The Fly (1986)

The setup

Seth Brundle is a brilliant, socially awkward inventor who believes he is close to making matter disappear in one place and reappear in another. He brings a science journalist back to his warehouse laboratory to watch the work and, she hopes, write about it. What begins as a flirtation between two curious people turns into a story about what happens when one of them stops being able to trust his own body.

Context

The Fly started with a short story. George Langelaan's tale of a scientist and a teleportation experiment appeared in Playboy in 1957, and Twentieth Century-Fox made a successful film from it the following year. In the early 1980s, producer Kip Ohman approached screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue about a remake, and Pogue and producer Stuart Cornfeld pitched it to Fox. The studio liked the idea but disliked the first draft. Cornfeld then arranged a deal in which Fox would distribute the picture if he found other financing, and that led him to Mel Brooks's company Brooksfilms.

Brooks brought in Walon Green to revise the script, and Pogue later returned to polish it. The first director, Robert Bierman, withdrew after a family tragedy. David Cronenberg, by then a leading figure in Canadian cinema, agreed to take over on the condition that he could rewrite the script himself. He did, and when the Writers Guild reviewed credits he insisted that Pogue share the screenplay credit. The picture was shot in Toronto, in the part of Canada where Cronenberg had made most of his films, and principal photography began on December 1, 1985.

Why it matters

The Fly is often named as the film in which body horror reached a wide audience without losing its seriousness. Cronenberg had been working with bodily fear since Shivers and Rabid in the 1970s, but those films played to a smaller crowd. This one carried a major-studio release, a recognizable star and an Academy Award, and it still asked viewers to look at physical decay and stay with it.

It also changed what people expect from a monster movie. The usual pattern keeps the creature as an outside threat. Here the threat is a person the audience has come to love, and the horror lies in watching someone you care about become unrecognizable while he tries to stay himself. That shift from fright to grief influenced later films about illness, addiction and mutation, and it is a large part of why the film is discussed by people who normally avoid the genre.

For readers following the genre as a whole, the film is a key stop in the body horror entry and a high point in the career traced in the David Cronenberg profile.

What to look for

• A transformation staged in distinct stages, each with its own look and its own emotional note, so the change plays as a story and not as a single reveal.
• A romance written as the center of the picture, with a young couple whose chemistry gives the later scenes their weight.
• A lead performance by Jeff Goldblum that stays funny, restless and human even as the character changes.
• Practical creature and makeup effects by Chris Walas, built from foam latex, puppets and mechanical rigs.
• A score by Howard Shore that treats the story as an opera of loss, played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
• Telepods that look like industrial machinery, part of a laboratory that feels lived in and slightly messy.

From one script to another

The path from first draft to finished film was bumpy, and the final script owes a lot to Cronenberg's decision to treat the central pair as a couple in the early days of a relationship. In earlier versions of the story a husband and wife are already established. Cronenberg's version lets the audience watch two strangers become close in the first third, so that when things go wrong they have something to lose. The University of Wisconsin's film program, writing about the picture, called the love story its exposed beating heart.

Cronenberg was paid roughly twice what he had been paid for The Dead Zone (1983), a sign that the studio saw him as a rising director with commercial potential. Several actors were considered for the lead before Goldblum. Brooks reportedly wanted Pierce Brosnan, whom Cronenberg rejected, and John Malkovich declined. John Lithgow also turned the part down, reportedly because it seemed too grotesque, and Michael Keaton and Richard Dreyfuss were also mentioned. Cronenberg proposed Goldblum, who was willing to accept the prosthetics.

Casting the couple

Geena Davis, who played the journalist Veronica Quaife, was then Goldblum's partner in real life. Cornfeld at first opposed casting her for that reason, but Cronenberg's view won out. The two actors do not play as veterans of a long marriage; they play as people who have just discovered each other, and the script lets them be playful, awkward and a little show-offy. John Getz completes the main trio in a supporting role that gives the story a third point of view.

Cronenberg also took a small part for himself. He appears briefly as a gynecologist, a cameo he took on at Davis's request, a bit of dry humor in a film that rarely lets the tension drop. The director's presence on screen is typical of his willingness to join the cast of his own films and joke about his reputation for stories about bodies.

Making the Brundle makeup

Chris Walas, who had worked with Cronenberg on Scanners (1981), at first turned down the job because he was tired of remakes. Cornfeld convinced him to read the script, and Walas came to see it as a tragedy dressed in science fiction, in his own phrase a Shakespearean one. He told Inverse that the project demanded far more planning than any he had done before. He and makeup artist Stephan Dupuis worked out the number of stages, where each would start and end, and whether the hairpieces should change, with the aim of keeping Goldblum recognizable on screen for as long as possible.

Reports describe about three months of makeup design and a transformation divided into seven stages, with the final creature designed first and the earlier stages built backward toward it. Walas had hoped for about six months of preparation and had closer to three, partly because of Canadian production rules and the timing of the start date. His California shop finished puppets to about ninety percent before shipping them to Toronto for the final work. Goldblum spent long hours in the makeup chair, and the later stages took many hours to apply.

