Mediating The Fly : Posthuman Metamorphosis in the 1950s

Abstract

One measure of The Fly's modest cultural purchase is its generation of continuations and variants. Like Frankenstein, this breeding of further episodes has transformed a simple horror story into a collective fabulation-so this is a piece of modern mythology in the raw. The Fly's first author was George Langelaan, a British writer raised in France. 1 Its first appearance was in the form of a short story published in Playboy in June 1957. 2 Within a year it was rescripted by James Clavell and made into a Twentieth-Century Fox movie directed by Kurt Neumann. This was followed by Return of the Fly in 1959, and Curse of the Fly in 1965. The northern hemisphere was safe from Fly remakes for two decades, until Charles Edward Pogue and David Cronenberg cowrote and Cronenberg directed his major revision of 1986, followed in 1989 by The Fly II. Criticism has been focused on cinematic matters, particularly Cronenberg's transformation of Neumann, with little reference to Langelaan. 3 In contrast, I will use a combination of literature-and-169