There’s a fine line between drama and excess, and every good horror movie has to ride that line like a roller coaster. Plenty of audiences have complained about the lack of realism in horror movies. Let’s be honest; it’s hard to appreciate a character that you can’t sympathize with.

Though The Fly focused on fairly human themes like pride and sacrifice, there were certainly more than a few scenes that felt a bit too fantastical.

At least, that was the opinion of Karl Struss, who served as cinematographer for the 1958 film. In Hollywood Cameramen: Sources of Light, by Charles Higham, Struss derided The Fly as “plain ridiculous.”

Particularly, Struss took issue with the film’s most climactic scene, in which François Delambre and Inspector Charas discover André Delambre, who has changed into a fly. Mercifully, the two men put Delambre out of his misery. Struss had such a problem with the scene that he took it up with The Fly’s director, Kurt Neumann.

“There was one scene there which I told the director, Kurt Neumann, was crazy,” said Struss. “They had the figure of a man reduced to the size of a fly, and the fly talked. And they made the man say, ‘Help me, help me!’ in a tiny voice. Oh, gee!”

Struss wasn’t the only person on set who was able to note the absurdity. Actors Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall, who played François and Charas, respectively, reportedly could not hold in their laughter while filming the scene.

Despite this, the scene has remained one of the more iconic moments in classic horror.