Nightmare Fuel / The Fly (1986)

As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!

---

It only gets worse from here.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Considering the fact that The Fly (1986) is made of Body Horror, and the magnum opus of David Cronenberg, be very afraid indeed...

---

• The original poster, which shows a human arm and an insect leg emerging from the telepod at the same time.
  • Another poster◊ shows Seth in his chrysalis form resting in the telepod, with the glass door cracking like he's hatching from an egg. Given what happens in the film's climax, this was essentially the worst-case scenario being played out.
  • Look closely, and you'll notice the door cracks also resemble the veins of a fly's wing.
• Stathis' horrendous stalking habits, while Played for Laughs in the 1980s, get really awful when you think about them. You have a man breaking into a woman's apartment, following her around without her knowledge, and going into furious, jealous ranting after finding out she's moved on and found another man. In today's society, that's incredibly creepy.
• The baboon experiment scene. The telepod knows how to transport living tissues intact, but not the order they go in, which Tele-Frags the baboon, turning it inside out. And it's still alive when it gets there.
• The night after Seth teleported himself and slept with Veronica, he wakes up, gets out of his bed...and starts doing all kinds of acrobatics and gymnastics all over his apartment. There's this atmospheric eeriness to that whole scene as Seth's sudden display of newfound Super-Strength is one of the first clues he Came Back Wrong. Veronica witnesses this in utter amazement and begins to realize Seth may no longer be the quirky scientist she met at the press event.
• The arm-wrestling scene, which ends with Seth snapping the guy's wrist in half; it starts bleeding profusely with the bone jutting out of his wound.
  • Before that, Seth's grip is apparently so strong that it causes his opponent's arm to start leaking...something. That, or Seth's fingers are embedded so deeply in the guy's arm that their sweat is pooling into the crevices he's making. Either way, it's not pretty.
    • The shooting script has it that the substance is pus leaking from Seth's fingertips, foreshadowing his fingernails coming off the next morning.
  • Moreover, Seth has been Drunk with Power and casually seductive in the preceding scenes, but as he arm-wrestles Marky, his face—and especially his eyes—takes on a strange, cold intensity that it never had before. After he wins the match so gruesomely, he seems slightly dazed and groggy as he and Tawny walk down the sidewalk and discusses what they'll do next, as if he were coming from something else controlling his mind. In hindsight, the match is the first sign of the Split-Personality Takeover that ultimately will consume his human reason and compassion.
• Seth managing to Bridal Carry Tawny up to his lab with seemingly endless energy as he starts running up the stairs. You can just tell that something is seriously wrong.
• When he still appears human, the scenes where Seth explodes at Veronica are downright disturbing, particularly when he throws her out.
  Seth: YOU'RE JEALOUS!!! I've become free, I've been released, and you can't stand it! You'll do anything to bring me down! Look at me. Does this look sick? Does this look like a sick man to you? [punches through a wooden support beam]
• Seth's appearance a mere 2 days after teleporting himself. His hair is sticky and lank, his face is starting to discolor and an increasing number of warts start forming. Veronica mentions that he smells bad. He's essentially a rotting corpse.
• The fingernail scene. Seth finally looks at himself in the mirror, and realizes Veronica wasn't exaggerating about his appearance. He tries to shave, only to find that his hairs are so hard that an electric razor can't cut them. After smashing the razor in frustration, he starts biting his fingernails, an established habit of his when he's anxious...and it peels off. Then he peels another fingernail off without much effort. It's here he realizes that something did go wrong in the telepod.
• The ungodly sound that is played on the soundtrack when the computer reveals that the secondary teleportation subject was a fly. It's like a sound that a giant fly buzzing overhead would make, and it helps emphasize the Internal Reveal to Seth.
  • If you're insectophobic, the extreme close-up of said fly eventually displayed on the computer screen may be the scariest image in the movie.
  • The computer revealing to Seth that it fused him and the housefly at the molecular-genetic level during the teleportation and Seth's more than appropriate horrified reaction.
• Stathis' completely horrified reaction to the video of Seth eating. Thankfully, we don't actually see Seth reabsorbing the melted food, but the sounds are disgusting enough.
• The moment when Veronica reveals to Stathis that she's pregnant.
  Veronica: I'm pregnant.
  Stathis: Oh, no. (realization dawns) Oh, no.
  Veronica: I'm pregnant with Seth's baby.
• Veronica's maggot baby nightmare, especially since it's not framed as a dream until she wakes up. It's often cited by viewers as the most frightening scene of the movie, and is the one that made the 100 Scariest Movie Moments list.
