Eat or be eaten: food and feasting in horror cinema
If you’re about to tuck into something to eat, I apologise. You’d better put that snack down and come back to it later because today we’re going to be talking about horror cinema’s stomach-churning relationship with food.
Whether it’s vampires draining the blood of some pale mortal in Dracula, zombies feasting on human entrails in Day of the Dead or the ubiquity of human butchery in Delicatessan and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the genre is packed with allusions to eating, digestion and hunger.
What is it about food that makes it so unnerving in the right context? I don’t know about you, but I’m rarely nervous when I sit down for a meal with my friends or family. Food is comforting, life-affirming even. Why, then, does it have the power to be so utterly horrifying?
Dial D for dinner: Pyscho and Poltergeist
Alfred Hitchcock understood very well how food could be used to create a sense of unease. As a self-confessed “fat man” the Master of Suspense had a complex relationship with eating. After being left alone in the house one night, young Alfred found himself unable to sleep. When his parents returned they found him cramming cold meat from the fridge into his mouth, his cheeks wet with tears. Even as an adult he both adored food and loathed the way it affected his physique. This anxiety made its way into films like Psycho. Take the deeply unnerving sandwiches and milk scene, in which Marion Crane accepts an invitation for a modest meal with Bates Motel’s awkward owner.
Here, food is not just food but an omen of things to come. Norman, an amateur taxidermist, comments that Marion eats “like a bird”, thus suggesting that he views her as prey. It’s true, though, Marion does eat like a bird. Rather than consuming her sandwich whole, she first eats a piece of ham, then she takes a slice of bread and butters the upturned side, which she eats as an open sandwich. Her dissection of the meal reveals a lot about her character, but it also foreshadows her demise, specifically, how she is about to be hacked to pieces in the shower. Tobe Hooper used a similar technique in his 1982 spine-chiller Poltergeist, in which the constantly-snacking Marty discovers a self-propelled steak sliding across the kitchen counter one night. In much the same way Marion’s sandwich foreshadows her death, the maggot-infested slab of meat alludes to the presence of rotting bodies beneath the house itself. Indeed, when Marty finally eats the chicken he had previously started gnawing at, he sees a vision of the flesh melting from his face. In this case, food is not just a narrative tool but a psychological one too. The maggoty steak and Marty’s face rot in precisely the same fashion, reminding the viewer that they too are destined to decay.
You are what you eat: cannibals on film
Horror cinema also makes great use of the fragile distinction between the devourer and the devoured. As modern humans living in modern societies, we are no longer aware of ourselves as something that could feasibly be consumed. We are, however, perfectly content to view domesticated livestock in such a way. The vampire, the zombie and the cannibal subvert this dynamic. They are all monstrous precisely because they warp our view of ourselves as invulnerable to predators. In their eyes, we are sources of nourishment, whether it be our blood, our brains or, as in the case of Hannibal, our livers.
All of these creatures give life to humanity’s insatiable hunger, not to mention the stubborn single-mindedness with which we seek to quench it. This is perhaps best explored in the 2016 film Raw, in which humanity’s willingness to ignore the ethical and environmental impact of meat consumption is highlighted by a teenage girl’s overriding desire to eat human flesh. If we are so happy to butcher livestock, cannibal films ask, what’s to stop us from butchering one another? Perhaps that’s why post-apocalyptic horrors like Delicatessan and The Road are so deeply unnerving. In pointing to the instability of society they remind us that our notions of what is and isn’t acceptable to eat are socially constructed. When normal society ceases to function, however, no flesh is off limits.
Hell’s Kitchen: the horror of indulgence
Horror directors also frequently exploit our understanding of food as an indicator of wealth and privilege. This is becoming an increasing source of subject matter for contemporary filmmakers, but it’s also there in the fifth instalment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, in which Freddie Kruger forces Greta, the child of an over-bearing mother who controls her diet, to eat herself to death. Greta’s death scene is one of the more Danteian punishments inflicted by Freddie Kruger. Her demise is not mere butchery; it is a direct affront to the diet-obsessed elites of the 1980s.
Mark Mylod’s upcoming black comedy horror The Menu makes victims of a similar narcissistic brand of person: the high-class foodie. Starring Nicholas Hoult and Anya Taylor-Joy, the film follows a young couple who travel to an exclusive restaurant on a remote island where an acclaimed chef has prepared a lavish menu. Each customer has paid $1,250 to experience this immersive dining experience – though few are prepared for what else is in store. Spoiler alert, it’s not caviar. Peter Strickland, meanwhile, is set to invite us into the dark and self-indulgent world of performance art in his upcoming horror hybrid Flux Gourmet, which follows a collective devoted to the art of culinary performance, very devoted indeed. Clearly, directors still have an appetite for the bizarre relationship between food and fear.
