the film suggests that she bears responsibility for what her body does, a troubling but central theme of Cronenberg’s work. The garbage truck ending strips away any romantic notion of sacrifice. She is not a martyr; she is garbage. A limitation of interpreting the ending this way is that it can seem to blame Rose for something entirely beyond her control. Some viewers find this morally questionable, suggesting the film punishes her for circumstances of medical circumstance rather than personal choice. The ending’s refusal to offer Rose dignity makes this tension explicit rather than hiding it.
The 2019 Remake’s Radically Different Conclusion
The Soska Sisters’ 2019 version of Rabid shares the same basic setup—a woman receives surgery that inadvertently creates a plague—but the ending diverges sharply. Rose does not surrender; she survives the outbreak. However, survival brings no relief. Dr. Burroughs, the physician who created her condition in the first place, immediately announces that he will keep Rose captive for ongoing medical research.
Her body has become property, a subject for indefinite experimentation. This ending represents a thematic pivot away from Cronenberg’s focus on guilt and bodily horror toward a critique of institutional exploitation and medical abuse. Where the original Rose accepts responsibility and chooses death, the 2019 Rose’s fate is chosen for her by the system that harmed her. She is not a monster destroyed; she is a resource to be utilized. The remake describes itself as a “feminist fairytale,” and this ending reflects that reframing—Rose is not punished for what her body has done but imprisoned for what doctors want her body to become.
Comparing the Two Endings: Guilt Versus Captivity
The structural difference between these endings reveals how much the filmmakers’ philosophical approach has shifted. Cronenberg’s 1977 film treats the ending as a logical conclusion to Rose’s arc of culpability. She is a vector of infection; the infected world consumes her. The Soska Sisters’ ending, by contrast, treats Rose as a victim of medical abuse, and her imprisonment is the film’s indictment of that abuse. One ending asks: what happens to the person who caused the catastrophe? The other asks: what happens to the person who is treated as a commodity by those in power? The practical difference matters for how viewers interpret Rose’s character.
In 1977, Rose’s surrender feels like acceptance of guilt, however unfairly assigned. In 2019, her captivity is imposed without consent, a continuation of the violation she has already experienced. The 2019 ending offers no closure, only a new form of entrapment. Cronenberg’s ending, despite its grimness, at least grants Rose agency in her final choice. The trade-off is that the original ending seems to blame Rose for circumstances beyond her control, while the remake’s ending shifts blame to institutional systems but leaves Rose without any agency whatsoever.
Medical Ethics and the Body as a Battleground
Both versions of Rabid use their endings to interrogate the ethics of medical intervention. In the original, the surgical procedure that was supposed to heal Rose instead creates the source of infection. The film suggests that medical science, despite its intentions, can produce monstrosity. Rose’s body becomes a weapon not through her choice but through the surgeon’s intervention. The ending—disposal in a garbage truck—treats her as a medical failure, waste product of a failed procedure.
The 2019 version extends this critique but focuses it differently. Here, the medical system does not accidentally create a monster; it deliberately imprisons a subject for research. The ending warns about the potential for medical institutions to view patients as experimental subjects rather than people deserving of autonomy and dignity. Dr. Burroughs’ decision to keep Rose captive is presented as an act of exploitation, not an accident. A significant limitation of this framing is that it may oversimplify institutional medical abuse, presenting it as a deliberate conspiracy rather than a systemic problem embedded in how institutions function.
The October Crisis and Social Breakdown
Cronenberg’s 1977 ending gains additional resonance when understood in the context of Canadian politics. The film parallels Canada’s October Crisis of 1970, when the country experienced a brief but intense period of civil unrest and martial law. The ending’s depiction of society breaking down, of cleanup crews disposing of bodies, and of the state exercising total control reflects anxieties about state power and social collapse that were contemporary to the film’s release.
Rose’s disposal in a garbage truck is not merely the removal of a biological threat; it is the state’s assertion of control over the body and over narrative. She is erased, made into waste. This ending reflects the political moment in which it was created, a moment when Canadians had just experienced their government invoke the War Measures Act.
How Each Ending Reflects Its Film’s Core Philosophy
The original Rabid ends on body horror and the consequences of failed medical science, with Rose accepting culpability for a condition she did not choose. It is bleak and uncomfortable, offering no redemptive narrative. The 2019 Rabid ends on institutional imprisonment and exploitation, refusing Rose the dignity of choice but also refusing to blame her for circumstances beyond her control. Each ending is a statement about what the filmmaker believes the story is ultimately about.
For Cronenberg, the story is about a body made monstrous by science and the guilt that attaches to monstrosity. For the Soska Sisters, the story is about a body claimed by institutions and the resistance to being treated as property. The endings are not interchangeable; they represent fundamentally different moral frameworks. When you watch Rabid, the ending you receive depends not just on the plot, but on which filmmaker’s vision of bodily autonomy, guilt, and institutional power you are engaging with.
- —
