Who’s For Dinner? Analyzing the Family Dinner Table in Cannibal Films

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. Play ball.”  GRANDMOTHER, Christmas Vacation (1989)

            “Would someone please pass the f*cking asparagus?” -LESTER BURNHAM, American Beauty (1999)

            “Shake, shake, shake, Señora, shake your body line. Shake, shake, shake, Señora, shake it  all the time.” Beetlejuice (1988)

Dinner is a time of togetherness. The table is a place where families gather together and talk about faith, politics, sports, or whatever problems they may be facing. It can also be a time of destruction. Fights break out, feelings get hurt and voices are raised. Throughout cinematic history, families have been gathering around the table for memorable movie moments. There is the dinner scene in Christmas Vacation where the entire family is ready to eat Christmas dinner. The candles are lit, everyone is on their best behavior and Clark is about to carve the turkey. But then it all goes wrong. For starters, in lieu of the blessing, the family gives a stunning rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance. Then Clark cuts open the turkey to find it dried to a crisp and inedible. The family dinner scene from American Beauty perfectly symbolizes the washing away of the American suburban family and the failed American dream. One of the most iconic scenes in the film Beetlejuice is when guests are supernaturally compelled to sing Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) at the dinner table. And the classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, starring Katherine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier, is completely centered around the table.

            Gathering around the table is a significant part of most human cultures. All around the world, families and friends gather around tables and share a meal. So, it is no surprise that dinner scenes often become so memorable in cinematic history. This episode covers three dinner table scenes in horror films about cannibal families. Looking specifically at Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), We Are Who We Are (2014) and Parents (1989) we can witness three very different families practicing cannibalism for very different reasons.

            According to Julie Hanlon Rubio, a professor of Christian ethics, “family meals are significant religious acts that say a great deal about a family’s identity” (Rubio 151). Much like Eucharist, Rubio says, “family meals are formative of family bonds and family mission in the world. Just in gathering, families make concrete their commitment to be together and orient themselves to a larger good” (143). What can these family dinner table scenes show us about family dynamics, identity, and responsibility?

            A family gathering around the table can represent more than just a simple meal. In the Christian faith, the “gathering of a community around a table can be experienced as communion” (Rubio 132). A meal together helps bond the family and create a community. “They are not simply focusing on their emotional bonds in order to ensure personal success and family closeness,” says Rubio, but “rather, they are binding themselves to one another in a community-oriented to Christ and to living out Christ’s mission” (134). Now, not all families who eat together are doing so in the name of the Lord or wish to live out Christ’s mission. But, they may be bonding over the mission of their family. No matter how messed up that mission may be. If it’s a family BBQ business where they sell human meat, a religious sacrifice, or just an alternative lifestyle, it’s still a mission, a familial identity.

            Time spent with family around the dinner table is also a time to educate the children. They learn how to ask questions, keep a conversation, ask how someone else is doing and listen to stories. They are being taught how to be a member of their culture. (144). All three films that will be discussed in this paper show different ways multiple generations are being trained in the family identity. The horror classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by Tobe Hooper, features one of the most notorious dinner table scenes in scary movie history. The well-known story follows a set of teenagers as they explore the property now occupied by a crazed murderous family. The horror drama We Are What We Are centers around a family fulfilling a religious tradition passed down from their ancestors where a human sacrifice must be eaten. And the Canadian horror comedy film Parents pokes fun at the idealist suburban family while still managing to incorporate people eating people. All three families have different purposes and all three families are presented in different ways by the filmmakers. The tables are set differently, the dinner attire varies drastically and the families themselves behave according to their own identity and created community. But one thing they all have in common? The meat on the table is human, not animal.

The Sawyers

            The Sawyer family, whose namesake doesn’t come until their sequel, is a poor family from the middle of nowhere Texas. The first family member we meet is Hitchhiker. He initially gets picked up by the group of teenagers, but his behavior in the car, including burning morbid pictures and cutting his and Franklin’s hand, causes them to kick him out. “My family’s always been into meats,” he tells them. The group then meets Old Man as they stop at a hole-in-the-wall BBQ joint that doubles as a gas station. “I’ve got some good barbeque here. Why don’t you fellas stick around here awhile?” The group then reaches their desired destination, Sally and Franklin’s family house. Inside the house, they meet Leatherface one by one. We don’t meet the fourth member of the family until closer to dinner time. Sally tries to escape the grasp of Leatherface and in doing so runs back to the BBQ joint for help. Old Man captures her and takes her to the family house for dinner. Each member of the Sawyer family serves a different purpose and makes for a “vicious take on the consumerist nuclear family” (Dudenhoeffer 58). Leatherface and Grandfather are dressed in nicer clothes than their fellow family members. They both wear a coat and tie. Leatherface looks particularly nice compared to his previous outfit. His white shirt pops under his black tie and his blazer fits almost like a three-quarter sleeve jacket and its dark color compliments his dark pants. Hitchhiker wears a dirty green t-shirt and Old Man wears a tan long sleeves top.

