When Bryan Ferry scored body horror
After a string of gory yet cerebrally stimulating shockers destined for the B-movie bin such as Shivers and Rabid, Canadian body horror auteur David Cronenberg entered the 1980s with a body of work that packed the underground exploitation with enough subversive critique and psychoanalytical plunder of the queasy human condition that his horror movies soon began attracting major Hollywood attention.
Following the tech-surrealist nightmare of 1983’s Videodrome and a grapple with Stephen King’s psychic thriller The Dead Zone, Cronenberg would hit his commercial stride with a remake of Kurt Neumann’s 1958 creature feature The Fly.
Lifting the original’s central conceit of a scientist who invents a matter transportation device and accidentally fuses his DNA with a common housefly who had entered his transport pod with him, Cronenberg pulls the conceptual angle toward a characteristically more visceral and degenerative plane. Rather than swapping heads as took place in the 1958 version, Dr Seth Brundle, played by Jeff Goldblum, initially exits his transfer pod seemingly fine.
Yet, after a period of hubristic strength and delusions of evolved higher status, it soon transpires that his machine programming hadn’t accounted for multiple organisms in one bay. Fusing Brundle and the fly on a genetic level, a slow and hideous transformation takes place where his body and sanity are slowly taken over by the insect within.
Cronenberg had always intended his take on 1986’s The Fly to be a broader and more universal examination of ageing, yet its drop amid the tragedy of the HIV/Aids crisis that had struck America and beyond across the decade formed an unwitting extra pertinence at the time. The tale of a partner watching their loved one ebb to a mysterious disease was an unsettling but moving exorcism of anxieties surrounding the pandemic at the time.
Future The Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore handled its score with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, yet a movie with such commercial appeal also had a big tie-in soundtrack single tacked on. The producers, Stuart Cornfeld and Mel Brooks, reached out to Roxy Music frontman and solo star Bryan Ferry to pen a piece. Teaming up with Chic’s Nile Rodgers, the pair wrote ‘Help Me’, a smooth sophistipop number that subtly, and with that deft Ferry class, touches on the film’s themes of transformation behind the lyrical guise of lovelorn existentialism: “I’m a stranger far from home, won’t you help me / Gotta find where I belong, help me”.
Cronenberg enjoyed the track but felt Ferry’s single just didn’t fit in the film itself, leaving it off the closing credits as was intended, and instead heard briefly in the bar scene before Brundle breaks a man’s wrist in an arm wrestle. Released in the USA as a 7″ picture disc with ‘Broken Wings’ as the B-side, ‘Help Me’ has become notoriously difficult to listen to, missing from most streaming services and online platforms, and only ever seeing a UK release as part of 1988’s The Ultimate Collection.
‘Help Me’ stands as one of Ferry’s finest solo cuts and a smart example of how to honour source material while crafting your own spin on the now antiquated practice of the movie single. Either a knowing nod or a welcome piece of happenstance, but the single’s title echoes the original 1958 film’s grisly scene where the human-headed fly is caught in a spider’s web, calling out for help as the venomous fangs inch closer to his head.
