This piece includes plot details of the film.
15th August 1986 saw the
release of perhaps one of the greatest science fiction horror films
of all time. The Fly, David Cronenberg’s body horror
masterpiece, not only allowed his uniquely disturbing cinematic style
to finally break into mainstream success, but was a rare genre film
that was both critically and artistically celebrated. For forty
years, The Fly has been a landmark of cinema. It’s a film
that skillfully balances horror, drama, romance and tragedy.
The Fly has long been a personal
favourite of mine. I didn’t see it on release, of course – I was
two, and even in the eighties taking toddlers to see horror movies
was frowned upon – instead catching it at still possibly-too-young
age in the late nineties. The film was already part of my
consciousness; a fabled celluloid nightmare that was surely far too
terrifying to possibly watch. So, when I found out it was going to be
shown late on Channel 4, naturally I stayed up late to watch it. I
also taped it for good measure, and watched that increasingly grainy
copy again and again over the years.
The film had a profound impact on me.
Yes, as a teen I was uncomfortably enthralled by the grotesque visual
effects, but I was also deeply moved by the film. Jeff Goldblum’s
performance as the doomed Seth Brundle is incredible. His growth from
a reclusive genius to a man embracing life and love, his return to
physical and emotional isolation as his body horrifically
degenerates, and his devastating final fate, are all related with
complete commitment. The performance is all the more impressive given
that Goldblum is encased in all-encompassing – and clearly
uncomfortable – make-up and prostheses for much of the film.
Just as impressive is Geena Davis as
Veronica Quaife, the science correspondent who first becomes
Brundle’s exclusive interviewer, then his confidante, lover,
victim, and finally executioner. Davis, in some ways, had the harder
role: making Ronnie’s experience of love and heartbreak believable
opposite a monstrosity, without the visceral impact of effects. It
helps, of course, that Davis and Goldblum were in a relationship at
the time (they married the following year). Their chemistry is
palpable, but it’s physics and biology that get destroy them. A
brutal ending is inevitable, but remains achingly sad. The
combination of the heartfelt lead performances; Cronenberg’s tight
script; the incredible visual creations; and Howard Shore’s
powerful, if sometimes overpowered, score, create something strangely
beautiful. Although it is, at the same time, nauseatingly repellent.
Horror cinema is now, finally, gaining
widespread respect in Hollywood as an artform and as social critique
(a perfect example being Coralie Fargeat’s award-winning 2024 film
The Substance, itself a distant descendent of The Fly).
In 1986, this was not the case, with both science fiction and horror
being widely considered popular schlock. Body horror, in particular,
was associated largely with the video nasties panic of the early
eighties. Even inarguable classics like Ridley Scott’s Alien and
John Carpenter’s The Thing took years to be truly
appreciated.
Cronenberg had made films in other
genres, of course, but his world was body horror science fiction
rooted in psychological fears: Shivers, Rabid, The
Brood. 1981’s Scanners brought a level of international
success, but had a lukewarm critical reception (which was fair; it’s
now a rather overrated cult favourite). His fascinating 1983 film
Videodrome was critically well-received but performed poorly.
Then, The Fly. Producers Stuart
Cornfeld and Kip Ohman sought to remake Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film.
Itself based on the 1957 short story by George Langelaan, Neumann’s
The Fly is an unusually intelligent horror film for the era,
one that had, along with its first sequel, 1959’s Return of the
Fly, become remembered as classic monster movies. Charles Edward
Pogue was hired to write the script based on the film and short
story. Pogue’s version had the essentials of the final film, but
when he and Cornfeld presented it to Fox, 20th Century
Fox, distributors and rights-holders to the original film, they
withdrew from production.
Cornfeld managed to persuade Fox to
agree to distribute the film if he could finance it through another
source. He turned to his friend and sometime collaborator, Mel
Brooks, who replaced Ohman as co-producer. Keeping his name off the
project in the public eye, so that people wouldn’t be expecting a
comedy, Brooks financed the production and brought in Walon Green to
rewrite the script, but went back to Pogue when Green’s version
didn’t fit the producers’ vision. Cronenberg, having achieved
further critical success with his 1983 film of Stephen King’s The
Dead Zone, was first choice for director, but was unavailable at
the time. Short film and television director Robert Bierman signed
on, but a personal tragedy forced him to drop out.
