[Editorial] Soho Horror Film Festival: Interview with Aimee Kuge on Cannibal Mukbang

Please note there are mentions of mild spoilers in this interview

Films that blend horror with romance always fascinate me; add a niche contemporary setting that I’ve never heard of before and I’m hooked. Cannibal Mukbang was made by Aimee Kuge, a young woman from New York, and I was privileged to spend a little time talking with her over Zoom, a couple of days before her UK premiere at Soho Horror Fest in Brixton, London.

Cannibal Mukbang is Aimee’s first film as a director, but I opened the conversation with a couple of items that caught my eye from her previous work; firstly, Castle Freak (Tate Steinsiek, 2020), which I really enjoyed when I caught it a couple of years ago. “I was doing behind the scenes work,” Aimee told me, “the EPK package, interviews for the Blu-ray, that kind of thing. It was fun, and Albania is a really cool place to go, so wild and pretty too. I’d recommend it.”

Aimee’s credits before that include a TV show called Teen Mom: what a contrast! “Yes, I do reality TV as a day job,” she explained. “I’ve worked on it for three years as a story-producer, and basically what I do is post-production: I watch hours and hours of reality footage and try to make a story out of it. It’s been fun, but it’s weird because the show’s been going since 2009, so all these ‘teens’ are in their thirties now. But it’s good, steady work and I love the team I work with.”

I was intrigued to find out how Aimee’s career had gone from there to directing her own gory romance. “I feel really privileged as a writer and a director, because it seems to me that the more experienced you get and the more things happen to you, the better your writing and directing will be. I’ve had so much experience working in customer service, and every single different type of job in the film world (special effects, make-up, producing, behind the scenes stuff, wardrobe), that it’s like my weird career has led right too this. I mean I even did food photography for a couple of years in New York---that was the first job that I got here---and so a lot of that kind of goes into Cannibal Mukbang. Of course, I also experienced going through relationships, getting my heart broken; and all those ups and downs made me really want to make something that expressed my experience with a toxic relationship. Also, a relationship with yourself, and with food and friends and family… I just wanted to make something people could relate to, with all those things.”

The plot of Cannibal Mukbang does indeed cover all of that, especially the complexity of relationships. Contrary to what one might expect from the title, there are some very endearing scenes, especially near the start when the two main characters are getting to know each other. We both laughed though, when I asked about a less appealing moment: would Aimee really recommend being hit by a car as a sound way to meet someone new? “Absolutely not!” she said. “I would not recommend that. You know, some of the films that inspired Cannibal Mukbang were the early 2000s romantic comedies, and I feel like there are just so many bizarre things that happen in those films that I wanted it to be a little bit whacky and I wanted to hook the viewer in the first ten minutes. Like this guy is so charming and shy, he’s not going to ask out the beautiful girl that he meets at the grocery store; she’s going to have to physically knock him out and drag him to her place for him to have the ‘balls’ to talk to her. He doesn’t have that, so she forces him to do it. And there’s this psych term going around called ‘love bombing’ and I feel like Ash is the perfect example of that. She has no idea who this man is, but she’s so into him, so interested in asking all the questions about him and really invested in his life. But I don’t think he’s ever experienced that until now, so I just feel getting hit by the car, for him, it doesn’t make sense, but it does make sense.”

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I saw it almost like a practical reflection of Ash’s personality. “That’s so smart of you to say that” said Aimee, “you’ve tapped into the character. That’s who she is, right, a fiery person. She’s not going to just go up to you and ask you on a date, but hit you with a car and bring you to her house.”

Whereas Mark could have benefited, let’s say, from getting to know Ash better. “Yes,” said Aimee, with a pensive look and a laugh. I asked whether maybe that is the message of the film; caution around people you hardly know.

*Spoiler ahead*

“I feel like especially in my early twenties and and my late teens,” said Aimee, “I would just fall for people so hard and so fast; and be so loyal to them, even if I knew they were wrong for me, or if I saw these red flags. For Mark, though, he sees the biggest red flag that he possibly could [spoiler redacted!] and he’s OK with it, ultimately, he’s fine with it! Instead of being like upset with her almost getting assaulted, he’s upset that she kills someone and won’t tell him why.”

*End spoiler*

The two actors, April Consalo who played Ash and Nate Wise who played Mark, worked beautifully together; I asked Aimee how she found them. “I got really lucky,” she said. “I used a casting service called Breakdown Express, and they host acting calls on this website, and about five hundred girls and three or four hundred boys sent me their headshots. So I went through and looked at their information, and these two stuck out at me from groups of about twenty each. And when I saw the audition for Mark, I felt Nate was so sweet and charming and mumbly, and mumblecore is of course a big influence for me; he was inside himself and at the same time expressive. Not just the way he talks but a lot of the stuff he did that was ‘clumsy’ was actually improv, he’d accidentally knock something over and we’d keep it in. With April, it was similar: she just has this Disney princess vibe to her because she’s so beautiful; but then when she speaks, she has an aura that’s dangerous and dark, and you can tell there’s a lot of depth underneath her exterior. She felt just right for Ash. I love casting, and always try to pick people who are not well-known yet, but have a raw talent and can connect with the material.”

I had to ask Aimee something that had been niggling at me: was Ash’s name a nod to The Evil Dead? At that, she straightened up and showed me her t-shirt. “Of course, it was!” she grinned. “For people not watching on Zoom, I’m wearing an Evil Dead shirt… so definitely! It’s such a powerful androgynous name; and once you watch the film and you see her flashback, you see that she does rise from the ashes, she has an all-time low in her life and comes out of it on top.”

