Body horror as we see in these films, but specifically in The Fly, is some of the most skin crawling horror out there. I think It's so effective because it is so easy to imagine what it would feel like to have your body transform in such a horrifying way. When Seth pulls his finger nail out it is so easy to feel that yourself. These make these films really unsettling and hard to sit through. I think it also plays into the feat of the loss of identity. If we change this much are we even still our self?
I think the fly is a really disturbing film, and a large part of that is the animal Seth fuses with. The fly is an insect that is often associated with garbage and trash, but also death and decay. This makes the transformation not only scary because of the confusion of what's happening and the grossness of it all. We all get this feeling that he's decaying and falling apart, and this pushes even farther when his face and skin starts to fall off in clumps. I think another part that makes the transformation so scary is that it's set up that there is no going back. The transformation can be stopped, all he can do is try and force people to join him in the experience. We see this at the end where he’s fused with the door and the best they can do for him is put him out of his misery. I like what the Mutant and Metaphor has to say about Seth being a genetic dead end after he turns into the fly. It shows how he’s not just no longer human, he is also alone and isolated in his existence. This helps to explain why he’s so obsessed with His child, and fusing with Veronica. He doesn't want to be alone.
I think alter sate works as a horror film, because it not only shows the destruction of the human body, but it also poses this existential idea that we are hiding some unknown truth deep within ourselves. This is such a horrifying idea because we already struggle to know the truth about the real world around us, now we're being confronted with the idea that we don’t even know the truth about ourselves. The movie then explores what we would need to do to unlock this knowledge, and also ask if it even a good idea to know it or is it best to be in the dark. I think this is pushed even further in the movie when Edward changes his physical form, and might have lost himself. The paper we read talks about how drugs and psychoactive drugs could be used to unlock deeper conciseness, and how they are often connected to spiritual practices. I think using this in the movie works really well, because once you’ve taken it there is no going back. It’s not like the tube at the beginning where he could exit at any time.