Cronenberg was approached again, and
agreed to direct if he could rewrite the script. By his own words,
“one line of dialogue” remained from Pogue’s script, but he
retained a co-writer credit as his script acted as the foundation of
the final screenplay. In fairness to Pogue, while his dialogue is
largely awful, rather more than a single line remains; a few choice
cuts kept in the final script. More noticeable is the structure of
the story; significant moments are retained, albeit often reworked,
and the general progression of the catastrophic events is largely
unchanged. (Pogue’s script was included in some DVD releases, and
is now easy enough to find online.)
The most significant change from both
the short story and 1958 film is that while the original inventor,
Delambre, has his features immediately replaced by those of the
intrusive fly, Brundle undergoes a slow and painful transformation.
This was an early decision by Pogue and Cornfeld, and it is vital for
the film to have the impact it does. While the 1958 film is also
tragic, there’s simply no way to portray the anguish, sorrow and
pain that Brundle goes through with a simple, one-and-done
transformation, that would render him expressionless and unable to
speak.
It also makes more sense, in as much as
a film about an impossible technology ever can make sense. The mass
of a fly is negligible compared to that of a human. Brundle’s
teleporter doesn’t somehow mix up the molecules of the fly and the
man, swap them about and mess with their proportions. Brundle’s
telepod system kills living matter, horribly, because it treats the
animate the same as the inanimate. In one of the most fascinating
parts of Cronenberg’s script, a post-coital moment between Seth and
Ronnie leads to his epiphany: that he has to program the computer so
that it will be “driven crazy by the flesh.” The computer now
identifies and treats living things as unique, extrapolating them
from their genetic code rather than simply translating them, atom by
atom.
Unfortunately, when a housefly gets
into the pod with Brundle, the computer becomes confused, and
reconciles the two genetic codes by splicing them together. Brundle
absorbs the mass of the fly without any apparent ill effect, but the
DNA of every cell has been altered. As soon as he steps out of the
pod, Brundle is half-human, half-fly; it just takes time for his body
to show this. What results is a truly horrific process of mutation
and degeneration, realised by Goldblum and the make-up, prosthetics
and animatronics of Chris Walas, Inc. Walas rightfully won an Academy
Award for best make-up for his design and realisation of Brundle’s
transformation into the monster known as Brundlefly, but this would
be nothing if not for Goldblum’s incredible physical and emotional
performance beneath the prosthetics.
Perhaps what has kept interest in the
film so alive is the debate about what Brundle’s transformation
represents. Cronenberg has said in different interviews that it was
intended to invoke the ageing process, or broadly disease. Brundle
himself refers to it as an especially aggressive form of cancer,
before he begins to understand that he is transforming, rather than
merely degenerating. Many commentators have seen it as an allegory of
AIDS, representing the body’s collapse as the immune system fails
and disease runs rampant within.
An analogy with ageing seems
appropriate in the early stages, as Brundle’s strength is sapped,
his hair recedes and falls out and his teeth drop out. He struggles
to walk, can no longer stomach food as he once did, and he loses his
potency (he doesn’t even have genitals by the time he’s stopped
bothering with clothes). On the other hand, it could be taken as a
metaphor for substance abuse; the initial effects are an incredible
feeling of power and virility, as Brundle becomes stronger, more
athletic, and more sexually aggressive. Only later does this give way
to physical collapse as his body rebels against him.
Perhaps it could even be seen as a
particularly exaggerated depiction of puberty, as Brundle first
breaks out in unpleasant skins blemishes, sprouts hair in unusual
places, and begins to smell. He’s stronger, obsessed with sex, and
his judgment is overruled by his instincts and hormonal changes. It’s
just the beginning of irrevocable changes to his body. Even Brundle’s
now famous “insect politics” speech, wherein he laments to Ronnie
that his nature now means he will inevitably hurt her, sounds
uncomfortably like the excusing of violence perpetrated by adult men.
