20 Hit Horror Movies NOBODY Saw Coming

12. The Fly (1986)

Gross-out body horror has historically been a tough sell with mainstream audiences - just look at how catastrophically John Carpenter's The Thing flopped back in 1980.

And so, the outlook wasn't sunny for David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of The Fly, no matter the appealing star pairing of Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.

Yet The Fly went on to gross $60.6 million against a $15 million budget, far surpassing most industry expectations.

The commercial success of Cronenberg's film is typically credited to its central tragic romance, which helped make its grotesque elements more accessible to a wider audience.

It also helped that The Fly was well-received even by mainstream critics, many of whom called for Goldblum to receive an Oscar nomination, whereas The Thing was largely panned upon release and only re-appraised years later.

All the same, The Fly remained an outlier for decades, as body horror didn't see this level of mainstream box office success again until The Substance almost 40 years later.