31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 16 (The Stuff)

This was about 30 years in the making for me, personally. The Stuff is one of those movies for me. I would see it at our local video store every weekend while looking for movies, and it looked like your typical 80's horror movie. I, an impressionable child scared shitless of horror, never wanted to go near it. Even later in life, when I got brave and rented Friday the 13th movies and shit from them, I never rented The Stuff. God knows where all those VHS tapes ended up. A landfill? The video store's basement? Either way, thanks to the magic of the Internet, I watched The Stuff in 720p quality. Wow! I should have turned it down so it would look like an old shitty VHS, but compression doesn't work the same as tape artifice. Anyway then. What the hell is The Stuff? Well, it's something wild that doesn't always work, but when it does I dig it. A satire of 80's hypercapitalism and Big Junk Food featuring mind-controlling goop people dug out of a hole and sold to the American public. Oh, now that's fun. Let's play with that for a second.

There is a movie I've seen that this movie reminds me of, but I won't tip my hand to it. You'll find out before the month is over, I promise you. The thing is less an outright horror movie and more a corporate thriller with some spooks and dread. You've got an industrial spy trying to find the secret of the titular Stuff, which is... literally goop people found bubbling out of the ground that tastes really good, that got mass marketed. Said goop quickly makes you addicted to it but there's plenty on store shelves and nobody really seems to fight over it. There's enough supply for the demand, and eventually the demand is that this shit takes you over completely. All while the company pumping it out of the ground is making all the money on Earth. Oh, sure, when our industry spy finally finds the Stuff mine, there's this talk about ending world hunger and forming a new order of life. It all sounds very utopian, but it's all in service of the almighty dollar and the Stuff. Even the Stuff's ad slogan, "Enough is never enough", is them all but saying "YOU'LL GET ADDICTED TO THIS SHIT AND MELT YOUR BRAIN AND GIVE US MONEY, HA HA HA!". People addicted to the Stuff can grow violent at the drop of a hat if you snoop around, willing to kill or make you ingest the shit. Now that's fucking brand loyalty. SEE THAT MAN? MURDER HIM! HE'S GOING TO DISCOVER THE SECRET OF THE STUFF! EAT THE STUFF! SERVE THE STUFF! KILL KILL KILL! The shit hollows you out and you're basically its host. What's an industrial spy to do?

Hire a goddamned militia. This is, admittedly, a bit of a tonal misstep for the film. The militia our spy ends up working with is led by an anti-Communist crackpot who's also just a tiny bit racist. Just the teensiest bit. That isn't great, and even though it's 1985 and anti-Communist sentiment is high... you're basically taking the piss out of capitalism with this movie. It's not the best of looks, but there's a kind of redemptive way out of it where they tell the crackpot Colonel what he wants to hear. Using advertisement savvy to get him to their side. That doesn't excuse the rest of it, but it's a potential thing happening. The ending, at least, is definitely some capitalist rebellion. The crackpot's live radio show message about how the Stuff will fucking kill you actually works, and people burn the shit en masse. It turns out, though, that the Stuff execs and the ice cream execs who hired the industrial spy in the first place have joined forces and merged their products into The Taste. The Taste is 88% normal ice cream, and 12% Stuff; enough to make you a Stuff addict, not enough to control your mind and hollow you out as a Stuff host. Our industrial spy reacts to this callous display of capitalist greed by pulling a gun on the guys and making them eat tubs and tubs of Stuff. As he so memorably says, "Are you eating it, or is it eating you?". It's a neat cap to the anti-cap. I kind of dig The Stuff. It's not perfect, but it has its heart mostly in the right place for me to have enjoyed it.