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.
When Creature from the Black Lagoon splashed onto screens in 1954, it gave birth to a very specific kind of horror lineage. The Gill-man became shorthand for aquatic terror, spawning sequels, remakes, homages, and an entire design language of webbed hands, dorsal fins, and rubber-suited menace. Decades later, Hollywood is still wading in that same water. Shark thrillers, deep-sea survival films, mutated piranha, colossal squids; the mechanics change, the budgets grow, but the imagination rarely leaves the lagoon. All the while, an entire ocean of water spirits: older, stranger, and far more psychologically terrifying, remain largely untouched. I’m talking about Mami Wata.
Who Is Mami Wata?
I’m Nigerian, and my first encounter with Mami Wata wasn’t through film or television but through my grandmother’s stories. The descriptions were consistent across tellings: impossibly beautiful women with flowing hair, luminous skin, and eyes that seemed to reflect light even in darkness. They appeared near rivers, lakes, shorelines — always half-revealed. The upper body was woman. The lower half, fish.
What unsettled me wasn’t just the imagery but the certainty. My grandmother didn’t narrate these encounters as distant folklore. She spoke about sightings, about people who had seen her, about behaviors one was expected to follow around certain waters. You didn’t swim in particular rivers. You didn’t wear certain colors near the shoreline. And you never interfered with offerings left at the water’s edge.
I didn’t need Universal Studios to teach me that water was dangerous. Mami Wata wasn’t a movie monster. She was real. That distinction between spectacle and belief is where the divide between Western aquatic horror and African water cosmology truly begins.
When Water Has Memory
Western water monsters tend to operate on biological logic. The shark in Jaws is hungry. The predators in Piranha are territorial. Even more fantastical aquatic beings, from the Gill-man to the amphibious figures in Guillermo del Toro’s films, are framed as species with instincts, habitats, and vulnerabilities. They can be tracked, studied, and eventually killed. The horror is physical.
African water spirits operate on metaphysical logic. They are not random predators but enforcers of balance, custodians of spiritual agreements, embodiments of moral consequence. If a water spirit targets someone, the cause is rarely accidental. Something has been violated, promised, inherited, or ignored. The fear is not of being eaten but of being claimed.
The Diasporic Reach of Mami Wata: From West Africa to the Atlantic
This cosmological framing transforms aquatic horror from a survival narrative into an existential reckoning. You cannot harpoon a covenant. You cannot dynamite a spiritual debt. If the water is calling, it is calling for a reason, and that reason may predate you.
Part of what makes Mami Wata so cinematically rich and so underutilized is that she is not a singular entity but a vast spiritual continuum stretching across regions and diasporas. There are a thousand different variations of this spirit, and no one is truer than the other.
Senegal, she manifests as Mame Coumba Bang, a river guardian presence tied to protection and retribution. In Haitian Vodou, her energies merge with La Sirène, a mermaid lwa associated with beauty, wealth, and the depths. In Brazil and across the Afro-Atlantic religious sphere, her echoes appear in Yemanjá, the maternal oceanic force honored in coastal ceremonies. This Yemanja is just a transliteration of the Yoruba Orisha (celestial spirits of the Yoruba culture) called Yemoja, revered as the “Mother of All” or “Mother of All Fishes”, and the guardian of water, motherhood, and fertility.
Despite regional variations, core iconography persists: mirrors, combs, serpents, flowing hair, radiant adornment, and the promise or danger of prosperity. She is seductive but sovereign, generous but exacting, beautiful but never harmless. That multiplicity alone gives her more narrative elasticity than most cinematic monsters, whose mythologies are often fixed and biologically bounded.
Mami Wata (2023)
Mami Wata in Contemporary Horror Cinema
Film has approached this cosmology cautiously but meaningfully in recent years.
Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny (2022) offers one of the most psychologically layered depictions. The film follows Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant working in New York, whose life becomes threaded with visions of Mame Coumba Bang. Water appears everywhere: bathtubs, swimming pools, reflective surfaces transforming modern infrastructure into spiritual thresholds. The haunting is tied to grief, migration, motherhood, and sacrifice, presenting the water spirit as an emotional and cosmological force rather than a jump-scare device.
C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s Mami Wata (2023) takes a more mythic approach. Shot in stark monochrome, the film portrays a coastal village structured around devotion to a water deity embodied through a human intermediary. As belief fractures, so does communal stability. The horror emerges not from attack but from spiritual imbalance, aligning the film more with atmospheric folk horror than creature features.
