Body Horror Intertwined with Reproductive Healthcare: Rewatching The Fly (1986) & Dead Ringers (1988) Today
In 1988, two years after the success of his horror remake The Fly, director David Cronenberg took a slight departure from his previous work to make a psychological thriller; still focused on the terrors of the body, but this time with a story rooted in reality. Dead Ringers was based on the bizarre true story of Stewart and Cyril Marcus, identical twin gynecologists working in New York City who died together in 1975 under mysterious circumstances. The film received ample critical recognition, winning several critics circle awards upon release and only growing in critical esteem in the thirty five years since then. However, it was not a box office hit like The Fly, which has become known as Cronenberg’s most iconic work. Watching these Cronenberg films in 2023, in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe V. Wade, his unique takes on body horror and their emphasis on the terror of unwanted pregnancy along with the tragic reality of patriarchal injustice in gynecology become even more cogent, while also serving as excellent time capsules of 1980s Canada.
Horror films have long relied upon the anxiety of an unwanted pregnancy, typically portraying it in a metaphorical nature. With Rosemary’s Baby as the most notable exception, in films like 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alien, and others the terror of one’s body being taken over by a foreign creature is potent. Oftentimes, it is male characters who are the host of the harmful parasite. In Alien, a facehugger first forces its eggs into Kane for incubation, where later a xenomorph is ‘birthed’ – killing Kane as it bursts through his stomach and goes on to terrorize the rest of the crew. The Fly is not new or innovative as a horror film whose central horror is metaphorically the terror of unwanted pregnancy, but like Rosemary’s Baby, it also presents the literal terror removed from the metaphor.
Brilliant scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) creates a teleportation device, but when testing it he accidentally melds his body with that of a fly. As the film continues, Brundel’s physical condition slowly deteriorates as more and more of his body is taken over by the fly’s biology; his fingernails fall off, his teeth crumble, he breaks out into marks across his face, his eating habits change. He vomits frequently during different points in this grotesque transformation that ultimately sees him as a human-sized fly. The metaphorical unwanted pregnancy is straight forward: some of the symptoms Brundel experiences during his transformation are analogous to those that can be experienced during pregnancy, another full body transformation with irreversible effects. In the case of unwanted pregnancy and Brundelfly, like in many horror films, there is something in the body that the person does not want in the body.
Notably, the creation of Brundelfly is not the film’s only example of an unwanted parasite. We learn that Brundel’s romantic interest, journalist Ronnie Quaife (Geena Davis), finds out she is pregnant with Brundel’s baby but is unsure if they conceived before his DNA transmutation or after. Quaife wants an abortion, repeatedly emphasizing that she “wants it out of [her] body”. One of the film’s scariest scenes is a dream sequence that begins with Quaife in a hospital for what, in dreamlike ambiguity, is coded as a simultaneous abortion/birth, and ends with Quaife screaming in horror at the product of her pregnancy: a maggot the size of a baby, silent except for the gooey sounds of its body writhing. The scene has stuck in the minds of viewers of the film for decades, becoming one of the most iconic images of the entire film, more so than any of the gorgeously grotesque visuals of Brundel’s body being taken over by the fly DNA. Quaife’s unwanted pregnancy is so resonant because it speaks the unspeakable. Broaching the taboo is central to horror as a genre, but the genre also creates its own taboos. By addressing unwanted pregnancy and abortion rights through metaphor, the existential terror of a literal unwanted pregnancy remains coded. Hidden, usually, behind the body of a cisgender man who can only create a facsimile of that body horror that is so real to people who can get pregnant – a horror we are forced to be cognizant of starting in the pre-teen years. The Fly addresses the taboo of coding, brings the literal anxiety to the forefront and makes tangible what is so terrifying about having one’s body overtaken by an unwelcome fetus.
While Cronenberg was working primarily in the United States when he made The Fly and Dead Ringers, his status as a Canadian filmmaker is significant to both films. The location The Fly takes place in is never specified, although certain plot points imply it is a Canadian metropolis, and Dead Ringers is explicitly set in Toronto, a change from where the Marcus twins actually had their practice in New York City. These Canadian locales are significant because while abortion was legalized in the United States in 1973, abortion in Canada was still restricted to if the pregnant person’s life was endangered by the pregnancy until a decision in 1988 lifted these restrictions. The Fly, being made in 1986, exists in a Canada still with restricted abortion, while Dead Ringers exists in a Toronto where the restrictions have just been or are about to be lifted.
