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THE TECHNOLOGY THAT WORKED: Teleportation and the Horror of Progress

21 Friday Aug 2026

Posted by in retrospective, the fly

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The most frightening thing about The Fly is not that Seth Brundle’s teleportation experiment goes wrong. It is that it works. That distinction sits quietly at the centre of David Cronenberg’s 1986 masterpiece. The telepods are not some half-finished contraption that malfunctions because their creator has failed to understand the science. They do precisely what Seth Brundle has designed them to do. They disintegrate matter at one point and reintegrate it at another. They take the impossible idea of instantaneous transportation and make it real.

The horror begins when the machine becomes capable of doing something its creator has not yet considered. And that is a much more disturbing proposition. Science fiction has traditionally presented technological progress as a gateway to possibility. The invention opens the door. Humanity walks through it. In The Fly, Cronenberg asks what happens when the door opens onto somewhere humanity was never prepared to go.

Seth Brundle doesn’t invent a failed machine. He invents a successful one with consequences he cannot comprehend. That makes the telepods one of the great pieces of technology in horror cinema—not because they are impossible, but because Cronenberg understands that technological progress is rarely frightening because something doesn’t work. It is frightening because something does.

A Machine That Changes the Rules

When Seth first demonstrates the telepods to Veronica Quaife, the scene is almost charming. There is excitement in his voice. He is awkward, excitable and utterly convinced that he has achieved something extraordinary. And he has. The machine transports Veronica’s stocking from one pod to another. Matter has crossed space without travelling through it. Seth has effectively abolished the journey between two points. The achievement is staggering. It is also beautifully modest.

Cronenberg doesn’t introduce the telepods with the fanfare of a conventional science-fiction blockbuster. There is no enormous laboratory filled with gleaming machinery. The devices sit inside a grimy warehouse, resembling oversized phone booths. Veronica initially approaches them with understandable scepticism. Yet there they are. They work.

The film’s brilliance lies in making the technology seem plausible enough for us to accept it before we have had time to question what it actually means. What happens to something when it is disassembled? What constitutes the thing that arrives at the other end? If the original matter is destroyed and another arrangement of matter is created elsewhere, has the object travelled? Or has it died and been reconstructed?

These questions sit underneath The Fly without requiring the film to provide a philosophical lecture. The telepods simply operate, and the audience gradually realises that Seth has not merely invented transportation. He has invented a machine capable of rewriting matter. And eventually, himself.

The Telepod Doesn’t Understand Life

The first true warning comes when Seth attempts to teleport a living organism. The machine fails spectacularly. The baboon emerges mutilated, its body turned inside out.

This is perhaps the film’s most important technological moment because Seth has encountered a limitation he doesn’t initially understand. The telepods can recognise and reconstruct inorganic matter, but living flesh presents a problem. Seth’s response is not to abandon the experiment. He teaches the machine. That detail is crucial. He reprograms the computer so that it can understand the biological complexity of living tissue. The second baboon survives.

The technology has evolved. The problem has been solved. And that solution takes Seth one step closer to the catastrophe waiting for him. The machine isn’t evil. It isn’t defective. It is simply incapable of making the ethical distinction between what can be done and what should be done. Neither, increasingly, is Seth.

The Romance of Progress

Seth’s relationship with Veronica is intimately connected to his technological ambitions. She is not merely a journalist documenting his invention. She becomes the human presence capable of interrupting his increasingly isolated relationship with the machine. Their romance initially seems to make Seth more human. It also makes his technology more ambitious. The moment he begins thinking about living matter differently, the telepods move from being a means of transportation to a mechanism for manipulating biological existence.

The machine changes because Seth changes. And Seth changes because of the machine. The relationship becomes circular. Technology gives him power. Power gives him confidence. Confidence gives him recklessness. Recklessness sends him back into the machine. This is why his self-teleportation is not simply an act of scientific curiosity.

It is an act of arrogance. He has solved the problem. He believes he understands the system. He believes he understands himself. He is wrong.

The Fly Is Not the Accident

The housefly that enters the telepod with Seth has often been treated as the random accident that sets the tragedy in motion. But randomness isn’t really the point. The fly is merely the final variable in a system Seth has already chosen to trust. The machine detects two biological entities. It does not panic. It does not malfunction. It makes a decision. It fuses them.

The computer identifies the presence of two organisms and produces a result that is, according to the logic of the machine, perfectly coherent: a new biological entity created from both sources. The film describes this as fusion at a molecular-genetic level.

The horror is therefore not that the computer fails to understand what it is doing. The horror is that it understands exactly enough to do it. Seth has built a machine capable of interpreting life as information. And once life becomes information, the distinction between human and insect becomes a problem of data. That is a profoundly Cronenbergian nightmare.

Technology Has No Morality

The telepods don’t know that Seth is a human being. They don’t know that he has a history. They don’t know that he loves Veronica. They don’t know that he has hopes for his future. They don’t know that a fly is a fly. They process information. That is their function. And this is where the film’s technological horror becomes more interesting than the conventional “mad scientist” narrative.

Seth does not unleash an evil machine upon the world. He creates a machine without a moral framework. It can perform the operation. It cannot determine whether the operation should occur. That responsibility remains with the human being operating it. And Seth gradually becomes incapable of carrying that responsibility. The machine isn’t corrupting him. It is revealing the danger of giving enormous power to someone who has mistaken intelligence for wisdom.

The Illusion of Purification

Immediately after his teleportation, Seth initially believes the machine has improved him. He is stronger. He is more energetic. His sexual confidence increases. He becomes almost evangelical about the experience.

Teleportation, he believes, has purified him. This is one of the film’s darkest jokes. The scientist has just undergone the most profound biological transformation imaginable and interprets the result as technological progress. He isn’t horrified by his body. He is impressed by it. He believes he has been upgraded. That word is important.

Seth doesn’t initially think he is becoming something else. He thinks he is becoming something better. The language of technological progress has entered his understanding of his own body. He has not become ill. He has evolved. He has not deteriorated. He has improved. The horror is that the distinction between those ideas becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

The Body as Software

Cronenberg’s great innovation is to make biological transformation feel like technological transformation. Seth’s body begins behaving as though it has received a corrupted software update. His fingernails detach. His skin changes. His bodily functions alter. His strength increases. His instincts become increasingly insectoid. The machine has rewritten him. And yet the process isn’t presented as a simple mutation. Seth becomes fascinated by the logic of what is happening to him. He studies his own transformation. He documents it. He gives it a name.

Brundlefly.

The scientist turns himself into the subject. He becomes both experiment and experimenter. This is one of the film’s most unsettling ideas: Seth retains enough scientific curiosity to observe his own destruction. He can see what is happening. He simply cannot stop it.

The Horror of Improvement

There is something particularly disturbing about the way Seth initially embraces his transformation because it reflects a very human faith in progress. We are conditioned to believe that new technology will make us faster, stronger, healthier and more efficient. Seth experiences exactly those things. He becomes stronger. He becomes faster. He develops abilities that his human body never possessed. If the transformation had stopped there, the telepods might have been celebrated as a technological miracle. Instead, Cronenberg asks the question that technological optimism frequently avoids:

What if becoming more efficient means becoming less human?

That is the heart of The Fly. Seth’s transformation isn’t simply from man to insect.It is from human complexity to biological efficiency. The fly doesn’t possess human morality.

