THE FLY (1958)
#31DaysOfHorror — October 8
This October, for the second year in a row, I’ll be reviewing one horror movie each day! Respected classics, trashy and forgotten B-movies, both new frights and old… I love ‘em all. Well, some of them I’ll probably hate. We’ll see.
The Plot
Late one night, François receives a panicked phone call from Helene, his sister-in-law. She’s killed his brother Andre, she tells him. Sure enough, he gets a phone call from the night watchman at the factory he owns with Andre; the night watchman has found a body crushed to death in a press.
Is Helene insane? Why has she committed this horrifying crime? Eventually, as she’s about to be either hanged for murder or institutionalized, she tells François and the Inspector the tale of her genius of a husband’s invention of a teleportation machine. It worked perfectly, she says, until a terrifying accident occurred— a fly found its way into the teleportation chamber, causing his atoms to be scrambled with the fly’s. He had become a horrifying, disfigured monster, half-human and half-fly; their only hope, then, would be to find the fly so they could possibly switch back.
My Review
I first saw The Fly when I was much younger. I remember sitting on my grandparents’ floor, watching the TV in their living room, being absolutely scared out of my mind at the end when the little fly-man caught in the spider web squeals “Heeeelllpppp meeeee!” Oddly, I swear the movie was in black and white. It appears I’m not alone in remembering the movie was black-and-white, although it does appear that I’m wrong. Because the BluRay version I watched for #31DaysOfHorror is in gorgeous, vibrant Technicolor. (The Netflix transfer [from which the screencaps in this article are taken] isn’t quite as vibrant or colorful, but the movie still looks pretty great, so I suggest giving it a watch there if you don’t have the BluRay.)
What a fun film. It’s not particularly “scary” for the vast majority of its runtime, but I love just about every aspect of it anyway. The set design, best exemplified by the excessive neon tubing in the image above, presents a delightfully over-the-top atomic-age conception of a scientist’s laboratory. “I don’t understand why parts of [the teleportation machine] work,” Andre tells his wife. Me neither. It doesn’t work. It’s impossible, we’re told over and over. But really, who cares how when it looks this cool?
Markers of the “atomic age” are all over this film, starting with one of the posters. “The first time atomic mutation on humans has been shown on the screen!” the poster screams, while some woman who isn’t even in the movie crawls away from the fly. The film has nothing to do with the atom bomb — technically, yes, Andre’s atoms have mutated, but it’s because they got scrambled with a fly’s, not because of radiation from an atomic bomb, like the vast majority of people reading that tagline would assume. Still, though; the postwar 1950s were a volatile time of technological advancement and social change, and the husband and wife at the center of the film have numerous conversations about the importance of technology, of science, and of the possibility for human enlightenment. Andre’s invention will change the world! they believe. The whole film is dripping with a very specifically ‘50s sense of wonder about science… until, that is, it gets very dark.
I’m very interested in the way the vast majority of the film is told from Helene’s perspective; it is she who gets to express the tensions and fears of the atomic age. She’s a stereotypically-devoted 1950s housewife for much of the film — dutifully allowing her husband to work in his lab whenever he wants, sometimes not seeing him for days on end; politely walking away without complaint when he becomes fixated on an idea and suddenly starts ignoring her mid-conversation; bringing him a saucer full of milk and rum when he slips her a note under the door one fateful night; repeatedly crushing his malformed head under a machine press until his blood pours across the floor. Y’know, all things any woman must do for her man. Gradually, her dual role as wife and mother takes her down a dark, unfathomably twisted path, as she’s forced to commit a horrific murder, and then to pretend to be insane, all for the sake of her son; the woman’s desires are almost never taken into account, as she must sacrifice everything.
“Andre, I get so scared sometimes,” Helene says, after Andre tells her that he’s accidentally disintegrated their cat and sent a stream of cat-atoms beaming out into space. “The suddenness of our age. Electronics. Rockets. Earth-satellites. Supersonic flight… and now this. It’s not so much who invents them; it’s the fact they exist!”
Andre laughs. She’s being a silly woman who doesn’t understand such manly pursuits as scientific advancement. “But you’re not frightened of TV or radio! Or of X-rays or electricity! Or that the earth is round!”
“No, but…” she answers, contemplating. “I’m just not ready to take it all in. It’s all so… quick.”
For a while, she tries, even after Andre’s accident has left him staggering around his laboratory, his face covered with a cloth to protect her from his new, grotesque head. It’s in these early post-transformation scenes that the horror elements of the film really start to creep in. Wisely, the film prevents us from seeing Andre’s horrific new head for the vast majority of the movie; instead, we just see a figure, standing in the corner of the room, and it’s incredibly unsettling.
During this encounter, Helene first catches a glimpse of what has happened to her husband when she sees his fly-arm, which he can’t seem to control. She clutches her face and shrieks — Patricia Owens gives good scream — and we truly feel her disgust and revulsion, even as she’s battling with the knowledge that the frightening arm belongs to the man she loves.
Andre eventually explains that he’s switched heads with a fly, and Helene dutifully spends a few days racing around the house trying to capture the other insect, looking more and more insane to her housekeeper. In the meantime, Andre’s mind becomes more and more muddled, until finally he can’t take it anymore. When she tells him that she’s failed to find the fly, he asks her to kill him. She panics and suggests that he teleport himself once more; perhaps this will un-scramble his atoms! But when he emerges from the chamber…
It didn’t work! The monster lurches at her, completely unrecognizable as her husband. Once more, Helene screams, and this time, in the film’s crowning, stand-out moment, we get a point-of-view shot from the perspective of the fly, looking out through his compound eyes at his wife.
In this moment, the consequence of atomic-age scientific “advancement” finally revealed to her, Helene is horrified, and she stands in for the entire era, for everyone uncomfortable with how rapidly society was changing around them. She is multiplied into an army, thousands of terrified housewives shrieking in unison at the “suddenness of the age.” This is what their devotion to their husbands has given them — this horrific thing now advancing on her, its intentions completely inscrutable behind those gigantic glassy eyes, threatening to upend everything she thought she knew about her life and future. “Rockets, Earth-satellites, super-sonic flight, and now, this.”
This movie exemplifies what I love about the power of the horror genre. Sure, The Fly is made to shock and disgust, to get our bodies to react in a physical way to something we’re seeing on screen. But, operating at the height of its generic powers — which, for the 1950s, The Fly certainly is — horror has the potential to provide real, visceral social commentary, to make us consider the dark, twisted underbelly of society in ways that other genres would never come close to touching. Life as a 1950s housewife wasn’t all Leave it to Beaver. There is a darkness just under the surface of the idyllic American nuclear family, and films like The Fly lay it bare for us.
The movies are usually a diversion, a way to escape from the everyday horrors of real life. In fact, to distract little Philippe from his mother’s horrific situation — she’s about to be charged with murdering her husband and carted off in a straightjacket to live out the rest of her life in a padded cell — Vincent Price’s character François tells Philippe, “I know! I’ll take you to the movies!” Generally speaking, the movies are how you get away from situations like this. But not horror films. Not The Fly.
It’s the little fly-man at the end of the film who squeals “Heeeelp meeeeee!” in such a desperate, tinny voice, as a spider draws him close, about to gnaw off his head. But, one can easily imagine the same voice nagging at the back of the minds of suburban housewives all over America as the 1950s draw to a close and society changes faster than they’re expected to understand, leaving them suffering in silence as society considers their problems too small, too laughable to do anything about. “Pleeeeeeease! Oh, pleeeeeease… Heeeeeelp meeeeee…”
