Embodied Horror: The Fly (1986) Turns 40, and Its Influence Lives On

Editors’ note: This piece contains major spoilers for The Fly (1986), Hereditary (2018), The Substance (2024), and A Different Man (2024).

The first David Cronenberg movies I ever watched were The Fly (1986) and Videodrome (1983), both scored from my regional Best Buy’s $5 bargain bin during a holiday break from college. Around the same time, right before my 20th birthday, I woke up one morning and felt like my entire body had been run over by an eighteen-wheeler. I started sleeping through my alarm in the morning, and was often too sore to attend my classes.

The Fly would become my entry into body horror during a time in my life where living in a rapidly changing body would upend my own relationship with what I’d started to call my “meat sack” years earlier. Even before mysterious pain and fatigue entered my life, I’d already lived 19 years as a multiply-disabled person—owing to anaphylactic allergic reactions that had begun when I was a teenager, and hemiplegic cerebral palsy on the left side of my body from my premature birth.

Weeks with unending pain and fatigue turned into months, which left my primary care doctor stumped. She suggested that we wait a few months to see if the pain and fatigue would go away; it did not. When I couldn’t sleep at night due to the pain—which was often—I’d post up in the study area of the apartment that I shared with three other students, wrap a blanket around my shoulders, plug headphones into my laptop’s audio port, and watch The Fly.

It took me years to build my self-acceptance from the ground up precisely because I do not experience my body in a conventional way.