Cinema

And a very happy “Salò” Day to you, my fellow feces feasters! We’re in the steaming, hot, thick of summer here at IndieWire, where we’re celebrating the 1970s for our annual decade week. Yes, it’s that magical time of year when an offhand joke about arthouse’s most infamous poop munchers can turn into serious research paid for by Penske Media. (Note: If my editors take that line out of this article, then THAT is censorship — and then this holiday was for NOTHING!) 

Anyway, it’s “Salò” Day! Have you put out your Blu-ray case for Pasolini’s ghost to take a shit in yet? 

Being first to any new tradition feels special, but IndieWire’s totally made-up holiday honors a movie that’s notorious for its ravenous use of No. 2. Premiered to shocked Parisian audiences on November 23, 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” adapts a sadistic fantasy written by the Marquis de Sade.

Penned by the Italian libertine while he was imprisoned at the Bastille from October to December in 1785, it’s a grotesque story that follows a group of nubile captives. Pasolini’s version is set during World War II at a remote mansion, where they’re tortured by fascists in a hedonistic ritual.

Testing your nerves and stomach by watching the “Circle of Shit” sequence is a right of passage for edge-lords, but you’ll find just as many serious cinephiles willing to defend “Salò” as essential arthouse. Provocateurs Bruce La Bruce and John Waters spoke with IndieWire about the misunderstood title’s sordid legacy and its director for “Salò” Day. Pasolini’s final film was released weeks after he died in a brutal attack, during which he was struck repeatedly, run over with a car, and set on fire.

The repulsive-yet-beautiful magnum opus that remained has been tangled up in theories about Pasolini’s murder ever since. Waters — whose commitment to putting scat on screen is storied thanks to the pooch in “Pink Flamingos” — thinks he fell victim to an affair or bad sexual encounter. Equally salacious, many historians prescribe to the idea that Pasolini was assassinated for his political views. Although “Salò” imagines a fictional scene in 1940s Italy, the anti-consumerist masterpiece allowed Pasolini to criticize the modern European society he knew as flavorless, cruel, and full of sewage.

For IndieWire’s giddy, gross, and disturbingly long history of shit-eating on film, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sadly, we weren’t able to jam any turd-themed “Titanic” references in here, but you’ll be happy that you pulled up your squatty potty when you see the fecal “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, dookie “Jaws,” and other cinematic poop jokes we’ve been cooking up. Plus, the truly brilliant beginnings of a crossover idea for “Ma 2” and “The Help.” (It’s fine if Blumhouse wants to fumble “M3GAN 2.0” — but I draw the line at letting Octavia eat shit.)

Why Are Fascist Fudge Nuggets a Delicacy in Arthouse Cinema? 

The Marquis de Sade’s obsession with consuming feces won’t make sense to everyone. Statistically speaking, whether you’re the shitter or the eater, “coprophagia” — a word that means the act of eating feces, derived from ancient Greek — is among the least common sexual interests out there. Not only because the kink is still so, so taboo but because it’s extremely dangerous. 

We’re only saying it once: IndieWire is not encouraging you to eat poop! Try to research this stuff and you will end up in a sea of extremely upsetting reports about several serious health conditions, including side effects from consensual scat snacking as well as tragedies that befall people with psychosis and dementia. Poop was also used in some of the earliest experiments for biological warfare.

Once more, in the spirit of late-stage capitalism, do not pass go, do not collect $200, DO NOT EAT POOP! (Even for a movie, unless you’re Divine!) Ahem. Now, then. 

The belief that sex, power, and fluids of any kind are inextricably linked has been around since the dawn of sadomasochism, so named for the Marquis de Sade. Emotions are an opaque science, but psychologists who study extreme fetishes have argued that humiliation is among the strongest feelings you can have… and inflict.

That’s the point of “Salò,” or at least part of it. 

Disturbed by the degradation of culture he saw in Rome in the mid-20th century, Pasolini grappled with political adversaries for much of his life. He was passionate about being Italian but early clashes with censors — memorably, including some over positive movie reviews from when he was a film critic — put Pasolini at odds with the government from an early age. He collaborated with Federico Fellini as a young filmmaker and wrote at length about taking up his mantle as a visual storyteller because he wanted to reflect forces he saw in the world but felt words could not describe

Poor Europeans have been rolling around in poop and mud since before Shakespeare’s days — see “Monthy Python and the Holy Grail,” also in 1975 — and force-feeding the masses garbage because your society runs on poison is a motif we’ve seen explored in everything from “Soylent Green” (1973) to “Delicatessen” (1991) to “Snowpiercer” (2013). Still, the shocking nature of “Salò” got Pasolini’s film banned in several countries and it wouldn’t reach the U.S. for another two years.