            This family has no matriarch. The Grandfather fulfills the role of the elder patriarch and the Old Man could arguably be the stand-in for the mother figure. If only because of the remarks about him being the cook and the sexist connection with women and the kitchen. Hitchhiker takes the lead during the dinner scene. Since Leatherface does not speak at all during the film, he comes across as younger than Hitchhiker. The family bickers around the table about the roles they play. Hitchhiker scopes out the victims, Leatherface kills them, and Old Man cooks them. Sally tells them that they “can make him stop”. Leatherface and Hitchiker approach her as she pleads to the Old Man to make him stop, referring to Leatherface. Hitchhiker says he can’t do anything because he’s just the cook. This causes the family members to argue about their status within the family and their contribution to their collective efforts. “Me and Leatherface do all the work. He don’t like it. Aint’ that right? You’re just a cook,” says Hitchhiker.

The Parkers

            The 2014 horror drama We Are What We Are begins with the death of the matriarch of the Delaware County family. The rain keeps falling and her hands keep shaking. She falls to the ground and hits her head before falling into a deep puddle to her death. In light of the devastating loss of their mother, the two eldest siblings, Iris (17) and Rose (14) are forced to take on more responsibility with the family as their father grieves. It is the two of them that go to the coroners to identify their mother’s body, not their father. The story begins on a Friday, the first eve of abstinence. They are refraining from eating until after Sunday; No flesh, no fruit, no grain. The film takes place in the present day, but the family lives simply. They are preparing for Lamb’s Day on Sunday. The father insists they will do it the way they’ve always done it. “But Momma is gone,” says Rose. The father responds, “It’s what we do Rose… Iris is the eldest daughter, it’s her responsibility now.” Rory has a few moments in the film where he shows his desire to eat something despite the family’s fast. On Saturday, he falls ill and the neighbor comes over to help the girls take care of him. He holds the neighbor’s hand as he lies in bed and he tells her that he is hungry. He then puts her finger in her mouth a bites her. She is taken back by his behavior, naturally. Rose and Iris continue to struggle with their newfound responsibility. Iris says, “I’m the oldest. That’s the way it works.” To which Rose responds, “It just doesn’t seem fair. None of it…. What if we refused to do it. We just stopped. He’d make us wouldn’t he?” Iris tells her that she just wants to get it over with and that they have an entire year to figure out how to digress from their lifestyle. Rose tells her sister, “I just wish we were like everyone else,” who responds, “Well we’re not.” The Parkers are divided.  

            The family history is written in a sacred book. It is a history that guides the family’s actions in the present. The girls read it aloud during several parts of the film. The book reveals the story of their family struggling to survive in the harsh winters of the frontier. The father figure struggles to feed the family and one day comes back to the camp with meat. The family is hungry and so they eat it, but something does not feel right. This act eventually repeats itself and soon the family becomes dependent on human flesh to survive. The stories in the book begin to parallel the present-day narratives. The father figure begins to become sick in the body and mind. “God chose us to be this way,” Frank says, “If we don’t do what He asks, we’ll get sick.” It is the tradition of their family. But Frank is on the brink. He needs to fulfill the commandment and eat the human flesh. So, the girls must complete the tradition and the family must kill and eat the human sacrifice in order to regain their strength. The book reads, “As father’s mind unravels, our survival has now become my burden.” The sisters go down into the cellar and we discover that there is a young woman chained up. The girls struggle but eventually kill her. They cry in shock at the horror they just committed. They don’t want to do that ever again. But they must prepare the body for the meal now.

The Laemles

            Michael (10) has just moved to a new neighborhood in the suburbia of the 1950s. He spends the entire film convinced that his parents have turned into cannibals. Michael is a socially awkward kid with an active imagination. He accidentally witnesses his parents shaving sex and misconstrued some of their actions. He believed his father was biting his mother. This only spurs an onslaught of traumatic dreams involving him falling in pools of blood and his father cutting up bodies. His parents, Nick and Lily, seem to be the quintessential suburban couple from the fifties. Lily has a wonderful kitchen in which she cooks huge meals in throughout the film. Michael is intimidated by his father. He almost fears him even from the start of the movie. There is something about his father that makes Michael uneasy, which most likely leads to his acceptance of the idea that his father is a cannibal.

