Corporate Animals premiered in the Sundance Film Festival’s Midnight category. It’s a comedy about a corporate retreat group trapped in a cave. When they resort to cannibalism, that qualifies Corporate Animals as a Bloody-Disgusting movie. They eat their guide, who is crushed in a cave-in, and the audience gets to see his skin and bones gradually come off.
“I think the violence and the gore came out of the subject matter,” director Patrick Brice told us.
“[Screenwriter ] Sam [Bain] is first and foremost a comedy writer, so thinking about the characters, thinking about the story was really our first intention in terms of laying groundwork in and then that stuff came in as window dressing as the script went on.”
For his part, Bain rejected the label “horror comedy.”
“Horror comedy doesn’t really [describe it],” Bain said. “I think it’s a black comedy with a corpse they eat.”
“It’s not meant to be a horror film or anything like that. It just felt like blood or violence to some degree was essential to the story but only in small doses.”
That said, when it comes to eating a human being, Brice went there. “That was pretty fucking gross,” Brice bragged. “We had whatever our set dressers initially set up for us and then we kept adding blood and intestines and body parts to it from that point on. It was something that we kept adding to. We only cut to it a couple times, but when we do, we want it to be effective.”
Jessica Williams takes a bite out of the arm on camera. While Williams was not available for an interview, her costar Karan Soni relayed what the arm was made out of.
“She said chocolate sauce and coconut [gelatin] but it was vegan,” Soni said. “I think she was pretty grossed out by it.”
Brice added, “Our hair and makeup person who did all our makeup but also created the arm for us, I think she tried to make it sound tastier to Jessica than it actually ended up being. But Jess really took one for the team.”
It only takes five days for the group to decide to eat the guide. Is that a little quick to resort to cannibalism?
“Or slow?” Bain asked right back. “Some audiences have been like, ‘Why’d you wait so long?’ Everyone was different but some people could never bear to do that. Some people would do it in a heartbeat. It just felt like I didn’t want that scene to be running too late in the film because it felt like a centerpiece defining scene in the movie. But also if it happens too quick then the desperation isn’t there.”
Cannibalism aside, just being trapped in a cave is scary enough for many people. The team built a cave for the set, and Soni recalls feeling the claustrophobia.
“We all started losing our minds actually because the cave had four walls and then they would lock us in there,” Soni said. “The walls were really, really high, and then if you had to go to the bathroom, these grips had to physically move these walls. So we really felt we were kind of just locked in this prison because video village was on the other side and all that stuff. Everyone started losing their minds a little bit so I think it was really good for the movie because we started just getting frustrated with each other. It was just doing the scenes over and over again, every morning coming back to that same cave and being like, ‘I just hate this cave.’ We all tried to find our spots where it was kind of comfortable to sit because there was not many. Then you’d just be like dammit, someone took the spot.”
So we know it’s bloody, but how disgusting is Corporate Animals? Well, Soni’s character vomits profusely at one point, and that’s when things got real messy (and gross) on set.
“It was a split pea soup concoction of some kind,” Soni recalled.
“Then we had a tube on one side that’s not facing camera that was attached. As they were pumping it out, it would kind of go all over so I had to kind of direct it with my mouth a little bit to keep it going. I don’t know if it actually had a smell or psychologically I just thought it smelled disgusting.”
“Something about the way the lighting hits that vomit always makes me happy when I’m watching it,” Brice added. “Also having the vomit go on for maybe two or three more shots than it probably should. If we’re going to go here, we might as well take it as far as we can.”
