There are filmmakers who borrow from Alfred Hitchcock, and then there is Brian De Palma.
Few directors have spent as much of their career interrogating Hitchcock’s visual language, psychological fixations and cinematic grammar. Yet Obsession—released in 1976—remains perhaps the most revealing example of De Palma’s fascination with his predecessor. It is a film constructed in the shadow of Vertigo, but rather than simply attempting to replicate Hitchcock, De Palma turns imitation itself into part of the film’s pathology.
Fifty years later, Obsession remains an intriguing and increasingly hypnotic piece of psychological cinema: an elegant, deliberately artificial film about grief, guilt, identity and the dangerous desire to recreate what has been lost.
At its centre is Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson), a wealthy New Orleans businessman whose wife Elizabeth (Geneviève Bujold) and young daughter are kidnapped. The ensuing tragedy leaves Michael devastated, and the years that follow do little to diminish his fixation on the woman he has lost.
When Michael eventually encounters Sandra Portinari, a young woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Elizabeth, grief mutates into something far more dangerous.
The premise immediately recalls Vertigo. Hitchcock’s Scottie Ferguson becomes obsessed with recreating the woman he believes he has lost; De Palma’s Michael is similarly confronted with the possibility of resurrecting his past through another woman.
But where Hitchcock’s film gradually exposes the terrifying psychological consequences of obsession, De Palma is interested in the machinery of that obsession—the rituals, repetitions and visual constructions through which cinema itself creates desire.
This is where Obsession becomes more than a simple Hitchcock pastiche.
De Palma doesn’t hide his influences. He embraces them.
The camera glides with an almost reverential precision. Mirrors fracture identities. Staircases become psychological spaces. Characters are observed through frames within frames. Faces become clues. Locations acquire an almost dreamlike quality. The film repeatedly asks us to look, then quietly questions whether what we have seen can actually be trusted.
It is unmistakably Hitchcockian.
Yet it is also unmistakably De Palma.
Where Hitchcock’s camera could often appear invisible in its precision, De Palma’s filmmaking is more conspicuous. His technique announces itself. The elaborate compositions, slow movements and visual repetitions are not simply storytelling devices; they become part of the film’s psychological architecture.
There is something almost operatic about Obsession.
That quality is reinforced by Bernard Herrmann’s score, which provides perhaps the film’s most direct connection to Hitchcock. Herrmann had famously scored Vertigo, and his music here creates an extraordinary sense of déjà vu. The score doesn’t merely accompany the film—it seems to summon another film from the past.
This is particularly appropriate because Obsession is fundamentally concerned with the inability to escape the past.
Michael doesn’t simply remember Elizabeth. He constructs his present around her absence.
His grief becomes ritual.
His memory becomes mythology.
And when Sandra enters his life, the possibility of recovering Elizabeth becomes more seductive than accepting that she is gone.
The tragedy is that Michael’s desire isn’t really for Sandra. It is for an idea.
That distinction sits at the heart of both Vertigo and Obsession. The woman becomes an image, a projection onto which the male protagonist can impose his memories and desires.
Cinema itself becomes complicit in this process.
De Palma repeatedly turns his characters into objects of visual fixation. We watch them being watched. We see people through windows, doorways and architectural frames. The act of looking becomes inseparable from the act of controlling.
And this is where De Palma’s fascination with Hitchcock becomes particularly interesting.
He isn’t merely copying Hitchcock’s techniques.
He is examining what those techniques do to an audience.
The camera seduces us just as Michael is seduced by his memories. We are encouraged to accept visual associations before we have fully understood them. We become participants in the same process of construction and reconstruction that consumes the protagonist.
The film’s New Orleans setting also contributes to this strange sense of unreality. Rather than functioning simply as a backdrop, the city feels almost like a memory itself—beautiful, historic and haunted by the past.
The locations possess a romantic grandeur, but there is something unsettling beneath that beauty.
Everything in Obsession seems to exist between two states: past and present, reality and fantasy, love and possession, memory and fabrication.
That ambiguity is central to its appeal.
It is also why the film remains fascinating despite its occasional melodramatic excesses. Obsession isn’t interested in naturalism. It wants heightened emotion, heightened architecture and heightened psychology.
It wants to feel like a nightmare dressed as a romantic thriller.
And sometimes it does.
There are moments when the film’s elaborate plotting threatens to become almost too contrived, and its Hitchcockian influences can feel less like subtle echoes and more like deliberate signposts. But that artificiality is also part of what makes the film compelling.
De Palma isn’t trying to convince us that this is ordinary life.
He’s constructing a cinematic dream.
And dreams rarely obey the rules of realism.
The most fascinating aspect of Obsession, viewed fifty years later, may therefore be the relationship between homage and originality.
At what point does influence become imitation?
And when does imitation become something new?
De Palma’s career would continue to wrestle with those questions. His fascination with Hitchcock would resurface repeatedly, sometimes playfully, sometimes provocatively and sometimes almost obsessively. But Obsession occupies a particularly important position because the Hitchcock influence isn’t simply decorative.
It is the foundation upon which the entire film has been constructed.
De Palma takes the skeleton of Vertigo and dresses it in his own visual language. He takes Hitchcock’s fascination with looking and pushes it toward voyeurism. He takes psychological obsession and makes it increasingly theatrical. He takes the idea of cinematic manipulation and makes the audience feel its effects.
In doing so, he creates something that is simultaneously derivative and deeply personal.
That contradiction is precisely what makes Obsession worth revisiting.
Fifty years on, it is tempting to view the film simply as “De Palma’s Vertigo.” But that description ultimately sells it short.
Obsession is a film about the dangers of trying to reproduce the past—and there is something wonderfully appropriate about a filmmaker making a film about reproduction while simultaneously reproducing one of cinema’s most famous psychological thrillers.
Perhaps that is the real obsession.
Not simply Michael’s desire to recreate Elizabeth.
Not simply De Palma’s fascination with Hitchcock.
But cinema’s own endless desire to revisit what came before, to take familiar images and attempt to make them live again.
Sometimes that results in imitation.
Sometimes it becomes transformation.
And in Obsession, Brian De Palma comes remarkably close to achieving both at once.
The Prognosis:
Obsession may have been born in Hitchcock’s shadow, but fifty years later, it stands as something more intriguing than a mere homage: a beautifully constructed, psychologically feverish examination of how memory, desire and cinema can become hopelessly entangled.
There is a temptation, fifty-two years after its release, to reduce The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to its most recognisable image.
A mask made of human skin.
A chainsaw.
A screaming woman.
Leatherface has become one of horror cinema’s great icons, a figure so deeply embedded within popular culture that it can now be difficult to remember just how strange Tobe Hooper’s film initially was. Yet to focus entirely on Leatherface is to mistake the face of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for its body.
Hooper’s masterpiece is not fundamentally about a monster.
It is about a system.
Its true horror lies in the discovery that the violence encountered by Sally Hardesty and her friends has not emerged from some supernatural void. It belongs to a world with an economy, a history, a family structure and a working methodology. The Sawyer household is not simply a collection of madmen waiting in the wilderness to attack unsuspecting teenagers. It is the grotesque remnant of an America that has industrialised violence, discarded its workers and then abandoned those left behind.
The house is horrifying because it is not irrational.
It is organised.
The End of the Slaughterhouse
The economic history of the Sawyer family hangs over the film even when it is not explicitly foregrounded.
The old man at the graveyard speaks of grave robbing as though he were discussing an old-fashioned form of local employment. The Hitchhiker collects photographs and scraps, turning the dead into souvenirs. Drayton Sawyer runs his decrepit petrol station and barbecue business. Grandpa was once celebrated for his skill at slaughtering cattle.
Again and again, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre returns to labour.
The family kills because killing is what they know.
But their knowledge belongs to an older America. Industrial change has made their particular skills obsolete. The slaughterhouse no longer requires the intimate violence of a man with a hammer. Machines can do the work faster, cleaner and more efficiently.
The Sawyers have been replaced.
And that replacement matters.
Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel do not present the family as aristocratic degenerates living outside civilisation. They are workers without work. Their violence is not detached from American industry; it is its grotesque continuation.
The cattle have simply been replaced by people.
That idea transforms the film’s violence. Leatherface does not stalk his victims with the theatrical precision of a traditional movie monster. He works.
When Kirk enters the house, Leatherface kills him quickly and drags the body away. Pam receives the same treatment. There is no prolonged speech, no ritualised pursuit and no self-conscious display of villainy. Leatherface’s brutality has an almost mechanical efficiency.
The victims arrive.
The job is done.
The next body follows.
It is one of the most unsettling things about the film: murder is treated as labour.
The Family Business
This is why the Sawyer family remains more disturbing than the individual members who inhabit it.
Leatherface is frightening, but he is not independent. The Hitchhiker is sadistic, yet his sadism exists within the wider structure of the household. Drayton appears comparatively rational until we realise that his version of rationality involves managing murder as though it were a difficult family business.
Everyone has a role.
Grandpa, the patriarch, represents the older tradition. He is the memory of what the family once was. Drayton maintains the household and attempts, with increasingly desperate authority, to keep everything functioning. The Hitchhiker appears to be responsible for procurement, surveillance and the unsettling rituals surrounding the bodies. Leatherface does the physical work.
Even the domestic arrangements are grotesquely recognisable.
They argue.
They complain.
They blame one another.
They worry about money.
They disagree about how things should be done.
The famous dinner sequence is terrifying partly because it resembles a family gathering distorted beyond recognition. Sally has not stumbled into the lair of an incomprehensible evil. She has been forced into someone else’s family home and seated at their table.
That is far worse.
The Sawyers have not rejected the idea of family.
They have preserved it.
They have simply preserved it after every other moral structure has decayed.
America as Meat
The title itself has always promised more than the film delivers.
There is no actual chainsaw massacre in the conventional sense. The chainsaw is an instrument of terror, but Hooper’s film is not structured around an extended slaughter. Its title is more suggestive than descriptive, combining industry and violence into a single American image.
Texas.
Chainsaw.
Massacre.
Each word carries a particular mythology.
