For a Halloween double feature, Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks and David Cronenberg’s 1986 film The Fly make for a queasy ride at times.

I’ll grant that Freaks was less of a gore-induced nausea than The Fly, though. I felt that the film focused on the spectacle of the sideshow rather than the woman’s punishment like in the short story. From today’s perspective, I could watch the movie from the viewpoint of audience implication. I found myself simultaneously intrigued and disturbed by the characters. Many of the characters’ deformities were emphasized by lingering shots, and I found myself being reprimanded for looking so intently. However, I’m not sure the movie intentionally did this; I think people of the 1930s were genuinely entertained by and inconsiderate of people with deformities.

The camera often lingers on the performers, highlighting their struggles with everyday tasks.

However, I did enjoy Cleopatra’s form of punishment in the film. Rather than being punished by her husband, the freaks band up in defense of one of their own kind. Punishing the mistreatment of the freaks by making her join their ranks is poetic justice at its best. In the short story, I could feel pity for her character. In the film, though, her character is judgmental and conniving through and through, leaving no room for pity.

Cronenberg’s The Fly embraces the grotesque head on. Whereas in Freaks, Cleopatra’s transformation from human to “freak” is implied, we witness every step of Seth Brundle’s transformation from human to human/fly.

I thought this appropriation of George Langelaan’s original short story was a successful representation of a prevailing sentiment of the 1980s: the uneasy feeling toward technology. At the beginning of the film, the teleportation device “can’t deal with the flesh yet.” The device must learn the ways of the flesh like Brundle, the socially awkward scientist who has sex with Geena Davis. In his first human teleportation experiment, the flesh is contaminated by the fly, causing the experiment to go horribly wrong. This exacerbates the paranoia about technology: how one tiny mistake can have a dangerous ripple effect upon human life.

Seth Brundle prepares to teleport himself, mixing technology and the flesh with what ends in terrible results.

The technology’s main flaw is that it is controlled by the user. The device relies only on what Brundle tells it to do; it cannot think for itself, and thus it cannot redeem itself. It ruins human life because it knew no better. This reflects the idea that though humans think they control technology, there can be unforeseen repercussions. I felt like the film captured the same anti-technology sentiments found in the short story, only in a way that related to the time period of the film’s release.

All that being said, I’ll never be able to look at a fly in the same way. Or a chicken, for that matter.