The Little Shop of Horrors · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

It's the middle of the night in a florist's shop on skid row, and a plant is hungry. Not roaring-hungry — bored-hungry. The pods droop, and a flat little voice (the screenwriter Charles Griffith's, dubbed in cheap and close) says: feed me. No menace in it, just appetite stating its terms. Hold on that voice. Almost everything Roger Corman's two-day quickie knows about itself is in that tone — the deadpan certainty that the world, underneath the gags, runs on nothing but hunger.

Deleuze gives us a name for a film built this way. Between the affection-image (the feeling that gathers in a close-up but hasn't yet broken into action) and the full action-image (the hero who sizes up a situation and changes it), he locates a stranger, lower thing: the impulse-image. Here the world doesn't present problems to be solved; it presents drives to be fed. Characters don't decide, they crave. This is Deleuze's reading of cinematic naturalism — not the polished realism of Bazin's neorealists but the Zola lineage, where a respectable surface keeps splitting open to show the raw appetite churning beneath. Little Shop of Horrors is one of the purest comic specimens of it ever shot, and it got there partly by accident.

Watch how the film lays its world out in two floors. There is the derived milieu — Gravis Mushnick's grubby shop, the documentary-flat skid-row street, the customers, the love plot with sweet oblivious Audrey. Ordinary, social, lit like a TV sitcom. And there is what Deleuze calls the originary world showing through it: a place of pure drive where the only law is consumption. Audrey Junior is that world made into a prop. The plant doesn't scheme or want power; it eats, and its growth (a parade of bigger and bigger papier-mâché puppets) is the only clock the film keeps. Each new size means more mouths fed, more bodies owed. That escalation isn't plot in the action-image sense. It's the line of slope — naturalism's signature curve, the irreversible downhill toward exhaustion and death. Seymour starts at the top of it with one accident and slides: from accidental killer to anxious caterer to, at the bottom, food himself, swallowed by the thing he grew. He never once acts his way out. He only feeds. A man who can perceive his situation perfectly and can do nothing but supply it — that's the impulse-image's trapped little engine, played here for laughs instead of dread.

And the laughs are where Deleuze's scheme pays off best, because the film's famous walk-ons are not filler. They're symptoms — figures who exist to make a single hidden drive visible and walk off. Dick Miller's Burson Fouch eats the flowers; appetite literalized. Best of all, young Jack Nicholson as Wilbur Force, the masochist grinning in the dentist's chair for the pleasure of the drill. That scene is what Deleuze would call a gest: a body arranged into a posture that lays a whole relation bare. Wilbur's bliss tells you, in two minutes, the rule the entire film runs on — that under the manners, everyone here is a mouth, and pleasure is just appetite that got what it wanted. The plant is only the loudest of them. Treat the plant as a fetish in the strict sense — a part-object soaked in compulsive force, the thing the whole shop starts to orbit — and the love story curdles nicely: Seymour names his monster Audrey after the girl, so even his tenderness is routed through hunger.

Why does this lens earn its keep on a picture usually filed under cheap fun? Because Corman's method is the form. The two-day shoot, the standing sets borrowed from A Bucket of Blood, the printed-early takes, the long flat takes used because there was no time for coverage — none of it leaves room for interiority. There is no psychology to slow the drives down. Economy stripped the film to exactly what naturalism wants: a world that is nothing but appetite in motion. Constraint did the work of style.

You can hear the discourse around it, too. The artist-who-kills-to-create came straight from A Bucket of Blood the year before — same team, same originary appetite dressed as art, here as horticulture. The breezy treat-murder-as-housekeeping deadpan is the tonal debt to Arsenic and Old Lace; the rattling overlap of the dialogue runs back to His Girl Friday; the detective bits flatten Dragnet into parody. And the slope ran forward in ways nobody planned: a lapsed copyright made the film a public-domain fixture on television for decades, and that ubiquity seeded the hit stage musical and its 1986 film — where the plant finally got the line everyone misquotes, "Feed me, Seymour," which this original never says.

So watch it again, but watch the mouths. Count them. The plant, the masochist, the flower-eater, the love that's really hunger wearing a name. Corman thought he was winning a bet about speed. What he actually shot was one of cinema's cleanest jokes about a world made of appetite — and the joke is that the appetite always wins.