IN CONVERSATION WITH AIMEE KUGE

In Aimee Kuge's CANNIBAL MUKBANG, shy and insecure Mark (Nate Wise) is in desperate search of a meaningful relationship, which is somewhat lost on his brother Maverick (Clay Von Carlowitz), who sees women as sexual objects.  When Mark meets mukbang streamer Ash (April Consalo), he's surprised when she reciprocates the attraction. But as his feelings for her grow, she not only wants to share her love of mukbanging but also her vigilante cannibalism.  

CANNIBAL MUKBANG is Kuge's feature debut. She has also produced Scooter McCrae's 2024 sci-fi erotic thriller, BLACK EYED SUSAN, about a tech engineer who is recruited to develop an AI sex doll, only to find himself confronting deeper philosophical questions. Kuge has also produced and edited the 2018 horror short film, THE AGONIZER, set on an abandoned military base where scientists once conducted off-the-grid experiments.  

In conversation with Gore in the Store, Kuge discussed the horror of toxic relationships and wanting to be crass and funny. She also spoke about disregarding clichéd ideas about point-of-view, being the recipient of a musical stroke of luck and finding beauty in the ugly.

A director's first narrative feature is a milestone moment. How do you look back on the experience of making CANNIBAL MUKBANG?

Aimee Kuge - I just love everything about making movies. I'm here for all of it. Honestly, I want this to be what I do forever, even though it is super time-consuming and complicated. I just love learning, and the whole process has been a learning experience. 

I look back super fondly. There have definitely been times in postproduction that were really tricky. Everybody sees the fun pictures on set where it looks like we're in summer camp, laughing and having a great time. But there were also almost two years of post — a year to finish the film and then a year delivering the film, making sure everything was correct for distribution. 

I feel like no one talks about that. No one says, "Oh, yeah, after you make the movie, you're gonna have to finish the movie, and then you're gonna have to deliver the movie." So, it has been a big learning experience for me, but I'm having a blast. 

What was the genesis of CANNIBAL MUKBANG? Was it spontaneous or was it a case of ideas coalescing together?

AK - A few ideas definitely coalesced together. Mukbanging entered my life in college. I was going through a period of a disordered type of eating, and I fell in love with mukbangers. It was a weird rabbit hole on the internet that had become popular in the U.S, but it was still relatively new. 

At that time, I started watching vegan mukbangers, and a lot of the people that would do these mukbangs were people that I wanted to be like. They were super fit and seeing them eat a ton of food made me feel more comfortable eating and helped get my head in a better place. 

Then it became this weird internet sensation. Nikocado Avocado was one of the vegan mukbangers I used to follow. He started making this channel on which he wasn't vegan, and he gained like 200 and something pounds. He got huge and started to become kind of a troll mukbanger. So, if you want to fall down a rabbit hole, there's a lot of weird mukbangers in the world. 

It had always been in my subconscious, and I never thought I would make a horror movie about this until I was at a party in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. A friend of a friend of a friend was there. I don't even remember her name, but she was talking about one of her girlfriends who went on a date with this guy through a dating app. She had a great date and really fell for this guy. He cooked her a bunch of food at his house, and she wanted to stay over, but he told her, "No, you should go home. We'll meet again soon." 

So, she goes home and the next day she doesn't feel great. She gets so sick that she goes to the hospital, and they do a bunch of tests to see what was in her stomach. They told her, "Oh, you have other human DNA in your stomach." How scary that would be stuck with me, and I guess the girl tried to find the guy again, but she couldn't find him anywhere. He was off the apps, and she never heard from him again. 

Weirdly, that inspired me to combine the idea of what if there was a cannibal muckbanger who is eating people, and it starts off with a romance? Those were the seeds of CANNIBAL MUKBANG. I just started writing that year, and it came out of me so fast. It was one of those things where once I had the idea, it just formed.

It's easy to describe the film as wildly imaginative, and yet the origins are rooted in reality. The horror lies in the way it conceals itself inside the premise. 

AK - I pull a lot of inspiration from my own life and experiences that friends have had. The heart of the movie is the romance between Mark and Ash. I think that's where the reality that you're talking about comes in, because they seem so real and you want them to work. But they clearly have a toxic, addict, codependent and enabler relationship. That stems from my own personal experiences with friends and partners — feeling like you get lost in a relationship. So, at the core of it all, when you peel back the mukbang and the cannibal layers, the real horror is this toxic relationship. 

