The Little Shop of Horrors is Dark Even For a Musical About a Killer Plant and the Depths of Human Misery

I love this fucked up musical.

I have seen The Little Shop of Horrors probably five or six times over a period of decades. I should be VERY familiar with it yet it still manages to surprise me. Watching the cult musical in 2023 I’m struck by how unabashedly filthy and dark it is.

I’m not entirely sure why that would come as a surprise. The Little Shop of Horrors is, after all, a musical about an impoverished orphan hopelessly in love with a woman being viciously abused by her psychotic dentist boyfriend who finds a way out of his miserable lot in life when he begins feeding bodies to an evil plant from outer space.

That’s pretty damn dark in a way that is true to Roger Corman’s non-musical original, which is nearly as famous for being filmed in two days and one night as it is for inspiring one of the most beloved musicals of the 1980s.

Frank Oz has said that he set out to make everything as transparently cheap and phony as possible. He didn’t want to create the illusion of reality; instead he wanted audiences to know that they were watching actors on a set, not people in the real world.

When plays of any stripe are adapted for the big screen there’s pressure to hide their theatrical roots and make adaptations as cinematic as possible, generally by opening up the story and having lots of different locations in order to make audiences forget that what they’re watching initially took place on a stage.

With the exception of fantasy sequences and a dentist’s office pretty much all of The Little Shop of Horrors takes place on the same street. In that respect The Little Shop of Horrors feels like the grown-up version of Sesame Street that The Happytime Murders desperately wanted to be.

Only instead of kindly Mr. Hooper we get Mushnik, a greedy sadist. Instead of Big Bird, Grover and Cookie Monster this street is perpetually dark and dirty and populated by hobos, sex workers, dope pushers and other denizens of the underworld.

Of course Sesame Street was wonderfully gritty during its 1970s prime. You really got the sense that if the camera pushed in any further it would show teenagers smoking the fattest blunt you’ve ever seen.

Oz’s strategy was finally in the underdog, penny-pinching spirit of early Roger Corman productions, where everything was done on the cheap and it’s MUCH cheaper to film everything on the same set, particularly if it’s a set you’ve used before.

That was the case with The Little Shop of Horrors, which was filmed on the sets for Bucket of Blood, another pitch-black comedy with a killer premise, literally and figuratively.

Being a savvy sort, Oz understood that all he had to do was transport the theatrical experience of The Little Shop of Horrors to the big screen in order to create an experience that wasn’t just satisfying; it’s damn near transcendent.

The Little Shop of Horrors doesn’t just take place on any street. It takes place on skid row, a hellscape of poverty, despair and abuse. It’s a grim dystopia where the sun never shines, people never smile and there’s never cause for hope or optimism.

Rick Moranis is perfectly typecast as sad sack protagonist Seymour Krelborn. He’s an orphan who was taken in by plant shop owner Mushnik (Vincent Gardenia, in a role Oz wanted Marlon Brando for) primarily as a source of free labor. The put-upon schlemiel’s tragicomic existence revolves around his desperate crush on Audrey (Ellen Greene), a coworker in an abusive relationship with Orin Scrivello D.D.S. (Steve Martin).

The deranged dentist’s vicious physical and psychological abuse is played entirely for laughs. That’s not unusual for a very dark comedy. The essence of dark comedy, after all, involves finding the humor in bleak subject matter and the ugliness of humanity and our unfortunate urges.

That’s the weird duality of The Little Shop of Horrors. It has its roots in the transgressive naughtiness of Roger Corman exploitation movies and Off-Broadway camp but it’s also a PG-13 comedy with a plethora of kiddie favorites in the cast and a super cool singing plant puppet no child could possibly resist.

How fucking amazing is Audrey II? Levi Stubbs of The Four Tops is a blast as a mean green mother from outer space and the puppet itself is a thing of beauty.

That’s also the essence of PG-13. It’s not quite adult. It’s not entirely family friendly. Instead it occupies a weird limbo. The Little Shop of Horrors pushes the PG-13 very hard, both in terms of bad taste gags about its vulnerable female lead getting pummeled by her laughing gas-addicted boyfriend and other very adult darkness.

