40 Years After The Stuff, Enough Is Still Never Enough

At the nexus between horror cinema and the commercial, capitalistic essence of American day-to-day life, there exists a relatively underexplored subject matter for the genre. We live in a society where the levers of consumer protection–the government agencies and regulators meant to man the walls between order and chaos–can increasingly be moved by the determined application of either the corporate dollar bill or (and this is painfully timely) pure, stark ignorance. Look at our government health agencies, now manned by ideological zealots who don’t believe in many of the basic building blocks of 21st century medicine. Look at our regulatory agencies as they cut inspection standards for the meat we eat every day, in the name of corporate profits. When these agencies tell you that a new snack food is a miracle of taste and nutrition, do you really believe them? Is there any way to know what we’re putting in our bodies on a daily basis, or how it might be affecting us? These are thoroughly modern concerns, currently the stuff of splashy headlines in 2025, but director Larry Cohen was already satirizing the same governmental apathy four decades ago when his gloopy cult horror classic The Stuff surged into theaters in June of 1985. Underappreciated, prescient and morbidly entertaining, The Stuff rings true in any era.

Those qualities make it representative of what we think of as a “Larry Cohen film,” in many respects. A master of urban satire with a penchant for poking wasps nests and attaching his films to hot button social issues, even as they structure themselves around oddball miscreants on the fringes of polite society, Cohen’s works included the likes of 1974 killer baby schlock horror It’s Alive and the deranged fusion of monster film and police procedural known as 1982’s Q: The Winged Serpent, which depicts a flying Aztec god on the loose in New York City, chomping the skulls of unwitting passerby. The latter stars the performer who would ultimately be Cohen’s muse: Actor Michael Moriarty, playing a skeezy opportunist (and aspiring jazz pianist?) who discovers where the titular monster is nesting and then attempts to parlay that information into an extortionate payday from NYC officials. In the twitchy, beguilingly strange Moriarty, Cohen seemed to find the man who could bring to life his uniquely grimy, street-level vision of human fallibility. So why not bring him back for 1985’s The Stuff, the ultimate consumerist critique of the era, predating the likes of John Carpenter’s more enduringly famous They Live by a full three years?

The Stuff imagines a nation with a soul rapidly corrupted not by politics, or social upheaval, but by innocent, comforting junk food quite literally eating us from the inside out. Who created this miraculous new snack treat? Would you believe that it’s simply found in the film’s opening moments by construction workers who discover it bubbling up from the ground? Later implied to be extraterrestrial in origin, it must conservatively rank as one of the most boldly stupid things that any cinematic character has ever done for the guy who first finds The Stuff to react to his new discovery by dipping a finger in it and popping the white mystery ooze into his mouth. “It’s sweet!”, he proclaims, which is just about the only description we ever receive in Cohen’s film of how exactly The Stuff might taste. Flash forward to a few months later, and The Stuff has gone into mass commercial manufacture, with a seemingly inexhaustible supply scooped up from the ground and shipped off around the globe, where it has decimated worldwide demand for ice cream, motivating titans of corporate junk food manufacturing to hire private detective/soldier of fortune David “Mo” Rutherford (Moriarty) to track down the secret behind the new culinary sensation. We tag along as “Mo” untangles the subsequent web of addiction, mind control and corporate malfeasance. You know it’s a sophisticated conspiracy, because at one point someone tries to run him down on the streets of New York in a truck emblazoned with a huge, not at all suspicious The Stuff logo.

One of the most unnerving things, when you watch The Stuff, is how absolutely vague the titular product ultimately is; how homogenous and undefined. It’s a food product, but no one in the film consumes it like we would a food product. It’s always seemingly shoveled straight out of the carton into people’s mouths. Toppings? No one adulterates The Stuff with any other flavor or texture, nor prepares it in any kind of aesthetically pleasing way. There are no alternate varieties of The Stuff; no line extensions to broaden its appeal. A chocolate version? Get the fuck out of here. Roadside stands sell The Stuff, and only The Stuff, with no accompaniments. Its addicting properties are immediately clear, but no one seems to mind–instead, the insatiable desire for The Stuff doubles as its iconic jingle and theme song: “Enough is never enough.”

