Of all the holidays celebrated worldwide, no single day is more loved by the UTG staff than Halloween. With the arrival of October, the time has finally come to begin rolling out a plethora of features and special announcements we have prepared in celebration of our favorite day, including the one you’re about to read.

31 Days Of Halloween is a recurring daily feature that will run throughout the month of October. The hope and goal of this column is to supply every UTG reader with a daily horror (or Halloween themed) movie recommendation that is guaranteed to amplify your All Hallows’ Eve festivities. We’ll be watching every film the day it’s featured, and we hope you’ll follow along at home. If you have a suggestion, contact us and we may include your favorite scarefest in an upcoming column!

Day 21: The Fly (1986)

“I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over… and the insect is awake.” – Seth Brundle

David Cronenberg’s 1986 adaptation of The Fly is a sci-fi horror masterpiece, plain and simple. Aside from the progression through the film careers of Amanda Bynes, Nick Nolte, or Mickey Rourke, rarely has there been a gradual physical transformation more terrifying or disturbing played out on screen than in The Fly.

As much as I love Dr. Ian Malcolm, David Levinson, Allistair Hennessey, or even him playing himself on The Larry Sanders Show, I think it’s safe to say that Jeff Goldblum’s portrayal of Seth Brundle/Brundlefly in The Fly is his best performance to date. He goes from suave and eccentric scientist to an absolute horror of an experiment gone awry in a matter of 95 minutes, and he’s perfect in every last one of them. The rest of the cast (Geena Davis, John Getz) is fine as well but not many performances in the horror genre can hold a torch to Goldblum’s Brundle. And yes, he took every opportunity to show off his piano skills even back in ’86…

I remember trying to watch The Fly with a friend when I was 8 or 9 years old but as you could imagine, I didn’t make it very far into the second act as Brundle begins his sickening transformation. Between Cronenberg’s practical effects and the great Howard Shore’s fitting score, The Fly evokes a slew of lasting nightmares. There’s even a horrifying larvae birth nightmare scene to induce more nightmares!

If you’ve gone all these years without experiencing Cronenberg’s most celebrated work, I promise you that you’ve been missing out. All the buzz was completely justified. Fly joke.

Editorial written by: Brian Lion – Follow him on Twitter
Last year’s Day 21 film: Hatchet

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Brian Leak

Editor-In-Chief. King of forgetting drinks in the freezer. Pop culture pack rat. X-Phile. LOST apologist.

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