The Stuff: Larry Cohen's Consumerism Horror

Larry Cohen’s The Stuff opens with two railway workers finding a white substance bubbling up out of the frozen ground, and one of them, against every instinct a sane person should have, tastes it. It is delicious. Within a year that substance is the biggest-selling dessert in America, sold in tubs, advertised with jingles, and craved by a nation that has no idea it is eating something alive. The 1985 film is a horror comedy about a product that consumes its consumers, and thirty years on it plays less like a period curio and more like a documentary shot slightly ahead of schedule.

Cohen had built a career on exactly this trick. He came out of television writing in the 1960s, created the series Branded and The Invaders, then turned to features with the killer-baby picture It’s Alive in 1974 and the winged-serpent-over-Manhattan romp Q in 1982, both of which hid social anxiety inside a monster. He shot fast and cheap, often stealing New York exteriors on the fly, and he trusted his premises to do the heavy lifting. By the time he reached The Stuff he had perfected the method: take one absurd idea, follow it with total logical seriousness, and let the absurdity expose something real about the country making it.

Cohen was the great American guerrilla, a writer-director who shot on real streets without permits, improvised around his stars, and packed pulp premises with more argument than the studios ever managed with ten times the budget. The Stuff is his purest satire, and its target is the machinery of appetite itself — the way a thing can be marketed into your mouth before you have decided you want it.

The advert as the monster

The plot runs on the bones of a paranoia thriller. Michael Moriarty plays David “Mo” Rutherford, a former FBI man turned industrial saboteur, hired by a cabal of ice-cream manufacturers whose sales are being obliterated by the mysterious new dessert. Mo is meant to find out what the Stuff is and steal the recipe. What he finds instead is that the Stuff is a parasitic organism that hollows out the people who eat it, taking over the body until the host is a smiling shell that exists only to buy more and to protect the supply. He teams up with a young boy, Jason, who has seen the contents of his family’s fridge moving, and with Nicole, an advertising executive played by Andrea Marcovicci who designed the very campaign selling the thing.

That last detail is the film’s masterstroke. Cohen makes the ad-woman a hero and then makes her complicit, and never lets the audience forget that the product could not eat America without the jingle. Threaded through the film are pitch-perfect faux commercials — glossy, upbeat, using real celebrity cameos to sell the fictional dessert — and they are shot with more affection and craft than the horror scenes, because Cohen understood that the advertisement is the true predator. The Stuff does not hunt. It is offered, endlessly, cheerfully, until refusing it starts to look like the strange behaviour. The tagline the film gives its product — a question about whether you are eating it or it is eating you — is the whole thesis in eight words.

Moriarty, off the leash

The structure is worth pausing on, because it is craftier than the loose surface suggests. Cohen withholds the nature of the Stuff for a surprisingly long stretch, letting Mo chase a corporate mystery before the horror declares itself, so that the film first teaches us to think about the product as a business problem. By the time we learn it is alive, we have already been trained to see it the way its makers do, as market share, and that complicity is engineered. The dread creeps in through the language of commerce rather than the language of monsters, which is why the scares, when they come, feel like something curdling in a boardroom.

The film would not work without Michael Moriarty, who gives one of the strangest leading-man performances of the decade. Mo Rutherford is an idiot who keeps announcing his own cunning, a good-old-boy drawl wrapped around a man who is mostly bluffing, and Moriarty plays him with a loose, improvisatory jazz that keeps threatening to derail the movie and never quite does. Cohen loved actors who would surprise him, and he and Moriarty made several films together; here the actor’s refusal to play anything straight becomes the picture’s comic engine. Mo is our guide through a conspiracy, and our guide is a chancer who lucks into the truth.

Around him Cohen stacks a deep bench of character faces. Garrett Morris plays a cookie magnate whose business the Stuff has ruined, Danny Aiello turns up as a compromised FDA man, and Paul Sorvino arrives late as Colonel Malcolm Grommett Spears, a paranoid right-wing militia leader whose private army becomes the film’s only available cavalry. Sorvino plays him as a self-satirising blowhard, and Cohen uses him to make a genuinely mischievous point: the flag-waving reactionary, the man convinced the country is being infiltrated, turns out to be the one person paranoid enough to be useful when the infiltration is real.

Why the satire still bites

The Stuff belongs to a small, precious tradition of horror films that understood the enemy was the market, and it is the wittiest of them because it locates the horror in demand rather than supply. The organism is barely a villain. The real antagonist is a public that will eat anything sold hard enough, and an industry that will sell anything that moves, and Cohen refuses to flatter the audience by pretending they would be immune.

The obvious cross-reference is John Carpenter’s They Live, which arrived three years later and turned the same anger about Reagan-era consumption into a science-fiction street brawl; where Carpenter buries the command to CONSUME inside every billboard, Cohen puts it in the dessert itself. The film also rhymes with Brian Yuzna’s Society, another late-decade nightmare about a hunger disguised as normal life, and with David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which had already diagnosed the way a product enters through pleasure and rewrites the host. Put the three on a shelf and you have the decade’s sharpest thinking about being eaten by the things you were told to want.

There is a reason the film has aged into relevance rather than out of it. The mechanisms Cohen lampooned have only tightened their grip: the influencer taste-test, the product that trends before anyone asks what is in it, the recall quietly followed by a relaunch. The Stuff predicted the emotional shape of all of it, the way desire can be manufactured upstream of the person who feels it. That it did so as a goofy monster movie with a milkshake for a villain is the joke, and the joke has outlasted almost every straight-faced message picture of its year.

The effects, handled by a team including David Allen and Steve Neill, lean on inversion and low gravity — the Stuff flows uphill, pours from mouths, drags bodies across ceilings — and the practical unreality of it works in the film’s favour, because a slicker monster would have distracted from the joke. This is a creature made of the same visual grammar as a spilled milkshake, and that banality is exactly the fear.

Spoilers below

Cohen refuses a clean victory, and the refusal is the point. Mo, Nicole, and Jason eventually trace the Stuff to its source and expose it, and the climax has Mo forcing the industry’s own men to eat the product on camera, a grimly funny reversal that turns the executives into the meal. Colonel Spears and his militia storm the processing plant, and the operation is shut down. The Stuff is pulled from shelves. It looks, for a moment, like the machine has been beaten.

Then Cohen delivers his kicker. In the closing scene the substance has not been eradicated at all; it has simply been rebranded and rationed, folded into a new product sold as an ingredient in something else, and Mo is left distributing a homemade warning while the appetite he fought carries quietly on under a different label. The organism cannot be killed because the organism is only doing what the market does — finding the next package, the next pitch, the next mouth. The film’s closing image is a marketing plan adapting, and it is the most honest horror ending the 1980s produced about the thing it was actually afraid of. Watch it beside They Live and you have a complete double feature on the American shopping cart as a crime scene.