Regarding toxic relationships, the social media space is one that encourages comparative behavioural patterns that are toxic towards our wellbeing.

AK - It's hard to capture that parasocial relationship we have with our friends, family and strangers online. If you zoom out and look, there are so many people on their phones. That's so boring and no one wants to watch that because a lot of us experience falling into that colourful parasocial world in our day-to-day lives. But if you step back, it's depressing, and it's really hard to portray that in film because it's so new and complicated. 

Were there any films or filmmakers that influenced CANNIBAL MUKBANG'S particular look and narrative energy?

AK - Well, I was inspired by other cannibal films, like RAW, TROUBLE EVERY DAY and RAVENOUS. I wanted this movie to have the playful energy of RAVENOUS, and then, aesthetically, I took a lot of inspiration from Wong Kar Wai's movies. I really love IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, and I put a lot of those photos in my vision board I shared with my director of photography [Harrison Kraft].

Funnily enough, half of the movie is a rom-com. So, I told Harrison that I'm inspired by 10 THINGS ABOUT YOU and SHE'S ALL THAT, and the first half of the movie needs to be filmed with 35mm and 50mm lenses that look true to our eye. Then, at the turning point when he finds out that she's a cannibal, we start to get a little more experimental and use super-wide lenses. And all of his dream sequences are shot with funky lenses too. The first one is shot on a vintage lens that has a dreamy type of quality. I told Harrison, "This needs to look like the dream sequence in THE EXORCIST 3." So, I pulled a lot from other films, both narratively and aesthetically. 

I was challenged a lot on this because it was such a low-budget movie, and we only had 14 days to shoot. There'd be some scenes where we'd get to a restaurant, for example, and we'd have to film 10 pages of dialogue in two hours. We just had to crank it out and get everything we needed. And luckily, I have a background in editing and postproduction, so, I knew I just needed to make sure I got their dialogue correctly and the rest we would figure out in the edit. 

Looking back, if I had more time, I would make different choices and I would have a lot more wide shots and other different types of things. But it goes with the narrative now that I've seen the film so many times, because it's from Mark's perspective, and he's such an insular character who is scared of everything. 

So, we are in a lot of interior spaces and using a lot of close-ups because he is vulnerable and closed-off to the world. He's anxious, and he has a lot of issues. Whereas when we go into Ash's world in the flashback, that's when we see a lot more wides, and we see more of the world. We get out of New York and New Jersey, and we go somewhere else. So, yeah, there was a lot of visual inspiration. 

In regard to the aesthetic growing out of the story, could you discuss the development of the film's music in this context? By having the audiovisual be in conversation with the story, does it create a sense of completion?

AK - I was extremely lucky to be working with my composer, Alex Cuervo. He is phenomenal. He has worked on SCARE PACKAGE and THE ARTIFICE GIRL. He has a kind of alt-rock background, and he's made a lot of different types of music with his partner. 

So, when I brought him on board, I gave him a song by [American rock band] SHE WANTS REVENGE for the montage. I told him I wanted something that sounded like this. He actually had a song that sounded almost exactly like it, and the lyrics really worked in my favour. I got lucky because he has a background in the type of music that I was after for this film, and he was also down to experiment too. 

The first piece that he wrote for the film was the flashback sequence, and that's the most raw and intense part of the score, in my opinion, because there is no dialogue and it was shot on film. So, a lot of the emotion you feel is from Alex's score, and we sampled it for the ending — we call it, ASH'S THEME. 

When she starts killing the swamp-man, it gets really intense and energetic. It goes from this sweet, plucky, folky type of music to more of a rock song. We put the song there, and I feel it just tied everything together. 

I also got lucky with my lead actor, Nate Wise. He has a music project called Sky Adler and I used two of his songs in the film. One of them is in the tent scene and then the other is in the first restaurant scene. His music is just so, simp boy, like, I'm yearning after this girl. It's so sweet, and it just works perfectly with his character.

There's an interesting switch that happens in the film. We're led to think it's about Mark's desperation to find his soulmate, but in reality it's about Ash's need to find absolute devotion. The character that first appeared insecure ends up being the more secure.   

AK - I wanted all the characters to have their flaws - no one is perfect. Mark is a sweet, hilarious, and awkward guy that I feel a lot of people will be able to see themselves in. Ash is like a badass, gorgeous, manic, pixie dream girl. She's amazing, but in the end, she can't get over her trauma, and she can't see that what this man did was wrong, but did he deserve to die? 

