In Lee Lawson’s Man Eating Pussy, a dying man prepares to experience birth in reverse, with his head consumed by a sex worker with a vagina for a face. This short film, categorized as drama-horror on its official SXSW page, is a surprisingly tender look at intimacy that occurs in a visually shocking way thanks to what it describes as its main character’s monstrous anatomy.
Awards Buzz spoke with Lawson about choosing this very specific title and the challenges that’s presented along the way:
“It depends on your comfort level, I guess. If you want to be polite, we just call it MEP, and if you’re more comfortable with the gritty midnight screening vibe, then it’s Man Eating Pussy. It’s not hard to get it out into the world because it’s attention-grabbing and people go, ‘What? I’m sorry, what? Your film is called what?’ It is hard to send people emails when your film is called that, because then it automatically, if they’ve got a spam blocker, it can automatically filter it out. So there’s been some creative email writing.”
She shared the unexpected inspiration for this short:
“It’s an interesting origin point. It was a smaller vignette in a larger project that I had written about a space brothel – not important – but beyond the conceptual spark of it, the impetus to make this project came from the fact that I started as an actress – I’m still an actress – basically in horror films. If you are getting into the industry and you’re entry-level and you’re not particularly good at comedy, a lot of the time where you’ll land to start is horror, because there’s so much of it made. There’s such an audience for it. Being on sets as an actress in entry-level horror, in indie and B-movie horror, a lot of what you’re doing is crying and dying. It’s a strange thing to be simulating these very, very intense moments where you’re almost always the victim. And if you don’t die, you survive, but you’ve been through a whole lot. So I think, in making a quote-unquote ‘horror film,’ something that riffs on the aesthetics of body horror, I wanted to take those experiences and turn them on their head and make a film that was actually very tender and that saw its female character in a very different way. I think it was it was it was those early experiences as an actor on horror sets that made me want to make a very different kind of film.”
Watch the video above to hear about the prosthetics process and if there’s any more to this story planned for the future.
Man Eating Pussy makes its world premiere in the Midnight Short Competition at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival.