Texas represents scale, frontier identity, independence and American excess. The chainsaw is a machine designed to cut through organic matter. A massacre is the language of war.
Hooper brings those ideas together and places them inside an apparently ordinary story about five young people travelling through rural Texas.
The contrast is crucial.
The horror does not begin in some distant, unknowable realm. It begins on the road.
The characters pass through decaying towns, abandoned buildings and landscapes that appear to have been left behind by modern America. The petrol station is still there, but its function is uncertain. The house remains standing, but the family inside it no longer belongs to the world outside.
The country has moved on.
The Sawyers have not.
They have become cultural debris.
And like much of what America leaves behind, they have not disappeared quietly.
The Great American Discard
What makes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre so powerful is its sense that the nightmare extends beyond the boundaries of the Sawyer house.
Hooper does not explain every detail. He doesn’t need to.
The film’s world already feels contaminated before Leatherface appears. The desecrated graveyard, the dead animals, the unsettling encounters on the road and the decaying rural landscape all suggest a society in which something has gone wrong long before the teenagers arrive.
The Sawyers are not an interruption.
They are a symptom.
This is where the film’s American nightmare becomes particularly potent. The United States has always been fascinated by progress, reinvention and expansion. Yet progress produces casualties. When industries modernise, people lose their livelihoods. When communities disappear, those left behind do not simply vanish with them.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre takes that anxiety to its most grotesque conclusion.
What if the people America no longer needs simply continue doing the work they were trained to do?
What if the machinery of violence survives after the machinery of society has abandoned it?
The Sawyers continue slaughtering because slaughter is the only language their world has taught them to speak.
Leatherface as Worker
This interpretation also changes the way we see Leatherface.
Over decades of sequels, remakes, reimaginings and franchise mythology, Leatherface has increasingly been isolated as the central villain of the Texas Chainsaw universe. The icon has gradually replaced the character.
But in Hooper’s original film, Leatherface is almost impossible to separate from the house around him.
He wears different masks for different social functions. One mask is practical. Another is domestic. Another suggests a grotesque attempt at femininity and hospitality. Leatherface is not simply hiding his identity. He appears to be performing identities that the family requires from him.
He is worker.
He is cook.
He is homemaker.
He is butcher.
The masks are costumes in a family play that Leatherface has been performing for so long that the distinction between person and role has collapsed.
That is what makes him unexpectedly tragic.
Leatherface is certainly violent, but the film does not present him as an autonomous force of evil in the manner of later slasher villains. When intruders enter the house, he panics. He reacts. He performs the function he has been taught to perform.
Kill the intruder.
Dispose of the body.
Return to work.
The chainsaw is not a symbol of Leatherface’s personality.
It is a tool.
And that is considerably more frightening.
The Violence of the Ordinary
Perhaps the most enduring achievement of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the way it makes violence feel ordinary.
There is surprisingly little explicit gore. The title promises carnage, but Hooper largely denies the audience the spectacle of it. What remains is suggestion: the sound of the hammer, the convulsions of the body, the industrial clatter of the house.
The film understands that imagination can make violence feel more authentic than explicit display.
Yet the restraint also reinforces the film’s central idea.
This is not violence performed for pleasure.
It is violence performed because it is part of the routine.
The Sawyers eat.
They work.
They argue.
They kill.
The distinction between these activities has become almost meaningless.
That collapse is what turns the dinner sequence into one of the most unbearable scenes in horror cinema. Sally is not simply threatened with death. She is absorbed into the machinery of the household.
She becomes part of the family business.
The family needs her to participate. They need her terror. They need another body.
Even Grandpa’s attempted killing is framed as a matter of professional pride. The old man was once good at this. He was once the best.
Now he can barely hold the hammer.
The family is witnessing the collapse of its own tradition.
It is grotesque.
It is horrifying.
And it is strangely sad.
The Machine That Ate Itself
The great irony of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is that the family represents a system ultimately consuming itself.
Industrial slaughter has made the Sawyers obsolete, yet the family responds by applying its industrial logic to human beings. They preserve the methods but lose the product. They inherit the machinery of violence but no longer possess a legitimate place to use it.
So the machine turns inward.
America begins eating itself.
The title’s massacre is therefore not simply an act of violence. It is an economic nightmare.
The Sawyers are what remains when labour loses its purpose but not its habits.
This is why the film continues to feel so unsettling. Leatherface may have become an icon, but the world that created him has not disappeared. Economic displacement, industrial decay, rural isolation and the anxiety surrounding who gets left behind remain deeply embedded within modern society.
If anything, the questions Hooper’s film raises have become more complicated.
Progress still produces casualties.
Industries still discard workers.
Communities still disappear.
And the people left behind are too often treated as though they have vanished simply because the rest of the country has stopped looking at them.
The Prognosis:
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre endures because it refuses to reduce horror to a single monster.
Leatherface is frightening.
The chainsaw is frightening.
The house is frightening.
But the true nightmare lies in the machinery connecting them.
The Sawyer family is a grotesque parody of the American household, built from labour, tradition, commerce and violence. They have inherited a world that no longer has any use for them, but they continue operating according to the only rules they understand.
They slaughter.
They consume.
They survive.
And somewhere inside that decaying house, America discovers that the monster it fears is not an invader from outside.
It is the thing left behind when progress moves on.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not simply about a family of cannibals.
It is about a culture capable of turning human beings into meat.
That is why, more than half a century later, the film still feels less like a nightmare from another world than an American nightmare staring back at itself.
And when Leatherface finally bursts from the house, chainsaw screaming beneath the Texas sun, he is not merely chasing Sally Hardesty.
He is chasing a world that has already left him behind.
The opening minutes of Passenger suggest that André Øvredal might have found another wonderfully confined nightmare.
A couple comes across a gruesome accident on an isolated stretch of highway. The darkness is oppressive, the road seemingly endless and the wreckage offers just enough information to make us suspicious of what we are seeing. Something is wrong. Something is watching. And when the couple eventually realise that whatever was responsible for the accident has followed them, Passenger briefly becomes the kind of lean, atmospheric horror film that Øvredal has demonstrated an instinct for before.
It is a particularly tantalising beginning from the director of The Autopsy of Jane Doe, a film that understood how to extract extraordinary tension from a restricted space and an increasingly disturbing mystery.
Unfortunately, Passenger spends much of the journey trying to find its way back to that opening.
What begins as a potentially unnerving supernatural road movie gradually becomes a predictable procession of demonic appearances, mythology dumps and familiar jump scares. The highway offers isolation, movement and endless possibility, but the film increasingly feels as though it is travelling in circles.
There is a good horror film trapped somewhere inside Passenger.
Unfortunately, it never quite gets out.
The Road Less Interesting
The premise is undeniably appealing.
Maddie and Tyler have embraced van life, leaving behind their previous existence to travel across America. The open road is supposed to represent freedom, escape and reinvention. Instead, after stopping at the scene of a horrific accident, their journey becomes a nightmare from which they cannot simply drive away.
There is something inherently cinematic about horror on the highway.
The road is a liminal space. It connects places without belonging to any of them. It can be empty for miles, leaving travellers isolated from help. At night, the world is reduced to headlights, darkness and whatever might be waiting beyond the reach of the beams.
Cinema has exploited that anxiety for decades, from Duel and The Hitcher to Jeepers Creepers and countless other variations on the idea that stopping on the wrong stretch of road can have consequences.
Passenger has all the ingredients.
What it doesn’t always have is the imagination to make them feel new.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe Effect
This is perhaps what makes the film most frustrating.
André Øvredal has already demonstrated how good he can be at turning limited environments into engines of suspense. The Autopsy of Jane Doe remains such an effective piece of horror because its mystery is allowed to accumulate gradually. A seemingly straightforward situation becomes progressively stranger, and the physical limitations of the morgue make escape increasingly difficult.
Passenger initially seems to promise a similar experience.
The van becomes the new morgue.
The highway becomes the new enclosed chamber.
The darkness outside becomes something unknowable.
But rather than allowing that uncertainty to breathe, the film increasingly explains itself.
And once the Passenger stops being a mysterious presence and becomes a set of supernatural rules, the film loses much of its power.
The Monster Is Better Before We Meet Him
The Passenger himself is a potentially effective horror creation.
There is something inherently unsettling about the figure that appears at the roadside. The idea of a supernatural entity attached to travellers and accidents has a folkloric quality that could have given the film a genuinely sinister identity.
The problem is that the more the film explains him, the less frightening he becomes.
Mystery is often the most valuable currency in supernatural horror.
What is that thing?
Why is it there?
What does it want?
What happens if we encounter it?
Passenger answers these questions with increasing enthusiasm.
And each answer diminishes the fear.
The entity eventually feels less like an unknowable evil stalking the highway and more like a horror villain operating according to a list of rules that the screenplay has conveniently provided for us.
The mythology may explain the Passenger.
It doesn’t make him more interesting.
The Hobo Code
The film attempts to build its mythology around the idea of signs and symbols used by travellers and outsiders, incorporating religious folklore and what is presented as a “hobo code” into the supernatural history of the Passenger.
There is an intriguing film hiding inside this idea.
The highway is already filled with stories. Missing people, roadside memorials, abandoned buildings, forgotten towns and travellers who never reached their destinations could have provided the foundation for something genuinely folkloric.
Instead, the mythology often feels like exposition arriving to explain what the audience should already have been allowed to fear.
The film’s greatest mistake is not that its mythology is too complicated.
It is that the mythology is less interesting than the mystery it replaces.
When the Road Becomes a Formula
The early sections of Passenger understand the importance of anticipation.
A figure glimpsed in the distance is more effective than a monster standing in full view.
A strange movement outside the van can be more unsettling than a sudden attack.
The darkness beyond the headlights is more frightening when we don’t know what might be inside it.
Øvredal occasionally demonstrates that understanding.
But too often the film opts for the easier route.
Something appears.
The music rises.
The camera moves.
The jump scare arrives.
Repeat.
The result is a horror film that increasingly telegraphs its intentions. Even the more effective sequences can feel as though they have been constructed around the expectation that the audience will know exactly when to brace themselves.