I want the viewer to think about how many other people she has done this to, and is she really in love with Mark? 

She clearly has a lot of issues, and so maybe she's trying to find comfort and intimacy through these relationships with men she can control, but she's never going to find it that way. Hopefully, if I get to make CANNIBAL MUKBANG 2, we'll explore that a little bit more. 

The dialogue has a provocative edge, especially the way in which Maverick talks about women. Is the film a throwback to previous decades when a film's dialogue could be less politically correct?

AK -. With his dialogue, I wanted Mark to be the extreme version of the nice guy that's almost fucked up, excuse my French. He's very submissive, but in a way that you want to shake him and tell him to just grow up and to have a voice. 

Growing up in the 90s and the early 2000s, a lot of the films I grew up with had dialogue from the male characters that's just like in CANNIBAL MUKBANG. I wanted it to be crass and funny. I wanted Maverick to be funny and for people to think, 'Is this guy for real?'

People have spoken around me and to me like that my whole life. It might seem unrealistic with the way it was performed, but you hear it all the time. Throughout college, from Colorado to New York, wherever I go, I sometimes hear conversations between men that can sound like that. So, it's extreme in a way, but it isn't as extreme as it is in real life. 

I also wanted to ask you about the framing of Ash's body, which in some scenes is sexualised. There's the belief that the male and female points-of-view shoot bodies and intimate scenes differently. In CANNIBAL MUKBANG any such distinction is blurred. 

AK - April and I had tons of conversations about the intimacy and how much skin she was going to show in this film. We worked with an intimacy coordinator, Kennedy Murray, and we had so much preparation for how she was going to look and feel. I told her, "If we're gonna show these shots of your body, then I want you to look and feel beautiful — I want you to feel hot." 

Just because it's from a feminine perspective doesn't mean that we're not gonna have some steamy shots, and we're not gonna have a beautiful butt shot and a beautiful boob shot. Women are allowed to feel hot, and they're allowed to film hot things. 

I wanted her to look beautiful; I wanted her to feel that. So, I showed her all the footage months before we even went on the festival circuit. I had a private screening with the two of us and I asked her, "Is there anything that you don't feel comfortable with?" Some filmmakers who read this will probably be screaming because, normally, you don't give your actors that sort of agency. But it was important to me that she was proud of it, that she would promote it and want people to see it. 

All of that is to say, I want to make beautiful and horrible things, whether it's from a female or male perspective. So, that's how I approached it, without thinking about that point-of-view. 

The beautiful and the ugly go well together and can be visually striking. I always think about the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO, and the conflict between the beautiful shot composition and the violent content. Or the "pride" murder in David Fincher's SEVEN, where the mix of red and white simultaneously looks weirdly beautiful but ugly. 

AK - Ash is the perfect representation of the beautiful but ugly. She has an ugliness and a messiness to her. The end shot, when she's holding Mark's face, and she's bloody, is probably my favourite shot of the movie — she looks so gorgeous. And it's in parallel with the beginning of the film when she's leaning over him in bed. She's so complicated, and that's where the real beauty of her character comes from.

Listening to you, I recall that what struck me about Coralie Fargeat's THE SUBSTANCE, was the way she objectifies Sue's (Margaret Qualley) body, focusing particularly on her hips and buttocks. Here, a female filmmaker takes back control of the woman's body and forces men to experience their leering and objectifying gaze through her point-of-view. Your observation that "women are allowed to feel hot, and they're allowed to film hot things" is a commentary on Fargeat's film, but you also speak to a broader, timely and important conversation.

AK - Well, thank you. What a freaking compliment, even mentioning my film with THE SUBSTANCE. I love that film, and hearing you say that reminds me of the shot in CANNIBAL MUKBANG, where we're just following Ash's butt in slow motion. I filmed that because I wanted to see Mark trying to hold her hand. Everybody sees her butt, and it's really funny to me because you have to confront what you're looking at and why. Like what you're saying, this is so uncomfortable. Why are we spending so much time on this woman's body? The real story is on the part of the screen where he's trying to hold her hand, but you don't see it because you're focusing on Ash's butt. 

It is a really interesting conversation that we'll continue to explore with films from here on out. I really can't wait to see what else happens in the horror genre with feminine female filmmakers in the future. 

Paul Risker

CANNIBAL MUKBANG is available in the US on Digital and On Demand and is available on Blu-Ray from 22nd April.