10 Horror Movie Romances That Make Love Terrifying
2. The Fly (1986)
David Cronenberg is best known for body horror, of which The Fly might be his most horrific. What makes this film terrifying on an emotional level is the romantic tragedy of someone watching their beloved change before their very eyes.
Then having to blow their head off.
Ronnie (Geena Davis) is dating scientist Seth (Jeff Goldblum), who manages to fuse his DNA with a fly during a teleportation experiment. His body gradually becomes less human, but most devastatingly for Ronnie, so does his mind. Cronenberg doesn’t limit body horror purely to Seth’s transformation, with Ronnie having a nightmare about giving birth to a gigantic maggot.
Ronnie’s nightmares become reality in the film’s finale. Ronnie watches in horror as the man she once loved has a monstrous fly creature explode from his decayed human shell. She then, screaming, has to shoot it with a shotgun.
In The Fly, Cronenberg takes romantic conventions of the happy couple and childbirth and destroys them with monstrous body horror, made all the more heart-wrenching by the slow breakdown of a couple’s love.