“Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.” Was Dialogue First

Five words sold a 1986 body-horror film: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” Plenty of people use the line without knowing it began as a piece of dialogue. This page follows it from the scene to the poster. The famous movie taglines section has the others.

Dialogue first, tagline second

The Fly is a science fiction horror film directed by David Cronenberg, released on August 15, 1986. Brooksfilms produced it and 20th Century Fox distributed it, with Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis and John Getz in the cast. It remakes the 1958 film of the same name, which was based on George Langelaan’s 1957 short story.

The marketing took the words from the scene and printed them as the tagline, and the line spread so far that a lot of the people who know it are unaware it began there.

Mel Brooks and the exchange

Cronenberg himself gave Brooks the credit for the line at a Beyond Fest tribute in 2018. He recalled Brooks reacting to the moment when a character says “Don’t be afraid”: the answer, Brooks said, should be “Yes, be afraid, be very afraid”.

So Brooks did not hand over finished dialogue. He reacted, Cronenberg told him he would put it in the script, and Cronenberg calls the result a collaboration. He still names Brooks as the source: “it was Mel who came up with [that]”. That is as firm as the credit gets, and it is a director’s memory, not a studio record.

In the film, the science journalist Veronica Quaife, played by Geena Davis, speaks the words. As Brundle starts to turn into an insect, he pleads with a character not to be afraid, and Veronica answers with the opposite advice. The line is hers, not Brundle’s.

One more thing to keep apart. Seth’s “Please help me” also ran in ad campaigns and became tied to the film in popular memory, but it is a line retained from the 1958 picture, per the AFI catalog.

The other lines on the poster

“Be afraid. Be very afraid.” was not the only line used to sell the film. It ran on the publicity posters, and two others were used alongside it: “Half man, half insect … total terror!” and “Something went wrong in the lab today… something very wrong”. Both describe the plot. Only the first lets you feel it.

Why the line works

The line does not describe the film. You do not know what is inside it, you only know you should be afraid. That is why it could be lifted out of the scene and printed on a poster, and why the people who use it often cannot say where it came from.

How the film did

The film was the top-grossing release in the country for its first two weeks and cost $10 million (AFI catalog). It earned $40,456,565 in the United States and $20,172,594 abroad. The makeup team of Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis won the Academy Award for Best Makeup, and the film won the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film in 1987. Best-of lists keep it: among the five most memorable horror taglines and the 10 greatest movie taglines.

Where it turns up now

The line is Wednesday Addams’s in Addams Family Values. A Goosebumps book published in August 1999 took the same words as its title. In October 2020 a Saturday Night Live sketch about that year’s vice presidential debate referenced the film.

Tagline or dialogue?

The same words did two jobs: dialogue in a scene, then a tagline in a campaign. AFI’s list of the 100 greatest movie quotes is all dialogue and starts with “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” from Gone with the Wind (1939). For the term itself, see what a movie tagline is. For other horror lines with a story, read “In space no one can hear you scream” and “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water”.