The next question I had planned was actually about that back story segment, which is very dramatic, but with no dialogue at all, quite different to the rest of the film (reminding me, in its differentness, of O-Ren Ishii’s animated back story in Kill Bill Vol 1). I asked Aimee how she decided on that silent approach. “Well, I feel that this film is all presented from Mark’s perspective,” she said, “at least until this point. We see it from his small, contained, obsessed perspective, while his whole world is resolving around Ash: there are lots of really tight close-ups, really still shots, close to them and intimate. Ash’s back story is the first time we see things from her perspective, which is so much bigger than Mark’s world, and also more timeless: we don’t know how old she is, or how much of what she says is true. Then we see this flashback on Super 8; and for me Super 8 was really important, not just because of my background (I went to an experimental film school in Colorado called CU Boulder, and forced to shoot on Super 8 for a year and forced to shoot on 16mm for a year), so I knew that I wanted to shoot part of the film on actual film. But with the budget and everything, I knew I couldn’t do the whole thing on film. So for me, shooting it on Super 8 and using that style was important for getting to know who Ash is and what her background is like, and how gritty and dark and scary and bigger her story is than Mark’s. So it had to look different: it couldn’t be as clean or colourful.”

I told Aimee that the back story segment had actually drawn me right back to a favourite film, Martyrs, too, and she gave an appreciative nod at that. “I love Martyrs, too,” she said.

Moving on to more practical topics, I asked Aimee what it had been like to film the gory scenes: was it messy, difficult, wonderful or what? “Oh, all of the above,” was the instant answer. “It was really, really challenging, but I’m lucky to have a brilliant team here in New York and New Jersey. I worked with Ashley and Alex from Yellow Moth Make-up and they did an amazing job: they cast the head that you see in the movie, the arm, the leg and all that. But there were challenges, of course, like any low-budget, indie horror movie; like filming in random people’s houses who would let us film there, trying not to get blood everywhere, whole trying to make it gory. Oh, and having actors eat a lot of fake meat and fake blood! They eat a lot; I mean it’s edible, but it’s not fun to eat a bunch of syrup for hours. There was one scene where Ash was feeding Mark a bunch of meat from a charcuterie board and we did that take five times in a row, and all the blood and ground up meat was made from Rice Krispies treats, chocolate syrup and maraschino cherries; so, by the end of it, they were buzzing, so high from so much sugar! So yeah, it was really fantastic, and I was lucky with the team, and that I was able to experiment with different types of things; like some of the body parts were made out of silicone, but for the flashback, I actually did those special effects myself, and made those out of liquid latex and actual meat. I would cook it, just barely, and then douse it in chocolate and food dye: it was gross. It was sweet meat that my actress, April was eating and then spitting out into a bowl. It was fun!”

Interestingly, there have been a number of films in recent years that mix cannibalism with romance or relationships: Fresh, Bones and All, Do Not Disturb and so on. I naturally recalled those other films when watching Cannibal Mukbang and I asked Aimee whether she saw cannibalism as a metaphor for difficulty in relationships, or if there might be some reason behind this rise. “Yeah, definitely, I think it is a metaphor for relationships,” she said, “and I think people who have been in relationships can relate to that feeling of losing yourself: it’s a physical representation of that; not only are they eating you alive emotionally, but physically too. I think it’s interesting that we’re seeing it more now, in 2023 and with the rise of social media, YouTube, TikTok and all these video forums with people gorging on food, and over-consumption of products in general. It makes total sense that these things gain in popularity, and people are relating to it; and I feel that this is the big message in Cannibal Mukbang: you’re watching an eating show and the whole movie is her eating this man alive, emotionally.”

And Mark seems OK with that. “Yes, he is OK with it,” Aimee agrees. “You’re exactly right. He loves it and he loves her, the attention, the chaos: he really loses himself.”

Usually, as an interview is heading towards its close, I ask my subjects what they are working on next. But I understand Aimee won Best Director at Screamfest (the film actually picked up four awards there); so I asked her how she plans to top that. “Oh, man, really I’m just happy that people are seeing the film,” she said modestly. “I’m working on distribution right now, I don’t have anything I can announce right now. I’m developing another feature and hoping to shoot in in 2024; it’s going to be about friendship and the early 2000s emo music scene, in small town America. That’s the next thing, but I can’t say the title or anything specific about it yet. I’m in post-production on another feature, called Black Eyed Susan, which should come out in 2024; I produced that. And in post-production for a few other shorts that I’m really excited about. I really believe in lifting up the people around me in the community here in Brooklyn, and I worked with two amazing female directors: April Consalo, who acted as Ash in Cannibal Mukbang, directed her first short earlier this year, and we’re in post-production on that; and I just wrapped another short with my co-editor on Cannibal Mukbang, Hayley Zalkin. So I have a lot of projects going on! But I’m excited for people to see this movie, and hopefully, I’ll be able to make Cannibal Mukbang 2, but we’ll see.”

I couldn’t tell from the titles and descriptions whether Aimee was going to drift away from horror, but perhaps not, if she’s considering a sequel. “Well one of the shorts is not exactly horror, but horror is very important to me,” Aimee said. “It’s such a great way to communicate really complex ideas to a wide audience and to express yourself; and to really represent under-represented communities and niche things in a way that people can digest. I’m a huge horror fan, and I don’t want to move away from the genre any time soon. Maybe when I’m, like, eighty, I’ll stop making horror movies. But maybe they’ll be cooler when I’m in my eighties, I’ll have more experience.”

Then I shall look forward to watching more Aimee Kuge-directed titles for several decades. 

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