The Best Food-Themed Horror Movies ~ Digital Library

We all know the Thanksgiving tradition is to digest in front of a football game, but why not do something a little different this year? Halloween might be over, but horror season is 365 days a year, especially if you tap into a theme with your programming. Load up your Blu-ray player with these essential scary flicks that have the common thread of involving food, that way before you sink into that tryptophan turkey coma, you’ll plant the seeds for some truly nasty nightmares.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

Photo Credit: NAI Entertainment

There’s no way we could do this list without paying homage to the 1978 spoof that might have started it all. John DeBello’s absurd exploitation movie tells the tale of sentient tomatoes that turn homicidal and try to eradicate humanity with all of the weapons they have to offer, which isn’t many. The U.S. government puts together a special strike force to stop the vegetable menace before it goes too far, and the President’s press secretary turns traitor after he discovers that the tomatoes can be controlled by music. If you’re looking for real scares, look elsewhere, but this schlocky cult hit could be the perfect appetizer for a food-themed horror festival.

The Stuff

Photo Credit: New World Pictures

Larry Cohen’s exploitation classic posits a very simple question: what if the food ate you? The titular Stuff is a white fluffy substance found deep beneath the surface of the Earth that is sweet, delicious, and completely calorie-free. It’s not long until a multinational conglomerate starts packing it up and selling it worldwide, unaware that the Stuff is a parasitic organism that converts its hosts into zombies before hollowing out their insides. An industrial saboteur is hired by the ice cream industry to investigate and things go wildly off the rails in this legendary flick.

Motel Hell

Photo Credit: United Artists

The thing about sausage is that it may be delicious, but you never really know what’s in it. Vincent Smith, the antagonist of 1980’s Motel Hell, is a farmer and motel owner who traps stray humans on his property and then buries them neck-deep in the garden to fatten them up before he smokes them. When Vincent falls in love with a female victim, things start to get awkward real fast around the motel, especially when his dim-witted sheriff brother shows up to throw a spanner in the works. Part serious, part satire, Motel Hell has a weird vibe that hasn’t ever been truly duplicated.

Dead Sushi

Photo Credit: Walker Pictures

Killer food isn’t restricted to just Western horror, as Noboru Iguchi’s deeply demented 2012 flick Killer Sushi aptly illustrates. When a pharmaceutical company accidentally devises a serum that transforms fish on rice into homicidal, self-animated murder machines, it kicks off an orgy of delicious violence that escalates madly until the film’s ridiculous climax. Inspired by shlockfests like Piranha 3D, Dead Sushi commits so fully to its absurd concept that it transcends its origins to become a unique and very watchable movie.

The Gingerdead Man

Photo Credit: Full Moon Entertainment / Talos Entertainment

You know a movie is aiming high when it casts Gary Busey as a serial killer named Millard Findlemeyer. After being executed in the electric chair, Findlemeyer’s ashes are mixed with gingerbread spice mix by his witch of a mother and formed into a gingerbread man for the holiday season by an unwitting baker. In classic Child’s Play fashion, the cookie becomes sentient and wants to pick up his evil deeds where he left off, launching a murder spree against bakery employees and anybody else who gets in his way. It’s unbelievable, but this flick spawned multiple sequels, including a crossover with the Evil Bong series.

La Grande Bouffe

Photo Credit: Mara Films

Film scholars might not jump to categorize Marco Ferreri’s 1973 La Grande Bouffe as a straight-up horror movie, but the visceral response that it elicits from viewers is enough for us to put it on our list. The plot involves four old friends who gather at a country home with the intent of eating themselves to death. Each of them is fed up with the world for different reasons, and over the course of a weekend they consume horrific amounts of food as their bodies (and the villa’s sewer system) break down. It’s repugnant, repulsive, and uncompromising, a perfect cap on your Thanksgiving gluttony.

Poultrygeist

Photo Credit: Troma Entertainment

You knew the schlock horror merchants at Troma would have to turn up on this list sooner or later, and 2006’s horror musical Poultrygeist is a fine addition to the food horror canon. When a group of strangers gets trapped inside a fast food restaurant that’s been constructed atop an ancient Native American burial ground (how many of those things are there, anyways?) it summons a demonic chicken spirit that proceeds to wreak havoc on all and sundry. Full of lowbrow gags, unconvincing gore, and sleazy sexploitation, this is a late-period Troma movie through and through, so maybe move grandma away from the TV before you put it on.

Cooties

Photo Credit: Lionsgate Premiere

Another flick where toxic poultry provides the fulcrum for blood and gore, 2014’s Cooties starts out by following a chicken at a processing plant on its journey from live bird to elementary school chicken nugget. Unfortunately for the kids chowing down, that bird was carrying one of those viruses that transform you into a flesh-craving maniac. Patient zero is a little girl named Shelley, who briskly starts infecting her classmates on the playground until the school is a frenzied hive of violence and chaos. And that’s just from a single nugget – who knows how many others are floating around out there.

Ice Cream Man

Photo Credit: A-Pix Entertainment Inc. /
Ardustry Home Entertainment LLC

Weird-looking character actor (and less famous brother of Ron) Clint Howard stars as the titular character in this off-key cult classic. Playing Gregory Tudor, who was traumatized by the death of an ice cream man in his youth, Howard returns to his home town after being released from a mental institution to start his own ice cream business – one that uses human flesh in the recipes, for some damn reason. This is a gleefully weird and incoherent movie made watchable by Howard’s singular performance as the homicidal dispenser of frozen treats. He really goes all-in on the part, and we’re sorry that the recent attempt to crowdfund a sequel flopped.

Thankskilling

Photo Credit: Gravitas Ventures / Warner Bros. Pictures

Let’s close out our list with the most holiday-appropriate film in the food horror canon. Jordan Downey’s deeply silly Thankskilling starts with a topless pilgrim being tomahawked to death by a demonic turkey named Turkie that walks the Earth every 500 years to kill every white person it sees. Cut to almost half a century later, as a group of college students are returning home for Thanksgiving break, only to face off with the evil bird after he’s released from imprisonment. Made on a ludicrously tiny budget, this one’s worth watching just for the sheer gusto that the cast and crew bring to the ridiculous proceedings.

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