Movies
Dinner, Party of 1: Autophagia in Horror
The prevalence of autophagia (also known as self-cannibalism, auto-cannibalism, or the act of eating oneself) is so common today that most people don’t even realize they take part. Autophagia applies to the self-consumption of any part of the body, including fingernails, dead skin, scabs, hair, blood, and, of course, meat. Give me a “Hello Clarice” if you just found out you’ve taken part in auto-cannibalism before.
Now, typically, the most devastating cases of self-cannibalism, where they go for the meat, are attributed to severe mental health crises.
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health emergency, reach out for help. You can call 988 or talk to someone at the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988lifine.org.
Although autophagia is incredibly common in its lesser forms, it’s all around pretty terrible for us. Nail biting can lead to infection. Hair eating can lead to hairballs (or that unfortunate scene in Raw). Human blood consumption can lead to toxic iron levels. To top things off, human meat has little caloric value (especially compared to beefier counterparts).
Crossing the line into extreme self-cannibalism is an unfathomable boundary for many people for countless reasons – so naturally, the horror genre is here to explore it. Gore is the theme this month at Horror Press, and the following adheres to it. Let that be a warning as we delve into eight horror movie moments that explore how the line into self-cannibalism is crossed.
Autophagia in Horror Movies
Talk to Me
The introduction may have left you feeling unsettled, so let’s start things off small with some innocent self-blood consumption.
In what was arguably one of the most disturbing moments in 2023’s Talk to Me, a possessed teen recovering from numerous head lacerations begins slamming the back of his head into a wall until it cracks and bleeds, where he then starts frantically lapping his blood off the hospital floor.
Now, I may have misled you a bit about it only being innocent blood-drinking because there most certainly had to be bits of cranial matter mixed in there. This scene showcases one of the most unsettling aspects of the extreme forms of auto cannibalism: A person taking place in something that is not only so far outside of their character but also goes against every survival instinct that we have. The resulting physical pain of those actions is inconceivable, yet the person carries on, overriding every failsafe our body has to protect us. This next entry is another glorious example of that.
Splatter: Naked Blood
The 1996 Japanese horror film Splatter: Naked Blood works on the premise that a drug is being tested that turns pain into pleasure. You may recognize it from my list of best eyeball horror, and the same scene referenced places it here.
To get right to the point, a woman scoops out her eyeball with a fork and proceeds to eat it. But it’s the cheerful, orgasmic delivery that makes this scene the most unsettling. In most other examples of auto cannibalism in horror, there are malicious undertones or frenzied acts. In this scene, she dines on her eyeball like she’s having the best time of her life.
This moment captures a complete and total disconnect from reality. Being so immersed in the delusion that a person seems sane while doing something crazy gives me the heebie-jeebies, worse than this subject matter.
I should hold that thought.
In the Tall Grass
If you look up incidents of auto cannibalism today, the mass majority of notable incidents tend to happen against one’s will. If you’re not following, let’s look at In the Tall Grass.
In the movie, Becky DeMuth finds herself in a seemingly inescapable field of tall grass. Inside, she meets a man with heavy cult-like ideals. This spells incredibly terrible things for her pregnancy, which a half-conscious Lucy discovers after said cult man hand-feeds her the contents of her womb.
Speaking of being forced to dine on one’s progeny:
Spell (2020)
In a tale reminiscent of Misery, Spell features a man named Marquis T. Woods, who, after being injured in a plane crash, is taken in by a stranger.
The stranger (played by the amazing Loretta Devine) begins controlling Marquis with voodoo. Until he can fight back, he has no choice but to eat what she gives. But unbeknownst to him initially, she fed Marquis his son’s hand.
While I know this doesn’t directly fall under auto-cannibalism, a philosophy reminiscent of Ouroboros is happening here: the snake eating its tail symbolizes the everlasting cycle of destruction and creation, life and death. It’s meant to be a positive symbol, one of the snake’s few positive symbolic associations culturally.
Since this meal happens as a pretext for the final battle that our protagonist wins, he successfully subverts the enemy’s tactics against them. The destruction of his creation led to her creating this meal, leading to her destruction. Ouroboros.
If you feel like this has slid off track, let’s get back on it.
Anthropophagus (1980)
This 1980 Italian film by Joe D’Amato goes by many names: The Beast, The Savage Island, The Grim Reaper, or Anthropophagus.
Another name could be “the movie where the cannibal eats the baby out of a pregnant lady and ends with him eating his own intestines.”