            Michael spends the film asking his parents questions and being suspicious of their odd behaviors. To the outside world, the Laemles are just about as normal as a family could get. Nick wears sweaters and plays golf in the living room. Lily looks like the picture-perfect housewife in perfectly fitted dresses and her hair is always up. Michael is the one who struggles to fit in. He has a hard time at school, he has reoccurring nightmares about his parents and none of the adults in his life truly listen to him. There is a tension between him and his parents that only worsens as the film progresses.

Dinner is Served

            Food is an important component of any cannibalism film. CLOSE UP shots of people eating is normal. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre the table is the humblest of them all. It’s a rough wooden table with a centerpiece made of bones. It holds a human skull and a dead bird. Each family member has a plate of food already in place at the top of the scene. They also have a knife and a fork set in their proper place. The simple pates have a few different pieces of meat on them, and that’s all. No garnish, not extravagance. Just a simple plate of links and meat pieces. There are no CLOSE-UPS of the meat on the plates and we do not see the characters clearly eating the meat. Leatherface feeds Grandfather a serving in the background, but it is not a clear focus within the shot and Hooper does not spend time showing the actual meat from the family’s bbq business. We do, however, get close-ups of Sally, who is a potential meal.

            The meal featured on the table at the Parker’s is a chili-like stew. Prepared carefully by Rose and Iris, the meal sits in a ceramic pot in the center of the table. Their table is lit with candles, nice china, and a basket of bread. The camera LINGERS on the bowl of human stew in all three dinner scenes in the film. This reminds the audience that this is no ordinary stew. Their table and setting are more formal than the Sawyers. All four members of the family are dressed nicely. Before they eat they say a prayer, hold hands, and thank God for their food. Parents feature several shots of meat throughout, but the table scene features EXTREME CLOSE-UPS on the meat as it is sliced by the fork and is ready to be eaten. Their family table is decorated with pastel dishes filled with various foods. The centerpiece, is, of course, a large platter of human meat. Besides the meat on the silver platter lay a green garnish. The table is covered with dishes of foods such as salads, corm, rolls, and vegetables. Three very different tables of three very different cannibal families.

The Dinner Scenes

            The dinner scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre starts with a SHOT of the moon. It comes INTO FOCUS after a few seconds. We then CUT quickly to Sally. It is a CLOSE-UP on her head. It’s tilted up, her neck bending under the weight of her heavy head. She’s regaining consciousness. The camera LINGERS on her face as she slowly processes her surroundings. Her eyes grow large and her face distressed. She’s tied to a chair with her mouth gagged. The audience is LOOKING through Sally’s eyes now. As she wakes up, she sees a chicken head directly in front of her. The camera PANS UP from the chicken head to a skull before coming into FOCUS directly on Grandfather’s face. She immediately screams and the camera PULLS away from her revealing that she is tied to a chair and sitting at the other end of their family table. The family screams and howls back at her, enjoying the terror they are causing. “You can make them stop,” she cries. They continue to mock her. The dinner sequence includes several CLOSE-UP shots of Sally’s face in distress, juxtaposed with SHOTS of the faces of the cannibal family.

            From Sally’s perspective, Hitchhiker is seated to her left with Old Man a seat behind him. Leatherface is to her right. And directly opposite her sits a slumping Grandfather. As Sally screams for her life, the family scream and howls back at her as they laugh at her despair. Their howls match her scream. The dining room is filthy. The chair on which Sally sits is flanked by two human arms and the light shade that hangs over the table is covered with a human face. A skeleton hangs in the corner and various dead animal bones grace the wallpapered room. There is a sequence of CLOSE-UPS on Sally’s eyes. We go BACK AND FORTH between her face and the laughing family as she yells to “make it stop.” The music intensifies. We get CLOSER and CLOSER shots of Sally’s eye until we see the veins in her eyeballs and the tears in her eyes. “Nowhere is this more obvious than when the camera movies in on Marilyn’s eyes in the dinner scene,” says Gunnar Hansen. The Leatherface actor writes in his book Chainsaw Confidential that “Sally is in a frenzy of fear and the camera stays tight on her, closing in, lingering on the details of her bloodshot eyes” (Hansen 128). He is referencing Sally’s torture being slow and meticulous compared to some of the other deaths that happened rapidly and without lingering.