It doesn’t possess human empathy. It doesn’t worry about dignity. It simply survives. Seth’s physical improvement therefore corresponds with a moral deterioration. The better his body becomes at being a fly, the worse he becomes at being Seth Brundle.

The Machine Cannot Give Him Back

Eventually Seth understands what the telepods have done. He tries to reverse the process. And once again, the technology works. The problem is that Seth’s understanding of the machine has changed. He is no longer simply trying to teleport himself. He is trying to manipulate identity.

He wants to use another human being to dilute the fly genes within his body. The telepod has become a mechanism for genetic reconstruction. The scientist who once wanted to transport matter across space now wants to use the same machine to decide what species he should belong to. This escalation is one of the film’s most devastating ideas. The technology never changes. Seth’s ambitions do.

Every solution creates a larger problem because the underlying assumption remains the same:

If something can be altered, it should be altered.

The telepods have given Seth extraordinary power. They have not given him wisdom.

The Telepods as a Modern Faustian Bargain

There is a distinctly Faustian structure to The Fly. Seth possesses knowledge that appears almost miraculous. He has achieved something that should be impossible. And the achievement transforms his understanding of what is possible. But unlike the traditional Faustian bargain, there is no demon standing outside the laboratory demanding payment. There doesn’t need to be. The invention itself is the bargain. Seth gets what he wants. He simply discovers that wanting it was the problem.

The telepods offer him freedom from physical distance. They ultimately imprison him inside his own biology. They promise instantaneous transportation. They leave him unable to escape his own body. They represent the conquest of nature. They demonstrate how little Seth understands nature in the first place. The machine therefore becomes a perfect symbol of technological hubris.

The Horror of Progress

Cronenberg made The Fly in the middle of a decade obsessed with technological acceleration. Computers were becoming increasingly embedded within everyday life. Biotechnology was advancing. Corporate science was becoming increasingly powerful. The language of innovation was increasingly associated with progress, wealth and human advancement. And yet Cronenberg’s film refuses to celebrate progress unconditionally.

It asks who controls it. Who benefits from it? Who understands its consequences? And what happens when the person operating the machine is so fascinated by what it can do that they stop asking whether it should be done? Those questions remain remarkably contemporary.

The real-world concept of teleportation is vastly different from Cronenberg’s fictional technology. Modern quantum teleportation concerns the transfer of quantum information rather than transporting a person or physical object intact from one place to another. Even speculative models of reconstructing a human being raise enormous questions concerning information, matter and identity. But The Fly doesn’t require its science to be literally predictive. It is using science fiction to explore a philosophical anxiety. What happens when technology gives us the ability to alter the fundamental conditions of existence before we have decided what those conditions mean?

The Technology That Worked

This is why the telepods are so important to The Fly. They are not a failed invention. They are an extraordinary success. Seth Brundle genuinely changes the world. His invention would transform civilisation if it could be perfected and controlled. Distance becomes irrelevant. Transportation is revolutionised. Matter can apparently be broken apart and reconstructed elsewhere. The miracle is real. And that is precisely why the film is horrifying. If the telepods had simply exploded, there would be no tragedy. If they had never worked, Seth would have remained a scientist pursuing an impossible dream. Instead, he succeeds. He creates the future. And then discovers that the future has no obligation to preserve him.

The Last Teleportation

By the end of The Fly, the telepods have ceased to represent progress. They represent inevitability. Seth enters the machine one final time not as the brilliant young scientist who first demonstrated his invention to Veronica, but as something barely recognisable as human. His body has become a fusion of flesh, insect and technology. His final transformation is grotesquely appropriate. He is no longer merely a man who has been changed by technology. He has become an entity created by technology.

The telepod has completed its journey from transportation device to biological engine. And when the final creature crawls from the wreckage and silently asks Veronica to end its suffering, the machine has achieved something almost unbearably tragic. It has worked perfectly. It has simply delivered its creator somewhere he never intended to go.

The Prognosis:

The genius of The Fly is that David Cronenberg never asks us to fear science itself. Science is not the villain. Technology is not inherently evil. Progress is not inherently destructive. The telepods are magnificent. That is what makes them terrifying. The film instead interrogates the faith we place in our inventions and the assumption that technological capability automatically represents human progress.

Seth Brundle can move matter through space. He cannot understand the meaning of being human. He can teach a machine to understand living tissue. He cannot understand the ethical consequences of altering it. He can rewrite biology. He cannot rewrite mortality. And when he finally attempts to use his own invention to escape what he has become, the machine does what it has always done. It obeys.

The horror is not that technology fails us. It is that technology can succeed perfectly while we fail ourselves. That is the true nightmare inside The Fly. The telepods don’t open a gateway to the future. They reveal the cost of arriving there too quickly.

  • Saul Muerte

The Woman Watching the Monster: Geena Davis’s Veronica Quaife

14 Friday Aug 2026

Posted by in retrospective, the fly

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When audiences think back to David Cronenberg’s The Fly, the images that usually come first are those of Jeff Goldblum’s extraordinary transformation. They remember the telepods, the deteriorating flesh, the grotesque practical effects and the slow evolution of Seth Brundle into Brundlefly. It is one of horror cinema’s most iconic metamorphoses and, rightly, Goldblum’s performance has become inseparable from the film’s legacy.

Yet focusing solely on Seth’s transformation risks overlooking the character who gives the film its emotional centre. Without Veronica Quaife, The Fly would still be a landmark of body horror. With her, it becomes something far more devastating: a love story about watching someone disappear while they are still standing in front of you.

Geena Davis does far more than play the romantic lead. She becomes the audience’s emotional anchor, guiding us through a tragedy that is as much about witnessing irreversible change as it is about enduring it. While Seth experiences the horror from within, Veronica experiences it from the outside. She cannot stop the transformation, cannot reverse it and cannot fully understand it. All she can do is watch, hope and eventually accept what neither science nor love can overcome.

One of the reasons Veronica remains such a compelling character is that she is never written as a passive participant in the story. Horror cinema has often relegated women to the role of victim or survivor, but Veronica occupies a far more nuanced position. She is an accomplished science journalist whose curiosity introduces her to Seth Brundle’s revolutionary work. She is intelligent, professionally ambitious and emotionally independent long before romance enters the picture.

That independence is crucial because it establishes the relationship on equal terms. Veronica is not drawn to Seth because he rescues her or because the screenplay requires a romance. She falls in love with his brilliance, his awkward humour and his boundless enthusiasm. Seth’s eccentricity becomes part of his charm, and Goldblum and Davis’ real-life relationship lends these early scenes a warmth that feels remarkably natural. Before The Fly becomes a horror film, it is almost a romantic drama, allowing audiences to invest in two people whose affection feels authentic rather than manufactured.

This emotional groundwork is what transforms the film’s second half into something so painful. The audience is not simply watching a scientist mutate into a monster; they are watching a relationship slowly disintegrate under the weight of something neither partner can control. Veronica remains committed to Seth long after most people would have walked away, continually searching for traces of the man she first met beneath the increasingly grotesque exterior.

In many ways, Veronica’s journey resembles what psychologists now describe as anticipatory grief. It is the experience of mourning someone before they have physically died—a gradual process of recognising that the person you love is slipping away while still being physically present. Cronenberg captures this emotional reality with remarkable sensitivity. Seth is alive throughout the film, yet every stage of his transformation places another layer of distance between who he was and who he is becoming.

