This article considers the issue of transgression and perversion with regard to JG Ballard's novel Crash (1973) and the screen adaptation directed by David Cronenberg (1997). The article argues that Ballard's staging of perversion at once exceeds cultural and ethical boundaries and re-imposes them, taboo and transgression being mutually constitutive. It also argues that Cronenberg's film re-work the narrative to suggest a moral reading of Ballard's text, in which the protagonists undergo a form of ethical corrosion through the performance of sexually transgressive acts.