Note: This story contains spoilers from “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” Episode 2
Don’t eat anything during the first two episodes of “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.” Your stomach will thank you.
Every season of “Monster” is filled with horrific moments, whether they be grisly murders via power tools or furniture made of human skin. But you don’t really expect “Monster” to make fart and poop jokes. Yet that’s exactly what happens in the most memorable dinner scene of the season.
What’s most shocking about this meal isn’t that Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan and Max Winkler put this stomach-turning scene on screen. It’s that this gross-out moment is based on real life.
Did the Borden family really get sick?
As shocking as the dinner scene may be, it’s actually based in reality.
Two days before Abby and Andrew Borden were murdered, the married couple became violently ill. Andrew’s brother-in-law John V. Morse also got sick as did the family’s live-in maid Bridget Sullivan. The illness was so severe that Abby Borden consulted a doctor about the incident the following morning and expressed her fear that someone had poisoned the family.
Later, doctors and the authorities traced the sickness to a swordfish and mutton broth that had been made days earlier and was improperly stored in a pantry.
Rumors emerged that the sickness was actually an attempt from Lizzie Borden to poison her family. A pharmacist testified during the trial that she attempted to buy prussic acid at his drug store, claiming she needed the chemical to clean a seal-skin cape. Those who believed Lizzie was guilty pointed to that attempted purchase as part of her murder attempt. But the prussic acid story was ruled to be irrelevant to the case.
How the dinner scene was filmed
Of course, Abby and Andrew Borden’s food poisoning isn’t an accident in the Netflix series. The incident emerges as Lizzie (Ella Beatty) and Bridget’s (Vicky Krieps) first attempt at killing Lizzie’s father and stepmother. But in the series, swordfish and mutton broth isn’t the culprit but rather oysters that Bridget knows are deadly.
The dinner scene in “Strong Kitty” is graphic to say the least. After Abby (Rebecca Hall) and Andrew (Charlie Hunnam) eat several oysters, Abby falls quiet. Seconds later she projectile vomits a stream of orange sick, setting off a chorus of seemingly endless vomit and explosive diarrhea.
It’s a lot. And that degree of gross out humor was very much intentional.
“The gold standard for this is will always be ‘Triangle of Sadness. We will never be as good as ‘Triangle of Sadness,’” director Max Winkler said wistfully, referring to the moment in Ruben Östlund’s black comedy when a fine dinner on a yacht is ruined when the guests fall ill to food poisoning and seasickness.
Preparing for the “Monster” dinner scene required several tests as the crew figured out how to execute the scene with practical effects. Both Hall and Hunnam wore tubes that the prop team injected with a sickly orange liquid.
“Rebecca has a very hard time being around vomiting and said very early that she is inclined to vomit if she’s around it. So that was my biggest fear, protecting Rebecca,” Winkler said. “Charlie was a champion for me. Charlie ate the oysters that were canned because we needed them to be super big. Charlie was a hero that day, but so was Rebecca.”
The team did a dry run before running through the real scene, fake vomit and all.
“That was a very messy, difficult day, but I am very pleased with how it turned out. Jack Price — our editor on that episode — was incredible in finding the musicality of it all,” Winkler said.
Musicality is a great descriptor of the scene. Just when you think it couldn’t go on for a second longer, the vomiting and farting pick up steam, launching a new wave of sickness. Winkler agreed that the scene was almost like “South Park” in its juvenile humor, as well as in the way it expertly plays the joke to death only to find new life in its vulgarity.
“A complete ‘South Park’ moment is when Charlie shits himself, and we literally zoom into his trousers. That is beyond ‘South Park,’” Winkler said, noting that he’s “obsessed” with Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s show.
“Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” is now streaming on Netflix.
