“Why be miserable when you may just have lemon cake?”

So says Rashida’s mom, Jackie (Cree Summer), within the last episode of Janine Nabers and Donald Glover’s hit horror series Swarm. Within the episode, serial killer Dre (Dominique Fishback) is on to her latest and last alias, now identifying as a masculine-presenting woman named Tony. She meets her girlfriend Rashida’s (Kiersey Clemons) parents for the primary time, and so they all have dinner together. While the audience is witnessing a radically different side to Dre, the setting is one we’re very conversant in in Swarm, with the characters incessantly eating together or by themselves. 

Dre eats after most of her murders. She eats a pie after her first murder, a sandwich after her second and steals a big amount of junk food from the house of her third victim. When a person asks to jerk off to Dre in episode two (who at this point was identifying as a stripper), she agrees but tells him, “I’m still gonna eat.” As promised, she continues to eat her pretzels while he masturbates to her body, completely unbothered. When Dre isn’t eating alone, she’s asked by others to eat with them. In episode two, Dre is asked out to lunch by Hailey (Paris Jackson); in episode 4, Dre is invited to have lunch with Eva (Billie Eilish) and her cult; and in episode five, Marissa’s (Chloe Bailey) old boss asks Dre to have lunch along with her in order that they can catch up after Marissa’s death. The characters in Swarm eat food with an ease that feels unfamiliar in our society.

I can’t remember the last time I had uncomplicated thoughts about food. After I was seven or eight years old, my mum gave me the responsibility of creating dinner for my siblings just a few times every week. While she ranted in regards to the importance of learning to cook for oneself, her statement was undermined by her reminder that I also needed to learn easy methods to cook so I could sooner or later turn into a superb wife and mother. In consequence, my future domestic life loomed large over my head like a dark cloud, taking the satisfaction straight out of creating and eating food during my childhood. After I was a youngster, my mum and her friends became involved in WeightWatchers. During that point, I learned that food wasn’t just my gendered responsibility as a “woman” but something that I needed to be wary of, restrict or outright ignore as a way to fit into my socially determined gender role, marked by thinness and self-discipline.

For thus a lot of us, food isn’t only a substance we eat for nourishment and fuel. As a substitute, it’s turn into a site of hysteria and guilt as we try for the promise of happiness we’re taught skinniness provides. Last 12 months, the NHS announced that they’re treating more young individuals with eating disorders than ever before, with the cost of living crisis exacerbating the difficulty. Moreover, the appetite-suppressing Ozempic is the word on everyone’s lips after its Recent York Magazine cover story titled ‘Life After Food’. While fatphobia continues to run rife in our society, the horror genre can often be a refuge from our diet-obsessed culture, acting as an area where contemporary ideas about food, gender and the body proceed to be denounced and challenged. 

The horror genre is considered one of “abundance – and food is the right metaphor in its narratives since it holds so many meanings without delay,” Laura Maw wrote in an article titled “There’s Nothing Scarier Than a Hungry Woman”. The suppression of 1’s appetite is never depicted in these pieces of media, with narratives full of cannibals, vampires and zombies who devour and indulge to the purpose of excess. One in all the primary things Megan Fox’s character does after being possessed by a demon in Jennifer’s Body is ransack Needy’s fridge. She later moves on, famously, to eating boys.

Last 12 months’s Bones and All begins with cannibal Maren (Taylor Russell) sneaking out of her house to attend a sleepover with the women from her school. Maren lays down beside considered one of her classmates, completely intoxicated by her scent. While her classmate attempts to ask her questions, Maren can barely concentrate to her. She is, as an alternative, completely fixated on her have to feed. When her classmate shows her their nail polish and asks for her opinion, Maren can’t control herself. She looks at her classmates’ fingers sensually after which devours them and not using a second thought. Unlike so a lot of us who’re traumatised by food plan culture, Maren listens to her bodily urges despite the fact that she knows it’ll land her in trouble. 

Horror narratives about murderous or morally dubious women make a selected point of rejecting the normal “politics of feminine food denial”. In BBC America’s Killing Eve (which shouldn’t be a horror but uses similar tropes), the central female characters are known for his or her rapacious appetites, often consuming foods seen as improper for the upkeep of the ‘conventional’ feminine body, akin to meat. In episode 4 of season one, Eve (Sandra Oh) and Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) meet in a butcher shop as they imagine they’ve discovered a mole of their team who played a hand within the death of Eve’s partner Bill. At the top of their conversation, Carolyn urges Eve to “stay nourished” and “get some chops” before leaving the butcher shop with what looks like a dinosaur-sized bone of meat. During a time of mourning, the bereaved naturally engage in a type of fasting. As a substitute of engaging in this kind of mourning, often coded as feminine, Eve and Carolyn refuse to downplay their appetites.

Female horror characters often embody society’s fears about women. Cultural critic Peter Biskind described The Exorcist as being “a male nightmare of female puberty. Emergent female sexuality is equated with demonic possession.” As Maw noted, women indulging their appetites and desires is monstrous to society. Being a girl is all about self-abnegation, we live to fulfil the desires of others reasonably than our own. We alter ourselves and our bodies, making them smaller in every context through weight-reduction plan and cosmetic surgery, through moving out of the way in which on the road and never taking on space. We apologise and deny our basic needs. We’ve grown up receiving messages about what it means to be a “good girl”, and in turn, we bend ourselves backwards to satisfy not possible standards set by others.

But these narratives full of monstrous women showcase individuals who’re allowed to enact their very own desires, who quench their very own thirsts and satisfy their very own hunger in ways in which so a lot of us have at all times longed to do. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find personal empowerment inside these narratives and, because of this, my eating habits and behavior began to alter. As a substitute of shaming myself after I found that I had overeaten, I made a decision to experience the sensation of fullness that transpired in my stomach – knowing that I’ll now have enough energy to get through the morning. 

After all, there are problems. The ladies leading these narratives are still skinny and conventionally attractive. Furthermore, it’s incredibly frustrating that these narratives feel ‘radical’ and ‘empowering’ to a lot of us because we live in a culture that normalises starvation; that shames and berates people for responding to their normal bodily urges. In Naomi Wolff’s seminal text The Beauty Myth, she writes that “women feel guilty about female fat because we implicitly recognise that under the parable, women’s bodies usually are not our own but society’s.” What I like in regards to the horror genre and these narratives is that they remind us that our bodies are our own. We do not need to live as society dictates, regardless of how truly horrifying which may be to others.