6The Fly (1986)
Insects are about as antithetical to the qualities that we use to define human life as you can get without becoming completely inorganic, and in David Cronenberg’s The Fly, the central character’s slow transformation into “Brundlefly,” a fly/human hybrid, is about as skin-crawling as it gets. Part of that is Cronenberg’s trademark themes of upsetting sexual desire and body horror, but the other part is just the sheer visceral fear of becoming something that is as fundamentally not you as you can imagine.
There’s a sickness inside Seth Brundle, but it’s not a disease—it’s a bodily invader, a fly whose DNA is changing him into something inhumane and awful. When Brundle’s jaw falls off and his true nature is revealed, it’s as terrible as seeing a disgusting mirror of all the evil inside him, and almost as awful as Veronica’s dream of delivering his maggot offspring. Wait, no, never mind. The maggot birth scene is definitely worse.
