The Fly (1986)
There are films that define a genre, and then there are films that redefine what a genre is even capable of. David Cronenberg's The Fly, released in 1986, sits firmly in the second category. Loosely based on George Langelaan's 1957 short story (itself previously adapted into a rather more camp 1958 Vincent Price vehicle), Cronenberg's version strips away most of the pulp-serial trappings and replaces them with something far more unsettling: genuine emotional weight. The premise, a scientist who accidentally merges his genetic material with a common housefly during a teleportation experiment gone wrong, is the stuff of low-budget Saturday matinees. What Cronenberg does with that premise is something else entirely. By the mid-1980s he had already established himself as the poet laureate of what critics were beginning to call "body horror", a strain of filmmaking concerned less with monsters from outside and more with the treacherous, mutable flesh we all inhabit. If you want to see where those preoccupations began, his earlier work, including Shivers and The Brood, lays the groundwork in characteristically uncomfortable fashion. The Fly is, in many respects, the fullest and most emotionally coherent expression of everything he had been working towards.
The production sits in an interesting commercial position. Mel Brooks, operating through his Brooksfilms banner alongside SLM Production Group, produced the picture, which raised a few eyebrows at the time given Brooks's association with broad comedy. In practice, he gave Cronenberg considerable creative freedom, and the result was a film that punched well above its relatively modest budget, earning somewhere in the region of $60 million at the box office against production costs of around $15 million. Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis led the practical effects team, a collaboration that would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Makeup, and the film's visual identity owes an enormous debt to their work. Howard Shore, who has been Cronenberg's composer of choice across much of his career, provided the score, a brooding, elegiac piece of work that sits a world away from the shrieking strings of more conventional horror.
The casting is, in retrospect, almost too good to be accidental. Jeff Goldblum was not quite the cultural institution he would later become, though he had already shown in films like adjacently genre-adjacent work of the period that he could carry a physical, heightened performance with conviction. His Seth Brundle is nervy, brilliant, and oddly endearing before things begin to go wrong, a combination that requires precisely the kind of loose-limbed, internally combusting energy Goldblum has always done well. Geena Davis, who was then at an early but already impressive stage of her career, brings intelligence and a kind of clear-eyed grief to Veronica, the science journalist who falls for Brundle and then watches, helpless, as something irreversible takes hold. John Getz rounds out the central triangle as her editor and ex-lover, a role that could easily have been thankless but which Getz plays with a polished but unremarkable credibility that keeps the human drama anchored. Together, the three of them give Cronenberg something he always uses well: real people in an unreal situation, reacting the way real people might.
Let’s talk about the sheer, unadulterated grossness of practical effects, because that is exactly what sells David Cronenberg’s 1986 picture The Fly.
Long before cinema became entirely reliant on weightless, pixelated CGI, we had the tactile, nauseating brilliance of latex, foam, and fake blood. This film is the absolute gold standard of the body horror genre. When Seth Brundle’s physical form begins its agonising, irreversible decay, the makeup and prosthetic work are so visceral and repulsive that you can practically smell the rot coming off the screen. It is a staggering achievement in practical filmmaking that makes your stomach turn in the best possible way.
Of course, all the melting flesh in the world wouldn't matter if the human element fell flat, but fair play to the casting department. I have always found Jeff Goldblum to be endlessly captivating for some reason, and he does a cracking job here as the eccentric, overly ambitious scientist. He brings a frantic, tragic energy to the role that makes his descent into monstrousness genuinely heartbreaking. He is perfectly matched by Geena Davis, who is brilliant as his increasingly horrified love interest. Their dynamic grounds the wildly original premise (a man accidentally splicing his DNA with a common housefly) in a deeply emotional reality, turning a creature feature into a devastating romance about watching the person you love slowly slip away.
Cronenberg paces this descent into madness with a relentless, creeping dread that I felt in my bones, aided immensely by a fantastic, brooding soundtrack that perfectly underscores the tragedy unfolding in that bleak, warehouse laboratory. The narrative never rushes the transformation, allowing the audience to sit with the psychological horror before the physical mutations truly take over. When the final, fully realised creature suit is finally revealed, it is a terrifying, grotesque marvel of 80s creature design. The sheer audacity of the practical effects, combined with the claustrophobic set design, creates an atmosphere of inescapable doom that keeps you glued to the seat.
This is a remarkably impressive piece of 80s sci-fi horror that manages to be both intellectually stimulating and viscerally repulsive. Cronenberg took a B-movie concept and elevated it into a profound, grotesque meditation on disease, aging, and the fragility of the human body. It remains a deeply unsettling, brilliantly executed nightmare that has lost none of its power to shock and sadden nearly four decades later. For anyone with a strong stomach and an appreciation for top-tier practical effects, it is an absolute must-watch.
The Fly remains one of those rare horror films that works on you in multiple directions at once, frightening and sad and occasionally almost funny, which is exactly the kind of tonal tightrope that separates the genre's best work from its merely competent. Cronenberg has continued to surprise and provoke across a long and varied filmography, not least in the quieter, more crime-inflected register of something like A History of Violence, but this is the film many viewers return to as his signature. It is the one where the ideas and the viscera and the heartbreak all arrive at the same moment, and none of them blink first. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Just, perhaps, not for the reasons you expect.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 1986 | Watched: 2026-08-04
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Fly (1986) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
