Writer-director Emily Lawson knows that the title of her award-winning short film “Man Eating Pussy” is “evocative, even profane.”
“SXSW used an asterisk,” says Lawson of the 12-minute film, which won the SXSW Midnight Short Special Jury Award at this year’s festival.
The film centers on an encounter between sex worker Kitty (Grace Glowicki) and her john, Freddie (Julian Richings), a man seeking a unique experience at the end of his life. If audiences think there’s not much left to the imagination with a title like “Man Eating Pussy”after reading the premise, they’d be wrong.
The film’s first surprise: Kitty’s face is a vulva. Or, as Lawson puts it, she’s “the literal personification of pussy.”
“She’s as much an object visually as you could make a female character – the personification of female objectification, but she’s not that,” says Lawson.
Kitty’s appearance thwarts the horror convention that female characters are merely objects that suffer for others’ enjoyment. As an actor who also performs in many horror films, Lawson wanted to provide a contrast to the “crying and screaming and dying” she experienced on a lot of horror sets.
“The idea of making a very different horror film, perhaps even making something that wore the skin of a horror film — that’s a very horror way to put it — that works on the aesthetics of body horror, but treats its female characters in a very different way… that was really exciting to me,” says Lawson.
Emily Lawson on Creating Kitty for ‘Man Eating Pussy’
One reason this film was made in the first place was due to initial R&D funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.
“If you pitch people an idea about a woman who has a vulva for a face, the first thing they’re going to say to you is, ‘I can’t see it. I don’t think it’s possible.’ So you have to prove that that’s possible,” says Lawson.
Lawson knew talented prosthetic designers who specialize in making the impossible possible. Having worked with prosthetics designer Monica Pavez on a previous horror film, she reached out to her and Alexandra Anger of Black Spot FX to gauge interest in working on the film. Pavez and Anger worked on David Cronenberg’s films Crimes of the Future and The Shrouds, as well as the TV shows Slasher and The Last of Us and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, among other credits.
“If you’re going to someone to work on something that is anatomical in nature, visceral, highly tactile. It’s probably not a bad idea to work with a team that have cut their teeth working on Cronenberg films,” comments Lawson.
Lawson remembers presenting the team with her initial model draft, which included a live casting of a vulva attached to an armature. Pavez took the idea and ran with it, creating many iterations of Kitty’s vulva-head. She explored both floral and monstrous designs before arriving at the version seen in the film.
“Your brain looks at the prosthetic and it keeps wanting to map a face onto it, like it vacillates between, like, ‘That’s an object/that’s a face,’” says Lawson. “It’s got a really strange uncanny aspect to it.”
After the design was settled, accommodations had to be made for Glowicki, who wore the prosthetic as Kitty. Lawson explains that the original prototype of the prosthetic placed a lot of weight on Glowicki’s neck and encased her in silicone, leaving her unable to see or hear, and only a small space to breathe through. Lawson wanted to ensure Glowicki’s comfort as she performed while wearing the prosthetic.
The finalized design of Kitty’s face prosthetic included a harness to take weight off Glowicki’s neck, along with pieces that easily removed from the face with magnetic closures for visibility and airflow.
“It felt super essential, in the spirit of treating female characters in horror films differently, to make sure that that was comfortable for her to wear in performance,” says Lawson.
The final prosthetic assembly was composed of thin silicone wearable pieces to allow for easy, naturalistic movement, lubricating silicone labial folds, and an animatronic clitoris “eye” that could blink at different speeds.
Kitty’s lines during the film are mapped to movements of the inner labia, which were animated in post by Sayer VFX with Scott Riopelle as VFX supervisor, who had worked on Crimson Peak and The Boys. Lawson says her film couldn’t have been made without the support of the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, and the National Film Board of Canada, and an equipment grant from Panavision New Filmmaker Program.
“I am so deeply grateful,” says Lawson. “It’s still kind of wild to me that all of those funding bodies got on board with this very strange, transgressive film.”
Lawson hopes that audiences walk out with a thoughtful perspective on Kitty and even what it means to be a woman.
“We like to compartmentalize women. We like to say that one’s for sex, and that one’s a mother and caretaker, and that one is, you know, an innocent one that will be pedestaled, but Kitty is kind of all of those things in one,” says Lawson.
“By allowing an audience to contemplate all of those things in tension, all of those contradictions, that’s her as a character, and that’s kind of all women as characters,” she adds. “These facets of womanhood are not separate. They’re inherent to the complexity of what it is to be a woman in the world.”
Main image: “Man Eating Pussy,” courtesy of the filmmaker.
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