Could it really have gotten him killed? 

The case is technically still open, but even depicting fake political prisoners from a war that was already over eating fascist shit (chocolate, really) would’ve been explosive socially. The “Circle of Shit” from “Salò” lives on in infamy, having broken the seal on a dramatic representation of subjugation spiraling out of control that’s ultimately just as embarrassing for the oppressors as it is for the victims. Yes, the horror begins with a crying blonde girl being given a spoon and pushed to her knees to eat feces in front of a cackling audience. But by dinner time, everyone gets the skidmark munchies and the shit soup is on.

In “Salò,” coprophagia serves as an on-ramp to genocide. Inspired by “Dante’s Inferno,” the “Circle of Blood” sequence cranks up the intensity and turns lethal in a vicious display of eye-gouging, genital mutilation, skin branding, and more acts of violence. Arguably, those are the images that should bother viewers the most — but jump ahead to the year 2025, when the West has widely prioritized mass consumerism and the social media dopamine drip over basic human rights, and the “Circle of Shit” still reigns supreme. 

Why? Movie scholars have as many theories about that as they do about Pasolini’s death. Still, there’s something to be said for one scenario being objectively worse than the other. Death is death, and the pain might stop if you stop with it. But isn’t it scarier if the thing that’s telling you it’s going to kill you spends 120 days feeding and fucking you first?

Tom Six Presents “The Lord of the Rings” for Forced Feces Eating

Grotesquerie and eroticism continued to commingle on screen throughout the 1980s and 1990s, mostly through home video and early internet platforms. An especially intense contingent of splatter and smut creators came out of Germany, Japan, and Brazil, making works that were supposedly so disturbing that word of their existence spread further than the footage ever did.

Not all of these movies — genre flicks, experimental pornos, arthouse efforts, and honest-to-god crimes — were meant to be political. But poop, nudity, and xenophobia have a knack for inspiring major censorship panic regardless of the maker’s intent. Denying someone access to provocative art, even art that was meant to be viewed in public, feels like an invasion of privacy. That’s not only a political conflict by its very nature, but it’s also a great way to get a film free advertising. 

It’s not a direct line, but you can eventually connect the dots between the underground “video nasties” in the UK (shocking physical media artifacts that circulated in and around London decades earlier) to edgelord fads like the “2 Girls 1 Cup” video that swept online in 2007. Still, you’d expect to find more coprophagia in full-on horror movies made after 9/11 than you do. 

Mainstream “torture porn” franchises like “Saw” mostly haven’t touched the subject, while extreme genre auteur Takashi Miike made his mark on fecal film with “Visitor Q” (2001) through a poop scene that’s unforgettable but not edible. (Sigh. Look, this guy is having a sex with a corpse and she suddenly defecates all over him. You are reading this article. Leave if you want!)

With the help of IFC Films, Tom Six finally righted that wrong with “The Human Centipede” in 2009. The sporadically hysterical body horror — about a Nazi-coded German surgeon (Dieter Laser) who sews three kidnapping victims together, mouth-to-anus — got a limited theatrical release in the U.S. That was all “The Human Centipede” needed to become an epic trilogy, even as the nasty reputation of the “one digestive tract/dog training” movie kept most folks away. 

At a time when even the biggest scaredy cats were lapping up the details of “Final Destination” Wikipedia pages, Six created a steady font of sadistic depravity that was quietly self-respecting. “The First Sequence” does the concept right with sharp editing, distinct production design, and a visual comedy language that culminates in a killer twist: If the Human Centipede wants to escape, then it has to take the… stairs?! Not long after that, Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) — AKA “the middle piece,” AKA the unluckiest final girl in film history — is abandoned with a front, dead from suicide (Akihiro Kitamura), and a back, dead from blood poisoning (Ashlynn Yennie). 

Six should’ve walked away then, but the Dutch filmmaker came back with a vengeance in “The Full Sequence” (2011). The plot of the original movie made the director the subject of serious cinematic ire — Hollywood was having its own prudish panic as a kind of low-level backlash to the extremism of the aughts — and that first sequel delivered subtle commentary from Six about the uninformed audiences he thought got his work wrong. Shot in black and white, “The Full Sequence” ups the number of victims from three to 12 and follows a “Human Centipede” superfan (Laurence R. Harvey) as he fails to replicate the events of the first film. 

