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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - August 15th

"THE FLY" released in 1986

Tawny: [after Seth says it's Tawny's turn to teleport] I'm afraid.
Seth Brundle: Don't be afraid.
[watching them from the back of the room]
Veronica: No. Be afraid... Be very afraid.

The second film to be loosely based on George Langelaan's 1957 short story of the same name, The Fly the film tells of an eccentric scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) who, after testing his teleportation device on himself, accidentally fuses his DNA with a common house fly that inadvertently flew into the machine, slowly turning Seth into a fly-hybrid creature!

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When brilliant but eccentric scientist Seth Brundle (Goldblum) meets Particle magazine journalist Veronica "Ronnie" Quaife at a meet-the-press event, he convinces her to return to him to his loft laboratory to see what he is working on;  a set of "Telepods" that allows instantaneous teleportation of an object from one pod to another. Quaife agrees to keep the prject a secret if Seth allows her to document his work. Seth and Veronica soon begin a romantic relationship, and their first sexual encounter provides inspiration for Seth, who reprograms the Telepod computer to cope with living flesh (although the Telepods can transport inanimate objects, they do not work properly on living things). Seth successfully teleports a second baboon (the brother of the first baboon that was turned inside-out during an earlier attempt!) with no apparent harm, and flushed with success plans to celebrate with Veronica, but she abruptly departs before they can celebrate. Seth's judgment soon becomes impaired by alcohol and his paranoid fear that Veronica is secretly rekindling her relationship with her editor and former lover, Stathis Borans (John Getz), culminate in Seth entering the Telepods himself, unaware that a common housefly has slipped inside the transmitter pod with him. Although Seth and Veronica later reconcile, Seth begins to exhibit what at first appear to be beneficial effects of the teleportation process, such as increased strength, stamina, and sexual potency, and he mistakenly believes that the teleporter has somehow improved and "purified" his body. But when his fingernails begin falling off he realizes that something went horribly wrong during his teleportation, and, checking his computer's records, discovers that the Telepod computer, confused by the presence of a secondary life-form inside the sending pod, merged him with the fly at the molecular-genetic level. As Seth's body continues to deteriorate, losing various body parts and becoming progressively less human, Veronica learns she is pregnant with Seth's baby, but cannot be sure if the child was conceived before or after his fateful teleportation. Overcome with fear, Veronica confronts Seth one last time, but realizes only too late that Seth has discovered a way to reverse his condition - by fusing his genes with Veronica and their unborn baby!

[first lines]
Seth Brundle: What am I working on? Uhh... I'm working on something that will change the world, and human life as we know it.

Top:   Eccentric, but brilliant, scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum);

Above:   Journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) helps Seth with his work

Co-producer Kip Ohman orginally approached screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue with the idea of remaking the classic science fiction horror film The Fly, andf together pitched the project to Twentieth Century Fox. However, after reading Pogue's first draft, the studio rescinded the offer and refused to release the rights (so Ohman and Pogue could not take the project to another studio). Ohman ultimately partnered with producer's Stuart Cornfeld and Mel Brooks to finance the picture, with Fox distributing it. While working at Fox, it was Scott Rudin's suggestion to Cornfeld that they hire David Cronenberg as director. Cronenberg agreed on two conditions; he be allowed to work with his regular group of collaborators, including Editor Ronald Sanders, Production Designer Carol Spier, Director of Photography Mark Irwin and Composer Howard Shore and rewrite the script to his satisfaction. With Pogue subsequently removed from the project, Cronenberg substantially altered the characters (and their names), the dialogue, and much of the plot. However, key details from Pogue's script (the fusion of man and fly and details of the metamorphosis) were retained.

David Cronenberg met with some opposition when he announced that he wanted to cast Jeff Goldblum in the lead role. The executive at Fox who was supervising the project felt that Goldblum was not a bankable star, and make-up effects supervisor Chris Walas felt that his face would be difficult to work with for the make-up effects. Cronenberg himself later had reservations when Goldblum suggested Geena Davis, his girlfriend at the time, for the other lead role, as he did not want to have to work with a real-life couple. Cronenberg was convinced after Davis's first reading that she was right for the role.

Seth Brundle: I was not pure. The teleporter insists on inner pure. I was not pure.
Veronica: I don't know what you mean.
Seth Brundle: A fly... got into the... transmitter pod with me that first time, when I was alone. The computer... got confused - there weren't supposed to be two separate genetic patterns - and it decided to... uhh... splice us together. It mated us, me and the fly. We hadn't even been properly introduced.