That title may be lengthy, though.
Our anthropophagus became a cannibal first out of starving necessity. After having to eat his family to survive, he lost every ounce of humanity. It triggered an animalistic rampage culminating in the film’s impactful finale I referenced earlier.
Interestingly, the word anthropophagus means cannibal, especially in old myths and fables. But the aforementioned loss of humanity calls into question whether a person who’s become devoid of all humanity is a cannibal.
Sure, scientifically, they’re still human. But there’s a philosophical question of choice and at what point a person’s ‘self’ is no longer them. Should that be considered? To explore this further, let’s look at another moment of auto cannibalism in horror.
The Evil Dead (1981)
In Sam Raimi’s 1981 The Evil Dead, we see Shelly eat off her hand in Deadite form. Should this be considered auto cannibalism? The consensus is that when a Kandarian demon possesses a person, their soul goes to hell or limbo, making it fair to say that the Deadite version of them is no longer them, at least for the time being.
From Mia in 2013’s Evil Dead, we know someone can return from Deadite possession, proving they’re not entirely gone. But most people who change to Deadites do not come back. This transformation from human into Deadite encapsulates the absence of the Id and the ego, the conscious and unconscious mind.
It calls into question at what point is the person no longer the person who’s eating themself? And if the person is not present, should it be considered auto-cannibalism?
This subject got complicated; let’s finish with some less philosophically debatable cases.
Raw (2016)
Typically, cannibalism in films is used as a metaphor for love or exploring sexuality. The film Raw, where a vegetarian develops a hunger for human flesh, is an excellent example of the exploration into cannibalism serving as a fill-in for sexual exploration.
Yet, while cannibalism shows a closeness with others and the discovery of oneself, auto-cannibalism tends to show the opposite: a separation between mind and body or the chasm between force and free will. Rawdipped into auto-cannibalism with some hair-eating and wrist-biting, showcasing them as compulsory acts. Yet, self-cannibalism happening out of acts of compulsion is exemplified strongest in our final entry.
Eat (2014)
In the film Eat, struggling rising star Novella McClure’s autophagia begins in a way that’s familiar to many of us: she bites her cuticles when she experiences anxiety. As she can’t find work and can’t pay her bills, her anxiety grows, as does the compulsion to chew on herself. The incidents of autophagia continue until she’s bitten off and eaten whole body parts.
She attempts to hide her self-mutilations from those closest to her, even putting heels on over her freshly mangled foot. It speaks to the underlying mental health factors that contribute to auto-cannibalism, as well as a hefty metaphor for the feeling of being eaten alive by anxiety. This film gives us a vulgarly realistic depiction of anxiety personified; we tear ourselves apart. But most importantly, even in its radical displays, Eat humanizes the act of auto-cannibalism, showing us the boundary between it happening and not isn’t quite as large as we’d like to believe.
After all of this, I’d be remiss not to mention that some people take place in extreme auto-cannibalism willingly to see what it’s like. One Reddit user shared that after he had a foot amputated for medical reasons, he had it prepared into foot tacos for him and his closest friends because they all had said they’d be interested in trying human meat if they ever ethically had the chance.
Someone cue the “you can’t eat at everybody’s house” music.
By and large, the extreme forms of auto-cannibalism fit so well into horror because the notion of losing one’s grip on existence to the extent of extreme self-consumption is equal parts horrific and possible. Perhaps you didn’t realize how possible until now, so enjoy going through your day with this information. May you be slightly unsettled, from one horror fan to another.
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I’ve spent years honing my craft making strange, retro-inspired horror films on a budget — films driven by style but rooted in emotion. Love, grief, heartbreak, longing — all filtered through darkness. I’ve always been drawn to horror because, like many people, I found healing there. In stories where fear becomes confrontation, where pain can finally take shape.
How Joshua Tree Inspired In the Valley
During COVID, my partner and I bought land in Joshua Tree and built an off-grid glampsite. It became an oasis away from the city — a place defined by silence, stars, old VHS tapes, and isolation that initially felt restorative. At night, we’d drift between local dive bars, searching for connection in the middle of nowhere.
One spot we frequented was Out There Bar — a strange desert refuge with drag nights, disco, and often only a handful of people scattered inside. Most nights felt harmless, almost dreamlike. But every so often, something shifted in me. A wall would suddenly go up — an instinctive voice whispering: Be careful. Don’t let anyone know you’re queer. The feeling was immediate and overwhelming. A defense mechanism I thought I had long outgrown. One of the largest military bases in the country sat only a few miles away, and soldiers would often cycle through the bar. Some encounters were warm, others less so, but there was always an underlying sensation I couldn’t shake — that isolating feeling of being watched too closely.
