Table Of ContentCONSUMING GOTHIC
Food and Horror in Film
Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Palgrave Gothic
Series Editor
Clive Bloom
Middlesex University
London, United Kingdom
This series of gothic books is the first to treat the genre in its many inter-
related, global and ‘extended’ cultural aspects to show how the taste for
the medieval and the sublime gave rise to a perverse taste for terror and
horror and how that taste became, not only international (with a huge fan
base in places such as South Korea and Japan) but also the sensibility of
the modern age, changing our attitudes to such diverse areas as the nature
of the artist, the meaning of drug abuse and the concept of the self. The
series is accessible but scholarly, with referencing kept to a minimum and
theory contextualised where possible. All the books are readable by an
intelligent student or a knowledgeable general reader interested in the
subject.
Editorial Advisory Board
Dr Ian Conrich, University of South Australia
Barry Forshaw, author/journalist, UK
Professor Gregg Kucich, University of Notre Dame, USA
Professor Gina Wisker, University of Brighton, UK
Dr Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, UK
Dr Alison Peirse, University of Yorkshire, UK
Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Professor William Hughes, Bath Spa University, UK
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14698
Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Consuming Gothic
Food and Horror in Film
Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Auckland University of Technology
Auckland, New Zealand
Palgrave Gothic
ISBN 978-1-137-45050-0 ISBN 978-1-137-45051-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45051-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930628
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A
cknowledgments
I always find it difficult to bring a project to a close, especially when the
topic is something that I have been thinking about for years. Overall, this
book feels more like a beginning, rather than an ending, as I definitely
did not get an opportunity to discuss in depth everything that was on my
mind, and needed attention. As I was writing, I kept thinking about all
those ‘other things’ I wanted to get into, but there just wasn’t scope on
this occasion. So my critical affair with the horrors of food and ingestion
is, it would seem, far from over. In these terms, I must acknowledge and
thank all the theorists and scholars who have informed my work, and sig-
nal that, whenever possible, I have used the more recent editions of their
work, and referenced them accordingly.
I would like to thank Felicity Plester (Commissioning Editor) and Clive
Bloom (Series Editor) at Palgrave for their enthusiastic response to my
project, and for giving me the opportunity to work on it. I would also like
to thank Auckland University of Technology for giving me the time to
write this book and the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New
Zealand (PopCAANZ) for their support in the form of a Book Publishing
Grant. Sincere gratitude goes to all the members of my international aca-
demic network – especially within the Gothic Association of New Zealand
and Australia (GANZA) – for their interest and encouragement. I am very
grateful to Corey Walden, my research assistant, for all his help with proof-
reading and formatting. A special ‘thank you’ goes to Catherine Spooner
and Donna Lee Brien, for taking the time to look at my notes when this
book was but a forming idea in my head.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
On a personal note, it would be remiss not to thank my friends and
family for their continuous support and interest. Particular gratitude goes
to mamma and papá, Mary Richards and Frank Schlaffmann, Aimee and
Dan Packer, and Natalie and Brett Baker for the endless supply of cheer,
good food, and popular culture discussions.
Above all, my most heartfelt gratitude goes to Rob Farnell for always
being there and believing in me.
c
ontents
1 Approaching Food and Horror 1
2 Horror Matters: Abominable Substances
and the Revulsions of Orality 39
3 Consuming Hunger: Body Narratives
and the Controversies of Incorporation 89
4 A Taste for Butchery: Slaughterhouse Narratives
and the Consumable Body 133
5 Feeding Nightmares: Madness, Hauntings,
and the Kitchen of Horrors 179
6 A Bitter Feast: Dining Tables in their Horror Contexts 221
7 Conclusion: Consuming Gothic and Its Discontents 261
Filmography 267
Index 271
vii
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 2.1 As the victim of a witchcraft ritual, Felicia Alden
(Veronica Cartwright) vomits the cherry stones in
The Witches of Eastwick (1987) 47
Fig. 2.2 Body modification and the horrors of coprophagia in
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009) 60
Fig. 3.1 The body of the ‘fat man’ is approached cautiously
in Se7en (1995) 99
Fig. 3.2 Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) exposes his hauntingly
emaciated body in The Machinist (2004) 116
Fig. 4.1 A meat hook awaits the unfortunate Pam (Teri McMinn)
in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) 148
Fig. 4.2 Doug Bukowski (Aaron Stanford) is locked in a freezer
filled with human body parts in The Hills Have Eyes (2006) 169
Fig. 5.1 Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) discovers the ‘haunted eggs’
exploding on her kitchen counter in Ghostbusters (1984) 181
Fig. 5.2 The Other Mother prepares breakfast in Coraline (2009) 203
Fig. 6.1 The famous dish in Indiana Jones and the Temple
of Doom (1984): snake surprise 224
Fig. 6.2 The eponymous title character (Cortney Palm)
in Sushi Girl (2012) 241
ix
CHAPTER 1
Approaching Food and Horror
As a young girl growing up in the 1980s, the fictional spectrum of my
childhood was peppered with a number of popular culture narratives that
often featured all manners of disgusting and monstrous things. As far as
the representational world of horror was concerned, vampires, zombies,
hauntings, and even the odd serial killer were features that I recognised
as – if not common – at least accepted parts of my film education. Yet,
I distinctly remember the first time I was truly horrified by a film, and
this was marked by my first encounter with David Cronenberg’s The Fly
(1986), a now iconic film that tells the Kafkaesque tale of Seth Brundle
(Jeff Goldblum), a scientist working on a teleportation device. I watched
the majority of the film with anticipation and only the expected amount of
discomfort: I squirmed at the sight of the twitching and mangled body of
the unfortunate baboon – the victim of the scientist’s failed experiment –
and wondered if, after the infamous fusion incident with a fly, the scientist
himself was actually ever going to turn into a human-sized insect, knowing
that he inevitably would. In spite of the abundance of body modification
horror, however, and the unavoidable notions of Otherness that invade
and pervade every note of the film, the most alienating and horrifying
moment for me was to witness the transforming – but still suggestively
humanoid – fly–human hybrid Seth throwing up on a powdered dough-
nut, with the intent of dissolving the food before consumption, just as
a fly would. At the sight of his dismayed girlfriend’s reaction, even Seth
candidly admits that his action was “disgusting”, but the dark humour
© The Author(s) 2017 1
L. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, Palgrave Gothic,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-45051-7_1