The last stage and the choice to stay human

Walas has said he wanted to put a performer in a costume for the final creature, which would have saved time. Cronenberg refused. He wanted something that felt non-human and hard to picture as a person, so the final form is a main puppet with extreme articulation, plus partial and full-body puppets worked by cables, rods and specialized inserts. The result is a creature that is not a giant fly, as in many older films, but a fusion of a man and an insect.

Some material was cut after previews. A sequence involving an animal and a short epilogue disturbed test audiences enough that Cronenberg dropped them. What remains is a film that spends more time on the stages in the middle of the change than on the final form, which is where most of its emotional power sits. Compare this with the monster design in Alien, where the creature is the problem from the start: here the monster is the end of a process that the audience witnesses in full.

Sound and score

Howard Shore, Cronenberg's regular composer, wrote and conducted the score with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It leans on large, mournful orchestral themes and not on shock cues, which supports the idea that the film is a tragedy before it is a horror story. The picture's audio mixing was done in London, since it was cheaper than Los Angeles. Bryan Ferry recorded a song for the film, but Cronenberg felt it did not fit, and it plays only briefly.

A soundtrack album appeared from Varèse Sarabande, and a two-disc reissue in 2005 paired this score with Christopher Young's music for The Fly II. For a look at how music and effects work together to frighten, see the piece on how horror uses sound, which uses similar principles in other films.

Release and reception

The Fly opened on August 15, 1986. Estimates of its budget run from about $9 million to $15 million. In North America it took in roughly $40.5 million, and its worldwide total is given as just over $60 million, making it a commercial success and Cronenberg's most financially successful film, according to the UW-Madison Cinematheque. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an average grade of B.

Critics were generally warm. Review aggregators report scores of about 80 on Metacritic and above 80 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes, though those numbers shift over time. Gene Siskel put the film tenth on his 1986 list, and Roger Ebert placed it in his top twenty. The New York Times' Caryn James found it too gory and uneven in tone. Time magazine included the film on its 2005 list of the 100 best movies, and the magazines Premiere and American Film both named it in their 1989 polls of the best films of the decade.

Awards

At the 59th Academy Awards in March 1987, Walas and Dupuis won the Oscar for Best Makeup, a rare nod for a horror film. The film also won the Saturn Awards for Best Horror Film, Best Makeup and Best Actor for Goldblum, the Special Jury Prize at the Avoriaz fantastic film festival and the Canadian Society of Cinematographers award for Mark Irwin's cinematography. It was nominated for a Hugo Award and for two BAFTAs, for makeup and for visual effects.

Many expected Goldblum to receive an Oscar nomination as well, and he did not. Siskel later said Goldblum had been stiffed, arguing that older voters seldom reward horror performances. It remains a familiar example of the way the Academy has treated the genre, with attention for craft but little for acting.

Reading the film

The film appeared at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and many critics read it as an allegory for that crisis. Cronenberg said he was surprised by the reading and described the film as a broader metaphor for illness, aging and the way a love affair can end. Both views have supporters. The story works as a portrait of any slow decline in which the sick person's body becomes unfamiliar to the people closest to him, and the film's emotional focus is the helplessness of those people.

Others compare it to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, though Cronenberg has stressed the differences. The hero is not just a victim. He is a man whose confidence and ambition lead him to a bad decision, and the film watches what his vanity and his charm do to his chances. That moral tension, together with the romance, is why the story hits harder than a plain tale of a lab accident.

Afterlife and where to go next

The Fly II (1989), directed by Walas, continued the story without Cronenberg, with Getz the only returning cast member from the original. Cronenberg later returned to the material for a 2008 opera. The success of the film gave him room to make Dead Ringers (1988) next. Details of the larger series are collected in the The Fly franchise hub.

Viewers who want to follow the thread can move to Cronenberg's other work, to psychological horror, where the mind is the site of decay, or to the creature-feature shelf, which shows the older tradition the film reshaped. The 1958 original is worth seeing as a contrast: the remake, by comparison, treats the transformation as a death in slow motion.

Verified details

• George Langelaan's short story first appeared in Playboy in 1957, and the first film version followed in 1958.
• Principal photography began on December 1, 1985, in Toronto, with work at Kleinburg Studio.
• The design of the telepods was partly inspired by the engine cylinder of Cronenberg's Ducati motorcycle.
• Cronenberg appears in a short cameo as a gynecologist.
• The transformation was planned in seven stages by Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis.
• Howard Shore's score was performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
• The film opened on August 15, 1986, and earned roughly $40.5 million in North America.
• Walas and Dupuis won the Academy Award for Best Makeup at the 59th Academy Awards.
• Jeff Goldblum won the Saturn Award for Best Actor for the role.
• The Fly II (1989) was directed by Chris Walas, the film's creature effects designer.

Connections

• Part of the The Fly franchise hub.
• Subgenre: Body Horror.
• Director profile: David Cronenberg.

Sources and further reading

• The Fly (1986 film), Wikipedia
• The 59th Academy Awards (1987), Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
• Chris Walas on The Fly, Inverse
• Cronenberg's The Fly: Tragic Love Story and Gorefest, UW-Madison Cinematheque