That is particularly disappointing coming from Øvredal.
His earlier work demonstrated a much greater patience with dread.
The Van Life Nightmare
There is also a missed opportunity in the film’s treatment of van life.
The idea of two people abandoning conventional domesticity for a life on the road should provide an extraordinary horror setting.
The van is simultaneously home and prison.
It offers freedom but little security.
It can take you anywhere, but once something gets inside, there is nowhere to hide.
That contradiction is terrific.
Yet Passenger doesn’t exploit it as deeply as it could.
The van becomes primarily a plot device rather than an extension of the characters’ psychological lives.
And that makes the road trip feel strangely anonymous.
The film could have explored what it means to voluntarily abandon the security of a permanent home only to discover that the open road offers no sanctuary.
Instead, the van largely becomes another location for the next supernatural encounter.
A Couple We Don’t Quite Know
The relationship between Maddie and Tyler also struggles to provide the emotional foundation the film needs.
A supernatural road movie becomes considerably more frightening when we care about the people who cannot escape the road.
But Maddie and Tyler remain somewhat thinly drawn.
Their relationship is functional enough to move the plot forward, but the film doesn’t give us enough sense of what makes them compelling as a couple before the nightmare begins.
That matters because Passenger is ultimately a story about two people trapped together.
The horror should test the relationship.
Instead, the relationship sometimes feels as though it is simply there to populate the horror.
The performances are capable, but the material doesn’t give them enough to work with.
The Promise of Øvredal
There are flashes of the film Passenger could have been.
A handful of visual ideas are genuinely striking. The nighttime sequences occasionally create an effective sense of spatial uncertainty, while Øvredal’s camera can still find interesting ways of turning apparently familiar locations into threatening environments.
One particularly inventive sequence involving a projected film spilling across the surrounding forest demonstrates the director’s ability to create imagery that is genuinely strange and memorable.
These moments remind us that the problem isn’t a lack of technical ability.
Øvredal can make a horror film look good.
He can stage a scare.
He can create atmosphere.
He can establish a threatening environment.
What Passenger lacks is a screenplay capable of consistently matching those instincts.
A Journey to Nowhere
The longer the film continues, the more its initial promise begins to evaporate.
The road should create momentum.
Instead, the narrative begins to drift.
The mystery should deepen.
Instead, it is explained.
The Passenger should become more frightening.
Instead, familiarity sets in.
And the relationship at the centre of the story should become more emotionally involving.
Instead, the characters remain largely where we found them.
This is where the film’s 94-minute running time begins to feel longer than it actually is.
There is a strange contradiction at the heart of Passenger: the film is never particularly long, but it feels as though it is taking a very long time to arrive anywhere.
It is a road movie without much sense of discovery.
The Horror of Predictability
Predictability is particularly damaging to horror because fear depends upon uncertainty.
Once the audience understands the rhythm, the tension begins to drain away.
We know the Passenger will appear.
We know someone will investigate.
We know the darkness will conceal something.
We know the characters will discover another piece of mythology.
And we know that the next scare is likely to arrive just when the soundtrack becomes suspiciously quiet.
There are still moments that work.
But they become isolated jolts rather than part of a sustained atmosphere of dread.
The film’s strongest scare may actually be its opening because, at that point, Passenger hasn’t yet told us what kind of film it is.
It simply lets us be afraid.
A Film Out of Time
Perhaps the strangest thing about Passenger is how contemporary its premise feels and how familiar its execution feels.
The horror landscape has become increasingly adventurous in recent years, with filmmakers finding fresh ways to approach supernatural folklore, body horror, psychological terror and genre hybridity.
Against that backdrop, Passenger feels unusually conventional.
That doesn’t automatically make a film bad.
There is nothing wrong with making a straightforward supernatural horror movie.
But straightforward doesn’t have to mean predictable.
Passenger occasionally seems satisfied with reproducing horror mechanics that other films have already used more effectively.
Its greatest sin isn’t that it is old-fashioned.
It’s that it doesn’t seem particularly interested in doing anything with being old-fashioned.
A Road Trip That Never Reaches Its Destination
The frustration with Passenger comes down to that central contradiction.
There is so much potential in the premise.
A demonic entity stalking people on America’s lonely highways.
A young couple living permanently on the road.
A vehicle that functions simultaneously as home, refuge and trap.
A folklore of missing travellers and roadside death.
An experienced horror filmmaker behind the camera.
That should be enough to make something memorable.
And there are glimpses of it.
But Passenger gradually abandons its strongest qualities in favour of increasingly familiar supernatural-horror territory.
The highway becomes generic.
The mythology becomes explanatory.
The scares become predictable.
The characters remain underdeveloped.
And the Passenger, who should be the film’s great nightmare invention, becomes increasingly ordinary.
The Prognosis:
Passenger is a disappointing film precisely because André Øvredal has already shown us how much better he can do.
There is real promise in its opening, where the combination of an isolated highway, a mysterious accident and an unseen supernatural presence creates the possibility of a genuinely unsettling road nightmare. For a brief period, the film seems to understand that the most frightening thing about travelling through darkness is not knowing what might be waiting beyond the headlights.
But Passenger cannot resist turning that uncertainty into explanation.
The further it travels, the more predictable the journey becomes.
What could have been a lean, atmospheric supernatural road horror instead becomes a collection of familiar scares and increasingly cumbersome mythology. The film isn’t without craft, and Øvredal occasionally finds an image or sequence capable of reminding us of the filmmaker who gave us The Autopsy of Jane Doe.
Those flashes make the disappointment sharper.
Because the film begins with the promise of a destination worth reaching.
Instead, it spends too much of its journey travelling the same stretch of road.
Passenger isn’t a complete disaster.
It’s something more frustrating.
It’s a horror film with a great road, a promising monster and a director capable of considerably more — and somehow it still manages to feel like we’ve been here before.
The body has always been one of horror’s most reliable battlegrounds. We fear what can enter it, what can escape from it and, perhaps most disturbingly, what it might become when it is no longer entirely under our control. With Saccharine, Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James takes that anxiety and feeds it through one of contemporary culture’s most persistent obsessions: the desire to change the body into something supposedly better.
Hana is a medical student consumed by dissatisfaction with her weight and appearance. When she encounters an obscure weight-loss craze promising extraordinary results, the temptation proves impossible to resist. The secret ingredient, however, is not some miracle pharmaceutical. It is human ash. And when Hana begins consuming it, she discovers that the dead aren’t necessarily prepared to become part of somebody else’s pursuit of perfection.
What begins as a grotesque diet-culture satire gradually develops into something stranger: a ghost story, a psychological horror film and a piece of body horror that asks how much of ourselves we are prepared to destroy in the pursuit of becoming somebody else.
It is an ambitious premise, and James is an ambitious filmmaker. The result doesn’t always manage to reconcile all of its ideas, but when Saccharine sinks its teeth into its central concerns, it demonstrates exactly why James has become such an interesting voice in Australian horror.
The James Body
Viewed alongside Relic, Saccharine begins to reveal something particularly fascinating about Natalie Erika James as a filmmaker.
These are very different horror films, dealing with very different forms of suffering, yet they are connected by an increasingly recognisable preoccupation: what happens when an internal experience becomes impossible to contain inside the mind and begins to manifest upon the body.
In Relic, that experience is dementia. Edna’s cognitive deterioration becomes increasingly physical, with the house itself seeming to absorb and reproduce the decay taking place within her. Mould spreads across the walls and eventually across Edna’s body, turning the invisible horror of neurological decline into something tangible.
Saccharine takes that same principle and turns it inward.
Hana isn’t losing control of her body because disease has taken it from her. She is attempting to take control of it herself. The horror emerges from the space between those two impulses. She wants to improve herself, to become thinner, more desirable and more acceptable, but the pursuit of that ideal gradually becomes an act of self-erasure.
James has described Saccharine as exploring the thin line between self-improvement and self-erasure, and that distinction provides perhaps the most useful key to understanding her cinema.
Her characters aren’t necessarily confronted by monsters that exist independently of their emotional lives. Instead, horror gives physical form to something they are already carrying.
In Relic, grief, ageing and the terror of watching a loved one disappear become an environment that literally decays around the characters. In Saccharine, shame, hunger and the desire to alter one’s body become a presence that enters Hana from within and gradually assumes control.
The monster is therefore never entirely external.
It is an expression.
From Decay to Self-Erasure
The connection between Relic and Saccharine becomes particularly striking when we consider their attitudes towards the body.
Edna’s body is betraying her.
Hana believes her body is betraying her.
The distinction is enormous, but James approaches both characters with the same fundamental empathy. Neither woman is simply a vessel for a horror metaphor. The supernatural allows James to explore experiences that are difficult to represent literally, while the human being remains at the centre of the film.
That is why the body horror in both films feels more tragic than sensational.
In Relic, the horror lies in the inevitability of deterioration and the helplessness of those watching it happen. In Saccharine, the horror lies in the possibility that the desire to escape dissatisfaction can become another form of destruction.
One woman cannot stop her body changing.
The other cannot stop trying to change hers.
Both are trapped by an increasingly hostile relationship with the physical self.
And in both cases, James makes that psychological imprisonment literal.
The House and the Body
There is also a fascinating architectural connection between the two films.
Relic is inseparable from its house. The building becomes an extension of Edna’s deteriorating mind, with rooms, corridors and walls transforming into expressions of confusion, entrapment and decay. The physical environment becomes a manifestation of the psychological experience.
Saccharine moves that idea into the body.
Hana’s environment still matters, but the primary architecture is now physical. Her body becomes the space through which the horror operates. The film’s medical settings are particularly appropriate because they turn the human form into something that can be examined, measured, dissected and categorised.
That is precisely what Hana is doing to herself.
She has internalised the idea that her body can be treated as a problem to solve.
James simply turns that idea into horror.
The result is a continuation of the spatial thinking that made Relic so effective. In both films, characters are trapped inside environments that increasingly reflect their psychological states. The difference is that Relic makes the house feel like a body, while Saccharine makes the body feel like a haunted house.
