The Fly (1986) 🪰🤮

“It’s the flesh, it just makes you crazy!”

David Cronenberg, the master of movies about sticking weird things in weird places, will soon be back on the big screen with some good old fashion body penetration horror, so I thought I’d revisit one of his most popular features, The Fly! A bug-eyed Jeff Goldblum and baby-faced Gena Davis star in this horror-romance(?) about a scientist whose ambition turns his life inside out.

The Fly broke ground with its creature design, and earned make-up effects artist Chris Walas an Academy Award. Howard Shore’s dramatic score serves high camp, and romance in a nod to the original 1958 film. It’s also one of the few instances of a female protagonist in a Cronenberg horror, and though there are some unfortunate damsel moments towards the end, Gena Davis brings warmth, sass and humanity to what is otherwise a very gross movie (soooooo much fly vomit).

As Goldblum’s Brundle-fly waxes poetic about “penetration beyond the veil of the flesh”, Cronenberg explores a bigger question about body autonomy that feels particularly relevant these days. Though he didn’t intend to create parallels with the ongoing AIDS pandemic in the 80s-90s, Cronenberg welcomed the comparisons, making the drastic cruelty of Brundle’s spontaneous decisions all the more tragic. Today, I read more into the pregnancy horror aspect that Davis’s Ronnie faces — “I want it out of my body” she insists. Both characters revolt when their bodies are co-opted by unwanted species, and though Brundle is at first infatuated with his transformation, Ronnie continuously asserts her autonomy and defends her body until the end.
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