Boiled down to a thoughtless pervert by the public, Six became one. The sequel also adds more sexual violence and crushes the skull of a newborn baby, for no reason — producing the kind of movie cinephiles thought “The First Sequence” was without seeing it. Six gets in some decently fun licks by bringing Yennie back as herself; the actress (whose feet get shown a lot in the original) flies to her captor thinking she’s got an audition for a Tarantino movie. But the diminishing returns leave even that sparky world-building in desperate need of nutrients. 

Completing the math on his personal vivisection, Six came back with the third and final “Human Centipede” in 2015. Set inside a maximum-security prison with an insane warden (Dieter Laser, recast!) working toward a 500-person human centipede, “The Final Sequence” was almost universally panned by critics. When it was selected to play as a “secret screening” that year at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, the title was revealed and at least a third of the audience reportedly walked out. You know, upright.

Funny or Serious Coprophagia? Try the Poop Eater’s Turing Test!

There are funny moments in both “Salò” and “The Human Centipede,” but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would be willing to let you classify them as 100 percent comedies. Fecal foodies have appeared in lighter cinematic fare for decades, and if gross-out laughs are your thing, there is something amusing about watching a person put in what someone else just put out.

Still, it’s a dark subject and shock humor can be confusing. So, we’ve devised an easy way to tell if the shit scene you’re watching was meant to be giggle-worthy or gag-inducing — at its very core. I call it the Poop Eater’s Turing Test, and we’ll use the pool scene from “Caddyshack” (1980) as an interesting example of an edge case so you can try it out for yourself.

In this clip from Harold Ramis’ beloved sports comedy, a bunch of country-clubbers are taking a dip when a mysterious brown log appears in the waves. Mere seconds after a little girl screams out, “Doodie!,” chaos ensues. Later, a man in a hazmat suit is examining the contaminant. Wouldn’t you know? It’s Carl Spackler (Bill Murray), here to conduct our Poop Eater’s Turing Test.

Taking a big bite of the alleged turd, the greenskeeper announces, “It’s no big deal!” He then checks the rest of the drained oasis for a second Baby Ruth candy bar. A guy getting paid by the hour eating chlorinated faux shit for the bit? Talk about “Salò” Day — and that scene passes, for sure.

Have you’ve figured out the secret to Poop Eater’s Turing Test yet? Let’s do one more.

Throughout the “Terrifier” franchise, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) brutalizes his victims and routinely finger-paints around their corpses using his own shit. The evil entertainer has yet to force-feed or directly torture any of his unwitting audience members with excrement. But he did put a live rat inside of that one woman for “Terrifier 3,” and filmmaker Damien Leone’s sadistic franchise pretty much exists because people heard a different lady got carved from vagina to face in “Terrifer” (2016).

Accounting for the fact that I have personally called Art “the Buster Keaton of killer clowns,” do we think that the “Terrifier” movies should be categorized as comedies? Survey says, no! It does not pass the Poop Eater’s Turing Test because even left on the walls, that shit is what? HUMAN.

Animal Bowel Bites, from “Step Brothers” to “Anchorman” to “Scary Movie 2”

There’s no reason to think we’re headed for a poop-laden apocalypse like we might really be with A.I. (wait, hear me out, fecal “War Games“?!) — but the Poop Eater’s Turing Test is called that because, God forbid a character does end up eating shit onscreen, what the poop is made of narratively matters.

A similar joke to the pool moment from “Caddyshack” plays out in Kevin Smith’s “Mallrats” (1995) when the comedy combines chocolate-covered pretzels and human ass-sweat as a form of revenge. Tricking someone into unwittingly eating your butt perspiration through a sugary confection pushes the envelope on black comedy a bit, but the scene manages to stay funny by leaving full-blown human poop out of it.

Of course, if the Depp v. Heard trial taught us anything, it’s that there are infinite ways you could theoretically torture someone using animal poop. However, if the dung that comes out of a dog, cat, bird, or another critter with four legs and/or wings on screen, then it’s usually ingested for laughs.

Yes, these disgusting gags may require the more erudite among us to take some intellectual Imodium – but there’s a special place in hell for anyone who thinks a pack of children making Will Ferrell lick white dog shit at a public park in “Step Brothers” (2008) isn’t funny. Brennan knows he’s doing it, obviously, but he’s terrified of his pint-sized captors, and even reset in fascist Italy, that’s good comedy.

