15 Most Disturbing Sci-Fi Movies

Be afraid. Be very afraid. This was The Fly’s strapline. The well-known slogan has since become a pop-culture catch-phrase, but it originated from The Fly’s marketing team.

It’s an apt phrase to express the themes in The Fly. There’s a primal fear to be taken from the film, which is intrinsic to the human condition. Whether you interpret the degeneration endured by the protagonist as the ravages of ageing or the cruelty of disease; The Fly speaks to the inevitability of decline in the human condition. The Fly gives us all something to fear within ourselves and in our helplessness against the slow entropy of time.

The Fly is David Cronenberg’s most lucrative success. Telling the doomed love story of the girl who met a mad scientist who turned himself, excruciatingly, into a humanoid fly. Jeff Goldblum delivers a stellar performance as the erstwhile human, who at first enjoys becoming the fly and then literally falls to agonizing, slimy pieces.

The practical effects are delightfully disgusting, there is an emotional resonance in the performances of Gena Davis and Jeff Goldblum, but it’s in the subtext that a version of this will happen to us all, where The Fly is truly horrific.