In The Fly, Brundel repeatedly attempts to convince Quaife to go through with the pregnancy despite her adament protests, seeing the fetus as a continuation of his existence now that his DNA has been corrupted. He begs her to “please not kill [him],” never acknowledging the pregnancy as anything other than a piece of himself – even as it occupies her body in the same way the fly, who he rejects as a part of himself, occupies his. Quaife has her ex boyfriend Stathis Borans take her to a doctor, where she is forced to plead her case on why she is ‘deserving’ of an abortion. Not because of the fact that it is Quaife’s body and she doesn’t want it to be used as a vessel, but because she must convince the skeptical doctor of the concern that her potential child could be born with unspecified ‘deformities’. He eventually agrees to the procedure, but Brundelfly abducts Quaife from the operating table, a further physical action by Brundel that removes Quaife’s bodily autonomy.
The climax of the film features Brundelfly attempting to force the pregnant Quaife to meld her DNA, the fetus’s DNA, and Brundelfly’s DNA together in order to decrease the percentage of Brundelfly that is made up of fly DNA. He fanatically preaches that if their DNA is melded to offset the fly, they will “be the ultimate family, three joined together in one body.” Brundel’s solution to the dissolution of his own bodily autonomy is to rob Quaife of hers, not only through trying to force her to continue the pregnancy, but also trying to force her to give up her entire person for his benefit. In the third act of the film, the point of view character has shifted from Brundel to Quaife, and she becomes the protagonist through which we experience the rest of the story. In this finale, the body horror/bodily autonomy link is taken to its extreme conclusion, literal annihilation of one’s own body for the sake of an aggressive parasite. As Brundel becomes a literal monster, his actions towards Quaife and her body are monstrous. Quaife, taking up the mantle of final girl, defeats Brundelfly. Without taking into account the film’s sequel (which was not a part of Cronenberg’s original vision for the story), the ending is left ambiguous on if Quaife receives an abortion after the events of the film. However, her unwavering desire for one implies that she will go through with the procedure.
While abortion is a central plot point of The Fly, even as the story takes place in a country with restrictive abortion laws, Dead Ringers takes place in a climate caught between restrictive abortion laws and the R. V. Morgentaler decision. The word abortion is never uttered, even though the entire film focuses on reproductive healthcare. While The Fly is implicitly and explicitly about abortion, Dead Ringers takes on the entire sphere of gynecological healthcare, uncovering the horrors that lie beneath the surface – how the patriarchy poisons even a sphere where pregnant people should feel safe and listened to.
A 1975 New York Magazine article by Linda Wolfe initially brought the bizarre true story of the life and death of the Marcus twins to mainstream attention, eventually inspiring a book which was adapted into Dead Ringers. Wolfe’s most significant takeaway from the twins’ mysterious deaths was about their bedside manner, or lack thereof, as male doctors dealing almost exclusively with female patients. Wolfe highlights the discomfort of her own brief experience as a former patient of the twins, and includes stories from other women who were treated by them as well, who spoke of the lack of regard the twins had for their patients as people – a disrespect that clearly had a gendered component. In Dead Ringers, Beverly and Elliot Mantle are similarly misogynistic toward their patients, openly calling them bimbos and even going so far as to use their patients as a dating pool, where both brothers bed the same women without the women ever realizing she is sleeping with both twins. To the brothers, the sexualities of their patients are both alluring and abhorrent.
Genevieve Bujold gives an excellent performance as Claire, a woman caught in this strange love triangle. She is a confident actress who seeks treatment for her infertility. While she is initially deceived by the twins’ act of pretending to be the same person, she eventually begins an intense romantic relationship only with Beverly, the more gentle of the two brothers. This romantic relationship, and how it separates Beverly and Elliot physically and mentally, begins the fracture that eventually leads to their deaths. From the film’s beginning, Beverly and Elliot’s masculinities are called into question. Claire notes that Beverly is typically a girl's name, causing him to become irate, while Elliot, initially presented as the more masculine, chauvinistic and independent of the brothers, uses the nickname “Ellie” with his brother. Beverly and Elliot perpetuate misogyny and traditional masculinity, but they are not entirely convincing performers.
Claire becomes a major component of the story immediately after her introduction, a much more powerful force than either of the brothers, who slowly come apart at the seams when tasked with living full lives as individuals. During her first exam, Beverly discovers that she has three separate entrances into her uterus, and it is because of this anomaly that she is unable to get pregnant. After learning of this, Claire calls herself a mutant, and the idea of the ‘mutant woman’ becomes all encompassing to Beverly as his mental health deteriorates. She introduces Beverly to drugs, the literal catalyst for the eventual downfalls and demises of the twins, and Claire and Beverly’s romance separates him from Elliot – causing his fragile portrayal of a strong masculine presence to crumble without the bolstering of his less masculine twin, a foil who boosts his ego in professional life and in his sexual fantasies.
The characterization of Claire as a supposed “mutant woman” both indicts and upholds misogynistic ideals of womanhood, with Claire claiming that “when [she is] dead, [she will] just be dead. [She will] never have been a woman, only a girl”, and that adopting a child wouldn’t be the same because “it won’t be a part of [her] body”, as though her potential to be a biological mother is the only thing that makes someone a woman. Intriguingly, it also echos Brundelfly’s pleads to Ronnie that she give birth to his child so that when he is gone, a part of him will still exist in the world, but with Claire, it is tied directly to an inadequacy she feels in playing the part of woman; an actress who believes she cannot convincingly portray a role central to her identity. It connects her with Beverly and Elliot, who also are struggling with performing their respective gender roles.