An Australian Body-Horror Tradition
This makes Saccharine part of a particularly interesting moment in Australian horror.
Australian genre cinema has long had an appetite for the grotesque, but recent years have seen filmmakers increasingly combine physical horror with sophisticated psychological and social themes. The Babadook, Relic, Sissy and Talk to Me are very different films, but each demonstrates the capacity of Australian horror to transform intimate anxieties into something monstrous.
Saccharine comfortably belongs within that tradition.
The horror doesn’t simply arrive from outside.
It grows from something recognisably human.
Hana’s obsession with her body is not an abstract concept. It is connected to the pressures surrounding beauty, desirability, self-worth and the seemingly endless cultural demand to improve ourselves.
James simply pushes those pressures to their most grotesque conclusion.
What if the shortcut actually worked?
What if you could consume something and become thinner almost immediately?
And what if the price of that transformation was another human being?
What Are We Willing to Consume?
The film’s weight-loss substance, Gray, is one of its most inspired concepts.
Initially, it appears almost miraculous. Users lose weight at an extraordinary rate, turning the fantasy of effortless transformation into reality.
But Hana is a medical student.
She investigates.
And what she discovers is horrifying.
The substance is human ash.
At that moment, Saccharine reveals its most deliciously perverse idea. The modern miracle cure isn’t some futuristic invention. It is simply death repackaged as a consumer product.
The body that society has taught Hana to despise can apparently be transformed through the consumption of another body.
It is cannibalism disguised as wellness.
And the more Hana understands about Gray, the further she is prepared to go to continue using it.
James is at her strongest when she allows this idea to speak for itself. She doesn’t need to explain the metaphor because the metaphor is already horrifying.
We have simply taken the language of dieting and pushed it into nightmare territory.
The Dead Fight Back
The film’s second major idea arrives when Hana begins to realise that the human remains she is consuming belonged to someone.
That someone does not necessarily appreciate what has happened.
The resulting ghost story gives Saccharine another layer of unease. Hana isn’t merely haunted because she has violated some supernatural rule. She is being confronted by the humanity she has tried to reduce to an ingredient.
The ghost becomes a physical manifestation of the moral consequence of Hana’s obsession.
The dead woman is no longer simply a body.
She is a person.
That distinction becomes increasingly important.
The more Hana becomes obsessed with changing herself, the more she begins to lose sight of the humanity of other people. The haunting therefore isn’t simply punishment.
It is confrontation.
Midori Francis’ Hana
Midori Francis carries much of the film’s emotional weight.
Hana could easily have become an unpleasant protagonist. Her decisions become increasingly disturbing, and her obsession leads her into ethically appalling territory. Yet Francis gives her enough vulnerability to make those choices comprehensible without excusing them.
There is desperation beneath the vanity.
There is loneliness beneath the obsession.
And there is an almost tragic belief that if Hana can simply fix her body, the rest of her life will somehow fall into place.
Francis understands that contradiction.
Hana knows that what she is doing is wrong.
She continues anyway.
That is much more interesting than a protagonist who simply doesn’t understand the consequences of her actions.
Her intelligence becomes part of the tragedy. She has enough medical knowledge to understand exactly what is happening, but knowledge cannot overcome obsession.
The Anatomy of Horror
James’ visual confidence is particularly evident in the way she treats the human body.
The medical environment provides an appropriately clinical backdrop. Bodies are dissected, examined and categorised. Human remains become objects of scientific study.
Then the film gradually turns those same bodies into objects of desire and consumption.
The clinical becomes corporeal.
The corporeal becomes edible.
The edible becomes supernatural.
James repeatedly finds ways of making the human body appear simultaneously fascinating and disgusting. Flesh, organs and food begin to occupy the same visual territory.
This is where Saccharine demonstrates some of its greatest confidence.
Body horror doesn’t necessarily require mutilation.
Sometimes the most disturbing image is something completely ordinary presented from the wrong perspective.
A meal becomes grotesque.
A body becomes food.
Food becomes flesh.
And the distinction between nourishment and destruction begins to disappear.
The Beautiful and the Grotesque
James’ visual evolution between Relic and Saccharine is equally revealing.
Relic is dominated by oppressive darkness, Gothic architecture, mould, shadow and gradual decay. Saccharine initially appears almost to reject that visual language. Its colours are brighter, its surfaces more artificial and its imagery more tactile.
But the underlying philosophy is remarkably similar.
James has spoken about wanting Saccharine to occupy a space between “candy and grime” — the artificial sweetness of pleasure alongside the physical rot underneath it.
That tension is central to her work.
The beautiful and the grotesque are never entirely separate.
In Relic, the family home contains both memories of love and the horror of deterioration. In Saccharine, the promise of beauty and self-improvement contains the possibility of self-destruction.
James seems instinctively drawn to the point where attraction becomes repulsion.
Something is beautiful because we desire it.
Something is horrifying because we understand what that desire can cost.
That is a sophisticated foundation for body horror.
A Ghost Story Inside a Body-Horror Film
The film’s most interesting structural decision is also one of its weaknesses.
James is essentially making two horror films at once.
One is a body-horror story about eating, weight loss and the desire to transform the physical self.
The other is a supernatural ghost story about a dead woman whose body has been violated and whose presence begins to haunt the person responsible.
Individually, both ideas are compelling.
Together, they don’t always fit comfortably.
The ghost story occasionally threatens to pull the film away from its strongest material. Just as the body-horror metaphor begins to bite, the narrative shifts towards more conventional supernatural mechanics.
This doesn’t make those sequences ineffective, but they are less distinctive.
James is at her best when the supernatural and physical become indistinguishable — when we aren’t quite sure whether Hana is being haunted by a ghost, by her own guilt or by the increasingly distorted relationship she has with her body.
The more conventional the haunting becomes, the less interesting the film feels.
When the Metaphor Starts Showing
There is no great subtlety to Saccharine.
That isn’t necessarily a criticism. Horror has always been capable of taking social anxieties and turning them into grotesque literalism.
James understands that the metaphor becomes more powerful when it becomes physically impossible to ignore.
But there are moments when the film explains what its imagery has already communicated.
We understand what Hana is experiencing.
We understand why she wants to change.
We understand the destructive nature of the culture surrounding her.
The film occasionally continues explaining after the horror has already made the point.
This becomes more noticeable as the narrative progresses. The film’s second half doesn’t always maintain the intensity established by its opening sections.
The irony is that the repetition has a thematic logic.
Obsession is repetitive.
The same thought returns.
The same ritual is repeated.
The same dissatisfaction resurfaces.
But what works psychologically doesn’t always work dramatically.
The Horror of Wanting More
One of the film’s strongest ideas is that Hana never reaches a point at which enough is enough.
The first transformation isn’t sufficient.
The next one isn’t sufficient.
The goal moves.
The body changes.
The dissatisfaction remains.
This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Saccharine because it doesn’t require a supernatural explanation.
The promise of perfection is inherently unstable.
There is always another flaw.
Another kilogram.
Another improvement.
Another version of ourselves waiting to be manufactured.
Hana’s horror comes from discovering that the thing she believes will finally make her happy has no finish line.
The body can always be changed.
The appetite can always return.
The obsession can always demand more.
The Horror of Self-Erasure
This is where Saccharine most clearly extends the ideas of Relic.
Edna’s body is being taken away from her.
Hana is voluntarily giving hers away.
The first is a horror of inevitable deterioration. The second is a horror of chosen transformation.
Yet both films ultimately arrive at a similar question:
What happens when the body ceases to feel like home?
James doesn’t provide an easy answer because neither film is really interested in easy answers.
Instead, she uses horror to make psychological experiences physical.
In Relic, decay becomes architecture.
In Saccharine, insecurity becomes consumption.
In both films, the body becomes the place where emotional and psychological damage can no longer remain invisible.
That may ultimately be the defining characteristic of James’ cinema.
She doesn’t use horror to escape reality.
She uses horror to make reality impossible to ignore.
The Australian Body-Horror Renaissance
There is something particularly encouraging about Saccharine existing within the current Australian horror landscape.
The country has always produced filmmakers willing to confront the grotesque, but there is now a remarkable confidence in Australian genre cinema’s ability to explore serious emotional and social issues through horror.
Saccharine doesn’t merely want us to recoil.
It wants the recoil to mean something.
The body becomes the battleground where social pressure, personal insecurity, desire, grief and guilt collide.
That makes James’ work part of a broader Australian horror tradition that treats genre as a means of examining the things we might otherwise find difficult to discuss directly.
And James is clearly developing a visual language of her own.
There is a confidence here that goes beyond the script’s occasional structural uncertainty.
A Film That Bites, But Doesn’t Always Chew
The frustrating thing about Saccharine is that its best ideas are genuinely excellent.
The concept of a weight-loss drug made from human ashes is inspired.
The collision of body horror and ghost story is fertile territory.
The Australian setting gives it a distinct identity.
Midori Francis is compelling.
And James has an instinct for visual horror that remains impressive.
But the film sometimes feels like it is carrying too many ideas at once.
The social commentary wants to be sharp.
The ghost story wants to be frightening.
The body horror wants to be disgusting.
The character drama wants to be emotional.
The romantic material wants to give Hana something to desire.
And the family material wants to explain where her relationship with her body originated.
Some of these elements complement one another beautifully.
Others simply compete for attention.
The result is a film that is frequently fascinating without always being completely satisfying.
The Prognosis:
Saccharine is an ambitious Australian horror film that deserves credit for taking a genuinely grotesque premise and using it to interrogate something far more familiar: our complicated relationship with our own bodies.
Natalie Erika James remains an assured visual filmmaker, and Saccharine confirms that the concerns emerging from Relic were not simply the product of a singular premise. There is a developing body of work here, one increasingly concerned with the physical manifestation of internal suffering.
Relic asked us to confront the horror of watching a body and mind deteriorate.
Saccharine asks us to confront the horror of desperately trying to prevent that body from being what it is.
One woman cannot stop herself changing.
The other cannot stop trying to change herself.
Both become trapped inside bodies that no longer feel like their own.