Geena Davis communicates this progression with extraordinary restraint. Rather than relying on dramatic emotional outbursts, she allows Veronica’s heartbreak to accumulate quietly. Small changes in expression, lingering silences and hesitant glances often reveal more than pages of dialogue ever could. As Seth becomes increasingly isolated within his own body, Veronica becomes increasingly isolated within her own grief. She is forced to watch events unfold with growing helplessness, recognising long before Seth does that there may be no cure.

Veronica’s profession also becomes surprisingly significant. As a journalist, she is trained to observe, investigate and seek evidence before reaching conclusions. Those instincts shape her response to Seth’s transformation. She refuses to dismiss what she is seeing, yet equally refuses to surrender to hysteria. Instead, she approaches the impossible with the same intellectual curiosity that first attracted her to Seth. Ironically, it is that shared belief in reason that makes the tragedy so much harder to bear. Knowledge offers neither of them comfort. It simply confirms the inevitability of what is happening.

As Seth’s physical deterioration accelerates, Veronica’s role gradually shifts from partner to caregiver. This aspect of The Fly often receives less attention than its spectacular body horror, yet it remains one of the film’s most emotionally truthful elements. She worries about Seth’s wellbeing, encourages him to seek help, attempts to protect him from his own increasingly destructive impulses and continues to care for him even as his appearance becomes almost unrecognisable.

Cronenberg presents caregiving not as heroic spectacle but as an act of quiet endurance. Veronica cannot fight the disease consuming Seth because there is no external enemy to defeat. Her greatest act of courage lies simply in remaining present. That emotional commitment gives The Fly much of its enduring humanity. The horror does not stem solely from physical mutation but from the painful recognition that love cannot always prevent loss.

The film’s infamous nightmare sequence, in which Veronica dreams of giving birth to a grotesque larval creature, extends these themes even further. On the surface, it functions as one of Cronenberg’s most memorable moments of body horror. Beneath that shock lies a profound anxiety about the body’s unpredictability. Seth’s mutation has infected Veronica’s imagination, transforming pregnancy—a symbol of hope and new life—into another source of terrifying uncertainty. It reinforces one of Cronenberg’s central ideas: the human body can never be fully controlled, even by those who inhabit it.

Throughout the film, Geena Davis never competes with the extraordinary makeup effects surrounding her. Instead, she grounds them. Every grotesque transformation Seth undergoes becomes emotionally meaningful because Veronica reacts not simply with fear, but with compassion, disbelief and lingering affection. She continually reminds both Seth and the audience that there is still a person worth saving beneath the decaying flesh.

This emotional perspective reaches its devastating conclusion during the film’s final moments. The horrific fusion of Brundlefly and the telepod remains one of horror cinema’s most unforgettable images, yet the true emotional climax belongs to Veronica. When the grotesque creature silently raises the shotgun towards itself, she immediately understands the request being made.

She is not destroying a monster.

She is granting mercy to the man she still recognises.

That distinction is what elevates the ending beyond conventional horror. Veronica’s final act is not one of victory but of compassion. She sees Seth when almost every visible trace of him has disappeared. In doing so, she reminds the audience that humanity cannot always be measured by appearance alone.

Looking back forty years later, Veronica Quaife feels more relevant than ever. Modern audiences, particularly those who have experienced serious illness, degenerative disease or the responsibilities of caregiving, often recognise her journey as much as Seth’s. While The Fly is frequently celebrated for its astonishing practical effects, its emotional longevity owes just as much to Davis’ understated performance. She transforms a story of physical mutation into a meditation on love, grief and acceptance.

The Prognosis:

If Seth Brundle embodies the horror of losing oneself, Veronica Quaife embodies the heartbreak of watching someone you love disappear piece by piece. Geena Davis gives The Fly its emotional soul, ensuring that beneath every layer of prosthetic makeup remains a relationship worth mourning. Her performance reminds us that monsters are rarely frightening simply because of what they become. They are frightening because someone remembers who they used to be.

Forty years after its release, The Fly continues to move audiences not solely because of Brundlefly’s extraordinary transformation, but because Veronica never stops searching for Seth beneath it. In the end, she teaches us the film’s most profound truth: love does not end when bodies change. It simply asks more of those who remain.

  • Saul Muerte

The Monster Who Knew What He Was Becoming: Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle

07 Friday Aug 2026

Posted by in retrospective, the fly

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Cinema has given us no shortage of unforgettable monsters. Dracula, Frankenstein’s Creature, the Wolf Man, the Xenomorph and The Thing have each become permanent fixtures in horror’s collective imagination. Among them stands Brundlefly, one of the most grotesque and tragic creations the genre has ever produced. Yet what distinguishes Seth Brundle from almost every monster that came before him is not simply his horrific transformation, but his awareness of it. He does not awaken as a creature stripped of his humanity. Instead, he experiences every stage of his own physical and psychological decline, fully conscious of the man he once was.

That distinction is what elevates David Cronenberg’s The Fly beyond a masterclass in practical effects and into the realm of genuine tragedy. While Chris Walas deservedly received an Academy Award for his astonishing makeup effects, those prosthetics only work because Jeff Goldblum never disappears beneath them. His performance ensures that every new mutation carries emotional weight. We are not merely watching a body change—we are watching a man remain painfully aware of his own extinction.

An Unlikely Horror Icon

By 1986, Jeff Goldblum was already recognised as one of Hollywood’s most distinctive actors, though not yet as a horror icon. There was always something unconventional about his screen presence. His dialogue seemed to emerge as though he were discovering each thought in real time. His speech was fragmented but articulate, his intelligence obvious without ever becoming cold, and his awkward charm made even the most eccentric characters feel strangely relatable.

Those qualities made him the perfect choice for Seth Brundle.

Cronenberg did not need a conventional leading man. He needed an actor capable of making extraordinary intelligence feel entirely believable without sacrificing warmth or vulnerability. Seth is a brilliant scientist, but he is also socially awkward, excitable and endearingly isolated. Goldblum gives him an infectious enthusiasm that immediately draws both Veronica Quaife and the audience into his world.

That emotional investment is crucial because The Fly asks us to mourn Seth long before he physically disappears. We first have to believe he is worth loving.

A Romance Before the Horror

One of the most remarkable aspects of The Fly is how gently it begins. The opening movement plays less like a horror film than an intimate romantic drama. Seth and Veronica’s conversations are playful and spontaneous, full of overlapping dialogue and genuine curiosity about one another. Their chemistry feels effortless because it was. Goldblum and Geena Davis were in a relationship during production, and that affection quietly informs every scene they share.

Cronenberg wisely allows audiences to fall in love with Seth before introducing the telepod accident. This isn’t simply narrative economy—it is emotional architecture. The horror only becomes devastating because the audience understands exactly what Veronica stands to lose.

Without those early scenes, Brundlefly would simply be another monster.

Instead, he becomes someone we grieve.

The Transformation Begins Before the Makeup

Much has been written about the extraordinary stages of Brundlefly’s physical transformation, but the real metamorphosis begins long before the prosthetics become apparent.

Watch Goldblum’s body language after Seth emerges from the telepod.

