Movies
‘Eater’ – Watch the Cannibal Short Film the Duffer Brothers Made 10 Years Before ‘Stranger Things’!
In the series finale of “Stranger Things,” Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) ends up being a student at New York University in pursuit of a filmmaking career, and he tells his pals that he’s working on an “anti-capitalist cannibal movie” titled The Consumer. Were creators Matt and Ross Duffer hinting at an in-universe spinoff movie down the road? Actually, the brothers were referencing a cannibal short film they already made together nearly 20 years prior!
The Duffer Brothers got their start directing a couple short films before they got around to creating the pop culture phenomenon that became “Stranger Things,” and one of those shorts was indeed a cannibal horror movie. It wasn’t titled The Consumer, however, but rather Eater.
Eater was co-directed by Matt and Ross Duffer during their time at California’s Dodge College, not unlike Jonathan Byers making a cannibal movie of his own while off at college!
Written and directed by the Duffer Brothers back in 2007, Eater was based on the same-titled short story by Peter Crowther. In the 18-minute short, “A rookie cop (Emanuel Borria) works the night shift at a police station with a cannibal prisoner on the loose.”
You can watch the suspenseful cannibal short below for a peek inside the minds of the Duffer Brothers when they were getting their start, just about 10 years prior to “Stranger Things”!
It’s interesting to note that Eater star Emanuel Borria reunited with the Duffer Brothers for “Stranger Things 5,” playing the character Sergeant Luis Ramirez in three of its episodes.
It’s also interesting to note that Peter Crowther’s short story was adapted by Stuart Gordon just one year after Eater was made by the Duffer Brothers. It was an episode of the NBC horror anthology “Fear Itself,” which was a spiritual successor to “Masters of Horror.”
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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