Chainsaws and Chuddle Dollops – The Horror of Family Dinners
Horror Moments Mini-series, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared Edition
‘Horror Moments’ is a weekly series examining horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. The ‘moments’ are published weekly on Thursdays, and I share articles on the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more on Mondays. Catch up with the recent Kate Bush series here and the full back catalogue of horror moments (from Wallace & Gromit to Shakespeare) here. Don’t forget to subscribe!
[Spoilers: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)]
One of the strangest windows you get into the lives of other people is when you visit a friend or partner’s home for the first time and sit down with their family for dinner. There’s always a faint sense of menace about these moments, especially if you’re in any way socially anxious. Will I have to pretend to like their food? Will I accidentally say something stupid or insensitive? Is it normal that the dog is eating at the table with us?
There’s an uncanny valley-like effect when you’re in someone else’s house and everything that is familiar, nostalgic and beloved to them is just a little bit…wrong to you. The awkwardness of not quite fitting in and wishing you were somewhere else is captured beautifully in a scene from Parks and Recreation where Leslie suddenly finds herself trapped in the middle of a family breakfast song:
There are loads of horror films that play on social anxieties associated with being the odd one out in someone else’s home, where the concept of the ‘family’ itself becomes a threat, but one of the best treatments of this theme I’ve ever seen is the third tv episode of Becky Sloan and Joe Pelling’s brilliantly bonkers Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.
This episode, ‘Family,’ follows the usual format of the show: our three colourful protagonists meet a teacher (in this case teachers) and are taught a dubious lesson that feels at first like a sequence from a children’s tv show but soon descends into horror and insanity.
Yet for the first time ever, the teachers in ‘Family’ are not anthropomorphic objects but are human. Well… sort of. The episode begins with Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and Duck struggling to get into a family-sized bag of ‘Chuddle Dollops’ which is apparently refusing to open because they aren’t a proper family. But what does ‘family’ really mean? It’s time to meet Todney and Lily to find out.
Whether it’s the fact that one of Todney’s eyes doesn’t quite point in the right direction, one of Lily’s puppet hands turns suddenly into real human fingers, or the fact that they’re both breathily voiced by the same grown man (James Stevenson Bretton), the twins are probably the most disturbing of all the teachers. Like ventriloquist dolls without handlers, they seem deeply unwholesome — but they do have the best song in the series.
The gang are invited round to the twins’ home to sample what a real family feels like, and meet Todney and Lily’s relatives (everyone apart from Mother who is conspicuously absent.) It’s a dingy place with a view of a brick wall through the window and a distinctly dirty look to the fading soft furnishings. The inhabitants themselves are all grotesque and communicate in inarticulate grunts and shrieks. Squashed up uncomfortably on the sofa our protagonists are told to breathe in the special ‘family scent.’ Didn’t you know that “every family has a scent?”
Todney and Lily are up there for me with the best creepy twins in the horror genre. They are essentially a parody of the Janet and John books, popularised in the mid-twentieth century, which helped children learn to read.
There’s nothing intentionally sinister about the originals, although over time using cherubic boys and girls with golden hair to symbolise idealised English life has become dated. I could write a whole separate article about how fascist propaganda pictures use the Caucasian nuclear family, and how horror as a genre has tended to subvert these themes.
The family meal has featured prominently in the patriotic propaganda of many a country. The ‘Freedom from Want’ poster from 1943 has been doing the rounds again on social media, its depiction of the idealised American family much-memed across the political spectrum. In 2022 an Austrian language horror film called Family Dinner conspicuously referenced its composition in its story of a teenager visiting relatives in a remote dwelling who are apparently interested in helping her lose weight.
Just to drive home the fact that family here means horror, the intertitles that appear in this episode recall the use of homely heirlooms to signal danger in Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018). Note the arcane symbols.
So the strange blonde twins Todney and Lily are already steeped in horror tropes by the time we sit down with them for their version of family dinner. It is here that we get our most overt horror reference in the series so far, a scene that directly mimics one of the most famous dinner table sequences of all time.
Yellow Guy has essentially been kidnapped and is being forced to play the role of ‘Mother’ so that the household can qualify for the Grolton’s Family Discount. Waking up, he finds that he has been bound to a chair whilst the family leers at him — just like poor Sally in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).
Arguably, ‘family’ is a central theme of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It is when Sally wakes up at the dinner table that we get the fullest sense that, however strange, this household has its own traditions, its own versions of etiquette and celebration. A corpse-like grandparent is wheeled out and fed. The room is carefully decorated with human bones and skin. There’s intergenerational conflict about who has to do the hard work of killing and who gets to be the cook, like any family with it’s disagreements.
This is what makes it all so uncomfortable, it’s because she feels as if she’s speaking with human beings, not monsters, that Sally pleads so fiercely for her life. Her screams and tears become a new in-joke amongst her captors and the horror comes not from physical torture but from the fear of being trapped with people you don’t understand, who seem united against you as a common enemy and stranger. It’s one of the most famous scenes in all of horror cinema – and not a drop of blood is spilt.
When Yellow Guy finally makes the call and the family bucket is delivered, Todney, Lily, and the rest of this awful household reveal their true monstrous forms and it all gets a bit Pennywise…you’ll have to watch the full episode to find out what happens. Do you have any family dinner horror stories?
Next week, we’ll return to those strange arcane symbols that keep appearing in the world of DHMIS. Until then, hhappy nightmares everyone!
Horror moments are posted every Thursday and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Mondays.
I’m a little terrified to watch Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, just from reading this, Rebekah! I love how subversive horror is.
Such a funny and horrific subject. My whole family is insane. Many a guest has been startled by their eccentricities. Me mother's sinister niceness. Me old man's brutal, working class violence and tendency to laugh at his own jokes by sticking his red, mad face in yours and laughing like Sid James. Me siblings (and my own) ability to say absolutely anything, often things that are completely taboo and out of order. Plus the fact that drugs were often used blatantly around the dinner table, as if they were legal and normal (they were normal for us). Also, me mum's house was filthy (I hadn't been aware till mates and girlfriends pointed it out to me), and appeared like a cross between a Chinese laundry and an old junk shop, often with so much crap about the place, you had a hard time finding somewhere to sit on the couch.
Me best mate's house was covered in a layer of dog hair, and his dad was an alcoholic. Both our dads were like characters from the Fast Show. "See this scar? I'm a survivor!" etc.
But going to girlfriend's family's for dinner was an interesting experience, as my terrible reputation always seemed to precede me. I'm schizophrenic, and I'm also a heroin addict. I was a criminal for most of me adult life n'all. I'm completely uneducated and left school with no qualifications. Everything I know is self-taught. I'm an autodidn'tact. But my girlfriends always seemed to be completely sane, well-educated girls, so their families were well unimpressed by me. Top that with the fact that I ain't unintelligent and am somewhat philosophical, I have a particularly unusual perspective on life, always at odds with society and acceptable thinking. Terrible rumours of my strange behaviour always seemed to have been discovered.
All these things made for awkward and weird situations. A favourite moment was, when I bent forward to pick something up and a syringe and blackened spoon fell out me jacket and landed at her mum's feet. It was one of her spoons n'all. Bless.