Perhaps only in the realm of creative endeavors can a final result be so deftly crafted, so inch-perfect, so true to its ethos and equally executed with such excellence, that it ends up being the very reason that someone can be let down by it.
That’s one of the plights currently going down on r/horror, and the subject in question is none other than 1986’s The Fly, which checks off just about all the aforementioned boxes and then some.
After heaping copious amounts of praise on the overwhelming majority of the film’s components, the user went on to describe their inability to stomach the film’s legendary body horror, courtesy of David Cronenberg and his long history of the grotesque staple.
They later mentioned in a comment that their disappointment stemmed from being unable to watch such a fantastic movie ever again due to the gatekeeping of their body horror intolerance.
Many responders couldn’t quite wrap their heads around such a take, pointing out how the stomach-churning imagery in The Fly is meant to elicit such a response, and subsequently wondering why such a post, valid as the feelings behind it may be, was even made.
These responses were compounded by the subreddit’s wisdom of steering clear from the work of Cronenberg if body horror can render you dangerously queasy.
We suppose that if any director could do his job perfectly while simultaneously disappointing some viewers as a direct result of that, it has to be Cronenberg. He can rest assured, of course, that this disappointment is an isolated incident, and his name has the power to attract swarms of eager horror buffs to screens big and small.