That continuity makes Saccharine more interesting than its individual successes and shortcomings might suggest. It establishes James as a filmmaker fascinated by the point at which psychological suffering crosses the threshold into physical horror.
The film doesn’t always achieve the devastating impact its premise promises. Its supernatural elements occasionally feel more conventional than its body-horror ideas, and its thematic commentary can sometimes become too explicit.
But there is enough ambition, imagination and outright grotesquerie here to make the film worthwhile.
James has created a horror story in which appetite becomes addiction, transformation becomes self-destruction and the dead refuse to remain reduced to ingredients.
It doesn’t always digest its ideas cleanly.
But when Saccharine sinks its teeth into its subject, it does so with considerable force.
And in an Australian horror landscape increasingly willing to make the body its canvas, that is something worth celebrating.
Relic made the house feel like a body.
Saccharine makes the body feel like a haunted house.
The next question is what James will choose to haunt.
When audiences think back to David Cronenberg’s The Fly, the images that usually come first are those of Jeff Goldblum’s extraordinary transformation. They remember the telepods, the deteriorating flesh, the grotesque practical effects and the slow evolution of Seth Brundle into Brundlefly. It is one of horror cinema’s most iconic metamorphoses and, rightly, Goldblum’s performance has become inseparable from the film’s legacy.
Yet focusing solely on Seth’s transformation risks overlooking the character who gives the film its emotional centre. Without Veronica Quaife, The Fly would still be a landmark of body horror. With her, it becomes something far more devastating: a love story about watching someone disappear while they are still standing in front of you.
Geena Davis does far more than play the romantic lead. She becomes the audience’s emotional anchor, guiding us through a tragedy that is as much about witnessing irreversible change as it is about enduring it. While Seth experiences the horror from within, Veronica experiences it from the outside. She cannot stop the transformation, cannot reverse it and cannot fully understand it. All she can do is watch, hope and eventually accept what neither science nor love can overcome.
One of the reasons Veronica remains such a compelling character is that she is never written as a passive participant in the story. Horror cinema has often relegated women to the role of victim or survivor, but Veronica occupies a far more nuanced position. She is an accomplished science journalist whose curiosity introduces her to Seth Brundle’s revolutionary work. She is intelligent, professionally ambitious and emotionally independent long before romance enters the picture.
That independence is crucial because it establishes the relationship on equal terms. Veronica is not drawn to Seth because he rescues her or because the screenplay requires a romance. She falls in love with his brilliance, his awkward humour and his boundless enthusiasm. Seth’s eccentricity becomes part of his charm, and Goldblum and Davis’ real-life relationship lends these early scenes a warmth that feels remarkably natural. Before The Fly becomes a horror film, it is almost a romantic drama, allowing audiences to invest in two people whose affection feels authentic rather than manufactured.
This emotional groundwork is what transforms the film’s second half into something so painful. The audience is not simply watching a scientist mutate into a monster; they are watching a relationship slowly disintegrate under the weight of something neither partner can control. Veronica remains committed to Seth long after most people would have walked away, continually searching for traces of the man she first met beneath the increasingly grotesque exterior.
In many ways, Veronica’s journey resembles what psychologists now describe as anticipatory grief. It is the experience of mourning someone before they have physically died—a gradual process of recognising that the person you love is slipping away while still being physically present. Cronenberg captures this emotional reality with remarkable sensitivity. Seth is alive throughout the film, yet every stage of his transformation places another layer of distance between who he was and who he is becoming.
Geena Davis communicates this progression with extraordinary restraint. Rather than relying on dramatic emotional outbursts, she allows Veronica’s heartbreak to accumulate quietly. Small changes in expression, lingering silences and hesitant glances often reveal more than pages of dialogue ever could. As Seth becomes increasingly isolated within his own body, Veronica becomes increasingly isolated within her own grief. She is forced to watch events unfold with growing helplessness, recognising long before Seth does that there may be no cure.
Veronica’s profession also becomes surprisingly significant. As a journalist, she is trained to observe, investigate and seek evidence before reaching conclusions. Those instincts shape her response to Seth’s transformation. She refuses to dismiss what she is seeing, yet equally refuses to surrender to hysteria. Instead, she approaches the impossible with the same intellectual curiosity that first attracted her to Seth. Ironically, it is that shared belief in reason that makes the tragedy so much harder to bear. Knowledge offers neither of them comfort. It simply confirms the inevitability of what is happening.
As Seth’s physical deterioration accelerates, Veronica’s role gradually shifts from partner to caregiver. This aspect of The Fly often receives less attention than its spectacular body horror, yet it remains one of the film’s most emotionally truthful elements. She worries about Seth’s wellbeing, encourages him to seek help, attempts to protect him from his own increasingly destructive impulses and continues to care for him even as his appearance becomes almost unrecognisable.
Cronenberg presents caregiving not as heroic spectacle but as an act of quiet endurance. Veronica cannot fight the disease consuming Seth because there is no external enemy to defeat. Her greatest act of courage lies simply in remaining present. That emotional commitment gives The Fly much of its enduring humanity. The horror does not stem solely from physical mutation but from the painful recognition that love cannot always prevent loss.
The film’s infamous nightmare sequence, in which Veronica dreams of giving birth to a grotesque larval creature, extends these themes even further. On the surface, it functions as one of Cronenberg’s most memorable moments of body horror. Beneath that shock lies a profound anxiety about the body’s unpredictability. Seth’s mutation has infected Veronica’s imagination, transforming pregnancy—a symbol of hope and new life—into another source of terrifying uncertainty. It reinforces one of Cronenberg’s central ideas: the human body can never be fully controlled, even by those who inhabit it.
Throughout the film, Geena Davis never competes with the extraordinary makeup effects surrounding her. Instead, she grounds them. Every grotesque transformation Seth undergoes becomes emotionally meaningful because Veronica reacts not simply with fear, but with compassion, disbelief and lingering affection. She continually reminds both Seth and the audience that there is still a person worth saving beneath the decaying flesh.
This emotional perspective reaches its devastating conclusion during the film’s final moments. The horrific fusion of Brundlefly and the telepod remains one of horror cinema’s most unforgettable images, yet the true emotional climax belongs to Veronica. When the grotesque creature silently raises the shotgun towards itself, she immediately understands the request being made.
She is not destroying a monster.
She is granting mercy to the man she still recognises.
That distinction is what elevates the ending beyond conventional horror. Veronica’s final act is not one of victory but of compassion. She sees Seth when almost every visible trace of him has disappeared. In doing so, she reminds the audience that humanity cannot always be measured by appearance alone.
Looking back forty years later, Veronica Quaife feels more relevant than ever. Modern audiences, particularly those who have experienced serious illness, degenerative disease or the responsibilities of caregiving, often recognise her journey as much as Seth’s. While The Fly is frequently celebrated for its astonishing practical effects, its emotional longevity owes just as much to Davis’ understated performance. She transforms a story of physical mutation into a meditation on love, grief and acceptance.
The Prognosis:
If Seth Brundle embodies the horror of losing oneself, Veronica Quaife embodies the heartbreak of watching someone you love disappear piece by piece. Geena Davis gives The Fly its emotional soul, ensuring that beneath every layer of prosthetic makeup remains a relationship worth mourning. Her performance reminds us that monsters are rarely frightening simply because of what they become. They are frightening because someone remembers who they used to be.
Forty years after its release, The Fly continues to move audiences not solely because of Brundlefly’s extraordinary transformation, but because Veronica never stops searching for Seth beneath it. In the end, she teaches us the film’s most profound truth: love does not end when bodies change. It simply asks more of those who remain.
Haunted houses have always reflected the people who live inside them. Sometimes they preserve memories. Sometimes they conceal terrible secrets. Occasionally they become prisons from which their occupants cannot escape. In Dan Curtis’Burnt Offerings, however, the house wants something far more intimate. It doesn’t simply haunt its residents. It consumes them.
Released in 1976 and adapted from Robert Marasco’s acclaimed novel, Burnt Offerings arrived during a remarkable decade for supernatural horror. It shared cinema screens with The Omen, Carrie and The Sentinel, yet it occupies a distinctive place within the haunted house tradition because it rejects sudden shocks in favour of slow psychological erosion.
The horror does not burst through the front door.
It quietly settles into the furniture.
A Bargain Too Good to Refuse
The premise carries the deceptive simplicity of a fairy tale. Ben and Marian Rolf, accompanied by their son David and Ben’s elderly Aunt Elizabeth, lease an enormous country mansion for the summer at an impossibly low price. There is only one condition. An elderly woman living in an upstairs bedroom must never be disturbed. Like all great Gothic stories, the bargain feels suspicious from the very beginning. Yet the temptation is irresistible.
The house promises everything a family could desire. Space. Beauty. Escape. Status. It offers the illusion of an ideal life. The price simply remains hidden.
A House That Feeds
Most haunted houses imprison. Dan Curtis imagines something far more unsettling. This house is alive. Not in the literal sense. But spiritually. Emotionally.
It draws strength from exhaustion, grief and isolation, feeding upon the emotional fractures already present within the family. The supernatural therefore becomes almost secondary. The true horror emerges through gradual transformation. Relationships deteriorate. Affection becomes resentment. Tenderness gives way to distance. The house never forces these changes. It merely nurtures them. Like a parasite discovering fertile ground.
Domestic Horror
One of Burnt Offerings’ greatest achievements is how firmly it roots its supernatural ideas within ordinary family life. The Rolf family are not extraordinary people. They are recognisably human. Parents attempting to create a better life. Children adapting to unfamiliar surroundings. Relatives carrying the quiet weight of old age. Their struggles feel domestic before they become supernatural. That distinction matters.
The house does not create dysfunction. It amplifies vulnerabilities that already exist. Curtis understands that the strongest haunted house stories rarely concern buildings. They concern families. The walls merely provide somewhere for those fractures to echo.
The American Dream with Rotten Foundations
Viewed fifty years later, Burnt Offerings feels remarkably prophetic. The magnificent mansion represents more than wealth or comfort. It embodies the promise of the American Dream itself. A beautiful home. A fresh start. The belief that happiness can be found behind an impressive front door. Yet the film quietly dismantles that fantasy.
