But what I’m interested in is not the readings of food as metaphors for capitalist consumption, the disintegration of the American family unit, or sexual taboos-but simply in the act of eating itself. Hunger is everywhere in horror: from werewolves to zombies to cannibals, the protagonists we find on screen are either devouring or being devoured. Food, from the grotesque to the delicious, populates the screen: the raw steak crawling across the kitchen counter in Poltergeist (1982) a distracted Drew Barrymore burning her popcorn in the opening scene of Scream (1999) the chocolate bars Charlie routinely snaps with her teeth in Hereditary (2018). Horror is a genre of excess, of abundance-and food is the perfect metaphor in its narratives because it holds so many meanings at once. An appetite satiated, without complication. The desire being met, being recognized, something clearly being given in to. I was ravenous and repulsed by my own appetite.īut maybe what I was feeling was not so much the desire to eat steak, but the desire to be allowed to desire. I woke up craving steak the next day: blood pooling against the lip of a plate, the tangy taste of metal against my teeth. When I first watched this scene in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) I had been a vegetarian for two years, but was oddly compelled by it: the yellow kitchen, the rose-red of the meat, the graceful ease with which Mia Farrow plunges into the steak’s fleshy center with a fork. Slicing a corner, she eats quickly, happily. She takes it out after a few seconds and places it on a floral plate.
She cuts it in half and drops it into a hot pan. Rosemary Woodhouse has unwrapped a piece of steak from its waxy brown paper. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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