The Self-Referential Scientist

From the fearful cry of the human-headed fly snagged on a spider-web at the end of the 1958 movie—“Help me! Please, help me!”—to the warning against erotic entanglement with a man becoming a fly in the 1986 remake—“Be afraid! Be very afraid!”—tag lines from The Fly have been etched into popular mythology. The Fly's cultural purchase also shows in its narrative transformations from ephemeral prose flction to B-movie institution, its generation of continuations and variants. It flrst appeared as a short story by George Langelaan published in Playboy in June 1957 (Langelaan 1957). Within a year it was rescripted by James Clavell and made into the Twentieth-Century Fox movie directed by Kurt Neumann. ¹ This was followed by Return of the Fly in 1959 and Curse of the Fly in 1965. Two decades later David Cronenberg rewrote Charles Edward Pogue's rewrite and directed his major revision of 1986, followed in 1989 by The Fly II. ² In 1997 it reemerged once more in the Simpsons episode “Fly vs. Fly.”