NEFARIOUS FILMS HORROR FEATURES

THE WONDERFUL WEIRDNESS OF SALAD FINGERS

A bent and wretched figure ambles across a blasted barren landscape. Twisted skeletal trees strain towards the sky and the few buildings standing in this space are shambling empty ruins. The figure turns to address us, which he does in the simpering high pitched stutter of the truly insane. The man’s skin is as green as his broken, jagged teeth are yellow and his hands are long fingered, hairy-knuckled monstrosities. This is Salad Fingers and he is telling us how pleasurable the feeling of rust is against his skin. Welcome to the most disturbing, unpleasant and just plain sinister flash animation currently online. Oh, it’s also very, very funny.

Salad Fingers is the creation of David Firth and has quickly become one of the most popular flash animation series out there. There is all manner of Salad Fingers merchandise available from rather cool wall clocks to the more traditional t-shirts and hoodies festooned with Mr. Fingers’ image. There are also a host of parodies, rip-offs and homages to Firth’s creation out there, most of them beyond poor but it is still testament to the strength of the series that it inspires such levels of imitation. In addition to all this there are also masses of articles discussing the Salad Finger’s phenomena and even websites trying to determine what it is all about. Herein lies one of the important factors to its success.

Though it is amusing, albeit in an extremely dark way and it is very dark, in an extremely amusing way, there is always the feeling when watching Salad Fingers that there is something going on beyond the seemingly random events that occur within a typical episode. Some theorists claim that the series actually is all occurring within the mindscape of a catastrophically damaged personality in the real world while others insist that the cartoon is nothing more than a big dark joke on David Firth’s behalf.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the truth remains that there is a lot of fun to be had with Mr. Fingers and his distinctly unwholesome friends, especially for those with a disposition which endears them to the macabre and let’s face it, why else would you be here?

Every aspect of a Salad Fingers episode is carefully chosen for its ability to repel and alienate the viewer. The title character himself is obviously grotesque with his hunched-back and vomit hued skin but it his voice which is the real master stroke in his realisation.

His soft northern lilt has a quality about it that is simultaneously innocent and very, very threatening. This dichotomy is at the heart of the character and is just as big a part of his menace as his actions and behaviour.

Salad Fingers spends a lot of time ‘playing’ with his friends – a bunch of finger puppets he gives names to such as Mary Stewart Price and Hubert Cumberdale. The Hubert Cumberdale puppet is one which has instigated much internet speculation. Salad Fingers seems to be slightly afraid and disgusted by him. On one occasion he tastes his finger puppet friends and concludes that while Mary Stewart Price smells of ‘sunshine dust’ Hubert Cumberdale tastes of ‘soot and poo’.

Perhaps the puppets are all aspects of his disjointed personality or maybe they are just the playthings of a childlike victim of mental disease. Salad Fingers certainly has a fragile innocence about him but he is also a dangerous character too even if he does not mean to be. A good example of the threat he poses is when he is cooking a fish in his oven but can’t reach it to get it out. He calls for help until a strange child turns up and tries to reach the fish by climbing into the back of the oven. Unfortunately Salad Fingers chooses this moment to be distracted by a rusty nail which he caresses and pierces his finger on. This seems to cause him a lot of pleasure and as the ‘red water’ comes out he passes out in an ecstatic stupor. When he wakes up the room is full of smoke and he proclaims that his fish must be cooked. That ain’t no fish.

Though the world of Salad Fingers is certainly a sparsely populated one it is by no means empty. There are a whole host of other grotesques that our green skinned hero interacts with throughout the course of the seven episodes the series currently consists of. Though they are all very different they all share the same characteristic of being utterly repugnant and communicating in weird noises that bear no relation to anything resembling language but which Salad Fingers seems to be able to interpret.

He could however be simply putting words in their mouths in much the same way as he does for his puppet friends who sometimes appear as full sized characters and sometimes appear to be able to move about of their own volition in their puppet form.

The only character to have spoken in a Salad Fingers cartoon is the little girl our strange hero has a picnic with in the episode ‘picnic’. Salad Fingers and the girl are having a picnic and seem to be enjoying themselves until the girl speaks to Salad Fingers.

These ‘mouth-words’ terrify him and have provoked various fans to speculate that the girl could actually be the real world breaking through into Salad Fingers’ fractured version of reality from which he is compelled to run and hide from.

Whatever the truth of the matter is, Salad Fingers is an intriguing and ingenious creation worthy of the attentions of any serious horror fan or any jovial horror fan too come to think of it. Actually, Salad Fingers is worthy of the attention of any fan of anything regardless of their relative sombreness or jocularity. Watch it.

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