Movie Chatting: Blood Diner
I will never stop doing this newsletter until I run out of topics I can connect to the Satanic Panic
I love horror movies in the way that you do when you spend multiple years in college bathing in Freudian essays about how gender theory intersects with The Exorcist and writing self-indulgent term papers that no one will read because your school’s media studies program is not notably well-regarded. I still haven’t seen The Exorcist, but I spent the last few months watching all the horror movies on Hulu before my student subscription runs out. One of those movies is Blood Diner.
Like the media studies program I quit, 1987’s Blood Diner is not notably well-regarded. It’s the story of two brothers who dig up the body of their occultist uncle to help them raise a pagan goddess using body parts taken from hot women who patronize their vegetarian diner. (Why are their veggie burgers so tasty? Take a wild guess.) It’s also the story of two mismatched police detectives trying to figure out who’s killing all these cheerleaders and club girls.
I recognize this is a sentence no one wants to read, but I thought about Blood Diner a lot recently while listening to a podcast. That podcast was You’re Wrong About, which busts cultural myths from the 20th century. Earlier this year they did a series about the book that inspired the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, Michelle Remembers, the supposedly true story of a woman who went to therapy in Canada in the late ‘70s and recovered memories of being ritually tortured by Satanists as a young child.
The impact of Michelle Remembers was far-reaching and long-lasting. Two Texas daycare owners imprisoned in the ‘90s after being accused of running a Satan cult out of their daycare were only released in 2013.
The world of Blood Diner is a lot like the world of Michelle Remembers. It’s a world of casual, illogical violence, where sex, murder, and occultism simmer together in the same pot. They’re not even methods of getting what you want. They’re more like something fun to do if you’re the wrong kind of person. Michelle’s mother’s cult resembles nothing so much as a social club, and brothers of Blood Diner are kind of just murdering people so they can keep hanging out with their undead uncle who has opaque motivations.
Blood Diner was conceived as a straightforward sequel to the 1963 splatter flick Blood Feast, but director Jackie Kong infused the script with a sense of humor. She turned one character, a patron at a rival restaurant interviewed several times by the cops, into a ventriloquist dummy. The character is Looney Tunes-silly, but the choice adds to the story — the brothers’ restaurant stole all the other vegetarian restaurants’ customers, to the point that this chef invented an imaginary friend to keep him company in his empty dining room.
I don’t know if Jackie Kong meant for Blood Feast to be a commentary on ‘80s paranoia about Satanism, it hasn’t come up in any interview with her I’ve seen, but it’s that kind of attention to theme that makes me feel like the movie has more going on than what’s on the surface. Yes, it’s a crude, gross gore-fest (the MPAA allegedly refused to rate it because it lacked any moral value), but it’s not just a crude, gross gore-fest.
It feels like the guiding philosophy here is frustration. This Satanic Panic thing is stupid, everything that’s going on is stupid, this is exactly how stupid you look. Is the idea of a family abducting and murdering loads and loads of women so they can Soylent Green their restaurant patrons any less stupid than the idea that the country is overrun by millions of blood-drinking, baby-murdering Satanists?
It’s a stupid, crass, illogical world out there. Blood Diner reflects that. If Blood Diner lacks any moral value, maybe that’s not the movie’s fault.
Header collage images by adrian and Hüseyin Topcu on Unsplash and from Wikimedia Commons (Dinners and Diners, the making of a Satanic myth).