Oz and screenwriter Howard Ashman got away with murder, most notably in Bill Murray’s famous cameo. Murray doesn’t just play his pain-loving masochist as someone who likes pain or even someone who gets off on pain so much as he plays him as someone who is literally having a series of overpowering orgasms from Steve Martin’s mortified tooth doctor, who does not like the idea of anyone getting off on pain other than himself.

If I were the ratings board or the studio I might have asked Oz if maybe they could skip the scene where a masochist appears to be jizzing voluminous buckets he’s so unbelievably turned on by dental pain but that scene made it into the movie, as do many other extremely family-unfriendly scenes, lines, gags and double entendres.

Yes, life is hopeless at the plant store until a glimmer of light pierces the darkness in the form of a strange and unusual plant that Seymour bought and is patiently nurturing. The nifty plant turns around the shop’s fortune. A previously empty business now has more customers than it can handle.

Acquiring and nurturing this Venus Man Trap from Outer Space transforms Seymour from hero to zero, from a loser with nothing going for him to a winner with a plant that obsesses the general public like no plant before or since.

Yet no matter how preposterously famous and successful Seymour becomes he never leaves that grungy little shop on skid row, nor does the film. It’s so committed to being dark, dirty and depressing that it maintains the same claustrophobic air. That’s a brilliant running gag I’d never noticed before.

The plant, named Audrey II after Seymour’s crush, makes Seymour’s dreams come true, but at a steep cost. Audrey II feeds on blood. When it gets tired of the modest droplets Seymour is feeding from his own body it angrily demands sacrifices.

Thankfully Seymour can think of at least one person whose violent death could only benefit humanity and who happens to also be his romantic rival: Martin’s sadist, who is like Frank Booth of Blue Velvet but more psychotic and violent.

Apparently in the original cut of The Little Shop of Horrors the dentist’s office was filthier and splattered with blood but audiences for, again, a dark comedy about a murderous plant and the hideousness of mankind, found it too depressing and distracting.

Seymour threatens the dentist with a gun but he dies before his rival can pull the trigger. That’s no great loss. His boss is next to go. Audrey II has a bottomless hunger to go with his bottomless capacity for destruction but he initially acts out Seymour’s will by giving him a seemingly ideal new life and then by giving him an excuse to kill people he wants dead.

Like all Faustian bargains, Seymour’s pact with Audrey II soon goes south. Audrey II wants to run amok and conquer this stupid planet with all of its puny man-animals but Seymour climactically shocks him.

This ending is decidedly different than the one Oz initially envisioned. In the Director’s Cut Audrey II succeeds in destroying Earth in a glorious climax as wonderfully dark and misanthropic as everything that comes before it.

The problem was that audiences liked Seymour and Audrey. They rooted for them. They were invested in their poignant little dreams. They didn’t want them to die along with the rest of humanity: they wanted a happy ending, for them to end up somewhere that’s green.

So Oz grudgingly gave audiences a happy ending that’s a staggering anti-climax. Ashman wrote Stanley and Audrey as mean-spirited caricatures of a put-upon nerd and sad sexpot respectively but Moranis and Greene turned them into real people with real dreams and real pathos.

But I’m not writing about The Little Shop of Horrors because of Moranis. I’m writing about it because James Belushi is in it and I’m writing up all his movies for this newsletter.

The lesser Belushi pops up at the end as a smooth talker who interrupts Seymour and Audrey’s singing with an offer to license Audrey II and spread its malevolent will all over the world.

It’s a wonderfully stylized performance, campy and fun. Oz was the perfect choice to direct The Little Shop of Horrors but I could definitely see John Waters directing it as well. Its combination of warmth and misanthropy feels very Waters, as does its camp naughtiness.

Belushi fits right in but he only got the gig after audiences and the studio nixed the original ending and the great Paul Dooley, who played the role originally, was unavailable.

So if you see the Director’s Cut, which is preferable, you get Dooley and if you go with the original you get Belushi.

That’s one more reason to watch the Director’s Cut but if the theatrical version is watered down but still packs a potent punch.

I was let down by Trading Places, the last James Belushi/Frank Oz collaboration I wrote about for this project but The Little Shop of Horrors holds up beautifully. It’s a nasty piece of work that’s also strangely beautiful and touching in spite of itself.

Up next: Jumping Jack Flash (which rumor has it is a gas, gas, gas)