Garden and City in Little Shop of Horrors
Hollywood has a history of swapping tragic endings for happy ones based upon the reaction of test audiences. Perhaps the most spectacular example is the 1986 movie adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors, whose original ending was so sinister and disturbing that it remained unseen for decades and subsequently became the stuff of legend. Yet this musical really does require two endings, the comic and the tragic, because its conniving, carnivorous plant has biblical roots.
The protagonist, a clumsy flower shop employee named Seymour Krelborne, winds up selling his soul for love and riches to a plant that requires a steady diet of human flesh and blood in order to grow.
In the original 1960 film—a low budget, farcical dark comedy which was famously shot in two days—Seymour stumbles his way into murder accidentally. The stage show, the first big hit for Howard Ashman and Alan Menken of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast fame, takes on the theme of the story of Faust more explicitly.1
But the 1986 film version of the musical is far more sympathetic to Seymour. The voracious—but initially helpless—alien plant itself is made the villain of the piece rather than merely an enabler of human greed and lust. Even the stage musical number “The Meek Shall Inherit,” a song during which Seymour deliberates over his Faustian pact, was actually staged and filmed but cut out early on, and the moral of the tale was greatly obscured.
Choose Your Own Ending
Since Seymour is painted as a victim of society and circumstance rather than as a spineless coward who has no moral compass, an element of hope is introduced and the audience grows attached to him. Instead of condemning his clumsy pursuit of love and fame at the expense of others, he is a hapless antihero whom viewers begin to root for. So, when Seymour finally gets his just desserts, as he did in the original comedy, it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Test audiences found it unpalatable and the final scores were abysmal. Director Frank Oz later recalled:
For every musical number there was applause, they loved it, it was just fantastic—until we killed our two leads. And then the theater became a refrigerator, an ice box. It was awful… Howard and I knew what we had to do: We had to cut that ending and make it a happy ending, or a satisfying ending. We didn’t want to, but we understood they couldn’t release it with that kind of a reaction. Audiences loved the two leads so much that when we killed them, they felt bereft.
Oz also claimed that audiences became far more emotionally attached to Seymour and Audrey than they did during the stage version because cinema allows close ups of the characters’ faces. This was compounded in the cinematic portrayal of their respective deaths, which is far more excruciating and brutal than could be technically achieved—and perhaps legally permitted—on stage.
The conclusion was quickly reworked with some new footage and some clever cutting. Seymour and his new girlfriend Audrey still end up “Somewhere That’s Green,” but instead of the digestive tract of a smooth-talking, saber-toothed, carnivorous pot plant, it is an adorable 1950s suburban bungalow sporting immaculate lawns.
Many fans despised the tacked-on Hollywood ending, but as producer David Geffen had said right from the start, “You can’t kill your leads.”
Despite the fact that the final musical number—a spectacular sequence in which giant plants take over New York City in a terrifying orgy of demolition—cost one fifth of the film’s total budget, the original tragic ending was scrapped. It was not reconstructed until 2012 for release on a single disk along with the theatrical version. This allows the viewer to choose between comedy and tragedy, life or death, for Seymour and Audrey.
Yet the stage musical did manage to be both comedy and tragedy, and this brings us to a consideration of the two-fold nature of redemption—blessing and cursing—as it is expressed in the Bible.
Kill the Plant or Keep the Girl
The strange plant in the window of a struggling flower shop on skid row attracts so much interest—and business—that Seymour is willing to feed it few drops of his own blood. After all, his boss, Mr Mushnik, asked him to keep it healthy. Or was that a threat?
But then it starts talking, demanding, and promising. Oh, and singing. The plant begins as a conflation of the Edenic garden-and-serpent but quickly matures into an established Cainite city-and-dragon. Even worse, like King Lamech, the plant brazenly defends—in verse—its bloodlust as a just enactment of righteous indignation.
If you wanna be profound,
if you really gotta justify,
take a breath and look around,
a lot of folks deserve to die!
As it is with sin, what begins as a private appeasement soon develops into an insatiable living hell that swallows people whole. In both versions, Audrey winds up in the razored gob of Audrey II (the plant), dressed in virginal white, and is rescued by Seymour. However, in the original, she dies and he gives her back to the plant. Seymour soon follows, voluntarily, but this skid row Adam and Eve are only the firstfruits of a greater, and grimmer, “harvest.”
The plants are subsequently marketed across America by greedy retailers, presumably to a nation of people who, like Seymour, are willing to shed blood behind closed doors in order to climb the social ladder. This leads to an entire gang of colossal, green-leafed, guffawing monsters who terrorize and vandalize New York, all to a catchy song called “Don’t Feed The Plants.” As in Genesis, the sin in the Garden led to murder in the Land and finally to the destruction of the World.
