This posting is my second foray into the macabre. My first was a story about Bloody Butcher cornmeal that I posted around this time last year. It was illustrated with appropriately “bloody” photos.

It was right when I was about to hit the “publish” button on Bloody Butcher that I came across a short film called Attack of the Helping Hand, shown above, and immediately recognized it as ideal Halloween-themed material for a food blog.

What could be a better metaphor for the horror show of the corporate food system than a sinister “helping hand”?  And this short has star horror film credentials to boot: It was written, produced, and directed in 1979 by Scott Spiegel, and features Sam Rami as the milkman (both Spiegel and Rami were teenagers at the time and would later become successful horror film makers).

I tucked Spiegel’s Helping Hand away until this year’s season of ghouls and ghosts, not wanting to overshadow my first attempt at “horror” food photography with the genius of two teenagers.

In the strange way that the Internet can lead you down unexpectedly interesting paths, sometimes more interesting than the original subject you keyed into the search field, I think that doing a due diligence online search for Hamburger Helper, to check branding and ingredients of a recipe I was editing for my day job, is what led me, somehow, to Attack of the Helping Hand. This is a case where following the rabbit was worth doing.