10 Horror Movie Scenes You Didn't See (Thanks To Test Audiences)
3. FOUR Different Endings - The Fly (1986)
David Cronenberg's The Fly concludes with an abrupt yet emotionally shattering final scene where Ronnie (Geena Davis) puts her increasingly mutated human-fly hybrid lover Seth (Jeff Goldblum) out of his misery with a shotgun blast to the head.
The film quickly ends without any sort of epilogue detailing the fallout of Seth's demise or the outcome of Ronnie being pregnant with his possibly-mutated baby.
During post-production, Cronenberg was struggling to settle on an ending, and so he actually shot four separate epilogues which were all test-screened with various audiences.
One saw Ronnie get back with her former lover Stathis (John Getz) where she's carrying his child; another where they're back together but she's not pregnant; a third where Veronica is single and not pregnant; and finally, Veronica is single and pregnant, suggesting she's keeping Seth's child.
However, not a single one of these endings was well-received by test audiences, possibly aided by the fact that all of them were interlinked with a canned dream sequence featuring a human baby with butterfly wings.
Even the cast and crew reportedly didn't want either ending where Ronnie ends up back with Stathis, feeling that it undermined Ronnie and Seth's tragic love story.
In the end, Cronenberg felt that test audiences were left so utterly shocked by Seth's death that the film didn't really have anywhere else to go, hence why it ends so suddenly.
It was the right call all things considered, though it'd certainly be interesting for fans to see how those four epilogues played out.