Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Little Shop of Horrors
1986 · Frank Oz · Little Shop of Horrors on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the color shift between the gray street and the flower shop. (light)
Robert Paynter lights Skid Row in permanent sodium-toned dusk, then warms and saturates the shop interior into a pocket of amber.
Payoff: The color tells you which space is a refuge and which one is the danger to escape.
Notice the three women who comment from stoops and fire escapes. (staging)
The doo-wop trio keeps appearing on the edges of scenes they are not part of, narrating and reacting without ever entering the plot.
Payoff: They give the film a running moral commentary that never has to be spoken by anyone in the story.
Track how much floor space is left in the shop each visit. (staging)
As the plant grows, Seymour's available room in the shop keeps shrinking scene by scene, until he is working around it more than in it.
Payoff: His shrinking space tells you he is losing control before the story says so out loud.
Listen to the plant's singing voice, full soul power from a vegetable. (sound)
Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops voices Audrey II completely straight, no camp in the delivery, a real instrument coming out of a puppet.
Payoff: The sincerity of the voice is what makes a talking plant genuinely persuasive instead of silly.
Listen for Audrey's voice suddenly opening into a full belt. (sound)
Ellen Greene speaks in a small, breathy register, then without warning lets the singing voice open all the way up in 'Suddenly Seymour.'
Payoff: The size of her voice arrives as news about who she actually is underneath.
Once you have seen it
Watch how the ending resolves against everything the first hour sets up. (structure)
Ashman's screenplay builds a tight Faustian chain where every gain costs a body, but the released ending lets Seymour survive and keep the girl.
Payoff: The film's structure was built for a cautionary fable, and you can feel it strain against its happy ending.
Watch the picture flatten into pastel, shadowless light during Audrey's daydream. (light)
'Somewhere That's Green' quotes 1950s advertising wholesale, even key, no shadow, a paradise built entirely out of purchasable objects.
Payoff: The film never mocks her for wanting it, and never pretends it would actually be enough.
Track each improvement in Seymour's life against what it just cost. (structure)
Every time Seymour feeds the plant, his own prospects visibly rise, a raise, new customers, respect, so ambition and murder run on the same ledger.
Payoff: The film argues that getting out of Skid Row this way always costs somebody a body.
Carry this in: Watch the shop shrink around Seymour. The space itself tells you what the plant is costing him.