40 years ago, ’The Fly’ was the quintessential David Cronenberg body horror film

Director David Cronenberg is so associated with the body horror genre that just about any movie that approaches that topic will end up compared to his work, even if it doesn’t feel much like it in any other way. And the Cronenberg body horror ur-text was The Fly, his film from 1984 that starred Jeff Goldblum as a man who unwittingly turns himself into the titular insect- and Geena Davis as the woman who loved him.

The Fly was released in August of 1986, 40 years ago this week, and was Cronenberg’s tenth feature, following the releases three years earlier of Videodrome and The Dead Zone.

Written by Cronenberg and Charles Edward Pogue, The Fly was based on a short story published in Playboy in the 1950s and previously adapted into a movie in 1958. Its producer is surprising: Mel Brooks, who was actually involved in the project before Cronenberg was. It was part of his 1980s run of producing non-comedies, which also included David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.

Jeff Goldblum has played a lot of scientists over the years, but none quite like Seth Brundle, his character in The Fly, and not only because of the prodigious mullet. Early on, he meets journalist Veronica “Ronnie” Quaife, and does what’s clearly every single girl’s dream: He invites her to his loft apartment to show off his teleportation machine. Ronnie is conflicted between her journalistic obligations and the requests of her ex-lover/boss, Stathis Borans (John Getz).

Somehow, she ends up with this odd scientist, and the two end up in a flirty relationship. Goldblum and Davis were later married and divorced, and also starred together in Transylvania 6-5000 and Earth Girls Are Easy. But Seth’s mad-scientist inclinations get in the way when he accidentally includes an errant fly in one of his teleportation experiments.

This starts by giving Seth Spider-Man-like super-strength powers, but later he lapses into grotesquerie, slowly turning into a fly. The longer the movie goes on, the grosser he looks, and the more disgusting materials begin to discharge from his body. And that’s before we get into her pregnancy, the question of whether their unborn child might have the fly mutation, and one of the most horrifying dream-sequence scares in the history of the movies.