What's Eating You?: Food and Horror on Screen

by Cynthia J. Miller (Editor), A. Bowdoin Van Riper (Editor)

Overview

Divided into four thematic sections, What's Eating You? explores the deeper significance of food on screen-the ways in which they reflect (or challenge) our deepest fears about consuming and being consumed. Among the questions it asks are: How do these films mock our taboos and unsettle our notions about the human condition? How do they critique our increasing focus on consumption? In what ways do they hold a mirror to our taken-for-granteds about food and humanity, asking if what we eat truly matters?

Horror narratives routinely grasp those questions and spin them into nightmares. Monstrous “others” dine on forbidden fare; the tables of consumption are turbaned, and the consumer becomes the consumed. Overindulgence, as Le Grande Bouffe (1973) and Street Trash (1987) warn, can kill us, and occasionally, as films like The Stuff (1985) and Poultrygeist (2006) illustrate, our food fights back. From Blood Feast (1963) to Sweeney Todd (2007), motion pictures have reminded us that it is an “eat or be eaten” world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501322389
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/23/2017
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Cynthia J. Miller is a Scholar-in-Residence at Emerson College, USA, and a cultural anthropologist specializing in popular culture and visual media. She serves on the board of the National Popular Culture/American Culture Association, and is Treasurer and Governing Board member of the International Association for Media and History, as well as Director of Communication for the Center for the Study of Film and History. She also serves on the editorial board of the Jourbanal of Popular Television. She is the winner of the James Welsh Prize for lifetime achievement in adaptation studies and the Peter C. Rollins prize for a book-length work in popular culture.

A. Bowdoin Van Riper is a historian who specializes in depictions of science and technology in popular culture. He is Web Coordinator for the Center for the Study of Film and History and an archivist for the Martha's Vineyard Museum. Van Riper's publications include Imagining Flight: Aviation in Popular Culture (2003), A Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists and Inventors in American Film and Television (2011).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
I. Let the Eater Beware
1. Death at the Drive-Thru: Fast Food Betrayal in Poultrygeist and Bad Taste
Cynthia J. Miller (Emerson College, USA)
2. Let Them Eat Steak: Food and the Family Horror Cycle
Hans Staats (Independent Scholar, USA)
3. Much Still Depends on Dinner: Cannibalism and Culinary Carnival in Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Zombieland (2009)
Sue Matheson (University College of the North, Canada)
4. Dumplings: The Commodification of Cannibalism and the Liminal Condition of Consumption
Alex Pinar and Salvador Murguia (Akita International University, Japan)
5. The Goo in You: Eating (and Being Eaten) in The Stuff
A. Bowdoin Van Riper (Independent Scholar, USA)
II. Sins of the Flesh
6. Cannibalism as Cultural Critique: Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) and Thatcherism
Thomas Prasch (Washburban University, USA)
7. "The red gums were their own": Food, Flesh, and the Female in Beloved
Bart Bishop (is Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, USA)
8. “Do I Look Tasty to You?:” Cannibalism Beyond Speech and the Limits of Food Capitalism in Park's 301/302
Tom Hertweck (University of Nevada, USA)
9. Flesh and Blood in Claude Chabrol's Le boucher
Jennifer L. Holm (University of Virginia's College at Wise, USA)
10. A Hunger for Dead Cakes: Visions of Abjection, Scapegoating and the Sin Eater
Ralph Beliveau (University of Oklahoma, USA)
III. The Extreme End of Consumption
11. Coprophagia as Class and Consumerism in the Human Centipede Films
Mark Henderson (Tuskegee University, USA)
12. Eat, Kill … Love? Courtship, Cannibalism, and Consumption in Hannibal
Michael Fuchs (University of Graz, Austria) and Michael Phillips (University of Graz, Austria)
13. Catering to the Cult of Ishtar: Blood Feast
Rob Weiner (Texas Tech University, USA) and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (Independent Scholar, USA)
14. From Gourmet to Gore: Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen (1991)
Karen A. Ritzenhoff (Central Connecticut State University, USA) and Cynthia J. Miller (Emerson College, USA)
15. Who Can Be Eaten? Consuming Animals and Humans in the Cannibal-Savage Horror Film
Erin E. Wiegand (Independent Scholar, USA)
IV. You Are What You Eat
16. “You Are What Others Think You Eat:” Food, Identity, and Subjectivity in Zombie Protagonist Narratives
LuAnne Roth (University of Missouri, USA)
17. From Sugar-Fueled Killer to Grotesque Gourmand: The Culinary Maturation of the Cinematic Serial Killer
Mark Bernard (University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA)
18. Consumption, Cannibalism, and Corruption in Jorge Michel Grau's Somos lo que hay
Stacy Rusnak (Georgia Gwinnett College, USA)
19. Sinister Pastry: British “Meat” Pies in Titus and Sweeny Todd
Vivian Halloran (Indiana University, USA)
20. All-Consuming Passions: Vampire Foodways in Contemporary Film and Television
Alexandra Frank (Independent Scholar, USA)
About the Editors
Notes on Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

[A] significant contribution to food and horror literature.” —Jourbanal of the Fantastic in the Arts

“In its embrace of transgression and grotesque eating, What's Eating You? ought to encourage anyone interested in the study of food, the environment, or horror to cultivate thoughts about their points of intersection.” —ALH Online Review

“Full of delicious little morsels, this collection will be devoured by horror scholars. Covering a smorgasbord of different types of horror, from Zombieland to Le Boucher, and from Human Centipede to Beloved, this collection is a feast that will leave one satisfied and yet wanting more.” —Mark Jancovich, Professor, School of Art, Media and American Studies, UEA, UK

“This wide ranging collection of essays illuminates the inventive ways that film and television explore the complex connections among food choices – especially taboo choices – and the monstrous other, the potentially monstrous self, the industrial food system, and inequality in modern society.” —Cynthia Baron, Professor of Theatre and Film and co-author of Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation (2014), Bowling Green State University, USA

“The simple yet profound focus on eating draws fresh approaches to a range of films. Some are canonical horror classics (Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and some cultish favourites (Dumplings, Bad Taste, The Stuff, Blood Feast), and some generally understood as outside the genre but revealing surprising links through the prism of consumption (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Beloved). Aficionados of horror shall find much here to devour.” —Murray Leeder, Instructor and Editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (2015), University of Calgary, Canada

“The adage 'You are what you eat' is old news to faculty engaged in Monster Theory who find themselves telling students that our monsters (of whom no small number eat humans) are actually us. Portrayals of food and consumption in horror narratives offer a substantive, albeit little explored avenue of inquiry into the human experience, and Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper are apt to devote a large volume to such a fascinating topic.” —John Edgar Browning, Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, co-editor of Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology, and co-author of Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

“Sharpen your favorite knife, tie your good bib on, and maybe even rig a blindfold from your napkin. This book's a bloody meal, and one you'll not soon forget.” —Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels and Professor, University Of Colorado Boulder, USA

From the Publisher