Even outside explicit depictions, diasporic media has drawn from the imagery. Lovecraft Country incorporates mermaid and water-spirit symbolism tied to Black feminine transformation. Beyoncé’s Black Is King floods its visual language with aquatic rebirth imagery; flowing fabrics, submerged figures, reflective ritual spaces invoking water as passage. The archetype is already present onscreen. It simply hasn’t yet been centered within a full-scale horror framework.
Erotic Horror and the Siren Archetype in Mami Wata Lore
One of the most cinematically potent aspects of Mami Wata mythology lies in how it intersects with erotic horror, though not through the framework Western audiences might expect.
She is not typically described as maintaining human lovers or demanding sexual exclusivity in the manner of succubi or possession demons. Her seduction is visual, atmospheric, and spatial. In many riverine and coastal accounts, she appears to fishermen or travelers as a breathtaking woman poised just above the waterline, adorned in jewelry, her hair impossibly still despite the wind.
Her beauty is disarming rather than aggressive. She beckons without words, drawing men closer step by step, deeper into the water, past the point where retreat is easy. By the time the illusion fractures, the shoreline is distant and the water heavy around the body. She pulls them under, sometimes violently, sometimes with an eerie calm inevitability. This places her closer to siren mythology than to Western erotic demons, her beauty functioning as a gravitational force.
Literature Has Long Understood Her Terror
While cinema is only beginning to explore these waters, literature, particularly African and diasporic speculative fiction, has spent decades charting them.
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard presents one of the earliest surreal landscapes where seductive river spirits and feminine supernatural entities blur beauty with existential threat. The protagonist’s encounters unfold in dream logic, where attraction overrides caution and spirits operate according to unfamiliar moral rules. The instability of desire wanting to move closer despite danger mirrors the psychological pull found in Mami Wata lore.
Ben Okri expands this cosmology in The Famished Road. Though centered on an abiku (a child destined for an early death), the novel’s watery metaphysics are constant. Rivers function as liminal highways between worlds, and feminine presences tied to water drift through the narrative like half-seen memories. Okri’s horror is not violent but permeable. The material world feels thin, easily breached, as though something vast waits just beneath its surface tension.
Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl channels similar unease through psychological haunting. Mirrored selves, spirit doubles, and invasive presences echo Mami Wata’s reflective themes, especially the idea that one can be watched, claimed, or shadowed by a presence from beyond visible reality.
Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch and its sequels places water spirits within a broader African magical system. In these books, wealth and power connect to spiritual forces older than modern nations. Even when Mami Wata is not directly named, the cosmology she belongs to, rivers as sentient boundaries, spirits as binding forces, remains intact. When she was talking about describing the beings from her Akata series, Okorafor noted, “You would be shocked by how much I don’t have to make up.”
Literature succeeds where film often hesitates because it can inhabit interiority. It can describe the humidity of river air, the hypnotic shimmer of reflected light, the emotional dissonance of wanting to step forward even when danger is understood. Readers feel the seduction and the dread simultaneously. The terror lies not in attack but in recognition in sensing the water knows you.
Why Mami Wata is Horror’s Most Untapped Goldmine
Modern horror has already shown an appetite for spirit-driven fear. Films like Hereditary, The Witch, and His House prove audiences are willing to engage with spiritual systems, ancestral consequence, and metaphysical dread. Aquatic horror, however, remains largely trapped in biological threat models.
Mami Wata offers something far richer; a mythology where water remembers, seduces, rewards, and reclaims. Where beauty is as dangerous as teeth. Where drowning can be spiritual as much as physical. For Black History Month especially, I’m sure engaging these features through horror is cultural storytelling; preserving oral traditions and diasporic continuity through cinematic language. Hollywood has spent seventy years circling the same lagoon.
Meanwhile, somewhere between the rivers of West Africa, the diasporic Atlantic, and the reflective surface of a midnight pool, a far older presence waits for the camera to find her. Preferably through a mirror she’s already holding.
Henry Selick’s return to the director’s chair after Coraline, represents righteousness, anti-authoritarianism, and the subtle art of not giving a fuck. With the support of Monkeypaw Productions and Jordan Peele in the writers’ room, Wendell & Wild crossed the cult classic finish line with a new round of applause from the wide intersections of punk rockers of color. A community, might I add, that historically has never stood to be disrespected.