The family agrees to let Grandfather have Sally. Cue more CLOSE-UPS on Sally’s face as she continues to scream. Old Man reassures her how good of a killer Grandfather is and references his work killing cows back at the slaughterhouse. This reminds the audience that this is a former slaughterhouse family who hit hard times and has since started killing, cooking, and eating people for the meat. At the table, they force Sally to kneel over a bucket as they try and help Grandfather bludgeon her head with a small sledgehammer. He fails because he is so weak and Sally manages to jump out of the window and escape this family table nightmare.

            There are three dinner scenes in We Are What We Are and all three scenes not only push the story forward but reveal the emotional state of the family. For the first dinner scene, the family sits around the table, blesses the food, and eats the stew. It is a normal act. There is tension between Iris and Rose and their father, but they still comply with the traditions of their family.  “It takes more than a flood to bring his family to its knees,” says Frank. There is a CLOSE-UP shot of Frank putting the spoon of human meat into his mouth. This is a much more formal dinner than the Sawyers would have. They are all dressed up. They pray, “Father, lift us from this world of goatishness, together, as one, and raise us to righteousness and heavenly laity. We have kept our tradition in its purity and seek our reward in the hereafter. Amen.” The children are learning and respecting the family tradition. The meal is a sacred time for the family. It’s a time for the family to grow stronger together and for the children to become more accustomed to their family way of life. They are acting out their identity and fulfilling their purpose as a family.

            The second dinner scene is very similar to the first. The candles are still lit and the family is dressed in their best. However, the tension within the family has shifted. The sisters are now actively afraid of their father and so a meal at the table starts to mean something different. Rose discovers a bottle of arsenic in the cupboard which she believes was put in their stew by their father. As Iris pours their soup into their bowls, Rose tries to clue her in on what their father has planned. With their food ready for consumption, the family grasp hands and Frank says a prayer over their food. There are still several CLOSE-UPS of the stew. Throughout the scene, Rose is uneasy and does not want to eat. As Rory is about to eat his stew, Rose knocks his bowl away from him and onto the floor. Then, there is a knock at the door. It’s the father of the woman they are eating. The scene ends with Frank asking him if he wasn’t to stay for dinner. When he confronts Frank about what he believes his family has done to his daughter, Frank takes out a gun and shoots him. However, Iris jumps in the way and she is grazed by the bullet.

            The third and final dinner table scene begins the way the others do. It is a continuation of the second scene as the father attempts to finish their last meal. Beautiful music plays as Frank pours his family fresh bowls of stew. Iris’ head is now bandaged from the events that occurred and Rose is crying, soaking wet from the rain. They know their fate. As Frank tries to comfort Rose, she softly tells him she loves him before quickly biting his neck. Iris watches for a moment in shock. Iris then stabs her father with a knife, sticking his hand to the table. Rose takes a huge bite out of his neck and lets him go. She relishes the taste of his flesh and then goes back for more. Iris also succumbs to the temptation of her father’s meat and begins eating a large chunk of his arm. Frank is yelling out in pain on his back on the table. Rory has retreated under the table and does not participate in the eating of their father. After Frank dies from loss of blood the girls continue to feed off of him and devour him. They chew on his meat, finally getting the nutrition they’ve lacked during the fast. Their faces are covered in blood, their dresses are soaked and their eyes are hungry. When they fill up on their meal they simply walk away from the table covered in blood, their father’s dead body still lying still on the table. Their act of cannibalism was still one of rebellion.

            Easting human meat once it’s been cooked in a stew and almost unrecognizable is one thing. Devouring a live human being and eating their raw flesh is another. This extreme action from Rose and Iris shows the pent-up aggression and fear they had toward their father and their family lifestyle. They were tired of listening to their father and were in a complete desperate state. He was going to kill all of them if they didn’t do something. So, they did to him what their own ancestors have been doing to people for generations. The image of Iris and Rose devouring their father offers an interesting contrast to the imagery of the family sitting down quietly and respectfully eating their food in communion with one another.   

