Too Many Cooks Too Many Cooks Too Many Cooks

When was the last time you watched Too Many Cooks? If your answer isn’t, “I’m watching it right now,” then I feel sorry for you.

I know it looks silly, but that's by design. It's supposed to be playful, absurd, and inventive. Still, the film tied a cold knot around my spine. That’s something I’ve only felt when there’s something I can’t name, something incomprehensible. There was something deeper hidden beneath the joke.

Thinking back on it, the reason I felt that is because this 11-minute short film captures the true meaning of cosmic horror. This silly comedy accomplishes something Lovecraft couldn't crack in hundreds upon hundreds of pages. As it devolves into something else, this unending sitcom title sequence becomes the perfect example of the fear of the unknowable.

At first, Too Many Cooks is nothing more than a sitcom opening. The best theme song ever written introduces the Cook family one by one. It’s a simple formula: a character stops what they're doing, turns to look at the camera, their name appears in cheerful yellow letters as the frame freezes. Pretty soon, we fall into its rhythm as it repeats and repeats and repeats. Character, smile, freeze, name. And each time, the Cook clan grows larger.

As the sequence goes on, the show starts drifting into other genres: sitcoms, Saturday morning cartoons, soap operas, Wonder Woman with Lynda Carter. The song keeps looping. The family keeps growing. Too many cooks, too many cooks.

This endless expansion of the Cook family is the core joke, but it’s also the seed of something stranger. The longer it goes on, the more you start to notice what doesn’t belong. The sitcom world stretches to make room for something else.

We even get Smarf.

After a few more character introductions, we get the first glimpse of true cosmic horror. It’s easy to miss: a man standing in the corner of the frame, out of place among the smiling faces [something has entered the text]. He doesn’t smile. He isn’t introduced. He’s outside of the rules of this world.

Like a Lovecraftian entity, he exists outside narrative logic. The sitcom is frozen in a loop; he’s not. How do you explain something that exists outside of story? As Too Many Cooks shows, you don’t. You can’t. [You can only sing his song.]

It takes a lot to make a stew

A pinch of salt and laughter too

A scoop of kids to add the spice

A dash of love to make it nice

And you've got...

Too Many Cooks

Then we see him in all his elder god glory for the first time. An entity that isn't restrained by time or place. Slowly, he warps the reality of the Cook family around himself [maybe even your [Too Many Cooks] reality]

He sits on the stairs. The Cooks don’t seem to notice him [because he doesn’t allow them to]. He watches silently from the edge of the frame. He warps reality around him. The sitcom logic can’t contain him forever. Eventually, it bends. Then it breaks.

That's when we face the sublime. The Killer, machete on hand, murders the Cooks one by one. The one thing we know about him is that killing brings him joy; take a look at that grin.

For a brief scene, we witness the true extent of his power. Katie Adkins stands suspended in the logic of the credits, but he doesn’t follow the same rules. Time itself freezes for the sitcom world, but not for him. The Killer has seen the loop repeat itself inifnitely; he's waited eons for Katie Adkins to show up again, just to kill her one more time. He's perfected the chase, the false sense of having escaped, even the splatter of blood as he cuts her down. The Cooks are just one of the millions of sadistic dreams the Killer has.

[He's watching you watch her run.] Katie runs through the set of Too Many Cooks. She sees other characters stuck in time. They bring to mind lifeless mannequins. Every single one of them has yellow letters hanging over them, except for the killer.

She runs and hides inside a closet, and the Killer follows her. She thinks she's safe, but her nature betrays her: the bright, yellow light gives her location away. The Killer finds her.

After this, we witness the world according to the Killer. Theme song still in the background, he eats the bodies of those he killed. And he never stops smiling.

But the horror doesn’t end with the killer’s grin. There’s a deeper infection spreading [deeper than the frame].

We cut to a patient strapped to a hospital bed, singing the theme song. [It takes a lot to make a stew/ A pinch of salt and laughter too/ A scoop of kids to add the spice/ A dash of love to make it nice/ And you've got/ Too Many Cooks] A doctor diagnoses him with “the worst case of intronitis he’s ever seen.” The sitcom logic is no longer confined to the title sequence; it’s invading bodies, minds, language itself. At first, it seems like this is a disease of the mind. But then the letters start to crawl. Slowly, like a parasite, the bright yellow names creep up the doctor’s body. He’s infected too [you can’t escape].

This is where the film goes into the sublime, and the moment where I felt actual fear. The logic of the sitcom collapses in on itself: the yellow letters form the actors’ bodies, while the actors themselves hang like names. You can hear their pain in their screams. This is the universe the Killer comes from. Too Many CooksToo Many CooksToo Many Cooks

[The broth is spoiled. I have a theory. The Killer creates Cooks for his own entertainment, just so he can dismember them. He's a sadistic god [like the millions of people who have watched this] The text is now a broth of itself. [ A scoop of kids to add the spice A dash of love to make it nice] I have another theory. The Killer grows stronger each time we hear his song. Too Many Cooks is a broth of cosmic horror. Keep singing.]

Finally, as the patriarch of this garbled world, he takes his place among his creations.

But here's the thing: they all smile. Do they smile because he forces them, or because they worship him? Does the Killer feel lonely after his massacres? Too many cooks? For him, there are never enough.

[It takes a lot to make a stew.]

[It never ends.]

Too Many Cooks2014