The Fly

The Fly (1958)

In Montreal, Canada a scientist is found dead, with his arm and head crushed in a hydraulic press. His wife later confesses to the crime but fails to give a motive as to why and begins to act very strangely. She starts to become obsessed with flies, but more particularly a white-headed fly. in flashback, André, Hélène, and their son Philippe are a happy family. André has been working on a matter-transporter device called the disintegrator-integrator. First, he tests it on small, inanimate objects, such as a newspaper, but he then proceeds to living creatures, including the family's pet cat (which fails to reintegrate, but can be heard meowing somewhere) and a guinea pig. After he is satisfied that these tests are succeeding, he builds a man-sized pair of chambers. One day, Hélène, worried because André has not come up from the basement lab for a couple of days, goes down to find André with a black cloth draped over his head and a strange deformity on his left hand. Communicating only with typed notes and knocking, André tells Hélène that he tried to transport himself, but that a fly was caught in the chamber with him, which resulted in the mixing of their atoms. This results in him having the head and left arm of a fly; and the fly has his miniature head and left arm, however he keeps his mind.

André needs Hélène to capture the fly so he can reverse the process. After she, her son, and their maid exhaustively search for it, she finds it, but it slips out a crack in the window. André's will begin to fade as the fly's instincts take over his brain. Time is running out, and while André can still think like a human, he smashes the equipment, burns his notes, and leads Hélène to the factory. When they arrive, he sets the hydraulic press, puts his head and arm under, and motions for Hélène to push the button. André's arm falls free as the press descends, and trying not to look, she raises the press, replaces the arm, and activates the machine a second time.

Upon hearing this confession, the chief detective on the case, Inspector Chara's, deems Hélène insane and guilty of murder. As they are about to haul her away, Philippe tells François he has seen the fly trapped in a web in the back garden. François convinces the inspector to come and see for himself. The two men see the fly, with both André's head and arm, trapped in the web as Phillippe told them. It screams "Help me! Help me!" as a large brown spider advance on it. Just as the spider is about to devour the creature, Chara's crushes them both with a rock. Knowing that nobody would believe the truth, François and he decide to declare André's death a suicide so that Hélène is not convicted of murder. In the end, Hélène, François, and Philippe resume their daily lives. Sometime later, Philippe and Hélène are playing croquet in the yard. François arrives to take his nephew to the zoo. In reply to his nephew's query about his father's death, François tells Philippe, "He was searching for the truth. He almost found a great truth, but for one instant, he was careless. The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world and the most dangerous".

https://youtu.be/Up6g0SDMJ7A

Above, I have provided the scene in which Andre is crying out for help.

The Fly (1986)

Brilliant but eccentric scientist Seth Brundle meets science journalist Veronica "Ronnie" Quaife at a meet-the-press event held by Bartok Science Industries, the company funding his work. He takes her back to the laboratory of his warehouse home and asks her to exclusively document his invention: two pods that can teleport objects between them. While the "telepods" can transport inanimate objects perfectly, they mutilate live tissue, as demonstrated when a baboon is ripped apart after being teleported.

As they both began to experiment, a new relationship was forming between them. Seth discovers that the machine is creating a synthetic version of biological material rather than the object itself. To solve the problem, he reprograms the system to understand the makeup of living tissue, and he successfully teleports a second baboon. Ronnie departs before they can celebrate, and Seth worries that she is rekindling her relationship with her editor Stathis Boran's. She left to confront Stathis about a veiled threat, spurred by his jealousy of Seth, to publish the tele pod story without her consent. Seth teleports himself alone, unaware that a housefly had entered the transmitter pod with him. He emerges from the receiving pod seemingly normal.

As the two start to reconcile, they notice that Seth starts acting very strangely. He is showing more strength, a craving for sugar, more stamina, and sexual potency, which he believes is from the machine purifying his body. Ronnie becomes very concerned after realizing he is forming new things on his back that coincide with an insect. Seth tries to tell Ronnie that it is the machine helping him and he tries to convince her to do the same thing. When she refuses, Seth goes to a bar and picks up a woman, we know what happens next. After their encounter, Seth tries to have the woman go into the machine, but Ronnie stops him.

Seth continues to deteriorate, losing body parts along with his human appearance. After several weeks, he reconnects with Ronnie and reveals he is becoming a hybrid of human and insect.

Seth installs a fusion program into the tele pod computer, planning to dilute the fly genes in his body with human DNA. Ronnie discovers she is pregnant with Seth's baby and has a nightmare of giving birth to a giant maggot. She demands that Stathis persuade a doctor to terminate the baby, but Seth abducts her before the procedure can take place and begs her to carry the child to terms. Seth reveals his final plan to Ronnie: he will use the telepods to fuse the two of them, along with the unborn child, into a single entity to become "the ultimate family". He drags her to the tele pod while she tears off his jaw in the struggle. This triggers Seth's final transformation, shedding his decaying flesh to become a monstrous, insectoid-human creature. Seth traps Ronnie in the first tele pod and puts himself in the other, and beings the countdown. Stathis recovers his shotgun and severs the cables connecting Ronnie's tele pod to the computer. Seth breaks halfway out of his own pod, but the fusion process activates, gruesomely amalgamating him with a chunk of the tele pod. Seth crawls to Ronnie and silently begs her to end his suffering. She tearfully fires the shotgun at his head, killing him instantly.

The comparison

In both films, we see the comparison of the scientist transforming from a human into a half human half fly, by a machine. There is also a love connection between the two main characters and how their love is intertwined with concern of how both men are essentially crazy. Another comparison is how in the original piece the man dies, and, in the adaptation, Seth also dies, but they die in different ways.

The contrast

There are several differences between the original film and the 1986 adaptation of The Fly. One main difference is that in the original, the scientist is married and has a child, compared to the adaptation where Seth is not married but ends up impregnating Ronnie and overall, they fall in love. Another difference is that the detective kills the scientist in the original film, but in the adaptation, Ronnie ends up killing Seth by way of a shotgun. Another main difference in these two films is that there is no other woman that the scientist meets. Coinciding with that statement, Seth tries to have Ronnie transform to be like him but she says no, and this does not happen in the original film.