Who Are Wendell & Wild?
The title refers to a witless pair of demon brothers, voiced by Peele and former Key & Peele co-star Keegan-Michael Key. In its early stages, the pair, along with Sister Helley (Angela Bassett), would lead the story. To explore themes of navigating trauma, anti-capitalism, gentrification, and how our justice systems set Black youth up to fail, though, Katherine “Kat” Koniqua Elliot (Lyric Ross) had to have taken the helm.
Kat’s character design forced a shift in Wendell & Wild’s sound. Heavily inspired by Brooklyn’s Afropunk festival, her hair is green, she rocks facial piercings, what I imagine are a pair of Demonia boots, and a DIY school uniform. The social commentary already aligns with the framework of original punk values. Why not make it a 3-for-3 and line it with the real world soundtrack of Black punk, as a young one reclaiming the righteousness left by punks before her. When we first meet the Elliott family, Kat and her father are seen wearing matching Fishbone band tees while their song “Ma and Pa” plays underneath. This small detail stands out, as punk these days is commonly hereditary, and used to teach positive righteousness in communities of color; not always simply born out of rebellion.
Henry Selick, Fishbone, and the Afropunk Connection
What the general public failed to see under the shadow of The Nightmare Before Christmas, was the strong allyship between the art of Selick, and generational Black punk movements. His love of the sound led him to direct the music video for Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero” in 1985, and his appreciation for the Afropunk next gen basically created the look and idea of Kat. Selick and music supervisor Rob Lowry knew that “punk songs offer more than energy and rebellion; they show the deep connection between Afro-Punk Kat and her father, Delroy, a first gen Black punk fan”. Delroy isn’t present for Kat’s journey, but his boombox is, allowing his songs of Black punk to drive and support his daughter through a system we know wasn’t meant for us to succeed.
After the death of her parents, Kat acts out, and lands in the “Break the Cycle” program, offering benefits to struggling schools from the government when admitting troubled youth. She realizes her position as a pawn for cash immediately, but carries on. Her first day at Catholic school is decorated by legendary Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, chanting “I am a poseur and I don’t care. I like to make people stare” as the nuns in the hallway plug up their ears in judgment of the alternative. Styrene’s vocals mirror Kat, from her stubborn nature to her unapologetic vibrancy, and right back to her (almost) fragile confidence.
Black Punk Soundtrack Breakdown: Songs That Define Kat’s Journey
Even more than dressing a scene with a song that fits, Kat’s character development is literally narrated by the sounds of her boombox. Her boost of confidence navigating hell, earth, and the system is echoed by the lyrics of generational punk Black women. “Young, Gifted, Black, In Leather” by Special Interest is not only an affirmation, but a window into Kat’s understanding, and foreshadowing into the hellmaiden she was born to be. “Every night the law is on my back. That’s why we fight, ‘cause we are young, gifted, Black, in leather”. Tamar-kali’s “Boot,” and “Fall Asleep” by Big Joanie offer the same, while throwing an “I told you so” at the erasure in a genre Black folks had a large hand in creating back in the day.
If I were to break down every weighted needle drop in this 105 minute runtime, you’d need some eyedrops. The toughest track moment takes place during the confrontation between private prison company Klaxon Korp and the locals of Rust Bank, soundtracked by “Wolf Like Me” by TV on the Radio. Even if Rage Against The Machine is the only punk name you know, it’d be impossible to ignore the feeling of how integral Black punk is to the soul of this story. I don’t mean to get preachy on you, but besides the hell of it all, you might still be able to relate off-screen.
Black Punk Representation and Why It Still Matters
I would like to be able to say “many have tried, few have succeeded” to wrap this up, but the truth is, Black punk is fighting monolith status when it comes to representation. Shazam any of these songs- the low play count despite the community fame, and street cred that runs for decades is problematic. Punk is a tight community that relies heavily on the “iykyk”, leaving room for misconceptions on what it’s about, and the undeniable fact that Black punk is larger than you think. It’s not just an edgy sound you can brood in your dorm room over. It’s a vibrant, independent lifestyle filled with war cries of freedom of expression, power to the community, and sticking it to the man. Fuck the prison system. Wendell & Wild got it all correct.
Don’t miss a beat. Listen to Kat’s playlist, straight from the boombox.
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