Possession becomes obsession. Ownership becomes servitude. The house demands constant attention while offering nothing in return. It transforms domestic aspiration into domestic imprisonment. In doing so, Burnt Offerings becomes less a ghost story than a meditation on the emotional cost of chasing impossible ideals.
Dan Curtis’ Quiet Direction
Best known for bringing Gothic storytelling into American homes through Dark Shadows, Dan Curtis directs with remarkable patience. Modern haunted house films often rely upon escalating spectacle. Curtis prefers accumulation. Small changes. Lingering silences. Subtle shifts in behaviour. Even the house itself appears to breathe differently as the narrative progresses. The result is less concerned with startling the audience than slowly convincing them that something is profoundly wrong. It is horror through atmosphere rather than interruption.
Oliver Reed and Karen Black
The emotional burden rests squarely upon Oliver Reed and Karen Black, both delivering performances that grow increasingly fractured as the house tightens its invisible grip. Reed grounds Ben with weary resilience, while Black charts Marian’s transformation with unsettling restraint. Rather than depicting outright possession, she portrays something quieter. An emotional surrender.
The house becomes less a place she inhabits than a purpose she embraces. That ambiguity remains one of the film’s greatest strengths. Is she possessed? Manipulated? Or simply responding to something buried deep within herself? Curtis wisely refuses definitive answers.
A Blueprint for Haunted Houses Yet to Come
Looking back from the perspective of fifty years, it becomes impossible not to recognise Burnt Offerings’ influence. Its patient pacing, psychological deterioration and emphasis on domestic collapse anticipate later classics including The Shining, The Changeling and countless modern haunted house narratives. While those films each forged their own identities, Burnt Offerings demonstrated that the most terrifying houses were not those filled with ghosts. They were the ones that quietly dismantled the families who entered them.
The Prognosis:
Burnt Offerings remains one of the great overlooked haunted house films of the 1970s. Not because it reinvented the genre through spectacle. But because it understood something more enduring. The most frightening houses are never truly empty. They are filled with longing. Regret. Grief. Unspoken resentment.
Dan Curtis transformed those invisible emotions into architecture itself, creating a home that feeds less upon blood than upon the fragile bonds holding a family together. Half a century later, its corridors remain unsettling not because something lurks at the top of the stairs…
But because every room quietly asks the same unsettling question.
What if the place we call home knows us better than we know ourselves?
There are few horror films that understand the relationship between a city and its inhabitants quite like C.H.U.D. (1984). Beneath its reputation as an unruly creature feature lies a particularly ugly vision of New York: a city of neglected infrastructure, toxic waste, political corruption and people who have effectively disappeared from the social landscape. The monsters merely give physical form to what the city would rather keep hidden.
Its soundtrack understands this.
Composed by Martin Cooper and David A. Hughes, the music of C.H.U.D. does not announce itself with the flamboyance of Fabio Frizzi’s Zombi 2, nor does it construct an elaborate melodic mythology in the manner of Christopher Young’s Hellraiser. Instead, it inhabits the margins. It hums, pulses and drones beneath the images, creating the sensation that something is operating just beyond our awareness.
This is music for a city that has forgotten how to sleep.
A City Beneath the City
The New York of C.H.U.D. is not the postcard metropolis. There are no reassuring skylines or romanticised streets. Instead, the film repeatedly directs our attention downward: into sewers, tunnels, abandoned spaces and the labyrinthine infrastructure that makes urban life possible while remaining largely invisible to those who benefit from it.
That distinction is crucial.
Cities are built upon layers. Modern civilisation depends upon systems of water, electricity, sanitation and transportation that are largely hidden from view. We experience their effects without having to confront their existence.
C.H.U.D. turns that arrangement into horror.
The soundtrack consequently feels less like a conventional film score than an extension of the infrastructure itself. Its electronic textures suggest machinery operating somewhere beyond the frame. Its low-frequency drones create the sensation of pressure beneath the ground. Rather than telling us when to be frightened, the music makes the environment feel inherently wrong.
The city is already sick.
The monsters are simply its symptoms.
The Sound of Neglect
What makes C.H.U.D. particularly interesting as an early-1980s horror film is the way its social anxieties are embedded within its monster mythology. The Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers are not supernatural invaders. They are the consequence of human decisions.
The film’s horror is therefore fundamentally ecological and political.
Toxic material has been dumped where it shouldn’t be. Homeless people have been pushed into spaces where nobody wants to look. Institutions are more interested in containing embarrassment than confronting responsibility.
The creatures have been produced by neglect.
Cooper and Hughes’ score rarely needs to underline this explicitly. Its cold electronic palette creates an atmosphere of institutional indifference. There is little warmth in the music because there is little warmth in the world it depicts.
This is not a soundtrack that asks us to fear the unknown.
It asks us to fear what we already know—and what we have chosen not to see.
The Underground as the Unconscious
The underground has always possessed a particular significance in horror.
It is where civilisation puts what it cannot accommodate.
The dead.
The unwanted.
The contaminated.
The forgotten.
In C.H.U.D., the sewer becomes a literalised subconscious. Everything pushed beneath the surface eventually returns.
This brings to mind the anthropological concept of the “non-place”, associated with French theorist Marc Augé: anonymous environments designed for transit rather than belonging. Subways, service corridors, tunnels and other infrastructural spaces are necessary to modern life, yet they remain psychologically peripheral.
C.H.U.D. transforms those spaces into places of revelation.
The characters descend beneath New York and discover that the city’s discarded material has acquired a life of its own.
The score accompanies this descent by gradually stripping away conventional musical familiarity. Melody becomes secondary to texture. Rhythm becomes a pulse. Sound becomes environment.
The deeper we travel, the less recognisable the world becomes.
Music Without a Monster
One of the most effective qualities of the C.H.U.D. soundtrack is its restraint.
Horror music often tells us how to respond. A sudden orchestral sting announces danger; a crescendo prepares us for violence; a sinister melody identifies the villain before the character even appears.
C.H.U.D. frequently works differently.
Its music creates an atmosphere in which danger is simply assumed.
This is particularly effective because the film’s monsters are rarely the most frightening thing in the room. The real unease comes from the possibility that the city has been operating according to rules that ordinary citizens never knew existed.
The soundtrack therefore doesn’t need to announce the creatures.
The environment has already become threatening.
The Early Electronic Horror Sound
There is also something distinctly of its period about the score.
The early 1980s represented a fascinating moment in horror music. Advances in synthesisers and recording technology were making electronic composition increasingly accessible, while filmmakers were discovering that synthetic sounds could produce forms of unease that traditional orchestration could not.
The result was a new sonic vocabulary.
Cold.
Mechanical.
Repetitive.
Alien.
Yet the electronic sound of C.H.U.D. is particularly appropriate because its horror is itself technological. This is not an ancient evil emerging from some forgotten crypt. It is a modern catastrophe produced by industry, infrastructure and institutional failure.
The synthesiser is therefore more than an aesthetic choice.
It belongs to the film’s world.
The Monster Is the System
Perhaps the most interesting way to interpret C.H.U.D. is to realise that its monsters are almost beside the point.
They are memorable because they provide the film with an immediately recognisable physical threat. But the film’s deeper horror comes from discovering how easily people can become invisible within a modern city.
The creatures live beneath the streets because society has created a space where they can exist unnoticed.
That makes the title itself strangely revealing.
Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.
Even their name sounds bureaucratic.
They are classified.
Categorised.
Reduced to an acronym.
The absurdity of the name disguises an uncomfortable truth: these creatures are the product of systems that have failed.
And the soundtrack reflects that failure.
Its cold electronic pulses feel almost administrative in their repetition, as though the machinery of the city continues functioning regardless of what has been buried beneath it.
The trains still run.
The lights still work.
The streets remain crowded.
And somewhere underneath all of it, something is feeding.
Why C.H.U.D. Still Sounds Modern
Four decades later, the soundtrack’s greatest achievement may be how little it dates.
The film itself is unmistakably a product of early-1980s New York, but its music possesses an abstraction that remains surprisingly contemporary.
Modern horror increasingly understands that atmosphere can be more unsettling than melody. Drone, texture, ambient noise and electronic minimalism have become central components of the genre’s musical vocabulary.
C.H.U.D. was already exploring those possibilities.
Its soundtrack does not demand to be remembered as a collection of themes.
It wants to be experienced as an environment.
And perhaps that is why it remains so effective.
Continue the Conversation
The music of C.H.U.D. is easy to overlook because the film itself is so visually and conceptually loud. But listen carefully and another film begins to emerge: one concerned less with monsters than with the hidden systems beneath modern civilisation.
In the latest episode of Sounds of Horror, Saul Muerte descends beneath the streets of New York to explore the score in greater detail, examining how Martin Cooper and David A. Hughes transform urban infrastructure into an instrument of dread.
If the film asks what might be living beneath the city, the soundtrack asks a more unsettling question:
What if the city itself is alive?
The Prognosis:
The most effective horror music does not necessarily frighten us in isolation.
Sometimes its achievement is more subtle.
It changes the way we hear a place.
After C.H.U.D., a subway tunnel is no longer merely a subway tunnel. A distant mechanical hum becomes something worth noticing. A manhole cover becomes a threshold. The familiar infrastructure of the modern city acquires a second, darker identity.
That is the real achievement of the C.H.U.D. soundtrack.
Cooper and Hughes don’t simply score the monsters beneath New York.
They score everything we have built above them.
And perhaps that is why the music remains so unsettling.
Because the most frightening thing beneath the city isn’t necessarily what has crawled out of the darkness.
The most effective psychological thrillers understand that mystery is not simply a narrative device—it is an emotional experience. The less we know, the more actively we participate, filling the gaps with our own anxieties, suspicions and expectations. When handled well, uncertainty becomes the film’s greatest weapon, allowing tension to grow not through spectacle but through imagination.
