Editorials
Why ‘Dumplings’ (2004) Is the Crown Jewel of Gastronomic Horror
In the small subgenre that is gastronomic horror, horror focused primarily on food, only a few films in recent memory have managed to make an impact. Flesh was wet spaghetti slapping you in the face, while The Menu was a surface-to-air rocket that blew up the pop culture landscape on release. Dumplings predates both of them and, in my humble opinion, surpasses them on a filmmaking and narrative level completely.
If there’s one thing my friends have heard time and time again, it’s that I’m always ready for some dumplings. They are one of my favorite things; not just my favorite things to eat, my favorite things bar none. If you steam them or fry them, I will come.
Now, I say this because the 2004 film Dumplings by director Fruit Chan made me fall out of love with dumplings for months after I had watched it. It is a film that I will never forget and utilizes food on film to tell a bizarre, tragic story in a way very few have.
Exploring the Gastronomic Horror Genre
In the small subgenre that is gastronomic horror, horror focused primarily on food, only a few films in recent memory have managed to make an impact. Flesh was wet spaghetti slapping you in the face, while The Menu was a surface-to-air rocket that blew up the pop culture landscape on release. Dumplings predates both of them and, in my humble opinion, surpasses them on a filmmaking and narrative level completely.
I remember first encountering Dumplings during a time in high school when I had gotten into that genre of YouTube video that talked about “disturbing films”, something I’ve derided in previous articles on Horror Press; I stand by the opinion that 9 times out of 10, you will be disappointed when you see a film on those lists. And Dumplings, ultimately, is a very grotesque film that is undoubtedly disturbing, but it’d be a reductive descriptor. Because it’s freaky, bloody, and sometimes psychosexual expression is not so secretly a piece of political counterculture created by a Hong Kong visionary: Fruit Chan.
Fruit Chan, The Man And The Myth
Cinema savant Fruit Chan is a one-man show of film talents: he’s an editor, a writer, but foremost a director. He cemented himself as a legend of the independent film scene in Hong Kong following a slow decade-long crawl to the top and is seen by many as the man who resurrected indie filmmaking during a time of great uncertainty.
The Handover of Hong Kong in ’97, in which Britain relinquished control of the country to mainland China, threatened the country’s economic stability due to speculation of a harsher and more restrictive regime than the United Kingdom’s. This meant a risk to all sectors, including film, and in turn, spurred a new generation of indie filmmakers to take center stage from their mainstream counterparts.
Alongside cinema legendary Wong Kar Wai and terribly underrated master Mabel Cheung, Fruit Chan became a hero of the Hong Kong New Wave era with his crime thrillers Made in Hong Kong and The Longest Summer which tackled the motif of change and Hong Kong’s evolution. And eventually, he brought those same ideas to the horror of Dumplings.
A Story of Tasting Beauty And It’s Ugliest Parts
SPOILERS FOR DUMPLINGS BEGIN HERE.
Released in October of 2004, Dumplings was adapted from the Lilian Lee book of the same name, and later cut into a short film collected in the anthology Three…Extremes. The star of the show is Mrs. Li, an aging starlet whose marriage is slowly dying due to her husband’s infidelity. Blaming her appearance and infertility, Mrs. Li begins paying lump sums of cash to a medicine woman named “Aunt” Mei for miracle dumplings: with a bit of ginger, cabbage, pork, and a potent secret ingredient minced extra fine, Mei cooks up dumplings that restore the youth of the eater. Just one problem…the secret ingredient is fetuses.
The Tragic Descent of Mrs. Li
As Mrs. Li and Mei’s relationship progresses, the duo becomes more entangled as the actress wrestles with the creation and side effects of the “magical” cure to all her problems, which may or may not actually be working at all. The story is equal parts modern fairy tale, drama, and horror show as we watch Mrs. Li’s mind deteriorate and see her slowly become more and more unstable as she’s entrenched in the craving for youth and beauty.
Miriam Yeung as Mrs. Li, captures a depressing sight with elegance, as you watch a figure of beauty and grace be swallowed up by the delusion of becoming “beautiful enough” for a man who doesn’t love her, all the while being acutely aware of her husband’s emotional abuse and infidelity.
