Aimee Kuge on Creating ‘Cannibal Mukbang’, Disastrous Dinner Dates, and Timeless Horror

The holiday season is a tumultuous time. The delicate balancing of relationships, the delicate balancing of food crammed on your Thanksgiving dinner plate. The indulgent nature of two incoming months of holiday parties, baked goods, and finding random candy in your pockets. And most of all, the love and heartbreak that can permeate all around it. 

So, is there any better time to talk about the romantic horror comedy Cannibal Mukbang again than now?

I covered Cannibal Mukbang as part of our Brooklyn Horror Film Festival series, where it came out as a fan favorite for a theatre packed to the gills. Since then, writer-director-to-watch Aimee Kuge has been on a film festival victory lap as the movie is received warmly all over the world, from Austin, to New Orleans, to Italy and back. Luckily, she could carve out some time to talk to us here at Horror Press about the movie and how it was made before things kicked back into high gear.

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First of all, congrats are in order for you and the Cannibal Mukbang crew, given the movie has been getting a lot of love. How does it feel seeing the film realized and getting eyes on it after all this time?

Aimee Kuge: It feels surreal, really magical, and wonderful. I’ve been working in film for a very long time and working on other people’s movies, so this is my first feature. Seeing it on the big screen is a really indescribable experience, so I’m very grateful.

A lot of people ask for an elevator pitch of the movie, but I really want to know: if you had to present Cannibal Mukbang as if it were a dish, how would you describe it? What’s C.M.’s flavor profile?

I mean, it’s a rich, hard-to-capture taste. But it’s a sweet and savory, umami-heavy dish… and has a little bitterness at the end. 

Do you remember what the earliest seeds of Cannibal Mukbang looked like? Where were you as a filmmaker and a creative when the idea first came to mind?  

A.K.: It actually came to me in 2020, I had been thinking about making something that had to do with food for a while. I was a food photographer for many years in New York when I first moved here, so its always been part of my filmmaking practice. I had been interested in mukbangs, and had some really bad experiences with my own body and with myself during that time. Mukbangs helped me get out of that funk. 

But what really solidified the idea for Cannibal Mukbang was when I was at a random party and I met a friend of a friend, who told me about her friend. She had gone on a date with a guy she matched with on Tinder, they had amazing chemistry. He made them an incredible dinner for two, and she wanted to stay the night, but he said he wanted to hold off and see her again, so he sent her off. The next day, she’s excited about the date, but her stomach starts hurting horribly. She ends up going to the hospital, they do some tests on the contents of her stomach…and they find out she had eaten human meat. She tried to find him again, but he just vanished completely.

That’s a brutal dinner date, to be sure. 

A.K.: It was a friend of a friend of a friend, so it might not be a real story. But it connected all the dots for me. Like, “What if I made a movie about a mukbanging cannibal?”! I feel bad for the person if it’s true, but I am grateful for that conversation, and grateful that in my life as an artist, these are the conversations I get to hear and write down. I’m thankful for how these stories transform and morph in different ways. 

Cannibalism aside for a moment. As a mukbang fan, were there more conventional food stylists, or particular content creators that you looked to for inspiration while shooting food for the movie?

There are some big mukbangers that were very inspirational to me, definitely Nikocado Avocado; he’s the face of it all. Trisha Paytas was too. I sent her a cold email years ago asking if she wanted to help me with this movie, and she never got back to me! Oh, and also Hunger Diaries. Those were the main three that inspired me the most.

I guess that also begs the question: hours-wise, how much footage of people eating crazy amounts of food did you watch for this film?

Hundreds, if not thousands! It started because I watched Food Network a lot while on the treadmill in college, and it took off from there. I found mukbangs, and now sometimes I watch mukbangs even while I’m working. I love the culture, and I think that the part of me that likes seeing it is disgusting, but it’s worth exploring clearly. These people are making millions, and I’m one of the millions consuming and enjoying it, so they’re onto something. But yeah, hundreds and hundreds of hours. A lot. 

As difficult as shooting food is, shooting those wonderfully gooey practical effects you get to see throughout the film was a big highlight. Were there any effects that gave you particular trouble while shooting?