Hellcat embraces that philosophy with admirable confidence. It presents a compelling premise, asks intriguing questions and maintains an atmosphere of unease throughout its lean running time. Yet while the journey is consistently engaging, the film ultimately discovers that sustaining mystery is easier than delivering a conclusion capable of matching it.
Lena (Dakota Gorman) awakens inside a moving camper trailer with a grotesque wound and no recollection of how she arrived there. The unseen driver calmly informs her that they have just one hour to reach medical help before she succumbs to an unimaginable fate. As the journey continues, physical pain intensifies, memories become increasingly unreliable and reality itself begins to fracture, leaving both Lena and the audience uncertain about who can be trusted—or whether there is even a truth waiting to be uncovered.
Director Brock Bodell demonstrates impressive confidence in such a tightly contained setting. Restricting much of the action to the interior of the camper could easily have become visually repetitive, but the film instead transforms confinement into its greatest dramatic asset. The cramped environment creates a constant sense of pressure, denying both Lena and the audience any opportunity to breathe. Every mile travelled feels significant because the destination remains frustratingly elusive.
That sense of claustrophobia is reinforced by the film’s measured visual style. Rather than relying on elaborate effects or relentless shocks, Bodell favours careful framing, restrained camerawork and an understated soundscape that allows tension to accumulate naturally. The camper itself becomes a liminal space where reality feels increasingly unstable, reflecting Lena’s deteriorating physical and psychological state.
Dakota Gorman carries much of the film’s emotional weight with considerable assurance. Confined for long stretches to a single location, her performance must continually sustain the audience’s investment while revealing only fragments of what Lena herself understands. Gorman balances fear, determination and growing confusion with admirable restraint, ensuring the character remains sympathetic even as the narrative becomes increasingly abstract.
The supporting performances likewise contribute to the film’s credibility. Because Hellcat depends so heavily on conversation, suggestion and ambiguity, emotional authenticity becomes essential. The cast grounds even the more enigmatic moments, allowing the mystery to remain intriguing rather than simply opaque.
Where Hellcat proves less convincing is in the way it negotiates its own expectations.
For much of its runtime, the film hints at revelations that promise to fundamentally reshape everything the audience believes they understand. Every conversation appears loaded with hidden meaning, every new development suggesting that something genuinely horrifying waits just beyond reach. It is an effective strategy for generating suspense, but one that inevitably places enormous pressure on the eventual payoff.
Unfortunately, that payoff never quite arrives with the force the premise seems to promise.
This is not because the conclusion lacks intelligence. On the contrary, Hellcat remains committed to its psychological ambitions until the very end. The difficulty lies in the imbalance between the tension it carefully cultivates and the emotional satisfaction ultimately delivered. The questions posed throughout the film often prove more compelling than the answers themselves.
Perhaps the greatest surprise is how restrained the horror remains. Despite its unsettling premise, Hellcat rarely seeks to overwhelm through fear or graphic spectacle. Instead, it functions primarily as a psychological mystery whose horror exists largely in implication. There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach, and many of the genre’s finest works have relied upon suggestion rather than explicit terror. Yet here the restraint occasionally feels less like artistic confidence and more like a reluctance to fully embrace the darker possibilities embedded within its own concept.
Even so, Hellcat deserves credit for refusing easy sensationalism. It trusts its audience to remain engaged through atmosphere, performance and uncertainty rather than constant shocks. That confidence is increasingly rare within contemporary horror, particularly among films operating within such modest confines.
The Prognosis:
Hellcat is a thoughtfully constructed psychological thriller that demonstrates how much tension can be generated from a simple premise executed with precision. Brock Bodell makes impressive use of a deliberately confined setting, while Dakota Gorman delivers a compelling central performance that anchors the film’s shifting realities with emotional conviction.
Although its carefully sustained mystery ultimately proves more satisfying than its resolution, the journey remains consistently engaging. Hellcat may not deliver the visceral impact or emotional catharsis its premise appears to promise, but it succeeds as an atmospheric exercise in uncertainty—one that understands mystery can be every bit as unsettling as the monsters we imagine lurking beyond it.
Australian genre cinema has never needed to look overseas for its nightmares. They have always been here: in the bush, in the suburbs, on isolated roads and beneath the seemingly endless glare of the Australian sun. From the brutal social realism of Wake in Fright through the post-apocalyptic ferocity of Mad Max, the unsettling suburban nightmares of Next of Kin and the blackly comic violence of 100 Bloody Acres, Australian filmmakers have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to turn familiar landscapes into places of profound unease.
Mia’Kate Russell’s Penny Lane Is Dead belongs comfortably within that tradition.
What makes the film particularly exciting, however, is that it doesn’t feel like an exercise in Australian genre nostalgia. Russell’s feature directorial debut has the confidence to understand the visual and thematic vocabulary of the films that came before it while still attempting to establish a voice of its own. Set during the blistering Australian summer of 1986, it takes the familiar ingredients of the holiday-house thriller—friendship, isolation, youthful recklessness, secrets and escalating violence—and turns them into something considerably darker.
The result is not without its imperfections. At times, the film’s ambition exceeds the precision of its execution, and some of its genre mechanisms are more familiar than revolutionary. But those shortcomings are considerably less interesting than what Russell gets right. Penny Lane Is Dead announces the arrival of a director with a remarkably assured understanding of atmosphere, performance and the particular unease that can emerge when Australian sunlight becomes almost as oppressive as darkness.
At the centre of it all is Kat, played by Sophia Wright Mendelsohn in a performance of extraordinary complexity.
The premise is deceptively straightforward. During a scorching summer in 1986, three best friends gather at a summer house to celebrate, only for a prank to spiral catastrophically out of control. What begins as youthful mischief rapidly becomes a fight for survival, and the familiar rhythms of friendship are replaced by suspicion, fear and bloodshed.
Yet Penny Lane Is Dead is less interested in the mechanics of the prank than in what happens when the social bonds holding these characters together begin to disintegrate.
Russell understands that the most effective horror frequently emerges from relationships rather than monsters. The threat isn’t simply something invading the house from outside. It develops within the group itself, exposing resentments and anxieties that were already present beneath the surface. The summer house consequently becomes less a refuge than a pressure chamber, with the oppressive heat amplifying every argument, every secret and every moment of uncertainty.
That Australian summer is crucial to the film’s identity.
There is an almost tactile quality to the heat. Russell understands the visual contradiction of the Australian landscape: the brightness, openness and apparent freedom of the coast can coexist with profound isolation. The relentless sunlight offers nowhere to hide, while the house becomes increasingly claustrophobic despite its connection to the vast landscape outside.
It is a distinctly Australian form of unease.
The film’s 1986 setting could easily have become an exercise in retro decoration, but Russell largely avoids allowing nostalgia to overwhelm the story. The period is present without becoming the point. Instead, the analogue world reinforces the film’s sense of isolation. These characters cannot simply reach for a smartphone and summon assistance. Information travels differently. Secrets remain secrets for longer. Physical proximity matters.
The result is a setting that feels authentically lived in rather than manufactured for aesthetic effect.
But Russell’s greatest achievement is her command of tone.
Penny Lane Is Dead moves between youthful energy, dark humour and genuine brutality without entirely settling into any one register. That instability works in the film’s favour. The characters are young, impulsive and capable of making spectacularly bad decisions, yet the consequences are never treated as weightless genre entertainment.
When the prank goes wrong, the film changes.
The laughter becomes uncomfortable.
The summer atmosphere becomes oppressive.
Friendship becomes liability.
And the question shifts from what happened to what these people are capable of doing now that survival is at stake.
That tonal transition is where Russell demonstrates the greatest promise as a filmmaker. She understands that violence is most effective when it alters the emotional temperature of a scene rather than simply providing spectacle. The blood matters because something has changed between the characters.
And then there is Kat.
Sophia Wright Mendelsohn gives the film an extraordinary centre of gravity. Kat could easily have been written as an archetype—the troubled friend, the survivor, the unpredictable one—but Mendelsohn refuses to allow her to settle into any convenient category.
Instead, Kat remains elusive.
Her motivations are not always immediately transparent. Her emotional responses can be contradictory. She can be sympathetic in one moment and deeply troubling in the next. There are flashes of vulnerability alongside moments of apparent calculation, and Mendelsohn never signals too clearly which version of Kat we are supposed to believe.
That ambiguity is enormously important.
The performance asks the audience to keep reassessing Kat rather than simply deciding whether she is “good” or “bad”. She exists somewhere in the uncomfortable territory between those definitions, where trauma, fear, loyalty and self-preservation begin to overlap.
Mendelsohn’s work is particularly impressive because so much of Kat’s complexity exists in what she doesn’t say. A look can alter the meaning of an entire exchange. A pause can suggest resentment, fear or calculation without definitively confirming any of them. She gives Kat an interiority that extends beyond what the screenplay explicitly tells us.
As the situation deteriorates, that interior world becomes increasingly difficult to read.
And that is precisely what makes her so compelling.
Kat isn’t simply someone trying to survive the horror.
She becomes part of the horror’s moral problem.
Russell and Mendelsohn understand that survival can be an ugly proposition. The genre has traditionally rewarded characters who demonstrate courage, loyalty and resourcefulness, but Penny Lane Is Dead is considerably more interested in what survival does to those qualities when the pressure becomes unbearable.
What would you sacrifice?
Who would you betray?
How much of yourself are you willing to abandon if doing so means seeing another sunrise?
Kat becomes the embodiment of those questions.
This is also where the film’s friendship dynamics become particularly effective. The three central characters aren’t simply interchangeable genre victims. Their histories and emotional connections matter, and the escalating violence forces those relationships into uncomfortable territory. The film understands that the destruction of friendship can be every bit as disturbing as physical violence.
There is a particular sadness to watching people who once knew each other intimately become strangers.
Russell captures that fracture with an increasingly grim confidence.
The film isn’t perfect. Some of its narrative turns feel familiar, and there are moments when the screenplay reaches for a psychological complexity that the plotting doesn’t entirely support. The pacing can also feel uneven as the film transitions between its more character-driven passages and its escalating genre violence.
At times, the film’s influences are visible.
But influence is not the same thing as imitation.