Aunt Mei: The Sinister Medicine Woman
Bai Ling’s performance as Aunt Mei is especially memorable and the part of the film that brought it back to the forefront of my mind. Ling embodies the quirks and mannerisms of a witch who has her client by the throat with this underlying sinister mood. There’s a subtle malicious tint to all she says and sings as she tries to sell a ghastly cure to a desperate woman.
And by the end, you’re not particularly rooting for either of them. Still, their chemistry on screen has you craving some resolution as their relationship gets messier and messier. Fruit Chan gives you just that, and a side of cruelty to go with it.
Unsettling Atmospheres and Claustrophobic Spaces
When it comes to the film’s look, Dumplings has a very specific inhospitable vibe that clashes with the small, would-be-comfortable interiors you’re forced to sit in. Mei’s apartment is a tight space, with a wall often being the central feature dividing her and Mrs. Li. The walls are adorned with photos, knick-knacks, and kitschy paintings of children that take on a sinister new meaning watching over the duo as Mrs. Li eats. Shot in Shek Kip Mei Estate, the first public housing estate in all of Hong Kong, it’s filled with people living their lives quietly in the background, but still feels lonely because of how everyone is spaced and placed.
When you get to Mrs. Li’s unfinished mansion, the interiors are framed, often blocking off her guests, shooting around corners and in close-ups being a crucial part of Fruit Chan’s camerawork that communicates the isolation of his subjects. The pristine white walls are more sanitary than classy, and the space as a whole feels like an eternal spec house, never meant to be inhabited.
Cold Lighting and Disgusting Delicacies
Lighting is the key element to making these spaces as uncomfortable as possible, and it’s also the driving force behind making the food in the film unbelievably unappetizing. Because Fruit Chan commits the cardinal sin of food photography, he uses cold lighting. Nothing makes food more unappetizing than cold lighting, and if you’ve ever been in a takeout restaurant late at night with fluorescent bulbs beaming down on whatever combination plate you ordered, you know how bad food can look in the wrong context. This might seem obvious, but this simple cinematic choice amplifies the already disturbing nature of Mrs. Li’s story by taking comfort food and making it feel like something being forced down your throat rather than willingly eaten (a recurring motif of Yeung’s performance while eating in the film).
And none of that is to discount the incredible foley work that gives you every agonizing sound of consumption; every chew, lick, and swallow is audible, and if you’re like me, you’ll want to squirm out of your headphones when you hear it. In a way, Fruit Chan invented a proto-ASMR.
If the goal of ASMR was to be as disgusting as humanly possible.
Deeper Themes: Misogyny, Consumption, and Cultural Anxiety
The script itself? That’s a whole other philosophical feast on its own.
The film’s writer and acclaimed author, Lilian Lee, weaves a story that delves into internalized misogyny, sexual violence, and the commodification of young women by the industries and men that use them. Lee makes a contrast early on between Mrs. Li’s consumption of the dumplings and her husband Mr. Li’s taste for balut (fertilized eggs with unhatched chicks in them); there is a clear mirroring between Mr. Li’s appetite for younger women and Mrs. Li’s appetite for his love, one that makes her story all the more futile and tragic as she decays both literally and morally to “better match” her husband.
Betrayal and Structural Violence
Mei’s eventual betrayal of Mrs. Li to sleep with her husband becomes a multiplying factor in that tragedy, as she becomes just one more person to act on the misogyny torturing Mrs. Li. Dumplings has a Cronenberg-esque relationship with sexuality, reminiscent of Videodrome and Crimes of the Future (2022) where sex is often correlated with violence; more on the Crimes end of the spectrum, Dumplings shows sex as a metaphor for structural violence, and how that violence often gets people to act against their own best interest.
Political and Cultural Reflections
What is a messed-up folk tale of misogyny and lost love on the surface also becomes a historically and politically charged film. The illegality of abortion in Hong Kong is brought up several times during the film by Mei, a doctor working in abortion clinics in China during the 1960s and whose marriage dissolved because of it. She travels back and forth from China to Hong Kong in the film, and a great emphasis is put on not only the physical and legal divide, but the cultural divide between the two countries: they’re so close, but so far apart.
