The “nightmare” movie that inspired David Cronenberg’s ‘The Fly’
The unrivalled progenitor of the body horror movie genre has to be the Canadian filmmaking icon David Cronenberg, whose movies often feature horrifying physical transformations, strange, life-altering diseases and explorations of the psychological impact of the body and its technological advancements.
Cronenberg has had so many memorable horror moments on screen, but perhaps one of the most interesting is his 1986 science fiction horror The Fly. It sees Jeff Goldblum play a scientist who turned into a fly-human hybrid creature after one of his experiments goes terribly wrong.
As with any filmmaker, Cronenberg has his big influences, and while on the surface, The Fly might seem like it could have only come from the mad mind of the Canadian body-horror auteur, the director once explained that he had been inspired to make one of its scenes after watching Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf.
When Cronenberg visited the JM Video store in Paris to discuss his favourite movies, he explained how Bergman had inspired him. “The Hour of the Wolf, this was a beautiful movie,” he said. “Very much a nightmare, and it had a particular importance for me because when I was making The Fly, I had a scene where we needed the character of the fly, played by Jeff Goldblum, to climb the walls and then climb up onto the ceiling.”
Hour of the Wolf was released in 1986, Bergman’s only horror film. It stars Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann and tells of the disappearance of a fictional painter called Johan Borg (von Sydow), who lived on an island with his wife (Ullmann) at a time when he was afflicted with insomnia and strange, disturbing visions.
When Cronenberg came to make The Fly, he remembered that Bergmann’s film featured a scene in which a character climbed up the walls. “I remembered that in this movie, there was a scene like that that a man is so anguished, he’s in such emotional pain, that he can actually just walk up a wall, onto the ceiling and out of his anguish,” he said.
The director went on to call the movie “very Swedish”, further explaining its influence: “So I watched this movie to see how it was done. Very simply, we had a big machine and a big carousel and all kinds of tricks. He did it very simply, but it was very, very effective. So I strangely have that connection.”
Check out the trailer for Ingmar Bergmann’s Hour of the Wolf below.