For the whole scene with Ash doing the “butchering” on the table, we were going to do a full-body cast, but we couldn’t make it work. We wanted Ash to be able to cut it open while she’s talking and see a lot more of that gore mid-conversation. We weren’t able to get the whole body, but luckily, Ashley and Alex from Yellow Moth Makeup F.X. made an amazing fake head, an amazing torso, an amazing arm, an amazing everything. 

That was the trickiest scene since I could only shoot with their dialogue, and then I came in on a separate day with April and the effects and filmed her separately, cutting everything up and editing it all together. 

That gnarly arm break was perfect, so I imagine it was a headache to get looking that good. 

It was really hard to shoot that because we were using this hose to make the fake rain, and my production designer Matt Weir was holding it above the camera trying not to get us soaked. But we got the arm break in one take! It worked out because they had the blood rig perfectly set up, and we got it in one shot. We only had a little time to do those effects, and it was really important to have Yellow Moth’s professionalism and be able to do it quickly.

With a title like Cannibal Mukbang, you can make a lot of comparisons to the cannibal exploitation films of the 70s and early 80s. How did that era of filmmaking resonate with this film so heavily?

There’s been a big resurgence of 70’s horror as of late, Giallo in particular. The first dream sequence that happens I wanted it to feel like a Fulci movie, and I wanted it to feel like you were taken to that timeless space those movies create. The flashback sequence is the connective tissue that connects those films and this one the most, it brings the Cannibal Mukbang together. And that flashback sequence also gives Ash a sort of timeless quality and makes it hard to determine exactly what she is, so I felt it resonated there.

Let’s talk about that flashback segment of the film, the one that shows us the origins of how Ash got a taste for human flesh. I enjoyed it because you don’t see it coming at all, it catches you off guard. What spurred you to insert such an aesthetically different sequence into the film? 

It was a lot about going back to my roots. I went to film school at C.U. Boulder, and a huge emphasis was placed on shooting on film, super-8 and 16mm. We weren’t actually allowed to shoot on digital cameras until we were juniors, which was crazy, so I shot a lot on film. I had it in my head that we would shoot that sequence on super-8 because stylistically, it is a massive flashback choice. You see a lot of flashbacks in sepia, but I feel like on film it feels really nostalgic.

And what was the transition like between two different mediums, all while shooting out in nature?

I had a really small crew down in Florida, my DP Harrison Kraft and my gaffer Danny Rinaldi like, really…they ate. They did such a good job with very little lighting, they really pulled through with that sequence. And we actually shot it simultaneously on a Panasonic Lumix S5, just in case we missed something. We would do a digital rehearsal to get the movement down first, then we’d get it on film. And even if it didn’t pan out, I would have it on digital… but it panned out.

So thematically, how did that technical aspect factor into telling the story of who Ash was?

Most of the movie is from Mark’s perspective. His perspective is closed, and intimate, with not a lot of wides and not a lot of movement. He’s a very stationary, one-track mind kind of character. But when we go into Ash’s world in the flashback, we see the nature she grew up in, we see a lot of dynamic movement, which is so different. And it had to be completely different from the rest of the movie and really stand out to communicate who she was.

On the topic of Ash, writing a character like her, getting that delicate nature of sympathetic but also quietly terrifying when you stop to think about it. Was she always written that way, or were there other plans for the character initially that evolved? Did April Consalo being cast change the character at all?

Well, she didn’t really change much from when I first wrote the script in 2020. She was always going to be this incredibly powerful, tense, sexy, multifaceted, funny, cool girl. But April definitely influenced how the character came out on screen just because of her intensity. She’s so beautiful, she looks like a Disney princess but also has this edge to her that looks like she could fuck you up. When I cast her, she just really got the character. She really brought herself as an actress into Ash and they became like one person to me for a bit.

She was dialed in completely.

Yeah, it was intense, but in a good way. We had a 14-day shooting schedule, the script is 110 pages, and we’re shooting a bunch of these pages every day. She was off the book immediately; she knew her lines and character in and out exactly, and we couldn’t have done it the way we did if she hadn’t. 

14 days is an absolutely insane timetable for a shooting schedule.

I don’t know how we did it honestly. There was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears… fake blood, and not real tears, just to clarify.

Many people will sympathize with the relationship dynamic between Mark and Ash, for better and for worse, especially with how well the leads April Consalo and Nate Wise play off each other. Were there any challenges in trying to capture that energy? 