The timid, slightly hunched scientist gradually disappears. His posture becomes more upright. His movements become larger, more confident and increasingly animalistic. Even the rhythm of his speech changes. The hesitant pauses that once reflected careful thought give way to absolute certainty.

The transformation initially appears exhilarating.

Seth is stronger.

More energetic.

More confident.

For a brief moment, even the audience wonders whether the accident has somehow improved him.

Goldblum plays this phase with remarkable restraint. He never tips into overt madness. Instead, he allows confidence to slowly curdle into arrogance. The audience senses something is wrong long before Seth does, making his growing exhilaration quietly unsettling rather than triumphant.

The Seduction of Evolution

One of The Fly’s greatest achievements is making Seth’s transformation initially desirable. His newfound physical abilities feel liberating. He no longer requires sleep. He possesses extraordinary strength and stamina. He speaks excitedly about humanity evolving into something greater.

For a brief period, Seth genuinely believes he has transcended human limitation.

Goldblum makes that belief completely convincing.

His infectious excitement almost persuades us that the experiment has been a success.

Almost.

Beneath every smile lies something unsettling. His confidence becomes too absolute. His certainty leaves no room for doubt. He stops questioning himself because he no longer sees any reason to.

Cronenberg allows audiences to experience the seduction of transformation alongside Seth, making the inevitable collapse all the more tragic.

Performing the Man, Not the Monster

Perhaps Goldblum’s greatest achievement is that he never actually performs Brundlefly.

He performs Seth Brundle trying desperately to remain Seth Brundle.

There is a profound difference.

Many monster performances ask actors to abandon humanity altogether. Goldblum does precisely the opposite. Even beneath increasingly elaborate makeup, fragments of the original scientist remain visible. His humour survives. His curiosity survives. His intelligence survives. Even his compassion lingers beneath the growing desperation.

The body changes faster than the person inside it.

That is why Brundlefly remains heartbreaking rather than merely grotesque.

The tragedy is not that Seth disappears.

It is that he remains trapped inside a body that no longer allows him to express who he is.

Knowledge as a Curse

Unlike so many cinematic monsters, Seth fully understands what is happening to him.

He analyses his own symptoms with scientific precision. He examines discarded fingernails and loose teeth. He studies his deteriorating body with the detached curiosity of a researcher before gradually realising that he has become both scientist and experiment.

Knowledge offers no comfort.

Instead, it becomes another form of suffering.

Goldblum never allows panic to overwhelm intelligence. Even as Seth deteriorates, his mind continues to function. That continued awareness makes every stage of the transformation infinitely more painful.

The audience is not watching ignorance.

We are watching consciousness imprisoned within irreversible biological change.

Looking Into the Mirror

Throughout The Fly, Cronenberg repeatedly returns Seth to the mirror.

Each glance becomes another confrontation with the loss of identity.

Initially, Seth examines himself with scientific curiosity. Later, he searches desperately for reassurance that the person he remembers still exists.

Goldblum’s reactions remain beautifully understated. He rarely resorts to melodrama. Instead, subtle expressions communicate dawning recognition, quiet fear and reluctant acceptance.

Eventually, even the mirror ceases to provide answers.

It simply confirms that the transformation can no longer be denied.

The scientist who once sought objective truth now finds himself terrified by it.

“I’m an Insect Who Dreamt He Was a Man”

Late in the film, Seth delivers one of horror cinema’s most unforgettable lines:

“I’m saying… I’ll hurt you if you stay.”

Shortly afterwards comes the devastating realisation that he has become “an insect who dreamt he was a man.”

The power of these scenes lies not simply in the writing but in Goldblum’s extraordinary delivery.

Gone is the excitable scientist from the opening act.

Gone is the arrogant confidence of his post-telepod euphoria.

What remains is exhaustion.

Acceptance.

Grief.

Seth is no longer searching for a cure.

He is mourning himself.

One Final Act of Humanity

The closing moments of The Fly remain among the most emotionally devastating in horror cinema.

Fused with the telepod itself, Brundlefly has become the ultimate expression of Cronenberg’s New Flesh—a grotesque fusion of technology and biology.

Yet Goldblum somehow finds one final fragment of humanity.

Unable to speak, he raises the shotgun towards his own head.

It is not an act of aggression.

It is a plea.

He is asking Veronica to end his suffering.

There is no monster in that moment.

Only Seth.

The audience recognises him instantly.

Which makes Veronica’s decision almost unbearable.

The Man Beneath the Makeup

Practical effects frequently dominate discussions of The Fly, and rightly so. Chris Walas’ work remains among the greatest achievements in horror makeup. But effects alone cannot sustain emotional tragedy.

Goldblum provides the continuity that the makeup cannot.

Every physical stage is matched by an equally precise psychological evolution. We always understand where Seth is emotionally, even when we struggle to recognise him physically.

That remarkable consistency transforms Brundlefly from a special-effects triumph into one of horror’s most fully realised tragic figures.

The Prognosis:

Forty years after The Fly, Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle remains one of the greatest performances in horror cinema because it never loses sight of the man beneath the mutation.

His achievement lies not in convincing audiences that a scientist becomes part fly. It lies in convincing us that Seth Brundle never entirely disappears. Somewhere beneath the collapsing flesh, the fractured bones and the grotesque mutations remains the brilliant, awkward man who simply wanted to change the world.

That lingering humanity is what continues to haunt audiences decades later.

Brundlefly may be one of horror’s most unforgettable monsters.

But it is Seth Brundle we remember.

Jeff Goldblum ensures that every stage of the transformation carries not only physical horror but profound emotional loss. His performance reminds us that the true terror of The Fly is not becoming something monstrous.

It is remaining human long enough to understand exactly what has been lost.

  • Saul Muerte

Cronenberg’s Body: From Shivers to The Fly

31 Friday Jul 2026

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How David Cronenberg Turned Flesh Into Fear

Before Seth Brundle stepped into the telepod, David Cronenberg had already spent more than a decade asking audiences to look at the human body differently. Not as something sacred. Not as something inviolable. But as something vulnerable. Something porous. Something capable of changing without permission.

From the parasitic creatures of Shivers to the psychic violence of Scanners, from the biological mutation of Rabid to the technological nightmare of Videodrome, Cronenberg’s cinema has repeatedly returned to the same unsettling proposition:

The body is not a fixed thing.

It is a process.

And processes can go wrong.

By the time The Fly arrived in 1986, Cronenberg had already established himself as one of cinema’s great anatomists of fear. Yet the film represents something more than another entry in his growing body of work. It is a culmination. Everything Cronenberg had been exploring—the relationship between flesh and identity, science and mutation, sexuality and disease, technology and transformation—converges in Seth Brundle’s tragic metamorphosis. The fly did not arrive from nowhere. Cronenberg had been building towards it for years.

The Parasite Within

Shivers—released in 1975—announced Cronenberg as a filmmaker fascinated by the vulnerability of the human body. Its premise is deliberately grotesque. Parasitic creatures spread through a luxury apartment complex, transforming the residents into sexually driven hosts. But beneath the visceral horror lies an idea that would become central to Cronenberg’s cinema. The body can be invaded. Worse still, it can be persuaded to betray us.

The parasites in Shivers do not simply attack their victims from outside. They become part of them. The boundary between self and other begins to collapse.

