Beyond perhaps any other film in 2018, Mandy is dense with indelible images – gimp-suited demon bikers summoned by a primal ocarina, a grinning gore-soaked Nicolas Cage, and a sprawling heavy-metal title card that emerges nearly two-thirds into the runtime. But even by the film’s own unhinged standards, one batshit moment stands above the rest: the Cheddar Goblin. Fresh from witnessing a harrowing act of violence, Cage’s traumatised Red Miller stumbles home forever changed, his world brutalised – and the first thing he’s greeted with is a bizarre, day-glo mac and cheese commercial starring a luminous green gremlin mascot who projectile-vomits America’s favourite dinner on cheering children. “It's like the universe slapping him in the face with its lunacy,” explains writer-director Panos Cosmatos.
Despite the Cheddar Goblin’s minimal screentime, the creature is something that Cosmatos and his producer Josh Waller thought through in some detail – specifically, how does the Cheddar Goblin work? "We would discuss the physiology of the goblin – does the macaroni manifest in the goblin, and the cheese?" Cosmatos muses. “Are there two different organs in the goblin – one that creates the mac, and one that creates the cheese? Or do you feed the goblin macaroni, and then the cheese sauce is inside of him, and it coats the macaroni and then he vomits it up?” If the answer is open to viewer interpretation, the filmmaker has his own personal favourite theory: “I like the thought that he has two separate organs – one that grows macaroni-type nodules, and one that creates this cheese-like sauce.”
The Cheddar Goblin was birthed from cabin fever, when Cosmatos and Waller holed up in a production office for weeks, riffing and spit-balling and brainstorming ideas for the film. And after an initial search for a real vintage commercial to use in the sequence, it soon became clear that the Cheddar Goblin wasn’t going away. “We fell in love with the idea,” says Cosmatos. “But we had so little time, and all the department heads were stretched so thin already that we thought, ‘We have to out-source this’.”
Eventually it fell to director Casper Kelly, behind Adult Swim viral hit Too Many Cooks (“one of the most stunning short films ever made,” reckons Cosmatos), to bring his off-kilter aesthetic to the scene. Kelly worked from a look-book provided by Cosmatos and Waller, consisting of images from 1985 horror-comedy Ghoulies and photos of good ol’ mac and cheese. “We called him and were like, 'We have $1000 or something, can you make a Cheddar Goblin commercial?' A few weeks later, there it was.”
Since the film’s release, Cheddar Goblin has become a sensation all of his own – he even has his own gobblin’ good Twitter account. And while Cosmatos never got to direct the Goblin himself, he holds the character close – literally. "Casper was nice enough to give me the original Cheddar Goblin when we met at Sundance, and I was very moved by that,” the filmmaker revealed. “The OG Cheddar Goblin now lives in my home."
Mandy is available now on Blu-ray and DVD. Read Empire's Best Movies of 2018 list, featuring Mandy, here.