You’ve seen the photos. Even if you haven't sat through the full two hours of David Cronenberg’s 1986 masterpiece, you know the face. Or, rather, the face as it starts to slide off the bone. Jeff Goldblum the fly images are essentially the gold standard for "body horror," a subgenre that thrives on making you want to look away while simultaneously forcing your eyes open.
There’s something about the way Seth Brundle—Goldblum’s brilliant, quirky, and ultimately doomed scientist—deteriorates that feels more "real" than anything a modern CGI farm could spit out. It’s messy. It’s wet. It looks like it smells terrible.
What People Get Wrong About the Transformation
Most people think the transformation was just a "monster suit" Goldblum put on for the final act. Honestly, that’s underselling the sheer logistical nightmare faced by Chris Walas and his makeup team. They didn't just build a bug. They built a disease.
The team actually reverse-engineered the entire look. They started by designing the final "Space Bug" (the stage where he’s barely human) and then worked backward to figure out how a normal guy with a great jawline becomes a pile of pulsing latex.
The Seven Stages of Brundlefly
If you look closely at high-res Jeff Goldblum the fly images, you can actually track the specific milestones of his decay. It wasn’t a linear slide into monstrosity; it was a series of plateaus.
- Stage 1: The "I Feel Great" Phase. This is Goldblum at his most manic. He’s got some weird, bristly hairs growing out of a wound on his back (made of tinted nylon fishing line, by the way), but otherwise, he just looks like he’s had too much espresso.
- Stage 2: The Blemish Era. You start seeing the "fly-juice." The makeup artists used a mixture of glycerine, zinc oxide, and food coloring to create the fluid that squirts out when Seth starts losing his fingernails.
- Stage 3: The Nectarine Face. This is where the prosthetic work gets heavy. His skin takes on a yellowish, bruised hue. It’s lumpy and uneven. This is the stage where he starts losing his ears—one of which was actually modeled after a crew member’s ear because Goldblum’s own ears were too difficult to cast.
- Stage 4 and 5: The "Brundle-Mess." He’s losing hair in patches. His jaw is starting to look unhinged. This is often the most tragic part of the visual journey because you can still see Goldblum’s expressive eyes through the prosthetic "meat."
- Stage 6 and 7: The Final Hybrid. By the time he’s crawling on the walls, Goldblum was wearing five pounds of makeup and latex. In the very final shots, the actor is replaced by a 45-kg animatronic puppet because no human body could move with that level of distortion.
Why These Images Look Better Than Modern CGI
We live in an era of "perfect" digital effects. But those 1986 images of Seth Brundle still carry a weight that $200 million Marvel movies often lack. Why?
Lighting.
Mark Irwin, the director of photography, had a hell of a time lighting Goldblum. He had to deal with dark, light-absorbing latex that changed color every day. One day the suit was ocher, the next it was a deep, bruised purple-brown. Irwin had to use "monster-style" cross-lighting to make the painted details on the suit pop. If he’d used flat, natural lighting, the whole thing would have looked like a cheap Halloween costume.
Instead, it looks like wet, living tissue.
The "vomit drop" (that corrosive digestive enzyme Brundle sprays on his food) was a mix of honey, eggs, and milk. It’s gross. It’s tactile. When you see a still image of that scene, your brain registers the texture of the fluid because it was actually there on the set.
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The Reality of Being Buried in Latex
Goldblum’s performance is what really sells these visuals. Usually, when an actor is covered in five pounds of foam and glue, they become stiff. Goldblum did the opposite.
He worked with the creature designers to incorporate his signature "Goldblum-isms"—the staccato twitches, the darting eyes, the head tilts—into the way the final puppet was operated. He didn't just wear the makeup; he lived under it.
The Academy actually got it right for once. Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis took home the Oscar for Best Makeup in 1987. It was a rare win for a horror movie, especially one as "disgusting" as this. But it wasn't just about the gore. It was about the tragedy.
Cronenberg always said the movie was a metaphor for aging and disease (specifically cancer, though many at the time linked it to the AIDS crisis). When you look at the images of Seth Brundle toward the end, you aren't just seeing a monster. You’re seeing the loss of a person.
Where to Find the Best Visual Archives
If you're looking for the highest quality Jeff Goldblum the fly images for a project or just out of morbid curiosity, you have to look beyond the blurry screengrabs.
- The Criterion Collection: Their 4K restoration is the cleanest the film has ever looked. You can see the individual nylon hairs and the metallic green "warts" clearly.
- American Cinematographer Archives: They have incredible behind-the-scenes shots that show the lighting rigs used to make the latex look like skin.
- The Chris Walas Inc. Portfolio: Some of the original concept sketches and "reverse-engineered" models are floating around in special effects history books.
A Quick Reality Check on the "Lost" Scenes
You might have heard of the "Monkey-Cat" scene. Yes, there are images of it. No, they aren't in the movie. It was a deleted sequence where Brundle tries to "cure" himself by fusing a cat and a baboon, and then has to club the resulting monstrosity to death. Test audiences hated it. It was "too much."
The images that remain in the final cut are effective because they balance the grotesque with a sense of lingering humanity.
Actionable Insights for Horror Fans
If you’re studying these images for your own creature design or just want to appreciate the craft more, pay attention to the asymmetry.
Walas intentionally made the Brundlefly asymmetrical. One side of the face is always more "decayed" than the other. Humans find symmetry beautiful and comforting; we find asymmetry deeply unsettling. That’s the "secret sauce" of why these images still trigger a fight-or-flight response forty years later.
If you’re doing a deep dive, start with the Stage 3 transition. It’s the perfect bridge between the man we know and the thing he becomes. Look at the way the lighting hits the "mushy" parts of the face—it’s a masterclass in using shadows to hide the seams of a prosthetic.
Check out the original press photos from 1986 if you can find them in archival databases. They often have better contrast than the digital transfers, showing the true "ocher and copper" tones the makeup team intended.