In the seventies and eighties, David Cronenberg was the master of odd, thoughtful but still shocking horror. SCANNERS, VIDEODROME and DEAD RINGERS delivered psychological as well as physical scares, whilst simultaneously displaying the director as an artistic force to be reckoned with. With the nineties, Cronenberg turned to (slightly) more gentile matter; CRASH, though still shocking, was firmly in the Drama genre. By the noughties, his relationship with Viggo Mortensen was generating Oscar nominations in A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and EASTERN PROMISES, and A DANGEROUS METHOD, a film about Freud, looks like it’ll have no exploding heads whatsoever.
However, fans of body horror and Jeff Goldblum might have a new reason to rejoice. THE FLY, arguably Cronenberg’s best, may be getting the sequel treatment. “I’ve written a script of that, and I don’t know if that’s going to really happen, but that has to do with Fox” said Cronenberg recently. Not the most promising words, perhaps, but rumours of the director taking on a Fly-related project again have been buzzing around for some time.
THE FLY has at least two things in common with John Carpenter’s THE THING. Apart from being two of the greatest ever horror films, they are both proof that remakes are sometimes of some worth. They both work because the effects look so genuinely disgusting, so physically present. The urge would most likely be to CGI a FLY remake to hell; we can only pray that this doesn’t happen. Though it does prove the fact that remakes can work, a modernised, computer graphics version could suck out all that’s good about THE FLY. It is for this reason that I hope Cronenberg himself takes on the project, rather than a hack with a computer.
Source: Shock Til You Drop
