Yellowjackets’ Most Gruesome Scene Made Everyone Sick
A recent cannibalism scene in Yellowjackets made the cast feel ill because of its graphic nature.
Showtimes’ thriller survival drama Yellowjackets may be one of the best shows on the platform. It features Christina Ricci and a cast of other actors in past and present timelines as they recall the horrific events following a plane disaster some 25 years before. According to Forbes, the series’ exploration of cannibalism even made its cast sick.
The cannibalism scene in question occurs when the survivors of the crash botch an attempted cremation of a body and instead end up roasting it. Succumbing to the smell of their deceased friend after a period of intense starvation, they end up ravaging the body. Yellowjackets certainly isn’t for the faint of heart, and the scene proves that it is not just another YA teen thriller.
The scene cuts away to an imaginary banquet (much to the chagrin of fans of the macabre) before any too-explicit scenes of cannibalism are shown. Apparently, the Yellowjackets team did shoot a scene that depicts cannibalism and even used a recipe to make a “corpse” edible for the actors involved. This apparently led to clear discomfort for those involved, with some people throwing up, and others even crying.
Although the scene was fake, the emotional reality for many of the Yellowjackets actors involved was made real by the physical devouring of something that represented and looked like roasted human flesh. For those actors that really embodied their characters at the time, there must have been instances where the lines between fiction and reality were blurred.
In the Forbes article, showrunner Ashley Lyle notes that Yellowjackets is a “metaphor for teenage hierarchy,” one that explores “the best and worst that human beings are capable of.” Showrunner Jonathan Lisco thinks the events that occur are “the ultimate cost and consequence of true and absolute freedom,” and that the cannibalism is “the ultimate sign of civilization falling away.” Still, the showrunners thought it was important “to find the why and the humanity even within the outcome.”
Showtime’s Yellowjackets makes William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies seem tame in comparison. Although both revolve around a group of young people stranded in a crash and forced to survive out in the wild, Yellowjackets focuses on a group of suburban teenage soccer players stranded in the Ontario wilderness after a plane crash.
Husband and wife Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson co-created, executive produced, and served as co-showrunners along with co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco. Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher and Sammi Hanratty star as the women pre-time skip during their survival era, while Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci, and Juliette Lewis portray their adult counterparts 25 years later still coping with the reality of their experiences. Yellowjackets is currently in the midst of airing its second season which premiered March 26th, 2023, and introduced Elijah Wood as the mysterious recurring character Walter.
There is something about the gruesome and horrific that people love, and Yellowjackets is no exception. The first season of the series was Showtime’s second-most streamed television series in its history only after the blood-bath drama series Dexter: New Blood.
Yellowjackets critiques the ways in which social hierarchies and norms, especially in teens, are themselves a form of violence that people enact upon one another. The cannibalism here, the idea that these girls are eating one another, is both literal and symbolic and speaks to this kind of tearing down of other young women out of desperation.
