In a laboratory, a woman runs towards the cloaked silhouette that emerges from a booth after a deafening bolt of lightning. Harshly, she removes the cloth covering the figure and reveals a hybrid monster, half human, half fly, with huge bulging eyes. The camera offers a close-up of the woman’s scream, followed by a reverse shot of the fly’s eyes. She screams again, and her image multiplies. In this subjective shot, we are seeing the woman through the multiple lenses of the compound eyes of that colossal fly. This recognisable scene from The Fly (Neumann, 1958) was a turning point in the history of the misleading convention that portrays flies as seeing mosaics of iterated images, instead of a continuous panorama. Rooted in previous scientific and microscopic observations, then turned visual and cinematic spectacle, in the 1950s these images became tinged with Cold War anxieties. This convention and its context projected many fears and prejudices towards flies, associating them with sickness and death. From a present in which these negative connotations persist and fuel a global decline in insect populations, it is urgent to expose and dissolve them. So we may start to care about insects again.