Top and Above:   Seth slowly transforms into "Brundlefly"!

The Academy Award-winning makeup was designed and executed by Chris Walas and his crew over a grueling three month schedule. The final "Brundlefly" creature was designed first, and then the various steps needed to carry protagonist Seth Brundle to that final incarnation were designed afterwards. Most of the time, Goldblum was often wearing as much as 5lbs of prosthetic makeup in his more scary scenes (taking nearly five hours to apply the most extensive makeup stages), with the Brundlefly's "vomit drop" being, in reality, made from honey, eggs, and milk. Geena Davis claims that the only time she felt "grossed out" by the amount of gore was in the scene where Seth's ear falls off and she holds him. She states that her reaction to holding her face up to Goldblum's was not acting and that she was indeed really grossed out. For the scenes with "inside-out" baboon, two puppeteers (one of them Chris Walas) were located underneath the floor animating the puppet while a third pumped blood. All three of them had to wear raincoats because of the large amounts of blood being pumped. Frequently the rest of the crew would break for lunch and forget about the three underneath the floor!

The infamous cat-monkey scene where Brundlefly fuses a cat and the remaining baboon and then beats it to death with a lead pipe was cut following a Toronto screening. According to producer Stuart Cornfeld the audience felt that there was no turning back for Seth and they lost all sympathy for his plight, which caused the rest of the film to not play as well. In Cornfeld's own words: "If you beat an animal to death, even a monkey-cat, your audience is not gonna be interested in your problems anymore". Also scripted, but never filmed, was a segment meant to have followed the deleted monkey-cat scene: A homeless lady screams after interrupting Brundlefly as he feeds out of an open dumpster. Brundlefly seizes the bag lady and disintegrates her face with his vomit drop. Before he finishes feeding on the woman's corpse, Brundlefly's humanity emerges for a moment; just long enough to contemplate the horror of his sub-human existence.

TRIVIA:   Producer Mel Brooks didn't want people to know he was a producer for the film because, he thought people wouldn't take it seriously if they knew he was involved. 

Top:   Director David Cronenberg directing Jeff Goldblum;

Above:   Cronenberg with Goldblum and Geena Davis

The Fly was critically acclaimed with most praise going to Goldblum's performance and the special effects. And Despite being a gory remake of a classic made by a controversial, non-mainstream director, the film was also a commercial success. Carrie Rickey from the  Philadelphia Inquirer wrote The Fly was, "Wildly imaginative, gut-wrenchingly scarifying and profoundly primal (not to mention funny), David Cronenberg's The Fly is a movie that whacks you in the solar plexus and leaves you gasping." Roger Ebert wrote, "The Exorcist (1973) aside, I can't think of another horror film as intense as The Fly. They are both almost unbearable to watch and certain sections of the latter have the upper-hand when it comes to inciting a sense of disgust, and that's saying something!". The Fly would ultimately go on to win the Academy Award for Best Make-up for Chris Walas & Stephan Dupuis, with many genre fans and film critics at the time also thinking that Jeff Goldblum's performance would receive a Best Actor Oscar nomination, but this did not come to pass. Gene Siskel subsequently stated that Goldblum most likely "got stiffed" out of a nomination because the older academy voters generally do not honor horror films.

Three years later, The Fly II was released, directed by directed by Chris Walas, the man behind the makeup and creature effects of both films. While David Cronenberg and Geena Davis opted not to be involved in the sequel, the only actor to return for the sequel was John Getz as an embittered Stathis Borans, joined by Eric Stoltz as Veronica and Seth's child, Martin Brundle. Receiving mostly negative reviews and a poor box office, their have still been numerous attempts to ressurrect the series over the years from a number of filmmakers; including Renny Harlin (with then wife Genna Davis) in the 1990's, Todd Lincoln in early 2003, and, most recently, by original director Cronenberg himself. In a late 2012 interview, Cronenberg provided additional details on why the project had stalled, citing, "I think maybe the script that I wrote was a little too radical for Fox, and they felt it really needed to be a very low-budget film at that point. However, what was in it that attracted them could not be done low-budget. So I think that was the problem".

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:   91%

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Be sure to check out IHdb's other articles for This Day in Horror - August 15th

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