The film’s most memorable song is Mei’s renditions of “Wave after Wave in Honghu Lake”, a CCP folk song whose tune changes throughout the film as she sings it to Mrs. Li. It is ultimately completely changed in meaning and tone by the time it is played through the film’s final moments, reflecting the shift in the cultural and political landscape of Hong Kong since the handover.
Cannibalism as Cultural Critique
Yun-Chu Tsai, a doctorate in East Asian languages and literature, posits that the film is a modern analysis of Chinese society and the act of consumption on both the personal and national scale. In her dissertation, “You Are Whom You Eat: Cannibalism in Contemporary Chinese Fiction and Film”, Tsai sees Dumplings as one of the late-stage pieces of media that take cannibalism and uses it to tell the story of a particular cultural anxiety: “both the anxiety of being marginalized and consumed others and the desire for consumption in a post-socialist, neoliberal Chinese society”.
Why Dumplings Remains Unforgettable
In all that I’ve said here today, I have yet to begin to scratch past the surface of Dumplings. To capture all the intricacies and finer details of this film, let alone the numerous readings you can make of it would be borderline impossible.
Dumplings takes a simple staple food and turns it into a conversation that, as any good one shared over a meal, can branch out in a hundred different directions with a thousand different trains of thought wrestling for control. And that conversation will keep the movie in your mind for much, much longer.
So, get out there and get to watching.
The United States spent most of this year celebrating its 250th anniversary. There have been parades, fireworks, and endless reminders of what the nation wants us to think are its founding ideals. Yet anniversaries are as much about what we choose to remember as they are about what we choose to forget. There is another anniversary this year. Five years ago this month, Candyman was released. The fact that both that film and America are sharing an anniversary this year may have been an accident, but that makes it no less significant.
Released amid another national reckoning over race, Nia DaCosta’s film asks a question that every celebration of America ought to confront: Is it possible to commemorate this nation without fully reckoning with the violence woven into its history? More than a sequel to a horror classic, Candyman is a meditation on the ghosts that haunt America because it has never fully reckoned with the past that created them.
How the Original Candyman Confronted America’s Racial History
The original Candyman understood this. Released in 1992 and set in the almost post-apocalyptic urban decay that was Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, Bernard Rose’s film arrived only months after the L.A. Race Riots, a moment when this country was coming to terms with the way the country’s relationship with Black folks was shaped by decades of segregation and racism.
Most audiences saw a supernatural slasher about a hook-handed killer summoned by saying his name five times into a mirror. But beneath the horror was a far more unsettling story. Candyman was about the lingering consequences of America’s racial history and the way white America has sometimes turned Black suffering into myth instead of confronting the systems that produced it.
The film’s true horror was never simply Candyman. It was the realization that monsters can be born from histories a nation refuses to face. That is exactly where the 2021 film expands the original’s vision.
Nia DaCosta’s Candyman Turns One Ghost Into Many
Bernard Rose’s Candyman explored the legacy of a single act of racist terror. Nia DaCosta’s film argues that the tragedy wasn’t confined to Daniel Robitaille, the man who became the monster. The 2021 film posits that Candyman is not one man but many.
Daniel Robitaille was lynched for loving a white woman. Sherman Fields takes on the mantle of the supernatural slasher because he was beaten to death by police after being falsely accused of harming a child. Anthony McCoy ultimately becomes part of the same legend. Their stories span generations, but they are connected by a nation that repeatedly produces the same injustice under different names at different points in history. The genius of the sequel is that it transforms Candyman from an individual ghost into a symbol of America’s recurring racial violence.
Candyman Shows How History Repeats Itself
History, the film suggests, is not something that happened once. It is something that keeps happening. That is why Candyman is one of my favorite films to teach in my Film and Philosophy course.
