‘In the Tall Grass’ Director Vincenzo Natali Breaks Down The Most Disturbing Scene in His Stephen King Adaptation

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for In the Tall Grass. If you haven’t watched the film on Netflix yet, go do that first, then come back. 

When it came to adapting Stephen King and Joe Hill’s In the Tall Grass—a new horror film on Netflix that is now streaming—writer/director Vincenzo Natali knew changes were necessary to turn the novella into a feature-length film. But there was one change he was not willing to make: He would not cut the scene that, in the short story is so disgusting, disturbing, and taboo, one might expect even the most dedicated horror fans to balk at it. But those who know Natali’s work, which includes 1997’s Cube and 2009’s Splice, know he would never shy away from those adjectives.

“If I had been told I couldn’t have had that scene, I would not have made the film,” Natali said firmly in a phone call with Decider. “In a way, it was the raison d’etre for me to make the movie.”

That scene—and if you didn’t listen to the spoiler warning at the top of the article, now is the last chance to do so—finds Becky, the lead female protagonist, eating her own newborn baby. And it’s definitely in the movie, in all its tiny bone-crunching glory. But before Natali gets into the gory details, some background info: King and his son Hill published In the Tall Grass in 2012 in two parts for Esquire magazine. The story—which is still available in the archives for a compelling and unsettling subway read—tells the story of two inseparable siblings, Cal and Becky, who are lured into a field of tall grass when they hear a little boy named Tobin crying for help. Quickly, they realize this is no ordinary grass. It separates them, moves them around, and messes with their head. They are lost, just like the little boy and his unhinged father, and to make matters worse, Becky is six months pregnant.

Natali cast newcomers Laysla De Oliveira and Avery Whitted as Becky and Cal respectively, Disney Channel’s Will Buie Jr. as Tobin, and Conjuring and Insidious star Patrick Wilson as Tobin’s father, Ross. The director also cast Harrison Gilbertson (Picnic at Hanging Rock) as Travis, the deadbeat father of Becky’s child who is mentioned only in passing in the short story, but who gets a much larger role in the film. Natali warned his actors going in that it would be a physically and emotionally taxing role. “I said to all of the actors, ‘You’re going to suffer,'” Natali said in a previous Decider interview. “You’re going to be exposed to the elements, bugs, and all that stuff.”

None suffered more than De Oliveira, who actually got hypothermia while filming the scene where Becky delivers her baby—a stillborn—in the rain. “She didn’t need to go to the hospital, but she needed to leave the set because her body was shutting down,” Natali said. “But she really was amazing—even when she was diagnosed with hypothermia, she didn’t complain.”

The scene that follows Becky’s miscarriage was no picnic either—or at least, not one that any sane human would want to attend.

“There’s a biblical quote in this, a metaphor, that all flesh is grass. That’s literalized in this moment when Becky eats her own baby,” Natali said. “That moment [in the short story] takes the reader to a place they’ve probably never been before—a very primal, basic place. The film is really about that: What is it to be human? What is our relationship to nature? When we’re broken down to our most basic components, is there more to us than just flesh? Are we more than just grass growing out of the ground?”

Despite his resolve that the scene was crucial to the film, Natali intentionally obscured the visual of Becky eating her baby. The way the scene is described in the book allows for this. It’s dark, Becky is weak, disoriented, dehydrated, and starving. Suddenly, her brother Cal appears to her in a strangely manic and joyful state. He cradles the baby she just delivered, then insists Becky eat, to get her strength back. He feeds her something—she doesn’t know what it is, but it tastes good. Cal tells her it’s just grass. “Cows do it all the time,” he says.

Natali said he “had no desire to explicitly show it. I actually thought that it could almost become laughable if you showed it. As is often the case with these things, it’s better if much of it is left to the audience’s imagination.” He nudged that imagination along with some truly excruciating noises of Becky chewing on her meal, which in real life was “a mixture of prosciutto, corn syrup, chicken and chicken bones.” Adding to the horror is Whitted’s unsettling performance as Cal, who, as Natali points out, brings a “disturbingly incestuous intimacy. She’s so hungry, he’s feeding her, and there’s something erotic about it in a very unsettling way.”

Though it really was Cal who fed his sister her baby in the story, in the movie, Becky is hallucinating. She sees Cal, but it’s actually Tobin’s unhinged father Ross. In the novella, everyone in the grass—Ross, Tobin, Becky, and Cal—goes insane. Cal goes before Becky, and Becky goes after she realizes her brother has nursed her back to health by feeding her the flesh of her own baby. There is no escape, and there is no happy ending. This, too, Natali changed.

“I actually wrote that version, with that [unhappy] ending,” he said. “I really like it in the book, but in the context of the movie—where you’ve spent nearly an hour and a half with these characters, desperately trying to get out of this place—to leave them there, to strip them of their humanity… I found it very unsatisfying.”

In the end, Cal, Becky, and Tobin escape the grass, while Travis is left behind. As to what happens next for characters who’ve endured such trauma, well, Natali would rather leave that up to you. “I like endings that open themselves up to another story, but I’m not generally interested in telling that story. I just like movies that leave you with something to chew on.”

Stream In the Tall Grass on Netflix