Did Mel Brooks Write One of the Best Horror Movie Lines of All Time?
With the exception of how Young Frankenstein scared the hell out of Homer Simpson —
— Mel Brooks’ directorial output isn’t known for being terribly creepy. But his filmography as a producer is a whole other story.
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In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Brooks’ production company Brooksfilms was behind a number of disturbing movies, including David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, the grave-robbing drama The Doctor and the Devils and The Vagrant, a horror-comedy about a yuppie who’s terrorized by an unhoused man.
But perhaps most shockingly, Brooks also produced David Cronenberg’s 1986 body horror classic The Fly. In fact, Brooks ended up saving the project after 20th Century Fox read the script and decided to withdraw funding. Brooksfilms stepped in to finance the picture, with Fox agreeing to distribute it.
As the director revealed in an interview published in Cronenberg on Cronenberg, Brooks was thrilled about having the freedom to produce a movie that wasn’t a broad comedy. “He prided himself on being a producer who would do stuff that was not expected of him, that was not him as a filmmaker or an actor,” Cronenberg recalled. “He was very excited.”
And Brooks didn’t try to restrict Cronenberg’s more disgusting impulses. In fact, he did the exact opposite: “He said, ‘I want you to go all the way. Let yourself go, and don’t hold back.’”
Brooks also seemingly had a hand in creating one of the film’s most memorable moments. After Jeff Goldblum’s slowly-decaying scientist character Seth Brundle has a one-night stand, he tries to force his date into his teleportation pod. When he insists that she shouldn’t be afraid, his girlfriend Ronnie (Geena Davis) randomly appears and proclaims, “No, be afraid. Be very afraid.”
During an event at 2018’s Beyond Fest, Cronenberg revealed that the iconic line actually originated with Brooks. “At one point, Mel was saying, about that particular moment, he said, ‘When he says, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ the answer should be, ‘Yes, be afraid, be very afraid.’” Cronenberg told the audience. “He wasn’t really giving me dialogue, he was just reacting. And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to put that in the script.’ So let’s say it was a collaboration. But yes, it was Mel who came up with that.”
Brooks remembers this story slightly differently. In a 2011 interview, Brooks seemed to suggest that the line was already in the script, but it was his idea to use it as the tagline for the film’s marketing campaign. “In the dialogue, there’s a line where Geena says, ‘No, be afraid, be very afraid,’ and I thought, ‘What a great line,’” Brooks told Moviefone. “We used that line in the poster and the advertising, ‘Be afraid, be very afraid.’”
It’s entirely possible that Brooks was forgetting that he came up with the line himself, or perhaps he was just being modest. Emma Westwood, who literally wrote the book on The Fly, wrote that “Brooks coined the phrase ‘be afraid, be very afraid,’ which became a line delivered by Geena Davis in the film, then the tagline of the film and has now made its way into popular vernacular.”
It’s pretty impressive that the same guy came up with both “Be afraid, be very afraid” and “May the Schwartz be with you.”