This is a recurring Cronenberg anxiety. What happens when something enters the body and cannot be removed? What happens when the thing we fear is no longer outside us? What happens when we become the host? These questions would return repeatedly throughout his career. And eventually, in The Fly, the invader would be almost impossibly small.

A single insect.

A moment of contamination.

One microscopic intrusion capable of changing everything.

Rabid: The Body as Transmission

If Shivers introduced the idea of bodily invasion, Rabid developed it into something more recognisably biological. Rose is transformed following experimental surgery. The result is not merely physical alteration. Her body becomes a vector. An instrument of transmission. Those she encounters are infected. The personal becomes communal. The individual body becomes a threat to everyone around it.

Cronenberg’s fascination with disease is already apparent. The horror does not remain contained within one person.

It spreads.

It moves.

It crosses boundaries.

The body becomes both victim and perpetrator. That duality is crucial to understanding The Fly. Seth Brundle is both the person suffering from his transformation and the creature capable of causing harm. His tragedy is therefore not simply that his body is changing. It is that the transformation begins to change his relationship with everyone else. The disease becomes identity.

The Brood: Trauma Made Flesh

With The Brood, Cronenberg moved away from conventional infection and towards something more psychologically complex. The body becomes an expression of trauma. Pain becomes physical. Emotion becomes biological. The distinction between psychological and physiological suffering begins to disappear.

It is an idea that would become increasingly important to Cronenberg’s work. The body doesn’t simply experience the mind. It expresses it. This makes The Brood an important stepping stone towards The Fly. Seth Brundle’s transformation may be caused by science, but his experience is fundamentally emotional.

Fear.

Denial.

Anger.

Desperation.

Isolation.

His body becomes the physical manifestation of an existential crisis. Cronenberg’s monsters are therefore rarely just monsters. They are states of being.

Scanners: The Mind Is Flesh Too

If The Brood explored the relationship between emotion and the body, Scanners expanded Cronenberg’s investigation into the relationship between mind and matter. The film’s infamous exploding-head sequence remains one of the most iconic images in Cronenberg’s cinema. Yet its deeper significance lies in the idea that the body cannot be separated from consciousness. The mind is not an abstract entity floating above the physical world.

It exists within flesh.

It is vulnerable to flesh.

And when the mind is overwhelmed, the body pays the price.

This becomes crucial in The Fly.

Seth’s intellect survives even as his physical form deteriorates.

He remains conscious.

He remains aware.

The tragedy is not that his mind disappears alongside his body. It is that it remains. The monster knows what is happening.

Videodrome: Welcome to the New Flesh

If there is a single film that provides the philosophical bridge between Cronenberg’s early body horror and The Fly, it is Videodrome.

“Long live the new flesh.”

The phrase became a defining statement of Cronenberg’s cinema. In Videodrome, technology doesn’t simply affect the body. It becomes part of the body. The boundaries between human flesh, media and machinery collapse. Reality becomes unstable. The body becomes something that can be rewritten.

Transformed.

Reprogrammed.

The concept of the “New Flesh” is not simply about mutation. It is about the end of certainty. The human body is no longer a stable category. It can be altered by technology.

By disease.

By desire.

By trauma.

By information.

By the world around it.

By the time Seth Brundle enters the telepod, the question is no longer whether the body can change. Cronenberg has already answered that. The question is:

What happens when we discover that change cannot be stopped?

The Dead Zone: The Body as Burden

The Dead Zone is sometimes treated as an outlier in Cronenberg’s filmography. It shouldn’t be. Although it lacks the overt grotesquerie of Shivers or Videodrome, its protagonist is still trapped inside a body that has become unfamiliar. Johnny Smith wakes from a coma with extraordinary abilities. But those abilities come at a cost.

His body has changed.

His life has changed.

His identity has changed.

He is forced to live with knowledge that isolates him from everyone else.

The supernatural premise is different from Cronenberg’s earlier films, but the emotional territory remains familiar. The individual becomes trapped within a condition they did not choose. The body becomes a prison. The person remains inside.

The Human Animal

Cronenberg’s fascination with transformation has always extended beyond disease. It is also about evolution.

What separates humans from animals?

What happens when that boundary begins to disappear?

This question sits at the centre of The Fly.

Seth initially interprets his transformation as evolution. He calls it “Brundlefly.” He imagines that he has transcended the limitations of humanity. He has become something new.

Something stronger.

Something better.

The tragedy is that he is not entirely wrong. There is something seductive about his transformation.

He is faster.

Stronger.

More energetic.

His body initially appears to improve.

But Cronenberg turns evolutionary optimism into existential horror.

Evolution has no moral compass. New does not mean better. Stronger does not mean happier. Survival does not mean humanity. Seth’s transformation becomes a grotesque parody of progress.

Sex, Desire and the Body

Sexuality has always been deeply embedded within Cronenberg’s body horror. From Shivers onwards, physical intimacy is rarely presented as entirely safe. Desire creates vulnerability.

Bodies come together.

Boundaries disappear.

Something is exchanged.

In The Fly, the relationship between Seth and Veronica begins with attraction. Their intimacy becomes the emotional centre of the film. And then the body that Veronica loves begins to change. The horror is therefore deeply connected to intimacy.

To touch someone is to know their body.

To love someone is to recognise them.

What happens when the body becomes unrecognisable?

What happens when the person you desire becomes someone—or something—you fear?

The film’s body horror is therefore inseparable from its love story. The transformation is frightening because it happens to someone. Not something.

Technology as the Catalyst

Cronenberg’s relationship with technology is rarely simplistic. Technology is not necessarily evil. It is simply powerful. And human beings are often incapable of understanding the consequences of their own inventions.

This is why the telepods are so important. They work. Seth has succeeded. The experiment is a triumph of scientific ingenuity. The tragedy comes from an unforeseen consequence. Technology has done exactly what Seth asked it to do. It simply doesn’t understand what he meant. The telepod cannot distinguish between the scientist and the fly. It sees matter. It sees patterns. It sees two organisms occupying the same space. And it creates something new. The horror is therefore not technological failure. It is technological success without human wisdom.

The Body as Identity

Perhaps the most important idea connecting Cronenberg’s films is the relationship between physical form and identity.

If the body changes, are we still ourselves?

If the mind survives, does the person survive?

If the face changes, does identity change with it?

If desire changes, does the self change?

Cronenberg never provides easy answers.

Instead, his films continually destabilise the idea of a fixed identity.

The body becomes fluid.

The self becomes unstable.

The boundary between human and non-human becomes increasingly difficult to define. Seth Brundle represents the ultimate expression of this philosophy. He is neither entirely human nor entirely fly. He exists between categories. And that is precisely where Cronenberg’s cinema has always been most comfortable.

From Infection to Transformation

Looking across Cronenberg’s career, a progression becomes visible.

Shivers asks what happens when the body is invaded.

Rabid asks what happens when the body becomes contagious.

The Brood asks what happens when psychological trauma becomes physical.

Scanners asks what happens when the mind itself becomes a biological weapon.

Videodrome asks what happens when technology rewrites the body.

The Dead Zone asks what happens when the body becomes a prison for unwanted knowledge.

And then comes The Fly.

A film that asks all of these questions at once.

What happens when the body is invaded?

What happens when it becomes contagious?

What happens when the mind remains trapped inside it?

What happens when technology causes the transformation?

What happens when identity itself begins to dissolve?

