‘Meat’s meat, and a man’s gotta eat.’ (Motel Hell, 1980): Food and Eating Within Contemporary Horror Cultures

Eating and drinking are timeless, universal and fundamental parts of all of our lives. Food has increasingly found itself on the menu within cultural, media and film studies as scholars seek to understand the relationships between foodstuff, the food system1 and cultural production. As Bower suggests, ‘ … clearly, when food appears in a film it is loaded with much more than calories’ (2004: 12). Notwithstanding increased attention being paid to the cultural work of food within popular media forms, far less consideration has been given to what Christie calls the ‘dark side of food on film’ (1998: 185), and what Korsmeyer refers to as the ‘dark side of eating’ (cited in Claflin, 2004: 246). This chapter seeks to address this gap in scholarship by examining how food and eating are employed within horror texts. Within horror texts, food, the food system and ‘foodways’ analysis2 tend to be overlooked or viewed as subordinate to broader historical, industrial and transcultural codes, conventions and audience expectations or affects.