The important thing is that Russell demonstrates an understanding of why Australian genre cinema has historically been so effective. The landscape matters. The heat matters. Isolation matters. Humour matters. Violence matters. Most importantly, the characters matter.
There is a distinctly Australian understanding of menace at work here: the recognition that the environment doesn’t need to become unfamiliar to become threatening. The house, the summer and the friendships are all recognisable. Russell simply applies enough pressure until their familiarity becomes uncomfortable.
That is an exciting foundation for a filmmaking career.
The Prognosis:
Penny Lane Is Dead is not a flawless film, but perfection is not what makes Russell’s debut exciting. What matters is the confidence behind the camera and the sense that a filmmaker has arrived with a genuine understanding of the genre she wants to inhabit.
Mia’Kate Russell demonstrates a strong visual sensibility, an assured command of atmosphere and, most importantly, an instinct for character-driven horror. She understands that Australian genre cinema works best when its horrors emerge from recognisable places and recognisable people rather than being imposed upon them.
And Sophia Wright Mendelsohn’s Kat gives the film its beating psychological heart.
It is a beautifully complex performance, one that refuses to simplify a character who becomes increasingly difficult to understand. Mendelsohn trusts the audience to sit with uncertainty, and the film is considerably stronger for it. Kat isn’t merely someone caught inside the nightmare. She becomes the question the nightmare is asking.
For all its rough edges, Penny Lane Is Dead feels like the kind of debut that deserves attention beyond its immediate genre pleasures. It belongs to an Australian tradition of dark, uncompromising genre filmmaking while suggesting that tradition still has plenty of life left in it.
If this is where Mia’Kate Russell begins, it will be fascinating to see where she goes next.
Cinema has given us no shortage of unforgettable monsters. Dracula, Frankenstein’s Creature, the Wolf Man, the Xenomorph and The Thing have each become permanent fixtures in horror’s collective imagination. Among them stands Brundlefly, one of the most grotesque and tragic creations the genre has ever produced. Yet what distinguishes Seth Brundle from almost every monster that came before him is not simply his horrific transformation, but his awareness of it. He does not awaken as a creature stripped of his humanity. Instead, he experiences every stage of his own physical and psychological decline, fully conscious of the man he once was.
That distinction is what elevates David Cronenberg’s The Fly beyond a masterclass in practical effects and into the realm of genuine tragedy. While Chris Walas deservedly received an Academy Award for his astonishing makeup effects, those prosthetics only work because Jeff Goldblum never disappears beneath them. His performance ensures that every new mutation carries emotional weight. We are not merely watching a body change—we are watching a man remain painfully aware of his own extinction.
An Unlikely Horror Icon
By 1986, Jeff Goldblum was already recognised as one of Hollywood’s most distinctive actors, though not yet as a horror icon. There was always something unconventional about his screen presence. His dialogue seemed to emerge as though he were discovering each thought in real time. His speech was fragmented but articulate, his intelligence obvious without ever becoming cold, and his awkward charm made even the most eccentric characters feel strangely relatable.
Those qualities made him the perfect choice for Seth Brundle.
Cronenberg did not need a conventional leading man. He needed an actor capable of making extraordinary intelligence feel entirely believable without sacrificing warmth or vulnerability. Seth is a brilliant scientist, but he is also socially awkward, excitable and endearingly isolated. Goldblum gives him an infectious enthusiasm that immediately draws both Veronica Quaife and the audience into his world.
That emotional investment is crucial because The Fly asks us to mourn Seth long before he physically disappears. We first have to believe he is worth loving.
A Romance Before the Horror
One of the most remarkable aspects of The Fly is how gently it begins. The opening movement plays less like a horror film than an intimate romantic drama. Seth and Veronica’s conversations are playful and spontaneous, full of overlapping dialogue and genuine curiosity about one another. Their chemistry feels effortless because it was. Goldblum and Geena Davis were in a relationship during production, and that affection quietly informs every scene they share.
Cronenberg wisely allows audiences to fall in love with Seth before introducing the telepod accident. This isn’t simply narrative economy—it is emotional architecture. The horror only becomes devastating because the audience understands exactly what Veronica stands to lose.
Without those early scenes, Brundlefly would simply be another monster.
Instead, he becomes someone we grieve.
The Transformation Begins Before the Makeup
Much has been written about the extraordinary stages of Brundlefly’s physical transformation, but the real metamorphosis begins long before the prosthetics become apparent.
Watch Goldblum’s body language after Seth emerges from the telepod.
The timid, slightly hunched scientist gradually disappears. His posture becomes more upright. His movements become larger, more confident and increasingly animalistic. Even the rhythm of his speech changes. The hesitant pauses that once reflected careful thought give way to absolute certainty.
The transformation initially appears exhilarating.
Seth is stronger.
More energetic.
More confident.
For a brief moment, even the audience wonders whether the accident has somehow improved him.
Goldblum plays this phase with remarkable restraint. He never tips into overt madness. Instead, he allows confidence to slowly curdle into arrogance. The audience senses something is wrong long before Seth does, making his growing exhilaration quietly unsettling rather than triumphant.
The Seduction of Evolution
One of The Fly’s greatest achievements is making Seth’s transformation initially desirable. His newfound physical abilities feel liberating. He no longer requires sleep. He possesses extraordinary strength and stamina. He speaks excitedly about humanity evolving into something greater.
For a brief period, Seth genuinely believes he has transcended human limitation.
Goldblum makes that belief completely convincing.
His infectious excitement almost persuades us that the experiment has been a success.
Almost.
Beneath every smile lies something unsettling. His confidence becomes too absolute. His certainty leaves no room for doubt. He stops questioning himself because he no longer sees any reason to.
Cronenberg allows audiences to experience the seduction of transformation alongside Seth, making the inevitable collapse all the more tragic.
Performing the Man, Not the Monster
Perhaps Goldblum’s greatest achievement is that he never actually performs Brundlefly.
He performs Seth Brundle trying desperately to remain Seth Brundle.
There is a profound difference.
Many monster performances ask actors to abandon humanity altogether. Goldblum does precisely the opposite. Even beneath increasingly elaborate makeup, fragments of the original scientist remain visible. His humour survives. His curiosity survives. His intelligence survives. Even his compassion lingers beneath the growing desperation.
The body changes faster than the person inside it.
That is why Brundlefly remains heartbreaking rather than merely grotesque.
The tragedy is not that Seth disappears.
It is that he remains trapped inside a body that no longer allows him to express who he is.
Knowledge as a Curse
Unlike so many cinematic monsters, Seth fully understands what is happening to him.
He analyses his own symptoms with scientific precision. He examines discarded fingernails and loose teeth. He studies his deteriorating body with the detached curiosity of a researcher before gradually realising that he has become both scientist and experiment.
Knowledge offers no comfort.
Instead, it becomes another form of suffering.
Goldblum never allows panic to overwhelm intelligence. Even as Seth deteriorates, his mind continues to function. That continued awareness makes every stage of the transformation infinitely more painful.
The audience is not watching ignorance.
We are watching consciousness imprisoned within irreversible biological change.
Looking Into the Mirror
Throughout The Fly, Cronenberg repeatedly returns Seth to the mirror.
Each glance becomes another confrontation with the loss of identity.
Initially, Seth examines himself with scientific curiosity. Later, he searches desperately for reassurance that the person he remembers still exists.
Goldblum’s reactions remain beautifully understated. He rarely resorts to melodrama. Instead, subtle expressions communicate dawning recognition, quiet fear and reluctant acceptance.
Eventually, even the mirror ceases to provide answers.
It simply confirms that the transformation can no longer be denied.
The scientist who once sought objective truth now finds himself terrified by it.
“I’m an Insect Who Dreamt He Was a Man”
Late in the film, Seth delivers one of horror cinema’s most unforgettable lines:
“I’m saying… I’ll hurt you if you stay.”
Shortly afterwards comes the devastating realisation that he has become “an insect who dreamt he was a man.”
The power of these scenes lies not simply in the writing but in Goldblum’s extraordinary delivery.
Gone is the excitable scientist from the opening act.
Gone is the arrogant confidence of his post-telepod euphoria.
What remains is exhaustion.
Acceptance.
Grief.
Seth is no longer searching for a cure.
He is mourning himself.
One Final Act of Humanity
The closing moments of The Fly remain among the most emotionally devastating in horror cinema.
Fused with the telepod itself, Brundlefly has become the ultimate expression of Cronenberg’s New Flesh—a grotesque fusion of technology and biology.
Yet Goldblum somehow finds one final fragment of humanity.
Unable to speak, he raises the shotgun towards his own head.
It is not an act of aggression.
It is a plea.
He is asking Veronica to end his suffering.
There is no monster in that moment.
Only Seth.
The audience recognises him instantly.
Which makes Veronica’s decision almost unbearable.
The Man Beneath the Makeup
Practical effects frequently dominate discussions of The Fly, and rightly so. Chris Walas’ work remains among the greatest achievements in horror makeup. But effects alone cannot sustain emotional tragedy.
Goldblum provides the continuity that the makeup cannot.
Every physical stage is matched by an equally precise psychological evolution. We always understand where Seth is emotionally, even when we struggle to recognise him physically.
That remarkable consistency transforms Brundlefly from a special-effects triumph into one of horror’s most fully realised tragic figures.
The Prognosis:
Forty years after The Fly, Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle remains one of the greatest performances in horror cinema because it never loses sight of the man beneath the mutation.
His achievement lies not in convincing audiences that a scientist becomes part fly. It lies in convincing us that Seth Brundle never entirely disappears. Somewhere beneath the collapsing flesh, the fractured bones and the grotesque mutations remains the brilliant, awkward man who simply wanted to change the world.
That lingering humanity is what continues to haunt audiences decades later.
Brundlefly may be one of horror’s most unforgettable monsters.
But it is Seth Brundle we remember.
Jeff Goldblum ensures that every stage of the transformation carries not only physical horror but profound emotional loss. His performance reminds us that the true terror of The Fly is not becoming something monstrous.
It is remaining human long enough to understand exactly what has been lost.
Surgeons of Horror 