[Music]
Well I think any cook loves to hear "that's delicious"
but it means a lot more when the food is actually horrific.
It's a dead body. It's a lung. Maybe a roadkill rat...
[Music]
I'm Janice Poon
and I'm the food stylist you come to if you want a grizzly little something for your table.
What have I done?...
Roasted legs;
peking style whole bodies;
edible insects;
tiny organs for dead rats;
edible snails,
ooh space whales...
(raw of course).
Janice can cook up a mean severed head
but she's pretty much a jack-of-all-trades.
Just how many jobs have you had Janice?
First I was an art director in an agency...
then a caterer;
a cookbook author;
a graphic novelist;
a sculptor;
then a miniaturist;
couturier,
and uh writing... did I forget anything?
Now back to the juicy stuff.
Oh I love the reading part of the creative process.
Lay back on the sofa.
I read as much as possible.
I just do a quick sketch to communicate to everybody the look I'm going for and narrow the field.
The kitchen is really where the sorrow begins.
That's where everything that you thought was going to work out great...
doesn't...
and that is where you really start to think- well now what am I going to do?
You know it's kind of yummy...
Nothing like a little raw hamburger to get you going.
Hang on - did she just eat raw meat?
As a food stylist I get all kinds of requests from actors who have dietary restrictions.
I didn't expect, however, to get one from a vampire queen who wouldn't eat meat.
What I used was essentially sweet potato.
That doesn't look like meat.
Hmm... maybe I need something to make it more gummy.
I'll put a bunch of glutinous flour in.
Well that's a bit yellow for meat isn't it? So I'll put in some beets.
After a couple minutes of the microwave spinning around, what it needs is a little tiny flax of fat.
I use chopped up rice and just plough that stuff in, oil, and that's really going to make it look visceral.
Surely that's not edible?
It's not just edible... It's delicious.
Any more tips and tricks?
Well, one little food item that we have in a lot of horror movies is corn syrup.
Corn syrup with food colouring in it to make it look like blood.
Buckets and buckets and buckets of this stuff get used for TV shows and you just, like, pour it on and lick it off.
I would say the duct tape of food styling is oil
because a little slick of oil is going to make anything look as if it just freshly cooked or it's just juicy and delicious.
With fake mold if you want it to be edible you have to use Dutch processed cocoa, which is a black powder,
spirulina powder, icing sugar, and white food colouring.
You can dust them on your food and it'll look just like mold. Furry but yummy.
Sometimes I use toothpaste because it comes in a tube and you just throw it in your bag and that's little blobs of mold
but people don't like to eat a lot of toothpaste so there you go.
Some of Janice's most gruesome dishes feature in the TV show Hannibal.
When I looked at the first Hannibal script I thought - wow these people are crazy.
Mads was the most adventurous.
He was kind of annoyed with me the first day when I didn't serve up real lung, real brain and real liver...
But then I knew he was going to be an adventurous eater so it all cut loose from there.
Our final scene was to be Bedelia's dining on her own leg.
The leg was the old go-to pork.
It had a marrow bone at the thigh end and a lamb shank at the ankle end.
I felt I had to apologize to Gillian and I said "Gillian I'm sorry I made the leg so big.
If I had made it the size of your leg it wouldn't have looked as impressive."
She did say, "oh that's beautiful", which is what you really want. She didn't say "oh my leg looks good."
[Laughter]
Any final words of wisdom, Janice?
Part of storytelling, of course, is that tension.
Especially with horror where so many of the characters are, psychically, on a knife's edge.
You want your food to be on a knife's edge too.
You want it to teeter.
Is it horrible?
Is it delicious?
No. It's horrible and delicious.