Getting right to the meat (pepperoni or otherwise) of the story, Slice opens with your average scene of a pizza delivery guy in a generic U.S. town (this one called Kingfisher). The delivery dude in question, Sean Hammerschmit (Austin Vesely, who also wrote and directed the film), has the same drugged out look and apathetic nature as any archetypal delivery person, complete with Meshuggah’s “Rational Gaze” blasting on his radio as he goes about his business with a nonplussed air. It would take a lot to phase this guy, and even getting his throat slashed doesn’t really do much to evoke emotion. Pulling up to a house in Ghost Town, Sean is about to deliver his last pizza.
It’s after this throat-slitting that we’re given a PSA in promotion for all the benefits of re-electing Mayor Tracy (Chris Parnell, who most will still recognize as 30 Rock’s Dr. Spaceman). Specifically calling out all he’s done for the living by relegating the ghost population to another part of town. Thus, the touted platform, “Being home to one of America’s largest ghost populations isn’t easy.” Here the camera flashes to the ghost population count of Kingfisher on the sign outside of town. It reads: 40,000.
The PSA continues, “Mayor Tracy moved the ghosts into their own neighborhood just west of town” (cue a map showing the ghosts “being transferred” to Ghost Town via graphics that indicate they did so willingly). Despite the whiteness of ghosts, it’s pretty clear what the subtext is: these are the marginalized people of a gentrified town. The origins of the ghosts trace back to when Halcyon Square, where Perfect Pizza Base is now located, was a horrific mental institution one could easily envision even Nurse Ratched being disturbed by.
The campaign ad concludes with, “Kingfisher truly is… a great place to be alive!” The unspoken finish to the sentence being–but not dead. Otherwise, you’ll be heavily sanctioned and discriminated against. As the town’s most ambitious young journalist, Sadie Sheridan (Rae Gray), catches wind of this fresh murder, she immediately heads toward the auditorium where the mayor is holding a press conference to address the gruesome slaying, believed to be the responsibility of a reemerged werewolf/Chinese food delivery guy named Dax Lycander (Chance Bennett a.k.a. Chance the Rapper). Riding around on his “motorcycle” (read: scooter) at the beginning of the movie in both real and animated form (when the title credits roll), he is quickly positioned as the only suspect.
When Sadie informs her co-worker, Jackson (Joe Keery), a photographer at the Kingfisher Chronicle, what the mayor has just told them, she also adds that one of the townspeople, Vera Marcus (Marilyn Dodds Frank), was sure to cry out that the murder is only the start of the penance the town will pay for the Halcyon days (and no, that does not refer to a “time of happiness and contentment”), when experiments were conducted on the current ghosts of this former mental institution. Jackson responds, “What the fuck does that have to do with pizza?” One could ask the same, really, of the conspiracy theory that spread like wildfire back in 2016, when the rise of Trump fuckery began (and has only continued to stew in its own trollish filth as what feels like the longest presidential term ever comes to a close, even if small-minded thinking does not).
It was also in March 2016 when the email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, was hacked. Just in time for the November election, Wikileaks released the emails, somehow interpreted by the alt-right to mean that a number of U.S. pizza restaurants (including Comet Ping Pong in D.C., where a man who believed in the theory shot a rifle inside the establishment in 2016 and another tried to set fire to it in 2019) were in cahoots with high-ranking Democratic officials to cover up a major child sex trafficking ring. Apparently taking the core of what Jeffrey Epstein’s game was all about and “making it their own,” these alt-right conspiracy theorists would soon veer into the QAnon juggernaut, founded upon the basic principles of what “Pizzagate” started: namely, the world is being run by Satanic sex-trafficking liberals and Trump has been sent down from the Heavens to single-handedly fight a battle against evil… despite, you know, himself being evil.
One wonders, then, what they would make of Dax being the Black hero (positioned as a villain by the public) at the center of a pizza conspiracy. Because we all know QAnon doesn’t believe in Black (or Jewish) heroes. Vera is among those who would seek to accuse him, not to mention she’s also the leader of a group called Justice 40,000, aiming to advocate for the rights of ghosts being treated like second-class citizens. And therefore to seek further justice for the murders now being committed in their neighborhood and for which they are also being deemed somehow complicit in.
It’s a cauldron of the same political machinations and stoked prejudices we see in real life (where the ghosts don’t make themselves quite so manifest). As Sadie seeks answers that no one can seem to provide, an internet spiral of search terms leads her finally to use the keywords “Kingfisher homicide food.” It is with this phrase that she unearths a 2007 article about another similar incident involving more murdered delivery people. An incident that reveals a juicier detail still: before it was Perfect Pizza Base, the address at 3042 Halcyon Square Drive was Yummy Yummy Chinese Cuisine. The location being smack dab in the middle of where the mental institution that conducted experiments on the 40,000 since-rendered ghost residents is, obviously, not a coincidence.
As the murder of the next pizza delivery guy, Scooter Martinez (Rudy Galvan), is further publicized by the mayor (urged to do so by Vera and her cohort, Debbie [Kelli Simpkins], who both have a vested interest in this undercover allegiance behind closed doors), he declares, “I am banning hauntings altogether. I’m sorry but my hand has been forced.” This, naturally, makes the ghost population feel all the more oppressed and falsely vilified.