What unsettled me most was the contradiction. I had been openly queer since I was seventeen. Proudly. Yet suddenly, in the place I considered my sanctuary, old survival instincts came rushing back. Joshua Tree is romanticized as liberating and expansive — a place people go to find themselves. And yet, underneath that openness, I found myself shrinking again. That feeling became the seed of In the Valley.
The stars are why you go to the desert. No matter how many vintage motels or pools people chase, the conversation always circles back to the sky. The desert remains one of the few places where light pollution disappears, and the stars reveal themselves fully. But I became fascinated by another feeling entirely: the sensation that something might be watching back. As the desert became my second home and that defensive wall kept resurfacing, I started interrogating the feeling more deeply. Why was I suddenly so concerned with safety? What exactly was I afraid of?
Queer Fear and Survival in Isolated Spaces
The answer was complicated because I hadn’t experienced overt homophobia in any defining way before. Sure, there had been passing slurs shouted from cars or strangers trying to provoke something ugly, but those moments felt easy to dismiss. What unsettled me more was the quieter feeling underneath it all — inherited vigilance. My partner is non-binary, and their safety often occupies my mind more than my own. Even in harmless moments, I found myself scanning rooms, reading body language, calculating exits. It wasn’t irrational. It was conditioning — a survival instinct sharpened over generations of queer people learning when to stay visible and when to disappear.
Building Horror From Internalized Fear
That was the horror I wanted to explore.
Not simply homophobia itself, but the psychological architecture it leaves behind. The way fear embeds itself into the body long after you convince yourself you’re safe. Eventually, I realized I had to confront it. I had to give it a face.
In the Valley is a descent — a body-switch film wrapped in alien imagery and retro western horror aesthetics. The film begins with Josh entering a queer speakeasy hidden in the middle of the desert. The room immediately studies him. Josh carries himself with hesitation, almost like someone entering a gay bar for the first time and trying desperately not to appear uncomfortable.
Romance, Desire, and Alien Horror
After several strange encounters with the bar’s enigmatic owner, Dahlia, the atmosphere shifts when Richard enters the room. Their connection is immediate, communicated through something as simple as a smile. Quiet conversation turns into flirtation, flirtation into dancing, and suddenly the film reveals itself as a romance. Richard takes Josh home after Josh admits he can barely remember where he lives — an important detail. Josh exists untethered, emotionally disoriented, searching for grounding in another person. Outside, the two lie beneath impossibly purple desert skies, staring upward as the stars loom over them.
For a moment, the desert becomes sacred. Then the film turns.
After the two move inside together, storm clouds begin swallowing the sky while purple lightning fractures across the landscape. The storm doesn’t interrupt their intimacy — it amplifies it. Desire and danger begin occupying the same emotional space. I wanted the sequence to feel like the best night of your life teetering on the edge of violence. With every flash of lightning, horrific images invade Josh’s psyche: a man bound to a barbed wire fence, an ominous cowboy gripping a bat, fragments of brutality interrupting intimacy like inherited nightmares.
By the climax of the sequence, the lovers are no longer alone. Their bed now sits exposed beneath the storm as two towering extraterrestrial beings silently observe them above. Because for me, the horror was never simply the aliens. It was the feeling of being watched while trying to love someone openly. At the final moan, Josh awakens alone — naked and abandoned beneath the brightness of the desert morning. Richard is gone.
The Desert, Memory, and Queer Trauma
Searching desperately for help, Josh instead discovers something impossible: a single black orchid growing from the dry sand. The flower mirrors the tattoo seen earlier on Richard’s arm. In panic, Josh rips the flower from the earth. Inside, a violent purple light pulses outward. Fractured memories stab through him in flashes: the dancing, the bedroom, the storm, the extraterrestrial figures looming above them. Then the desert itself revolts, erupting into blood and consuming him completely before releasing him back into the endless landscape.
By nightfall, dehydrated and unraveling, Josh discovers a lone fire burning beside an unfinished barbed wire fence. A baseball bat rests in the flames. Torn clothing hangs from the wire. Nearby, he finds a mound of disturbed earth crowned with a cowboy hat. Beneath the hat sits another black orchid.
