A scientific experiment goes wrong, and a man turns into a fly. This served as the recipe for an O.K. ’50s mutant movie. David Cronenberg’s remake went way beyond, and I don’t mean in its deliciously grotesque special effects. The film turned the malignancy of its misguided hero (Jeff Goldblum) into a metaphor for all degenerative diseases — cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s — and the effect it has on the victim. He fights it; he tries to outthink it; he monitors his deterioration, with irony, then anger. Because The Fly is about a man facing his own decay and hoping against hope to negotiate with the inevitable, it is the most human of all horror films.
Top 25 Horror Movies
From silent vampires to animated murders to sharks that won't die, TIME chronicles the best from more than a century's worth of big-screen scares
The Fly
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Full List
Horror Movies
- Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
- The Fly
- The Exorcist
- Night of the Living Dead
- Freaks
- Blood Feast
- Carrie
- Men Behind the Sun
- Paranormal Activity
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
- Thirst
- Braindead/Dead Alive
- Jaws
- Bambi
- Audition
- The Phantom of the Opera
- Trilogy of Terror
- Peeping Tom
- Halloween
- Frankenstein
- Nosferatu
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers
- Alien
- Psycho