Students walk into class expecting a horror movie. They leave wrestling with questions about history, memory, and justice. We spend little time talking about jump scares or gore. (Because, let’s be honest, there is not much of that in the film.) Instead, we ask why some histories become legends while others are forgotten, what societies owe their victims, and whether a nation can ever move forward without honestly confronting the violence that shaped it.
The Horror of Remembering What America Wants to Forget
A good horror film reveals what we fear. What makes Candyman great is how it reveals what we would rather not remember. That is what haunted me the first time I saw it, long after the credits had rolled.
Five years after its release, Candyman remains one of the most unsettling movies in recent years because the history it confronts is not safely behind us. The original film understood that America’s racial violence could not simply be buried, while the 2021 film showed how easily that violence can be reproduced across generations.
Its Unquestionable Legacy in Horror
As America celebrates 250 years, Candyman reminds us that commemorating the nation’s founding requires remembering all this country’s history, including the parts that make the celebration uncomfortable.
We cannot exorcise a ghost by refusing to acknowledge why it exists. Perhaps that is the film’s most important lesson. The past does not haunt us because we remember it. It haunts us because we don’t.
Sometimes it feels borderline ridiculous to gush about John Carpenter’s The Thing as much as I do. It’s gotten to the point where when I’m asked about my favorite horror film by both friends and strangers, a little bit of embarrassment tinges my expression as I answer; it feels so obvious and rarely surprises anyone. Saying I love The Thing when people expect me to bust out an obscure foreign horror film or a cerebral thriller makes me feel like a rosy cheeked child with a propeller hat and a giant lollipop. “Wow, you love one of the most popular horror films of all time, congrats!”
But it’s just the truth. The first film of John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy”, all three of its films are among my favorites. But The Thing has a special place in my heart. It shaped my taste in horror, my taste in most media in general, to be honest. It’s become the gold standard, 10/10 baseline test for the vast majority of my reviews; it is a perfect film, so I judge other films against it. And it’s one of the few movies I have to run back to and watch yearly like clockwork (usually when I’m spending a part of winter tied to the couch). It is, in all regards, the perfect film. If it isn’t the perfect film, then it is at the very least the perfect sci-fi horror film.
So, what exactly qualifies The Thing for literal perfection? It’s a high bar to clear. This article, as informal as it is compared to most of my editorials, is an attempt to explain it.
Even if Carpenter Isn’t the Goat, His Team for The Thing Was
As far as crews go, John Carpenter’s The Thing had the cinematic equivalent of the ’96 Chicago Bulls behind it. We’re talking about an amalgam of some of the most talented people to ever grace the silver screens with their work, boasting alongside John Carpenter two of the heaviest hitters in all of cinematic history: Dean Cundey, and Rob Bottin. Now, we can debate all day about whether John Carpenter is the greatest of all time when it comes to horror directors. Personally, I’m just as liable to say Cronenberg, Del Toro, or Hooper as I am to say Carpenter.
But the key factor to remember here is that Carpenter is the coach, not the star player; the Phil Jackson, if you will. Yes, he is the visionary who directed a near perfect cast of players and composed a tale of pure, apocalyptic paranoia. More importantly, he put together and coordinated the team that would make his vision manifest as reality. And if Carpenter is Phil Jackson, Rob Bottin is the team’s Michael Jordan here, the greatest of all time.
(And to all my Lebron fans, I love you, but you have to sit down for this analogy.)
The Legend of Rob Bottin
Bottin’s story is borderline unbelievable, but it’s the best way to explain how abnormally skilled he is and what he brought to the table for Carpenter. At age 14, Bottin became an apprentice to the at-the-time GOAT Rick Baker after sending him a letter seeking an autograph while sharing his creature designs. He was a quick study under Baker, joining him on the ’76 King Kong and Star Wars, before bouncing to Carpenter’s The Fog and then iconic werewolf picture The Howling.
When he reunited with Carpenter in 1982, he now had 6 classic films under his belt and was moving like an FX bullet train. From ages 22 to 23, he worked on The Thing for 57 weeks in both pre-production and on set. Nearly 24/7 for 400 days, Bottin’s all-gas no-brakes work ethic made The Thing at the cost of his own health, and it resulted in him being hospitalized with pneumonia. He survived and went on to make Robocop. And at least one of your favorite films.