The answer is Seth Brundle.

The Fly as Culmination

That is why The Fly occupies such a significant place within Cronenberg’s filmography.

It is not simply his most famous body-horror film.

It is his most complete.

The film takes the ideas that had occupied him for more than a decade and brings them together within a single character.

Seth is infected.

He is transforming.

His body is becoming contagious.

His mind is changing.

Technology has caused the mutation.

His identity is dissolving.

And the people who love him are forced to watch.

Everything is connected.

The horror is physical.

Psychological.

Sexual.

Technological.

Existential.

And emotional.

The body becomes the battlefield upon which all of these fears collide.

After Brundlefly

Cronenberg’s later career would move increasingly away from the visceral body horror that defined his early work. But the body never truly disappeared. It simply became less visible. The themes remained.

Identity.

Transformation.

Desire.

Technology.

Mortality.

The instability of the self.

Even when Cronenberg’s films moved into crime drama, psychological thriller or literary adaptation, the same fascination remained beneath the surface. His characters continued to inhabit bodies that could not be trusted.

Bodies that betrayed them.

Bodies that desired things the mind could not control.

Bodies that became sites of transformation.

The flesh remained.

The Prognosis:

David Cronenberg did not invent body horror. But he transformed its possibilities. He understood that the most disturbing thing about the human body is not what happens when something attacks it. It is what happens when it changes.

When it stops behaving as expected.

When it becomes unfamiliar.

When it begins to reveal something about ourselves that we would rather not see.

From the parasites of Shivers to the mutation of Rabid.

From the psychic violence of Scanners to the New Flesh of Videodrome.

From the isolated body of The Dead Zone to the tragic metamorphosis of The Fly.

Cronenberg’s cinema has always been asking variations of the same question.

Where does the human end?

Is it the skin?

The mind?

The memory?

The face?

The body?

The answer becomes increasingly difficult to locate. And perhaps that is the point. Because in Cronenberg’s universe, the body is never fixed. It is always becoming something else.

Sometimes that transformation is terrifying.

Sometimes it is liberating.

Sometimes it is both.

But eventually, every one of us must confront the uncomfortable truth at the centre of Cronenberg’s work.

We are not separate from our bodies.

We are them.

And when the body changes, so does the person inside it. Seth Brundle simply takes that journey further than most of us ever will. He becomes the ultimate Cronenbergian nightmare. Not because he stops being human. But because he discovers, far too late, just how fragile the idea of being human really was.

  • Saul Muerte

The Fly (1986) at 40: The Body Is the Horror

27 Monday Jul 2026

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There are monsters that lurk in the shadows.

There are monsters that emerge from beneath the bed.

There are monsters that arrive from another planet, another dimension, another time.

And then there are monsters that begin with us.

David Cronenberg’s The Fly is often described as one of the greatest body-horror films ever made. But that description, while accurate, feels strangely inadequate. Because The Fly isn’t frightening simply because a man’s body begins to change. It is frightening because he knows it is happening. He watches himself disappear.

Released in 1986, Cronenberg’s reimagining of the 1958 science-fiction horror film transformed a familiar monster-movie premise into something far more intimate and devastating. Where Kurt Neumann’s original film explored the consequences of scientific experimentation, Cronenberg turned the story inward, making the body itself the site of an existential catastrophe.

At its centre is Seth Brundle. A brilliant scientist. A man who believes technology can overcome the limitations of human existence. A man who falls in love. And then, through a moment of scientific accident, becomes something else entirely. The horror is not that Seth becomes a monster. The horror is that, for a while, he remains human enough to understand exactly what he is losing.

The Beautiful Lie of Progress

Seth Brundle’s teleportation experiment begins with optimism. He has created something extraordinary. The telepods can transport matter from one location to another. Instantaneously. The impossible has become possible.

In the world of The Fly, science is not inherently sinister. The experiment works. That is what makes it so terrifying. The telepods aren’t defective. Seth isn’t punished because his invention fails. He is punished because it succeeds in a way he never anticipated.

A fly enters the pod. Seth enters after it. The computer doesn’t understand that two organisms have occupied the same space. It simply combines them. The result is not an explosion. It is not immediate death. It is transformation. And transformation, as Cronenberg understands better than almost any filmmaker, is infinitely more frightening than destruction.

Death is an ending.

Change is a process.

The Horror of Becoming

Seth doesn’t wake up one morning as Brundlefly. He becomes Brundlefly. That distinction forms the emotional foundation of the entire film. At first, the changes appear almost miraculous. Seth is stronger. More energetic. More confident. He moves with an exhilarating physicality. His body appears to have been improved. He calls it “the next step” in human evolution. For a brief moment, he believes he has transcended humanity.

This is perhaps the most seductive stage of the transformation. The monster doesn’t initially feel like a monster. It feels like an upgrade. Cronenberg’s genius is to make that idea both exhilarating and horrifying. Seth believes he has discovered something wonderful. The audience understands that he has discovered something terrible.

Then the body begins to betray him. The skin changes. The hair disappears. The fingernails loosen. The teeth become unstable. The body begins shedding itself. And Seth watches. That is the true horror.

The Body as Betrayal

Cronenberg’s cinema has always been fascinated by the fragile boundary between mind and flesh. In Shivers, the body becomes an instrument of infection. In Rabid, physical transformation becomes inseparable from sexuality. In The Brood, emotional trauma manifests physically. In Scanners, the mind becomes a weapon. In Videodrome, technology invades the body and consciousness itself.

By the time Cronenberg made The Fly, the body had become his most important cinematic landscape. But here, the body isn’t merely invaded. It is changing from within. Seth cannot escape himself. There is nowhere to run. No monster outside the window. No external force to defeat. His enemy is his own biology. The horror becomes profoundly intimate.

The Disease Film

It is tempting to view The Fly entirely through the lens of science fiction. But the film increasingly resembles something else. A disease narrative.

Seth develops symptoms. He rationalises them. He searches for explanations. He tries to understand what is happening. He becomes increasingly isolated. The people around him struggle to comprehend the transformation. And eventually, there is no cure.

The science-fiction premise provides the mechanism. The emotional experience is recognisably human. This is the horror of illness. Of watching someone change. Of witnessing the deterioration of someone you love. Of knowing that the person standing in front of you is still there somewhere, even as the body becomes unrecognisable. The fly is therefore not simply a monster. It is a metaphor for the terrifying unpredictability of mortality.

The Love Story at the Centre

Without Veronica Quaife, The Fly would still be an extraordinary piece of horror cinema. With her, it becomes something else. A tragedy.

Veronica isn’t merely the witness to Seth’s transformation. She is the person who loves him while it happens. That distinction gives the film its emotional weight. She meets Seth before the accident. She knows the man beneath the changing flesh. She remembers his voice, his humour, his intelligence and his vulnerability. As his body deteriorates, she is forced to confront an impossible question.

At what point does the person you love cease to be the person you know?

Cronenberg refuses to provide an easy answer. Seth remains Seth. And yet he doesn’t. He is simultaneously himself and something else. The film’s horror exists in that uncertainty.

Jeff Goldblum’s Transformation

Much has been written about the physical transformation of Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle. The prosthetics. The makeup. The practical effects. The grotesque imagery. All of it remains extraordinary. But the true achievement belongs to Goldblum’s performance.

