David Cronenberg Influence

One of our favourite directors is David Cronenberg. We especially love Videodrome, Scanners, Existenz, Dead Zone, Crash, and The Fly. The Fly is our absolute favourite of those films. If you were born in 1950 you might recall the original version with the infamous scene where the scientist ends up with his head on a fly's body and is about to eaten by a spider and cries out "Help me!" in a tiny voice. But if you're an 80's fanatic like me then you might be more familiar with David Cronenberg's remake. It's like the original one except it's different, Jeff Goldblum doesn't end up with his head on a fly's body oh no- it's much worse he ends up turning into a really grotesque hybrid of human and fly. One crucial element that David Cronenberg never forgets to add in his movies is horrific transformations involving the body changing in really horrible ways (this type of transformation is known as either a Painful Transformation or Transformation Trauma, and is full of Body Horror).

It may have given quite a lot of viewers nightmares and Squicked them out, but it kind of inspired us. My brother owns a teleportation pod like the one Jeff has in the movie, and he actually lets me use it. Although my brother himself got the insane idea to recreate Jeff's experiment from the film and ended up turning into a clone of BrundleFly. It took four and a half weeks to figure out how to change him back into himself. The Fly has been satirised numerous times. On one episode of Beetleborgs, Flabber brings a sketch of a teleportation device to life with his magic and gives it a test run, a fly-like monster named Kombat Gnat (who has a lot of razor sharp teeth and the ability to shrink) gets into the machine, their dna gets merged together and Flabber ends up turning into it like Jeff Goldblum in the movie. However he gets turned back to normal in the end.


Some of our work feature a homage to The Fly. One of which is the episode of The Misadventures Of Doc M where I test out my brother's teleportation device and Chumsley the werejohncandy accidentally falls into the machine, our dna gets merged together and I end up slowly changing into Chumsley. It also happened to my brother one time, my brother was testing it out for the first time, just as soon as the machine starts the sequence he realises that his Buzz Lightyear action figure is in the machine with him and he ended up turning into a life sized Buzz Lightyear. It took a long time to figure out a way to change him back to normal in the end but luckily I found a way to do it. We turned most of him back to normal, except when he came out he still had the "wings" sticking out of his back (and he still does).