Credit: Far Out / Moviestore Entertainment
October 31st, 2026 · 11:00am GMT
In today’s glut of reboots and reimaginings, one 1986 revisit of a creature feature from Hollywood’s B-movie heyday still stands as one of the finest examples of the top-tier movie remake.
Horror should offer fantastic potential for any writer and director to mine yesteryear’s creature features and fright flicks and repurpose them for a new era. Social anxieties shift with each passing decade, and Hollywood’s horror landscape has tried its best to exploit such febrile milieus to capture the imagination and make serious dough at the box office.
In a sea of limp The Fog retreads, unnecessary Psycho shot-for-shot imitations, and the awful effort to turn the Universal Monsters canon into a Marvel Cinematic Universe-style action caper, a few directors manage to grasp the essence of the material they’re grappling with and prod new targets of unease.
With Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the sinister pod people jumped from a McCarthyite Cold War-chiller to a parable of post-Watergate paranoia. The zombies that lurch towards the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead were motivated by mindless consumerism in the original before becoming an allegory of post-9/11 breakdown in the 2004 remake. HG Wells’s immortal The Invisible Man was twisted into a #MeToo examination of the invisible effects of gaslighting abuse from the Universal classic’s 1933 tale of irresponsible science and Dust Bowl ruin.
It was 1986 that boasted the finest horror reimagining of the lot. Intended as an apologue based on the mortal certitude of ageing but afforded extra pertinence amid a climate wracked by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, The Fly saw David Cronenberg apply his signature body horror lens to Kurt Neumann’s 1958 original. Honouring the narrative thread of a scientist inventing a teleportation device and a common housefly’s travel through space to horrifying conclusions, it depicted the genetic haywire of man and insect via a slow and miserable physical deterioration rather than a simple head swap, all watched in anguish by his partner.
Jeff Goldblum’s turn as Seth Brundle stands as tall as anything from Lon Chaney or Boris Karloff, grippingly capturing the psychological breakdown of the nebbish scientist’s collapse into the ‘Brundlefly’ hybrid that twists the mind before it transforms his body into a new form with human and fly characteristics. So proud was he of the film that Goldblum allegedly sent one of the stars of the original picture a handwritten letter of torch-passing appreciation: “I hope you like it as much as I liked yours.”
Horror icon Vincent Price never actually played the scientist, the head-swapped inventor going to David Hedison, but he did lend his theatrical command to the scientist’s brother, François. Speaking nearly 30 years later on The Sinister Image to film historian David Del Valle, Price expressed warmth regarding Goldblum’s “terribly sweet” gesture, but found that Cronenberg’s take on The Fly strayed too far into the realm of gore, as well as lacking a strong “moralistic tale” in the vein of the pathos of 1931’s Frankenstein.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Price is not wrong on the gore front. As is typical of the Cronenberg oeuvre, The Fly depicts all manner of fleshy mutation with the finest puppetry, prosthetics, and buckets of fake viscera ready for the camera, from broken wrists in an arm wrestle gone wrong and pus-oozing fingernails, to corrosive vomit attacks that melt away limbs. It was the ‘vomit drop’ that turned Price off, finding the scene where Brundle gags an acidic enzyme onto doughnuts to then consume the dissolved slurry both nauseating and unintentionally hilarious.
Yet lacking a moral tale? 1986’s The Fly indeed disregards the original’s closing line: “The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world and the most dangerous”, but, aside from the standard cautionary warnings about scientific hubris, Cronenberg reveals a deeper truth to his sci-fi horror that no moral teaching can ever contend with: that physical degradation, ebbing mental faculties, and infirm vulnerability await us all as death beckons with its bony finger every single day.