He doesn’t simply play a man becoming an insect. He plays a man discovering that he is becoming an insect. The distinction is enormous. The early Seth is charismatic and restless. He is brilliant but socially awkward. His excitement is infectious. As the transformation progresses, that energy becomes something more dangerous.

Confidence becomes arrogance.

Curiosity becomes obsession.

Euphoria becomes desperation.

The physical performance changes because the psychological performance changes. Goldblum doesn’t disappear beneath the makeup. He remains visible within it. That is why the transformation is so disturbing. We never forget who is underneath.

The New Flesh

Cronenberg’s concept of the “New Flesh” had already emerged through Videodrome, but The Fly offers perhaps its most accessible expression. Seth believes that he has evolved. He imagines himself as something beyond humanity. Yet the film presents evolution as indifferent rather than glorious.

There is no moral progression. No guarantee that “new” means “better.” The body changes because biology demands change. The universe doesn’t care whether the result is beautiful. It doesn’t care whether Seth is ready. And it certainly doesn’t care whether Veronica can bear to watch.

The New Flesh is therefore both promise and nightmare. Transformation without consent Evolution without morality. Progress without compassion.

The Monster We Pity

The great achievement of The Fly is that it makes the audience pity its monster. We don’t simply fear Brundlefly. We mourn him. The film continually asks us to remember the man who existed before the transformation. That memory becomes increasingly painful.

The more monstrous Seth becomes, the more desperately we want to find him. And eventually, the film confronts us with an unbearable possibility. Perhaps there is no Seth left to save. Or perhaps there is. Perhaps he is trapped somewhere inside the creature. Perhaps the monster understands exactly what it has become. The uncertainty is devastating.

The Horror of Care

There is another dimension to The Fly that becomes more apparent with age. The film is about caregiving. About witnessing decline. About loving someone whose body is changing beyond their control. Veronica’s experience is therefore not simply that of a horror heroine. She becomes a caretaker. A witness. An advocate. And eventually, the person who must confront the limits of compassion.

There is a profound cruelty in asking someone to remain beside you while you disappear. There is an equal cruelty in asking someone to leave. The Fly understands that love does not always provide solutions. Sometimes love simply means staying long enough to witness the truth.

The Horror of Mortality

Every great monster story contains a fear of death. The Fly contains something worse. It contains the fear of living while dying. Seth’s transformation is gradual. There is time to understand it. Time to fear it. Time to deny it. Time to rage against it. That makes the film more devastating than a simple creature feature.

Death is unavoidable. But the prospect of watching ourselves deteriorate piece by piece is something far more difficult to contemplate. Cronenberg forces the audience to confront that fear through flesh. The body becomes a clock. Every new symptom marks another step towards the inevitable.

Forty Years of Rot

Four decades after its release, The Fly remains one of the most extraordinary examples of mainstream body horror ever produced. The film was released by a major Hollywood studio. It featured recognisable stars. It possessed a substantial budget. And yet it refused to soften its central nightmare.

The practical effects remain shocking because they serve the story rather than overwhelm it. The gore is not decoration. It is narrative Every transformation tells us something about Seth’s physical and psychological decline. The body horror is therefore inseparable from the emotional horror. We recoil because we understand what the images mean.

The Remake That Became Something Else

Cronenberg’s film is technically a remake. But it feels less like a remake than a reinvention. The 1958 The Fly emerged from an era fascinated by atomic science and the dangers of experimentation. Cronenberg’s 1986 film belongs to another age. An era increasingly anxious about technology, genetic transformation, disease and the instability of the human body. The premise remains familiar. The nightmare changes.

That is what makes The Fly such a fascinating example of cinematic reinterpretation. The same story can be told twice. The monster can remain the same. Yet the fears surrounding it can evolve completely.

The Final Transformation

By the film’s conclusion, Seth Brundle has become almost entirely unrecognisable. But the tragedy is not that he has become an insect. It is that he knows what he has become. The final moments are not about defeating a monster. They are about acknowledging one. Veronica’s final act is not triumphant. It is devastating.

There is no victory. No cure. No restoration of the natural order. Only an ending. The kind of ending that forces us to confront the fact that some transformations cannot be reversed.

The Prognosis:

Forty years after David Cronenberg’s The Fly first entered cinemas, its reputation as a masterpiece of body horror remains entirely justified. But to describe it only as a body-horror film is to underestimate what Cronenberg achieved.

This is a film about disease.

About technology.

About evolution.

About sexuality.

About mortality.

About love.

And ultimately, about the terrifying fragility of identity.

Seth Brundle does not become frightening because he becomes less human. He becomes frightening because some part of his humanity remains. We recognise him. We remember him. We understand what he is losing. And because we understand that loss, we understand the film’s deepest horror.

The body is not a vessel we inhabit. It is the thing through which we experience ourselves. It is how we recognise one another.

How we touch.

How we love.

How we move through the world.

And eventually, it is the thing that betrays us.

That is why The Fly remains so powerful at forty. The monster is not the fly. The monster is the knowledge that none of us can remain unchanged forever. Seth Brundle simply gets to experience that truth sooner than the rest of us.

  • Saul Muerte

Shivers (1975) – Cronenberg’s Parasites of Paranoia

26 Friday Sep 2025

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Being terrified is just the beginning!

Fifty years on, David Cronenberg’s Shivers still crawls under the skin with its unnerving mix of clinical detachment and raw, bodily horror. Long before he became a household name with The Fly or Videodrome, Cronenberg was already sketching out the blueprint for what would define his career: a fascination with the fragility of the body, the corruption of the mind, and the terrifyingly thin barrier between civilized society and primal chaos.

Set in a sterile, luxury apartment complex on the outskirts of Montreal, the film wastes no time in subverting its backdrop. The sleek modernity of Starliner Towers becomes the perfect incubator for dread when a strain of parasites begins infecting its residents. What starts as a medical curiosity spirals into an epidemic of violent, lust-fueled mania, leaving Dr. Roger St. Luc (Paul Hampton) desperately trying to contain the outbreak before it spills into the wider city.

Seen today, Shivers is more than just a scrappy feature—it’s a disturbing excavation of suburban sanity itself. Cronenberg peels back the polished façade of modern living to expose the harrowing paranoia festering beneath. The parasites aren’t just creatures; they’re symbols of desire, repression, and contagion, spreading through the building like gossip at a cocktail party, reminding us how easily fear and panic can travel.

While the low budget occasionally betrays its ambition, the rough edges only enhance the sense of unease. This is Cronenberg at his most raw and uncompromising, testing boundaries that would echo across his career. From here, he would refine his obsessions into the sleek terror of Scanners, the grotesque intimacy of The Fly, and the icy eroticism of Crash. But in Shivers, we see the first burst of infection—the moment body horror and social commentary fused into something unshakably his own.

The Prognosis:

Shivers hasn’t lost its bite. It’s grim, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s as relevant as ever in a world still haunted by viral outbreaks and communal fear. Cronenberg reminds us that the real horror doesn’t just come from outside—it festers within, waiting patiently to consume us all, one by one.

  • Saul Muerte

The Shrouds (2024) – Cronenberg’s Grief-Laced Techno-Tomb

02 Wednesday Jul 2025

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How dark are you willing to go? For David Cronenberg, The Shrouds marks another step into the abyss—one not of body horror, but of soul-rattling grief. This is arguably his most intimate and meditative work in decades, stitched together from threads of personal mourning, speculative technology, and the philosophical weight of death’s final curtain.