As Beverly’s mental state worsens and his dependence on drugs becomes more pronounced, so does his obsession with the “mutant woman” as a problem in need of solving. It recalls the film’s prologue where the Mantle twins invent a gynecological device that would be too painful to use on a living person, though the boys hardly care about such an obstacle – their disinterest in the comfort of their patients immediately at the forefront of the story. Beverly attempts to use said instrument on a patient during a routine check up, and when she informs him of how painful it is, he mocks her, accusing her of bestiality. After the incident, he asserts that “there’s nothing the matter with the instrument, it’s the body. The woman’s body was all wrong.” Soon after, he tasks an artist with creating what he deems “gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women.” These instruments resemble phalluses, and their sharp edges, malformed shapes, and medical sterility emphasize their violence, drawing a connection to the personal and professional harm Beverly and Elliot cause in their office when they have sex with their patients, foreshadowing their later actions but also speaking to the long tradition of people who can get pregnant having physically painful experiences at the gynecologist. Beverly attempts to use one of these tools on a patient during surgery, but is stopped before he can cause serious damage, and is soon after put on leave, isolated and continuing to physically and mentally deteriorate.
Addiction and delusion soon consume Elliot as well, and the two brothers are left alone in their shuttered practice, with only each other and piles of filth for company. Eventually, the brothers make the decision to use the instruments for mutant women on themselves, with Beverly cutting open Elliot’s stomach after acknowledging that “separation can be a terrifying thing”. Elliot’s wound resembles a cesarean section, and it also resembles a vaginal opening, recalling the respective metaphorical abdomen-vagina in Cronenberg’s earlier work Videodrome – yet another throughline in how horror as a genre uses the real horrors of having a vagina under patriarchy by placing it onto a cisgender male body to indicate a more ‘default’ human experience. The mutant woman is ultimately realized in Elliot and Beverly; their preoccupation and fear of the mutant woman being entirely reflexive, a projection of their own inadequacies. After Elliot dies of his mutant woman wound, Beverly dies draped over him, creating the film’s final image, evoking the popular imagery of the Madonna and child. The twins, so disdainful of the soon to be or hopeful mothers under their care as patients, die in a perverse tableau of the ideal archetypal mother whose immaculate conception could also categorize her as a supposed mutant woman.
By transferring the setting of the twins’ story from New York City to Toronto, Cronenberg changes the context in which the twins’ practice is located. The restrictions on reproductive rights literally written into Canadian law is palpable in how Beverly and Elliot treat their patients, and how abortion becomes unmentionable, even in an environment dedicated to questions of conception, fertility, and uterine health. But the film also speaks to the political climate in the United States, where abortion rights were being challenged fifteen years after Roe V. Wade through Webster V. Reproductive Health Services, which weakened the protections put forth in the Roe V. Wade decision. While Canada was decriminalizing abortion, the United States was experiencing backlash socially and in the courts. Both countries were in turmoil surrounding the issue of abortion, legislatively caught in the murky space between acceptable and unacceptable. This in-between space is captured in The Fly and Dead Ringers, who take the turmoil of one’s rights being up for debate and correctly portray such an experience as deeply and existentially frightening.
Elliot and Beverly become emblematic of the misogyny present even in a sphere of healthcare that is predominantly utilized by women. They see the bodies of their patients as inherently monstrous, a conclusion not too surprising to come to in a horror film – a genre that consistently problematizes the vagina by transposing it metaphorically onto cisgender male characters who succumb to the terror of one’s internal organs being used by an outside being. Ultimately, the mutants of Dead Ringers are not vaginas, or even metaphorical vaginas, but the twins themselves; shown through Elliot and Beverly’s struggle to fulfill shallow, classic ideals of masculinity and inability to self actualize as independent people, but also their refusal to see women as full people, instead as a collection of body parts worth inquiry but not worth respect. Their fragmentation of others, combined with their own interconnectedness, seeing themselves as literally conjoined, brings on their downfall.
In 2023, a year after the overturning of Roe V. Wade by the Supreme Court after the culmination of decades of conservative attacks on abortion rights, returning to art from 1986 and 1988 respectively may seem irrelevant, but both The Fly and Dead Ringers provide fascinating, troubling, disturbing, and deeply cathartic representations of the embodied experiences of people who can get pregnant under the thumb of legal, social, and structural bodily oppression. Cronenberg’s natural talent for body horror is taken to its natural conclusion in these films, forgoing the metaphor and instead laying bare the real life body horror of patriarchy. Ultimately, the two films feel prescient and as relevant as ever.
