Surely one of horror’s most promising unmade films is David Cronenberg’s Frankenstein. This adaptation was to be a contemporary rethinking of Mary Shelley’s novel featuring a humanised, intelligent creature. Despite an advert in a 1980 issue of Variety, the project never got far into development. To anyone familiar with Cronenberg’s obsession with the body, with its pathologies, decay and fusion with technology, Frankenstein would have been a perfect fit.
It is possible to find traces of that project’s DNA in Cronenberg’s The Fly. His most successful and critically acclaimed film to date, it has become a landmark and inspiration to many modern directors, from Luca Guadagnino to Julia Ducournau and Alex Garland.
Coralie Fargeat even mentioned it as the single biggest influence on The Substance (2024), the surprise hit responsible for the recent resurgence of body horror films. Associated with special effects and gruesome tableaux, body horror is a sub-genre of the horror film concerned with the transformation, mutation and destruction of the body.
Along with other fellow body horror classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Thing (1982) and Evil Dead II (1987), The Fly is considered one of the best horror remakes ever made. It’s based on the 1957 short story of the same title by French-British writer George Langelaan and is technically a remake of the 1958 film directed by Kurt Neumann. But Cronenberg’s film is so distinct from its source materials that it can be rightfully considered a reinterpretation.
The most significant alteration is that the protagonist gradually becomes a fly, rather than two distinct entities – a man with the head and claw of a fly and a fly with a white (human) head. The film plays less like B-movie atomic horror and more like heartbreaking melodrama, touching on deep themes like sudden psychological changes and our over-reliance on technology.
Focalisation, or the perspective through which events are presented, also matters. The film is told largely from protagonist Seth Brundle’s (Jeff Goldblum) point of view and traces his emotional journey from initial excitement at his newfound superpowers to helplessness, isolation and the eventual loss of his humanity.
The film was also marked by its visceral tone, achieved in large part thanks to its Oscar-winning makeup effects.
Body horror’s tragic heart
The Fly’s story of a mad scientist fusing with a housefly – usually a figure of disgust associated with putrefaction – provides all the main ingredients of body horror. There’s a body morphing, loss of control and plenty of bloodcurdling motifs, like fingernails falling off or flesh-dissolving vomit.
And yet, what audiences praise most about the film is its heart. Like Frankenstein, The Fly is in essence a horror tragedy in which we remain resolutely on the side of the monster: we feel and recognise his plight.
The Fly is not unlike other artistic examples of existentialist body horror, like Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis (1915), an edition of which Cronenberg introduced in 2014.
Some film critics have interpreted The Fly as a response to the Aids crisis. But Seth Brundle’s predicament is comparable to a variety of human experiences, from life-changing illnesses to ageing and even addiction. Body horror may be visually explicit and bombastic, but with The Fly, it also proved it had a soul.
Following an eight-year hiatus after Maps to the Stars (2014), Cronenberg made a comeback in 2022 with Crimes of the Future, a dystopian vision of society in which plastic is so ubiquitous that some humans have evolved to digest it. Like its follow-up about tombstones broadcasting live images of the deceased to their mourners, The Shrouds (2024), Crimes marked an acclaimed return to form. As it has done for others, body horror provides Cronenberg with powerful tools to examine issues like environmental catastrophe and hyper-surveillance.
Sandwiched between these recent features was The Death of David Cronenberg (2021), a disturbing short in which Cronenberg lovingly cuddles his own discoloured corpse.
Like The Fly, it can be read as another meditation on mortality and on the strange physical and cognitive processes our bodies undergo as we grow older.
Often celebrated for his invention of “the new flesh”, the new stage of human transcendence through technology introduced in Videodrome (1983), only Cronenberg has been able to record the vicissitudes of life in such uncompromising yet affectionate terms. The Fly may well be his most accomplished and emotional work.
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Xavier Aldana Reyes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