However it’s viewed, the
transformation is stomach-churning (although for me, the smaller,
more feasible moments, such as Brundle’s fingernails peeling off,
are more nauseating). By the later stages, where Goldblum is
ensconced in a full bodysuit, his skin is little more than a scab
waiting to picked away. This plays out against Ronnie’s terrifying
discovery that she is pregnant, leading to the truly horrifying dream
sequence in which she gives birth to a huge, squirming maggot. This
is one scene that can never have the same impact on me, as a cis man,
as it will on someone who can bear children. It’s the one scene
I’ve had to fast-forward through when watching with women in the
past, as many have found it simply too disturbing. (Although not
nearly so unsettling as Cronenberg’s later psychological (and
gynaecological) thriller Dead Ringers.)
By this stage, Brundle has lost much of
his reason. He refuses to let Ronnie undergo an abortion, fearing
that it will kill the last human remnant of him, and yet he proceeds
to go through with his plan to fuse father, mother and baby in a
single body, a desperate attempt to make himself more human. (An
element perhaps inspired by a similar moment in the little remembered
1965 pseudo-sequel, Curse of the Fly.) This truly nightmarish
fate might be the most appalling concept in the film, made all the
worse by how unnecessary it is. After all, a simple tissue sample
would be enough to introduce human DNA back into his genetic code.
However, Brundle’s sanity is quite clearly eroded by this stage, as
he succumbs to his most violent and bloodthirsty urges.
It’s in this final struggle that
Ronnie inadvertently triggers Brundle’s final transformation – or
perhaps that should be, metamorphosis. Ronnie literally rips
Brundle’s jaw off, leaving him finally unable to express himself
save through frantic motions, before the rest of his outer skin
sloughs off, revealing the true Brundlefly within. An incredible
animatronic creation, the Brundlefly imago is both terrifying and
pathetic; utterly malformed, it is clearly an aberration, not a
viable organism. It’s only thanks to the remarkable courage of the
now horribly injured Stathis Borans (John Getz), who began the story
as little more than a stalkerish creep, that the horrific fusion
process is aborted before it begins.
The creature, in its panic, attempts to
break out of the telepod it has sealed itself in, causing its final,
ignoble fate: fused to the very machinery that lead to this
horrendous chain of events. Goldblum, of course, is long gone by now,
and yet the even more malformed “Brundlething,” thanks to some
astonishing animatronics, still displays some desperate humanity. We,
and Ronnie, see it’s still Brundle in there, silently pleading for
an end to his suffering.
It’s a somewhat anticlimactic final
moment, but it’s hard to see how anything else would suffice but
the brutal full stop of Brundle’s death. Early rest screenings
included various versions of a more hopeful ending, none of which
worked. Also excised was an extremely unpleasant fusion
experimentation scene, which was cut due to making Brundle appear too
monstrous, reducing audience sympathy. It’s an understandable
choice, although it’s an important scene which sets up much of the
final act (both the fusion process and Brundle’s descent into
animalistic insanity). Still more horrific was a scene of
cannibalism, which survived in one form or another through every
version of the script, before being cut before filming began.
So, while The Fly may not be
perfect, it might be as close to perfect as horror cinema gets.
Powerfully moving, it’s a physiological and psychological nightmare
that is, underneath it all, a whirlwind love story. There’s nothing
quite like it, which is perhaps why attempts at a sequel have all
failed, one way or another. Make-up maestro Chris Walas directed the
1989 sequel, the unimaginatively titled The Fly II. While it
has its moments, and the central performance by Eric Stoltz almost
saves it, The Fly II has little in common with its predecessor
and settled for being an especially gruesome monster/slasher film.
Geena Davis was involved with a more
promising alternative sequel, tentatively titled Flies, which
would have involved Ronnie giving birth to twins, and dealing with
their genetic destiny. Cronenberg himself does not ordinarily make
sequels to his work, but at different times he has spoken of the
possibility of a further exploration of the themes of The Fly,
or potentially even another remake (a remake of his own remake, in
fact). The closest we’ve actually got to this was the 2008 opera
The Fly, composed by original scorer Howard Shore, with some
involvement by Cronenberg. More recently, Nikyatu Jusu, writer and
director of The Nanny, has been linked to a potential
follow-up.
Whether any further exploration of The
Fly and its themes ever materialises, it’s clear that the
film’s impact is still reverberating through Hollywood. Be
inspired… be very inspired.
