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.
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.
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