While it might be difficult to see how food plays an important role in certain horror classics and modern horror films, when analyzing what foods are being eaten, when these foods are being eaten, and what message the filmmakers are trying to give to the audience it can become very clear that it does in fact have an influence on the emotions of the viewers. Horror tries to make everyday life horrific, that is essentially what makes horror films, books, and games so scary. Food is an essential aspect of human survival and in many cultures, food brings comfort to a community. Strategically using food in horror can therefore create feelings of disgust, wretchedness, and terror, all important to set a tone in certain films. This article will discuss the importance of food in horror and how it creates these emotions within the viewers while providing specific references from horror films with the exception of cannibalism as the reaction to it is quite obvious. 

For most avid horror film viewers, it takes a lot of visual representation on screen to invoke more horrifying feelings or emotions. For this reason, filmmakers might try to create these emotions through symbolism, sound, and other camera techniques. However, just the simplest change in everyday life can cause massive disgust in even the most experienced horror film viewer. Using food as symbolism or foreshadowing can be seen in various classic horror films from Poltergeist (1982) to Silence of the Lambs (1991), however, it is not discussed much in film analysis leaving more room for interpretation from the audience, allowing the viewers to consist of multiple backgrounds, culturally to relate to the images on screen. In other horror films, food is used not as symbolism or foreshadowing, but a simple method of terror and disgust. This can be seen in films such as It (1990) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988). 

In Poltergeist, food is used as direct foreshadowing to the strange occurrences happening throughout the film and the unsettling reality of what lies in the basement of the home. The types of food being eaten in the film highlight this directly, and it is important to analyze who is eating what throughout the film to grasp the full concept. In the film, Marty, the paranormal investigator, is the only character who consumes meat throughout the entire story. While the audience is shown other characters eating throughout the film, they only consume vegetarian foods. One specific scene that shows this is the scene where Dana is snacking on everything in the fridge, later at night. When taking a closer look at what exactly she is consuming, it is all vegetarian and a rather strange combination of items, from pickles to potato salad and finishing it off with a swig of orange juice. Not many viewers would notice this immediately, but those who do would most likely be disgusted with the combination that she consumes in under five minutes.

The most famous food scene in the film is the scene where Marty has a midnight snack consisting of Cheetos, a chicken wing, and a Fred Flinstone sized steak that most people would find ridiculous. This is also the only time that meat is consumed at all during the film, and it is quickly interrupted by a bizarre and horrifying hallucination of Marty ripping his own skin off his face. This hallucination is brought on by Marty discovering that the seemingly beautiful steak he was consuming was actually old, rotten, and had maggots crawling all over it. The importance of this scene from a film analysis perspective is that it alludes to Marty viewing himself as a corpse, though the food he consumes as meat is quite literally dead flesh, and directly foreshadows the discovery of corpses underneath the home. What is more interesting about this, is that food brings doom, so to speak, as it foreshadows the reality of what lies beneath the home.