“Scary Movie 2” (2001) takes the cake for the most nauseating use of liquid animal shit — mixing bird crap and fresh mashed potatoes with an ableist gag that hasn’t aged well. In “American Wedding” (2003), Stifler (Sean William Scott) is, uh, “forced” to eat a fresh dog turd he’s just picked up using a candy wrapper to avoid an awkward social situation. Feces on film hit Ferrell before too, when “Anchorman: The Legend of Run Burgundy” (2004) made us ask if it was worse to eat cat shit or have your dog poop in your refrigerator.

There are exceptions to the Poop Eater’s Turing Test. The one that keeps coming to mind is the sex worker who takes a dump on the living room floor in Mila Kunis’ apartment on a dare in “Ted” (2012)? Still, the science mostly stands. Take it from Divine and the pals of Johnny Knoxville, who complicated the subject by showing the controversial act unsimulated.

“Pink Flamingos,” “Jackass,” and the (Weak) Argument for Using Real Shit on Movie Sets

You really, really, really should not eat shit — but the legendary John Waters and illustrious late drag queen Divine made the best case for practical poop with the revolutionary “Pink Flamingos” in 1972. The transgressive work of satire aimed to push past every boundary previously encountered by the Pope of Trash, and angel that she was, Divine ascended to the grueling task.

The dog shit scene is genuinely hard to take. You watch the turd come out of the pooch. Divine gets on her knees to scoop it and — well, yeah, then she pops it in her mouth. The feces contrast with her teeth in a way that inexplicably clashes with her eyeshadow, and the vignette is instantly burned in your brain. It’s like a bad memory that makes you laugh? Blurring the Poop Eater’s Turing Test with proof that at least one half of this mouth-to-anus fiasco is very much human, “Pink Flamingos” will forever be remembered as a faucet for Waters’ brilliant and polarizing artistic diarrhea.

The “Jackass” boys followed suit in the 2000s, completing a slew of stunts involving the feces. In the appropriately named “Jackass Number Two,” Dave England put on a straw hat and went out to a field with Three 6 Mafia to eat horse shit for $200. Commenting on the experience in real time, he proclaimed, “It’s dry.” The crew would later, uh, “milk” a horse and drink it in that same film. The TV and movie franchise remains home to one of the most beloved stunt casts ever formed. If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough — in sickness and in shit.

Minny’s Poop Pie from “The Help” (and, The Gaping Hole Only Porn Can Fill for Some Scatologists)

Leave it to the Oscar-winning Octavia Spencer to bring our shiny and textured history of cinematic coprophagia to a close. The gift that kept on giving and giving and giving (in a way I should really talk to my therapist about), “Salò” Day could come once a year and I’d never get bored. The psychology of these scenes and our reactions to them are fascinating, and at time when Americans could really use Pasolini’s perspective on revisionist history, “The Help” (2011) pushes out an all-time great poop-eating scene with fiery tenacity.

Minny’s Chocolate Pie — a devilish baked good with a stinky secret in the center — crystallizes a seriocomic canon that’s stretched all the way from “Salò” to “South Park.” Fed up with her racist employer, Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard), in the Jim Crow-era south, Black housemaid Minny (Spencer) serves her tormenter the seemingly tasty treat. Then, she declares victory, saying, “Eat my shit.”

Despite its success in the awards circuit, and the revelation that was and is Viola Davis, “The Help” is not remembered entirely fondly. It’s been criticized for its main event (a white savior narrative with Emma Stone) and reconsidered as an overly simplistic feel-good take on a societal problem that is far from fixed. And yet, Minny’s recipe for vengeance continues to bring film lovers joy.

Empathy is a strength, not a weakness — and it’s worth remembering that the libertines of “Salò” ultimately found a way to imprison themselves, too. Stuck in a vicious cycle of shit-fuck-eat-hurt, the fascist offenders and their young trainees manage to survive the events of the film, but we watch their souls depart their bodies in a kind of mesmerizing and profoundly emotional loop. Speaking with Men’s Health in 2022, three fetishists shared why poop turned them on, and though there was plenty of talk about dominance and submission, the main themes were absurdism and acceptance. No shit.

IndieWire’s ‘70s Week is presented by Bleecker Street’s “RELAY.” Riz Ahmed plays a world class “fixer” who specializes in brokering lucrative payoffs between corrupt corporations and the individuals who threaten their ruin. IndieWire calls “RELAY” “sharp, fun, and smartly entertaining from its first scene to its final twist, ‘RELAY’ is a modern paranoid thriller that harkens back to the genre’s ’70s heyday.” From director David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”) and also starring Lily James, in theaters August 22.