Uncovering the Film’s Central Mystery
This time, when Josh removes it, there are no violent visions. Only silence. He begins digging. Slowly, a grave reveals itself. Inside lies a body reduced almost entirely to bone and weathered skin. Then Josh realizes who he’s looking at. Richard. Not recently dead — but buried there for years.
The Horror of “Bury Your Gays”
Josh stumbles backward in horror only to suddenly find himself seated beside Richard once more at the barbed wire fence, the same way they sat together in the bar earlier that night. Only now the atmosphere has changed completely. Romance has curdled into mourning. Richard speaks like a ghost struggling to remember his own humanity. He tells Josh the story of a man who only wanted love — and another man too terrified to survive what that love awakened inside him — and suddenly everything clicks into place.
The uneasy looks from the bar patrons were never truly about Josh. They were about what he represented: a repetition. An echo. The cowboy was never a monster in the traditional sense.
He was fear weaponized.
A closeted man who carried his self-hatred into the desert and attempted to bury it there alongside the person who exposed it. A literal manifestation of the old horror trope: “bury your gays.” Richard tells Josh it’s time to leave. The grave suddenly splits open into a violent purple void as storm clouds consume the desert once more. Before falling in, Josh looks back one final time. The extraterrestrial beings stand silently above the true history of the murder unfolding beneath them: Richard bound to the barbed wire fence while the cowboy approaches slowly with the bat in hand. Josh is no longer witnessing metaphor. He is witnessing buried history itself.
How In the Valley Reclaims Queer Horror Tropes
Josh crawls out of the grave and back into the present day. Disoriented and exhausted, he stumbles toward the bar from the beginning of the film — only now it has changed. Modern cars sit outside. The once-forgotten dive has been transformed into a stylish Airbnb. Inside, a man frantically calls the police, searching for his missing partner.
Then Josh collapses through the doorway. His own partner rushes toward him, holding him tightly in relief. And in that final moment, music begins playing softly in the background.
The spirits of Richard and the Cowboy appear together one last time, replaying their dance across the room. But now the cowboy is no longer monstrous — just young, frightened, human. Josh watches as they move together exactly as he and Richard once did. Finally, everything aligns.
The Hidden Meaning Behind In the Valley
Josh was chosen to relive this forgotten history — not simply to witness violence, but to understand survival. To recognize the privilege and responsibility of existing openly in spaces where others once had to hide. The desert did not just hold trauma. It held memories. In The Valley is intentionally layered. Viewers may miss the clues on a first watch: the body switch, the orchid tattoo, the realization that the sex scene is not simply passion but “gay panic” refracted through alien abduction imagery. The storm itself becomes psychological — terror building inside someone unable to reconcile desire with shame.
Why Horror Is the Perfect Language for Queer Stories
I never wanted to make a “clear” queer film because my experience as a queer person has never felt clear or linear. Fear rarely announces itself directly. Trauma lingers, mutates, hides in the body, resurfaces unexpectedly. Horror became the only language that felt honest enough to express it. The core of In the Valley is about the collision between passion and fear. A film wrapped in neon skies, extraterrestrials, and retro horror, but underneath, grappling with violence, shame, inherited trauma, and survival. Even the barbed wire fence carries historical weight. It directly references a young queer man whose death mirrored the imagery in the film. If you know, you know. If you don’t, I encourage you to research the history of violence against queer people, particularly in isolated spaces where secrecy and fear have too often turned deadly.
When Art and Reality Collide
Since the film’s release, it has played festivals around the world and received recognition I’m incredibly grateful for. But life has a strange way of collapsing the distance between art and reality. In February of this year, I was physically attacked for being queer for the first time in my life. The assault left me with a severe concussion and heavy bruising, and I’m still processing what it changed inside me.
The Real-World Importance of Queer Horror
More than anything, it forced me to confront a difficult realization:
The fear that inspired this film was never imaginary. It was always real.
Which is precisely why we have to keep protecting one another. Keep creating spaces for queer people to exist openly. Keep telling stories that confront what others would rather bury. And keep making horror films that remind us we survived.
Yes, Paul W. S Anderson’s film Event Horizon is far from perfect. In fact, it is very deeply flawed, especially because of its semi-lost, boundary-pushing torture scenes, dated character motifs, and a sense of humor that, tonally, does not feel a thousand percent well-balanced with the existential, hopeless tone. That being said, many of the negative reactions do not account for the pure nightmare fuel of this film at its core. Event Horizon might not be the greatest sci-fi horror film of all time (though I would personally say otherwise), but there is more than enough of a case for it being the most frightening.
