The years between 1983 and 1985 saw David Cronenberg in something of a paradox. The success of his earlier movies, including his adaptation of The Dead Zone, had earned him a deserved reputation as a filmmaker on the rise. Yet while all kinds of offers were coming in from Hollywood – most wildly unsuitable, such as Beverly Hills Cop, some potentially extraordinary, such as Return Of The Jedi and Top Gun – the director found himself embroiled in the development hell of Total Recall.

Having written several drafts of the Total Recall script, and even paying visits to Rome and Tunisia to scout locations, the production suddenly fell apart. With neither Cronenberg nor producer Dino De Laurentiis willing to budge over which version of the script to film – De Laurentiis and co-producer famously wanted “Raiders Of The Lost Ark go to Mars”, while Cronenberg wanted a story about “memory, identity and madness” – the pair ultimately agreed to go their separate ways.

With Total Recall by the wayside, Cronenberg suddenly found himself in Los Angeles without a film to make. “I was in dire straits financially,” the director recalled in the book Cronenberg On Cronenberg. “I was just hoping that somehow something would happen that would be honourable, a movie that I could be really happy doing.”

At the same time, producers Stuart Cornfield and Mel Brooks were looking to remake The Fly, a George Langelaan short story originally made into a movie in 1958. Where the original was a critically and financially well-received tale about a scientist who swapped heads with a fly while experimenting with a matter transporter, the new version, as written by screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue, imagined the fusion of man and insect as slow and insidious, like a disease gradually strangling the humanity out of its luckless protagonist.