Hold your hat and hang on to your soul.
Something’s coming to eat the world whole.
If we fight it we’ve still got a chance.
But whatever they offer you,
Don’t feed the plants!
The difference between this version of Little Shop of Horrors and the book of Genesis is that Adam and Eve did not die immediately for their sin. It was atoned for, so there was a promise of hope. Even the Great Flood was not final, with Noah’s family blessed in the eye of the curse. More specifically, in the ascension offering and later rites, this atoning act gradually became a more and more obvious promise of resurrection and ascension. And this is where, strangely, the off-broadway musical got things right.
On stage, Seymour and Audrey are consumed by the plant, but from the blood red foliage of the beast sprout the faces of all those who have been consumed. It is they who, from the grave, sing the final number as a warning, much like the rich man who had despised Lazarus. Moreover, the audience is able to celebrate with the living and the dead when the actors appear on stage to take a bow. In a theatrical production, as it is in the Bible, death, no matter how tragic, is not really final. The Bible is ultimately a comedy. Peter Leithart writes:
Ancient wisdom was tragic wisdom. It was the wisdom of the Stoic who had learned not to expect too much, who had adjusted himself to the grim realities of Murphy’s Law, who realized that history, like the individual’s life, was a sometimes slow, sometimes rapid but always inexorable progress toward death. Wisdom involved disciplining, chastening, and controlling hope, if not its surgical removal. Hope was a youthful and charming thing, but had to give way to the grim realism of age…
Against the classical nostalgia for a golden age lost and unlikely to be revived, the Bible, beginning with the prophets of Israel and continuing into the New Testament, holds out the promise of a future age of glory, peace, justice, and abundance. The last state is not worse than the first. In every way, the last state is superior to the first, and infinitely superior to the painful evils of the ages between first and last… The New Testament turns the perspective of the Hebrew prophets into a framework for the whole of human history.2
The Little Book
The book of Revelation is a replay of the events in Eden, however, not only is it a tragicomic finale, it was also written to be sung. The prophecy predicts the imminent end of Old Covenant history now that the offenses of the arche-typical individuals at the beginning of the Bible have come to full term as institutions.
Adam, the original Faust, has become the False Prophet, the kingdom of the Herods willing to sell its soul.
Eve has been offered to the serpent and is now fully corrupted, a false church, Jerusalem as a whore willing to slay her true sons, the apostolic prophets.
The serpent is the beast from the Sea, Neronic Rome, promising kingdom, power, glory, and blessing to the Man and the Woman even while it plots their deaths.
At His ascension, Jesus opens the New Covenant scroll. The four gospels ride out as royal decrees carried by swift horsemen. They eventually lead to the culmination of the apostolic witness against the old world order and its blood sacrifices. To finish the process, Christ gives a portion of that scroll, a “little book” to John. He is no longer to merely listen (a priestly act), or write (a kingly act), but to speak a sevenfold thunder (a prophetic act) as the final warning, the last trumpet against this Jewish Jericho.
Under Jesus’ rule in heaven, the Old Covenant comes to an end, and Josephus recorded for us the barbarity of this event as it unfolded on earth. The Land and the womb were rendered rootless and fruitless.3 But that “little book of woes” brought both cursing and blessing. As in Eden, the shedding of blood atoned for sin. The city of the old Seymour and Audrey, founded on the blood of all the prophets beginning with Abel, was destroyed, consumed by the very beast which had promised to it a glorious future. The true Seymour and the true Audrey were also slain but rose again, and their “Somewhere That’s Green” is revealed to be a city with an entire forest of the Tree of Life.
When judgment comes, it is always a two-edged sword. Both the righteous and the wicked are cut down, but the righteous rise again. And then they sing a new song. If we are honest, we all desire a Hollywood ending, but not one that comes too easily. God knows we have deeper roots than that. The climax of the Bible meets humanity’s most profound yearnings, turning our mourning into joy, and giving us a raucous finale free of cheap sentimentality.
This article is a chapter from Dark Sayings: Essays for the Eyes of the Heart
- The 1960 film was planned initially as a film about a private investigator, and then as a horror-comedy. Two horror concepts pitched by the writer—a vampire music critic or a salad chef who winds up cooking customers—were rejected. The director and writer settled on a man-eating plant, perhaps inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1956 short sci-fi story “The Reluctant Orchid,” which was in turn inspired by H. G. Wells’ 1905 story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.”
- Peter J Leithart, Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy and Hope in Western Literature, 15, 21.
- For more discussion, see the chapters “The Lost History” and “Sin City” in Michael Bull, Moses and the Revelation: Why the End of the World is not in Your Future.