  • Just Veronica's paranoia that she might be carrying a mutant. Right after she sees Seth looking even worse than before after trying and failing to tell him about her pregnancy, she's frantically begging Stathis to take her to an abortion clinic, to the point where she tells him, "'Cause I don't want it in my body! Do you understand me?! I don't want it in my body!" when he asks her why. Things take a turn for the worse when we cut up to the roof to discover that Seth overheard the whole conversation about the abortion before he steps away from the roof to follow Veronica and Stathis to the clinic.
• As the transformation further takes over, Seth tries communicating to his computer. What we hear is Jeff Goldblum's normal but pained voice, but what gets translated through the computer is a garbled, inhuman mockery of the human voice. And then we see the message displayed on the computer screen:
  ERROR: PATTERN MISMATCH. VOICE NOT RECOGNIZED. VOICE NOT RECOGNIZED. VOICE NOT RECOGNIZED. VOICE NOT RECOGNIZED. VOICE NOT RECOGNIZED. VOICE NOT RECOGNIZED. VO-
• Seth realizing that Veronica should stay away from him because he is starting to lose his humanity. Very tense scene. Kind of doubles as a Tear Jerker if you notice the tears Seth and Veronica are both shedding after.
• Seth sneaking up on Stathis and melting his hand and foot with his vomit drop. And it's implied that if Veronica hadn't stopped him, he would have melted his freaking face!
  • It's even more nightmarish when one considers the context. Seth was deeply insecure about his relationship with Veronica upon realizing that Stathis was not only her editor but ex-lover. Seth misunderstanding why Veronica left on the night of his triumph with the telepods drove him to jealousy and drunkenness...and his fateful teleportation. Moreover, he knows that Stathis was aiding her in her efforts to abort Seth's child. And NOW Stathis arrives to rescue Veronica. It is horribly clear from the expressions on Seth's face that his maiming of Stathis is not merely an expression of the brutal, uncompromised nature of his insect side, but of all the jealousy and resentment that ever lay in his human heart. He could easily kill Stathis outright, but he wants to make him suffer first, and he is clearly enjoying making him suffer. Only Veronica's interruption reminds him of what remains of his better self.
  • Before that Stathis has a look around Seth's squalor while a man-sized shadow quickly moves above him.
• The One-Winged Angel transformation, as what remains of Seth's human flesh starts to fall off and his fly-self erupts from his original body.
  • The transformation starts when Veronica rips off Seth's jaw. It's still twitching on the floor when she throws it down after realizing what's happened.
  • The insect-like buzzing noises Brundlefly produces when his transformation is complete. And then there's the human-like bellows as he painfully fuses with parts of the telepod...
  • And why is Veronica trying to escape him? He's revealed that, for his attempt to cure himself, he needs to fuse himself to her, the woman he loves, and the mother of his unborn child. Seth's last words are: "We'll be the ultimate family! A family of...three...joined together in one body...more human than I am alone!" And he's going to teleport Veronica while the latter is fully clothed. It's best not to think about what the end result would have been had this plan succeeded...
  • On top of that, there's how Seth explains all this, down to those last words. There's hope in his voice. He's trying to assure her it's going to be okay, even wonderful. His dorky, passionate, and loving nature was why Veronica came to love him, but his transformation has twisted him into someone about to do something so evil that only Laser-Guided Karma can strike him down.
• Brundlefly ends up merged with the components of the telepod. A big chunk of it is left protruding out of his back, his flesh warped around the machinery, and all he can do to move around is crawl and make ungodly wheezes. It's not hard to see how much pain he's in, especially when he places the barrel of the shotgun on his head.
  • The moment just before the pod finished merging Brundlefly with pieces of the booth: the encoding sequence frantically flashes computational alphanumeric values all over the monitor indicating it can't make heads or tails fusing a complex life-form and inorganic metal. As if your imagination wasn't already flaring up when the transmission field takes Brundlefly and a section of the pod.
• The deleted "Monkey-Cat" scene. An early attempt at turning the telepod into a Merging Machine, which fuses the surviving baboon and a cat into a horrible, agonizing mess that Seth ends up beating to death with a lead pipe after it attacks him.
• This film is evidence that Howard Shore is a goddamn genius at dramatically scary and intense film scores, if not film scores in general.
• The fact that Seth's project would have inevitably ended in tragedy, regardless of his fate. Even if Seth had teleported safely, the telepods would have eventually gone public. Who knows how many people would have been mutated before the design flaw was discovered and the machines were recalled? Unless the intention is to have human operators of the telepods' computer terminals to check and ensure there are no foreign bodies in them when the subject is being teleported.

---