Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Little Shop of Horrors
1960 · Roger Corman · The 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 Audrey Junior get bigger every time it's on screen. (setting)
The plant grows through a series of larger and larger puppets across the film, and each size marks how far Seymour has been pulled in.
Payoff: The plant's size works like a clock, marking the story's stakes instead of the time of day.
Listen for the plant's flat little demand, 'feed me.' (sound)
Charles Griffith dubs Audrey Junior's voice himself, flat and undemanding in tone even as its request escalates in stakes each time.
Payoff: There is no menace in the voice, only appetite stating what it wants next.
Watch the customers play their oddest habits completely straight. (performance)
Walk-on characters like the man who eats flowers or the masochist thrilled by the dentist's drill deliver their strangeness with total deadpan conviction.
Payoff: Playing the absurd as perfectly ordinary is the film's whole comic strategy. In the reading: symptom. Deleuze would call a walk-on like this a symptom, a figure who exists to make one hidden appetite visible and then leaves.
Notice how cramped and grubby Mushnick's shop always looks. (setting)
The skid-row shop and street are shot with a documentary plainness, flat lighting and few setups, closer to a sitcom than to horror atmosphere.
Payoff: An ordinary broken-down storefront is where the film hides its monster in plain sight. In the reading: derived-milieu. Deleuze calls an ordinary social surface like this a derived milieu, the recognizable world a stranger appetite is working underneath.
Watch Seymour's panic rise every time the plant gets hungry. (performance)
Jonathan Haze plays Seymour as a quivering nebbish, all apology and nerves, sliding a little further into trouble with each new demand.
Payoff: He never plans anything; he only reacts, which is the joke and the trap both.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the mouths: the plant, the masochist, the flower eater, the love that's really hunger.