At the centre is Karsh (played with measured intensity by Vincent Cassel), a widower and tech entrepreneur who creates a radical new device: one that allows the living to peer into the graves of their deceased loved ones via digitally monitored “shrouds.” This deeply invasive (yet oddly spiritual) concept is classic Cronenberg—scientific progress colliding with deeply human frailty. But when a series of graves, including that of Karsh’s wife, are mysteriously desecrated, the film pivots into a sombre, noir-like mystery driven more by obsession than resolution.

From the turn of the century, Cronenberg’s work—Spider, A History of Violence, Cosmopolis, and Crimes of the Future—has leaned away from his earlier grotesque sensibilities and toward psychological excavation. The Shrouds is a continuation of that journey, and perhaps his most self-reflective piece since The Fly. With the recent passing of his wife, the film becomes a stark act of cinematic mourning—less a story than a eulogy.

The concept of the shroud here operates on multiple levels: biblically, as the linen of death and resurrection; metaphorically, as the veil between life and death; and narratively, as the enigma that cloaks Karsh’s unraveling. There’s also the ever-present shroud of mystery that clouds the truth—not only of the graveyard desecrations, but of Karsh himself. As the film progresses, Karsh becomes more opaque, his motives murkier, and his grief increasingly pathological. These twists are fascinating but also frustrating, leading the narrative into a fog of unanswered questions that might leave some viewers cold.

Yet Cronenberg surrounds Cassel with a stellar cast that brings warmth and depth. Diane Kruger and Guy Pearce, both enigmatic and grounded, help anchor the film in emotional reality even as it drifts into cerebral territory. Their performances are subtle yet compelling, with Pearce offering a particularly nuanced turn.

The Prognosis:

The Shrouds isn’t easy to love—but then again, grief rarely is. What it offers is a look into one man’s private hell, filtered through the lens of a director who has never shied away from uncomfortable truths. If its philosophical weight sometimes outweighs its dramatic clarity, it remains a compelling, mournful meditation from one of cinema’s most fearless auteurs.

  • Saul Muerte

The Shrouds will be screening in cinemas nationwide from Thu 3rd July.

Movie review: Crimes of the Future (2022)

27 Saturday Aug 2022

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For a director considered one of a kind, and creating a unique vision for film with the birth of venereal horror, it seems interesting that David Cronenberg should return to the horror genre having been absent from the scene for 23 years. And yet, his latest entry, Crimes of the Future, (which shares the same title as his 1970 feature, but there the similarity ends) bears all the hallmarks of these earlier films in his canon of work combined with his more recent and psychological ventures. Where Cronenberg built his name through the physical and sensual characteristics of humanity, his other fascination in the metaphysical realm and human psyche has risen to the fore. 

There are familiar themes at play here with the advancements of humanity through biotechnology in this instance, but still the harbouring of infectious disease to remind us of our own frailty. The twist though is that infectious disease has been eradicated and humankind has been left with pushing the boundaries of morality without the risk of harm that can come about through surgical measures. These actions are now considered an art form; Cronenberg’s playground, a balance of art and physical horror with an intellectual bent, firmly in the mix. Confrontation is always at the heart of Cronenberg’s features, his curiosity to look at the way we shift and squirm a prime scrutiny of his work. In the opening scenes Crimes of the Future forces us into the realms of discomfort when a mother smothers her child with a pillow because she believes him to be inhuman.

In the film’s journey, we primarily follow Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), who has an accelerated evolution syndrome, where he can develop new internal organs. This leads him to perform live surgical procedures carried out by his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux). Much like Max Renn in Videodrome, Tenser is driven by his pursuit of truth and this exploration spirals deeper into a loss of control and a fatal resolution.

Tenser weaves his way through an investigation that sees him employed by a governmental agency to infiltrate a group of radicals. This sees him rub shoulders with the National Organ Registry where Timlin (Kristen Stewart) and Wippet (Don McKellar) work. Timlin is immediately enamoured by Tenser and is sexually drawn to him. 

There’s also Lang (Scott Speedman) who is the father of the afore-mentioned boy killed by his mother. Lang’s story is also a tragic one, driven to investigate his son’s condition that allowed him to consume plastics with no detriment to the human body. 

All these avenues intertwine into one complete examination of the human soul, immersed in a world where the physical is no longer a barrier. With no obstacles in place, what does it mean to be human? A question that continues to guide Cronenberg’s pursuit.

The Prognosis:

Mortality is and always be the vessel of David Cronenberg’s interests, be it through venereal horror, metaphysical horror, or sensual and intellectual obsessions. His latest vehicle is a culmination of them all, and through his uniqueness Cronenberg manages to project potentially his most complete image of himself, but in doing so, some of that identity gets lost in this portrayal. Without the edges; Without the pointy edges of quirkiness; David Cronenberg, much like his own lead characters, Max Renn; Seth Brundle; Beverly and Elliot Mantle, become lost in his pursuits and finds his own personality engulfed into obscurity.  Yet I still find myself drawn by his vision.

  • Saul Muerte

Retrospective: Scanners (1981)

26 Tuesday Jan 2021

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It’s been 40 years since David Cronenberg’s visionary tale of telepathy, telekinesis and by now a recurring theme in the Canadian director’s work, espionage surrounded by political and government conspiracies embedded in a deeply psychoanalytical point of view. 

It’s hard to believe that this is Cronenberg’s seventh outing in the director’s chair, having already produced body horror films such as Shivers and Rabid, the latter of which had been reimagined by The Soska Sisters and is well worth your time. Scanners still has that low budget, earth feel to it that is often expected in the first few films in one’s career, and only two years later he would serve up a double hitter in the classics Videodrome and The Dead Zone.

Another theme that is prevalent throughout Cronenberg’s work is that of an uprising, often from an oppressed group or individual, but also that of misguided intentions that lead to their true calling.

In the case of Scanners, we are first introduced to Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), who is ostracized from society by appearance at first, being a homeless figure trying to survive on the streets, but we quickly learn that he harbours the ability to read people’s minds and inflict pain on those who torment or ridicule him through telekinesis. This ability comes attached to a group in society known as scanners and when he is detected in a shopping mall, he is soon hunted down and subjected to close scrutiny and rehabilitation by Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan). 

Once he conforms to the will of Ruth and with it the Government agency that takes advantage of Ruth’s knowledge, Vale is then charged with hunting down a group of vigilantes led by Revok (Another fine turn from Michael Ironside). Can Revok be controlled? Or is there more to Revok’s revolution than meets the eye?

Scanners can be bookmarked as the film that changed Cronenberg’s career, moving away from the body horror image that had shaped his career at this point, and moving him into the mainstream playing field.
It still has some moments that reflect the style and substance that made Croeneberg’s name on screen, most notably this head explosion scene…

The prognosis:

Scanners does suffer a little in exposition and the lead performance from Stephen Lack, is somewhat stilted which detracts from engaging with the narrative. Whether this is down to the performance of the actor in question or the director’s choice in portrayal is hard to pin down, but it certainly curbs the film from being Cronenberg’s finest moment. It is still an enjoyable ride though and well worth your time to explore a master visionist honing his craft. 

  • Saul Muerte