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Showing posts with the label Kurt Neumann

CGAA Unit 1 Anatomy: Shapeshifters 1: The Fly (1958) 19/09/2011

Summary: Brilliant scientist Andre Delambre becomes unwittingly fused with a house fly while testing his Matter Teleportation device. Based on a short story written by George Langelaan and drawing comparisons with Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis. The Fly is one of the earliest examples of the Body Horror genre, where degeneration or transformation of the human body forms the basis of the film's shocks. The film has been parodied continuously and is widely considered a classic of the Science Fiction genre - spawning two sequels and an infamous retelling in 1986. Analysis: “... After Andre’s transformation into the monstrosity he types a message to Helene, in which these words appear. “There are things man should never experiment with.” The film explicitly links Andre’s assumption of the god/scientist role with atomic-age fears...” (Hendershot, 2001:31) “The Fly operates routinely within a sf/horror framework of condemning radical scientific experimentation as transgressive while s...