I got very lucky. I had a feeling about both of them when I first cast them, and we had a joint meeting before I gave them the final offer. We met at a bar, and they had this chemistry between them where they didn’t exactly vibe right away, but they were already teasing each other and playfully flirting, and I just felt it. They had a genuine tension, they weren’t being fake with each other, so I knew we could make this work. 

Later, we had another meeting with my intimacy coordinator, Kennedy Murray, and I said, “All right, we’re going to go through all the make-out and sex stuff right now” and see if we had any adjustments we needed to make. And I made them watch the scene in Twilight where Edward and Bella first kiss, and also the bus stop kiss in Spun before they went for it. And when they rehearsed their first kiss, I knew this would work. The core of the movie is their chemistry, and it just worked.

Cannibalism as a metaphor for love has been a very hot topic as of late in both film and literature. Do you feel that in the context of the film, the cannibalism shown is more about the love of self or the love of others?

I definitely think it’s about the love of others. If we do a sequel, we can tap into the idea of it as self-love, but I wanted the movie to be focused on this toxic romance. I know it’s a bit of an oversaturated trope at this point, but this is an eating show where one person is eating the other alive, so it makes sense. It’s about that love for others, not just romantic love but also familial love, a love for vengeance. I don’t think these characters love themselves at all, and that’s why they do what they do.  

We’ve covered that there are a lot of homages to great classic grimy horror in this movie. Are there any homages to great classic romantic films that might go over viewers’ heads? I felt a twinge of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Absolutely! Eternal Sunshine was a major inspiration for me. The whole Before trilogy, especially Before Sunset. There are some cuts of She’s All That and 10 Things I Hate About You. Not romance, but there’s a touch of Superbad on the comedy side. 

Are there any films you would consider a spiritual sibling or precursor to Cannibal Mukbang? One that you would pair it with for a double feature? 

Definitely Jennifer’s Body. That’s like the big sister of Cannibal Mukbang, that’s what I aspire to make, to make something like that.

Honestly, same. We should all strive to be a little more like Diablo Cody.

Yes, Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama, 100%.

Mukbanging is one of the biggest subcultures in a near-endless number of communities online that are ripe for taking in cinema. Are there any other internet subcultures that you would want to make a horror movie about?

I’m currently working on a new romantic horror script about emo kids and the emo music scene. I just pitched it at Austin Film Fest, and it did well there, so I am hoping to write the script and get it out within the next few years. Indie sleaze is really popular right now, and I want to make a movie about that early-2000’s scene. You know, everything happens in these 30-year cycles, and the early-2000’s are coming back with how fast trends move now. I want a movie all about the music.

Who would you put on the soundtrack for the movie? Yellowcard? Dashboard Confessional?

You know, My Chemical Romance is a given. There’s some really new, amazing emo that’s coming out now, like Saturdays at Your Place, Prince Daddy, and the Hyena. It’s having a huge comeback, especially with older bands like Blink-182 getting big again. I think the world is ready for it again.

Daydream with me a bit. No reins, no questions asked, just unlimited funding, whatever you need to make it. What kind of horror movie would you make in the wake of Cannibal Mukbang? 

Can I say Cannibal Mukbang 2? It’s Cannibal Mukbang 2! We have the ideas down, April and I have begun writing the script for it. But I also really want to make my emo movie. Hopefully, we’ll make enough money, find investors who are interested, and be able to make them both. It’s going to happen. I want to make more romantic horror comedies, that’s where I want to live in. It’s the world I like to write in. 

…So. If they’re having an eating competition, who’s winning: Nikocado Avocado, or Ash?

Ooh. I don’t know. He recently lost like 80 lbs. Back in 2021, Nikocado could beat her, at peak form. But Ash in 2023 could hold her own. This is the toughest question yet. If it were real food and not human food, Nikocado would win. But if it’s about eating humans, Ash wins.

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Thanks again to Aimee for all the great insights on the film! I also want to thank Nate Wise and George Blandino-Ripley for the images for this article. And if you want to read the review of Cannibal Mukbang that was so good lead actress April Consalo wanted to get a tattoo of it (Aimee’s words, not mine), you can check it out here! 

And if you’re hungry for seconds and thirds of the best horror content out there, stay tuned to Horror Press!