Page 37 - AVN September 2023

“It’s an allegory for women’s repressed sexuality...”
-Lulu Chu
While the title might at first call to mind a certain people-devouring plant-thing from Little Shop of Horrors, Ricky Greenwood’s new splatter-core howl-a-thon Feed Me owes much more to another piece of cheeky fright cinema: the 2007 freakshow parable Teeth.
“It goes back to when we did the movie Blue Moon Rising,” Greenwood explained during a break on the set of the five-day shoot for Feed Me in an unassuming Porn Valley house-turned-studio. “[AVN Award-winning makeup artist] Alexxx Moon was on set with me, it was the first time we worked together, and we were joking around about, ‘[What if] a pussy was talking and having teeth and stuff?’ We were just talking about it ... I tried searching people and studios to see if they’d be interested, obviously they didn’t want to do it, nobody was biting on it.”
Pun intended? Not quite sure, but we digress.
“So I finally find an angle that was not just a stupid concept of a pussy talking and having teeth, but more meat around it,” he continued. “The writer, Maddy [Barton], she was like, ‘Oh, maybe we can go with something more like about the male gaze, and that’s the picture that she has in her mind, her sexual desire that she sees as innocent, it can be the monster—we put some meat around the bone and it became a more interesting story. This character is discovering herself sexually, and we don’t know if she really have a monster inside of her or not, maybe this is what she’s picturing or it’s what society is telling her, that her sexuality is bad or not good.”
The character in question, Sally, is portrayed by Lulu Chu, who told us over her lunch prior to the girl/girl scene she’d be shooting shortly with September Reign, “I was really excited when I heard about the premise. It seemed really different, and I’ve always been into horror stuff. My character is trying to discover her sexuality, and her boyfriend’s disappointing her, her mom is very religious, so there’s not a lot of talk about sex, and the monster just kind of starts it all ... it’s like, you’re not being satisfied, you need something more.
“It’s an allegory for women’s repressed sexuality,” she went on, “which really spoke home to me, because I grew up very Catholic. My parents never even had a sex talk with me. I had to learn on the internet and in public school. So I really related to the role. And then to prepare, I watched a lot of Exorcist clips.”
Yep, the horror influences keep on coming ... in fact, Chu describes Feed Me as “Teeth meets Jennifer’s Body meets It Follows.” And Greenwood adds, “You also have Bad Brains ... like the monster that comes out looks like the Bad Brains monster.”
ON THE SET | 9.23 | AVN.COM 37