            For Michael in Parents, the dinner table is a place where he is held hostage, much like Sally. After spending the whole movie wondering if there is something wrong with his parents, he finds himself tied to a chair looking at his parents at the opposite end. The film uses several CLOSE-UP shots of food throughout. Before we get to the actual dinner table scene, we see a shot of the parents standing over the outside grill with a huge amount of meats cooking over a fire. They call for Michael. Dinner is ready. Michael, now keen on his parent’s actions and determined to stop them, was waiting for his parents with a baseball bat. He hits his father and the tray of meat falls to the ground with him in SLOW MOTION. We CUT to Michael tied up at the table with his parents talking to him. The background is spinning, “You eat people,” he says.  “I’ve been watching you, Michael, you’re an outsider. You’re not like them. You’re like us,” his father responds. The way everything behind the family is spinning, yet they are perfectly still, is a powerful filmmaking choice. Michael’s world is spinning. The center of his world, his parents, are responsible for it spinning out of control yet they are still right in front of him, preventing him from escaping. Michael tells his parents that he does not love them anymore. His father then tells him that they are bound for life. It does not matter how much Michael hates them, he is a part of the family. His father tells him that Michael will soon acquire the taste for human meat like his mother did.

            Nick begins to untie him and tells him that he can eat or run outside and shout to the world that his parents are cannibals. He tells him that if he tells people, they will burn them. Lily then opens the lid to the tray of meat in front of them. There is a CUT to a shot from inside the dish, where the three of them are looking down into the dish. This is followed by a CLOSE-UP of the meat on the tray. A beat later, Michael sits across from his parents. We see a CLOSE-UP of his eye, then a CLOSE UP of a piece of meat. One can’t help but be reminded of the back and forth shots between Sally and the Sawyers in Texas Chainsaw Massacre despite the drastic tonal difference in the way the scene plays out. His father then comes to him and tries to feed him. Michael stabs his father in the chest. As Nick is taking Michael's way to kill him, she stabs Nick. He then stabs her back. Michael hides as his father looks form him. This scene is underscored with upbeat music. The family is still under the appearance of the perfect suburban family.

Nick and Lily sit across from the table. The camera starts CLOSE ON them and then moves back, revealing a large tray of meat and a fully set family dinner table. A CLOSE UP on his eye seems like another obvious callback to Chainsaw. Michael looking at the human meat on the table is inter-spliced with CLOSE UP shots of the pieces of meat. There is a shot of Nick looking directly at the camera from Michael’s point of view. He’s about to feed him, but it looks like he is about to feed the audience a bite of human flesh. There is a shot of the meat on a fork with Michael OUT OF FOCUS in the background. We then go back and forth between the meat and the fork, to Michael’s face, his mouth presumably widening as he gets ready to take a bite of the meat. We then see him grab a knife in slow motion and stab his father in the shoulder. Nick grabs Michael by his head and holds him up. “Kids. Who made the little bastards,” he says in pain. Lily automatically tries to free her son from Nick’s clutches. “Don’t hurt him Nick” she says. The father is willing to hurt the child as a reciprocating gesture. The mother on the other hand immediately jumps to the defense of her child. She even stabs Nick as he takes Michael away, presumably to kill him.

            The dinner table scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre is six minutes long. According to Hansen, Hooper shot two master shots of the scene. One from Grandfather’s point of view and the one from Sally’s. The audience is meant to feel as if they were Sally in certain most of the scenes. Looking through her eyes and seeing the family in front of us, we feel as if we are attending the dinner from hell. Sally is a hostage. She is a guest and also the main course. The Parker family dynamic is shifting in the midst of a family tragedy. The tradition of Cannibalism that has been passed down from generation to generation was stopped with Iris and Rose as they refuse to follow the family traditions by the end of the film. Michael escapes the grasp of his parents, who kill each other by the time their story ends. Michael is sent to live with his grandparents. The last shot of the movie is his grandparents offering him a piece of meat, causing Michael to think that perhaps his father learned his cannibalistic ways from his parents. It is a multigenerational family tradition. It is how their family functions. “We’d have more time together,” Nick told Michel. If only he would follow in the footsteps of his parents. According to Sobchak, “the child not only acts as a humanizer but also as the overseer of familial roles and responsibilities” (186).

            Particularly in We Are What We Are and Parents, the children act as the conscious of the family. They must assume their given responsibilities or else face the consequences. Sobchak notes, “the contemporary family melodrama plays out an uneasy acceptance of patriarchy’s decline” (185). All three films feature a wounded patriarch. Grandfather can barely hold up his hand, Frank's weakness as the film progresses, and ends up dead on the dinner table. Nick, the strongest patriarch of the three represented in the films discussed in this paper is the most threatening and put together. But he does not survive the movie. The families depicted in these cannibal movies operate in different ways. They look different, speak differently and eat differently. They represent different forms of family identity and provide a commentary on the family as a community the responsibility families have to each other and their given purpose; Even if that purpose is killing and eating people.