10 More Horror Movies So Sad You Can Only Watch Them Once
7. The Fly
Who'dda thunk that a deeply gross-out body-horror movie about a man being slowly transformed into a fly would also be one of the genre's all-time great tragedies?
For all of its nauseating makeup and gore effects, David Cronenberg's The Fly is a film primed to leave you ugly-sobbing by the end.
The Fly is centered around Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), a scientist whose teleportation experiment goes horribly wrong, irreversibly fusing his DNA with that of a housefly.
The rest of the movie chronicles Brundle's deeply icky yet also increasingly devastating transformation into a grotesque man-fly hybrid, giving audiences one of the genre's most visceral depictions of a person quite literally losing their humanity - and also their mind.
But the saddest part is well and truly saved for last, when Brundle completes his transformation and, seeing the monstrous entity he's become, silently begs his pregnant partner, Veronica (Geena Davis), to blow his head off with a shotgun and end his suffering, which she does.
It's a testament to Cronenberg's firm handle on the story's tone and phenomenal performances from both Goldblum and Davis that The Fly takes a potentially campy premise and makes it genuinely one of the most emotionally overwhelming horror movies you could ever see.