Because no conventional disease or weaponry can kill Rob Bottin.
The Thing Still Features Horror’s Best Practical Effects
Okay, that last bit might be hyperbolic, but the man sincerely put his life on the line to make special effects that haven’t been topped since. Not the best effects in just horror history, or science fiction history, but effects that haven’t been topped in any genre for over 44 years. Not by his mentor Rick Baker, not by Screaming Mad George, not by Alec Gillis (though shoutout to him for his criminally scrapped work on The Thing (2011), and even more criminally ignored work on Harbinger Down). I love Dawn of the Dead, believe me, I do, but he certainly isn’t being beaten out by Tom Savini’s body of work. And that isn’t to disrespect and say that all of the artists that I just mentioned are bad, they’re the best in the game! But Rob Bottin was just that much better.
This inevitably invites the counterpoint: “But it wasn’t just Bottin! Stan Winston and his people were the ones who worked on the Dog Thing to give Bottin’s crew a break, and that’s the best monster in the movie!”. To which I say: look me in the eye and tell me the Dog Thing sequence is better than the Palmer Thing sequence. That’s not even counting the Norwegian Thing, both Norris Things, and the absolutely masterful final creature work that was the Blair Thing. The only reason Bottin and his people didn’t win Academy Awards for their work was because they got jumped by E.T., The Dark Crystal, Conan the Barbarian, and Blade Runner all at the same time at the Oscars. It’s just a consequence of being released during the best year for movies ever.
Okay, Now We Can Talk About Dean Cundey
But of course, these effects are then supported by another true legend: Dean Cundey. Selling people on Rob Bottin being the greatest effects artist of all time, isn’t nearly as difficult as advocating for Cundey, who despite an impressive catalog of filmography, slowed down in the back half of his career. He’s often overshadowed in conversations when it comes to The Thing; it’s always talk of Carpenter’s directing, Bottin’s effects, and Ennio Morricone’s incredible soundtrack up front, and rarely any of Cundey’s work. He isn’t spoken about in the same breath as John Alcott or Michael Ballhaus, cinematographers whose work is associated with prestigious cinema because of their proximity to great directors.
Cundey might not be the director of photography your Martin Scorsese’s or Paul Thomas Anderson’s went running to, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t think he was the most important cinematographer in horror history, just for his work with Carpenter and Spielberg. He helmed three of the most influential films in all of horror with his lighting and camera operating: The Thing, Halloween, and Jurassic Park. The man’s fingerprints are automatically on the cultural DNA of all slashers, most practical effects-driven horror films, and the biggest gateway horror franchise in film history.
The Dream Team That Made The Thing Perfection
Cundey has gone on record saying that despite Carpenter’s input, he was effectively given free rein to light and frame The Thing. The man didn’t just know how to shoot effects to make them evoke true disgust from the audience, he was able to manipulate every aspect of the shot to terrify. His sixth sense cinematography wasn’t just for lighting and playing with shadows, but for the speed of camera movement, the power of his blocking, and for having a complete grasp of communicating texture and temperature.
And temperature is the soul of The Thing. John J. Lloyd’s production design of the research station and the great white expanse around it feels just as bone chilling as the film’s antagonist, thanks to Cundey. There isn’t a single flat shot in the thing, not a moment that doesn’t feel dynamic, and it’s because of Dean Cundey.
Now, all this being said about Bottin and Cundey, they are far from the only ones who synthesized this structurally perfect organism of a movie. Every bit of Todd C. Ramsay’s editing splices the film’s scenes together to move perfectly in-time. David Lewis Yewdall’s sound design and how it gave a voice to the horrors on screen will be etched into people’s brains forever. The point is that everyone, every single person who had a hand in making the film, helped make the movie flawless.
Like the cells of the thing from another world, each crew member on John Carpenter’s The Thing moved in concert with the next, in unison, to create the greatest sci-fi horror of all time. So, is it any wonder why 40 some years later, the film still has us all captured?