All the while, Astrid (Zazie Beetz), now Sean’s “widowed” girlfriend, has been shaking down the entire town for information about his death, including the Big Cheese (Y’lan Noel)–the appropriately pizza-related nickname of Kingfisher’s most successful drug lord. It is as she has a knife to his throat, ready to make a slice herself, that the cops show up, sending everyone scattering like roaches at a Papa John’s in Brooklyn. The two cops on the job for interrogating the Big Cheese are Steve Marsh (Tim Decker) and Bradley (Will Brill), the former of which is sure to mention that his own father was killed by a werewolf, thus a certain prejudice.
With the Big Cheese offering little help, the cops wait it out until they can finally catch Dax, cuffing him after a chase through a junkyard wherein he actually spares Bradley his life by saving it from a certain death. Thus, we are introduced to a very clear-cut sense of morality that makes us think perhaps he isn’t as bad as they say.
While observing him in the interrogation room, Steve asks his superior, “What are you thinking on motive?” He responds, “Well, he’s a thousand years old Steve. He’s probably very bored.” As QAnon knows, boredom can certainly steep the flavors of insanity, especially in a lockdown climate.
As the sauce thickens, so does the plot. And despite Jack’s (Paul Scheer)–the manager of Perfect Pizza Base–best attempts to keep the business running, the fear and paranoia fomenting in Kingfisher makes shilling pizza almost as difficult as it is to at a sit-down restaurant in a pandemic. Things get a bit The World’s End (a.k.a. the final installment of Simon Pegg’s Cornetto trilogy) when we see the big unveiling of who the murderers of all these pizza delivery boys really are.
Meanwhile, Joe (Lakin Valdez, the only ghost who works for Jack), continues to get more cryptic with his warnings until Sadie finally shows up to back the vague doom and gloom sentiments he’s been spouting all along. Descending into the basement, they run into Carl (Larry Neumann Jr.), a “person” Jack previously had no awareness of until he explains he’s the ghost janitor. Soon, they get to talking and Carl points out that Halcyon Square is so much more than a former mental institution where unspeakable “treatments” took place. No, it is, in fact, also the gateway to hell. As Carl confirms, “Well, if it’s on this lot, then yeah, your pizza place is a gateway to hell. Congrats, there aren’t that many. Here, Arizona… there are a bunch of ‘em in Florida.”
Carl goes on about how the witches (at this juncture in the movie, you’ll know who they are) have plans to help build a slave army of ghosts, then get into “world domination, end times.” “Good God,” Sadie says. “No, no. Just Satan,” the janitor corrects.
As the supernatural game of political ping pong (not Comet Ping Pong) escalates, Vera aims to turns the ghosts against the mayor in a palpably ferocious way by asserting, “For years, this man has stood on this very stage, and spouted anti-ghost rhetoric, sanctioning Ghost Town and, most recently, accusing the ghosts of a murderous conspiracy.” She then clinches the stirring of public emotion by revealing Mayor Tracy to be a ghost himself (for aren’t we always the cruelest toward those who most remind us of ourselves?). He counters with the intel that she herself is a witch. Soon, she pulls some Anjelica Huston shit (‘cause we ain’t bothering with the Anne Hathaway reference to The Witches) and starts spouting green orbs from her mouth, along with the rest of her coven. A headline following reads, “WITCHCRAFT. Mayor Tracy and Witches Frame Ghosts for Murder Spree.” The revelation quickly sets off a “haunting spree.”
Sadie describes it in her article with the line, “The city’s ghosts, victims of the ongoing media conspiracy, have taken to the streets, terrorizing the living as they go about their business.” The alt-right, too, feels overly victimized by the media and their so-called conspiracy to cover up the truth about the liberal elites of America running a pedophilic sex cult and worshipping Satan. Indeed, everything about the plot is very “now”–conspiracies involving pizza, prejudices against a “race of people” deemed inferior (this can also be viewed as something for QAnon followers to identify with, seeing as how ghosts are the whitest of them all). And, what’s more, Slice has all the makings of being as essential to the limited pizza movie pantheon, right up there with the greatest of them all, Mystic Pizza (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles [the 1990 one, should you be blasphemous and need clarification] and I Love You to Death also being up there in the “genre”). Simultaneously at the forefront and in the background at all times, the role of pizza is integral to the narrative.
And in one scene, when Jack screams, “Damn you for taking delicious pizza away from the fine people of this town!” we might almost fully understand how such a universally loved food item could come to be wielded at the center of one of the most absurd conspiracy theories. Almost. Because, after all, what could be more threatening to the easily manipulated than the notion that something as fantastic as pizza (even shitty American pizza) is being used as a front for the forces of the most sinister evil? A question also posed in another movie that came out a year after Slice, Satanic Panic, which uses pizza delivery to make a statement about class as well (picking up where the 80s movie, Society, left off–minus the involvement of pizza). And as Judi Ross (Ruby Modine) in Satanic Panic says, “Welcome to the world behind the world.” For sometimes it is easier to believe that there has to be a demonic force behind the reality that only assholes are in charge, and they’re only in charge because they’re rich, and they’re only rich because they’ve given their souls to Satan.
Upon the conclusion to Slice (complete with a hilarious tag of a commercial for Jack’s new restaurant), Sadie narrates, “Sometimes heroes are unlikely, and sometimes villains hide in plain sight.” In the case of QAnon, we rather miss a time when the latter half of that statement was true, during those “Halcyon days” called before the Capitol riots.