The Hellish Premise That Makes Event Horizon So Terrifying
The film itself follows a group of scientists in the distant future looking for a lost ship – the “Event Horizon”. The ship, which was revolutionary in its ability to literally fold space time, poke a hole through it, and go through, went missing years ago, and had only just been discovered. As the crew boards the abandoned ship, the film plays out like a combination of cosmic terror, a haunted house/gothic aesthetic, and hopeless dread, as they discover the ship may have passed through Hell itself.
The Chaos Realm and the Fear of a Fate Worse Than Death
Probably the scariest existential concept introduced in Event Horizon is the concept of a fate worse than death. In addition to the haunted house horrors of visualized grief and deadly kills, the film vies for a more Hellraiser approach of inflicting brutal, unflinching nightmare fuel on its characters and audience. I am of course referring to the chaos realm, and how it completely derails any expectations of what the movie might have been.
So let’s say you go to a movie theater to see Event Horizon in the 1990s. It’s labeled as sci-fi horror. With Alien 4 scheduled to come out in a few months, and films such as The Arrival, 12 Monkeys, and other grunge science fiction outings filling the decades, one could assume the movie would be an alien, time travel, or other high sci-fi concept film. Soon, it shows itself as a haunted house story in space. Then, with one more twist, it becomes half Lovecraftian cosmic terror of the unknown, and half otherworldly torture. The ship passes through a Hellish torture realm; anyone who sees it becomes corrupted, and they might even participate in the infamous “blood orgy” scene. Seeing is not just believing-it is possession and corruption. This is Hellraiser in space.
Cosmic Horror and Lovecraftian Terror in Space
The concept of the chaos realm, as a demonic version of the zone from Annihilation, is partially scary because of the movie’s pacing, and how it takes a while to set up this twist of a concept. It is a festering, evil place we are dealing with. Even inanimate objects such as the ship itself, can become sentient demons in their own right. The movie, intelligently so, also does not overexplain this place. It is not quite Hell itself, but rather, a place of pure evil caught in between time and space, that people may have interpreted as Hell.
Sam Neill’s Dr. Weir Is an Underrated Horror Villain
Throughout the film, Sam Neill’s character, Dr. William Weir, makes a horrific transformation. Revealed to be the designer of the Event Horizon, visions of his dead wife led him to reach this chaos realm himself. On the Event Horizon, which had become a demon, William becomes a corrupted servant of the Hellish servants on the other side.
A potential factor in the lack of awareness of Event Horizon is that it came out in the 90s, not the 80s. If this film had premiered about ten years earlier, it almost definitely would have held Sam Neill’s character on the same pedestal as Pinhead, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Michael Myers. However, in the late 90s, there was such a fatigue over slashers and high-concept antagonists that his character didn’t receive the cult status he should have.
Seriously…the bloody, scraped-in satanic symbols into the body? The blood-drenched skin? The cold, unloving attitude? He gives Pinhead a run for his money, and is a whole lot more sadistic than him. All the elements are there for an iconic horror villain, making his way into Funko Pop figures and T-shirts. However, he is not held on that pedestal as he should be. Maybe if there were a couple more sequels with him doing wacky kills and making puns? Sign me up for Event Horizon: The Dream Master.
The Gothic Design of the Event Horizon Ship
In addition to Sam Neill’s character, the ship itself should be as iconic as the Overlook Hotel or Amity Island. It is not a regular science-fiction designed thing, but rather more akin to a gothic Church. It gives the impression that it was destined for evil from its conception, and no one would have any control over where it went. Truly chilling-huge props (pun not intended) to production designer Joseph Bennett.
Why Event Horizon Is a Sci-Fi Horror Masterpiece
Event Horizon is a masterwork of terror. Yes, it’s cheesy at times with dated effects, and yes, some of its corny jokes feel out of place when the rest of the movie is painstakingly serious, but at its core are some truly terrifying concepts.
Ending on a final factoid, the movie was famously cut down from its original length. Some of the cut scenes from the horrific torture sequences, which were shot on film, were actually found years later in a Transylvanian salt mine of all places. Imagine being the poor sucker who uncovers practically done torture scenes in a mine. Hopefully, one day we might have a Director’s cut that would somehow be even scarier. But for now, Event Horizon as is, could take the cake as the most frightening sci-fi-horror film of the 1990s.