The Stuff, ultimately, is more than just nefariously addictive: It’s also alive, an entity that seems to share something like a hive consciousness. People who consume The Stuff and become addicted to it–Mo Rutherford quickly terms them “Stuffies”–are compelled to eat more and more, while evangelizing on the virtues of it (low in calories!) to others, coercing them to try it. Eventually, when The Stuff no longer has any use for its hosts, it escapes from the body in hideous fashion through the mouth, moving under its own power and leaving behind a used-up husk. And it seems to take special notice of those like the young boy Jason (Scott Bloom), who are equipped with the proper level of paranoia and are weirded out by seeing their family become obsessed over the course of a few days with eating carton after cartoon of paste-like ooze. The creepiest portions of The Stuff are from this boy’s perspective, as his family attempts to guilt and shame him into joining them; a more emotionally coercive spin on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, meets The Blob. When he insists that The Stuff is alive, that he’s seen it moving, his grinning Stuffie father is ready with a quick rationalization: “Microorganisms are good for us, Jason. They kill the bad things inside us.” Chatting between themselves, Jason’s older brother remarks that now that he’s been eating The Stuff, “I never get tired anymore.” His father warmly replies: “None of us get tired, now that we’re eating properly.” Being a Stuffie is clearly bliss!

Like so many Larry Cohen features, The Stuff teeters between incisive and ridiculous, creepy and absurd–never more so than in its visual FX, with the film’s most iconic image being the disturbingly garish transformation sequences, when The Stuff announces its presence and erupts out of a Stuffie. Its dialogue is similarly blunt, Cohen apparently not wanting to risk any chance of his audience failing to understand what they’re seeing: Mo Rutherford is introduced through a conversation between the various junk food captains of industry, one of whom actually says “Are you sure we want to get mixed up with INDUSTRIAL SPIES?” Young boy Jason (who looks like he’s about 8) is eventually saved from his pod people family by Rutherford, and rather than dumping the kid off in some safe locale, the “industrial spy” and his cohort simply bring the child around everywhere with them for the rest of the film–including on climactic military missions where guys with machine guns are riddling Stuffie zombies with bullets in a pitched battle. And there’s Jason, scampering around in the midst of it all. It’s pure Cohen fever dream material, and even after The Stuff is effectively defeated, it’s never mentioned what happens to all of the people who were addicted to/taken over by the substance. Are they all killed off in a global purge? Has Jason been orphaned? Cohen doesn’t bother to think much further than the immediate end of his satirical point.

In fact, of all the material in The Stuff that arguably reads as most dated now, 40 years later, the most painfully idealistic of concepts is probably that a simple news exposé or demonstration of The Stuff’s harmful effects would successfully dissuade anyone from consuming or defending it. We now live in a society that is so hopelessly, fatally partisan in every aspect of our behavior that if a prominent politician or newscaster attempted to condemn The Stuff on health grounds, polarized members of the opposite party would immediately rally around and conspicuously increase their consumption of it out of pure spite and knee-jerk partisan reaction. “Don’t tell me that I shouldn’t consume the alien parasite,” they would no doubt screech. “Liberty means surrendering yourself to The Stuff.” Half of the country would be submerging themselves in massive vats of The Stuff if they thought that doing so would somehow trigger the libs.

This is perhaps the deepest essence of horror in returning to The Stuff now, four decades later–knowing that Larry Cohen would have contemporarily seen himself as a bitter cynic, but simultaneously recognizing that even what qualified as a cynic in 1985 still seems somehow idealistic to us today. Cohen didn’t see humanity as beyond saving. In the end, mankind overcomes The Stuff in Cohen’s film because they’re able to process new information, to reset their opinions, to discard their beliefs and think critically when the warning klaxons sound. They’re able to get past the propaganda; past the wall-to-wall advertising; past the corrupt politicians to embrace the truth, and embrace their neighbors once again. Now, can you imagine any issue that could so unite Americans as a bloc in 2025? Or would we instead see Robert F. Kennedy on a 24/7 loop on Fox News, extolling the virtues of The Stuff as an alternative to childhood vaccinations?

For the sake of the species, it’s probably best that the worst we have to worry about for now are celebrity collaboration Oreo flavors.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.