The satirical new Showtime sequence The Curse, created by masters of discomfort Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, affords viewers many causes to squirm. However for its characters, it’s rooster that serves as a persistent and unsettling specter: poultry is current the place it’s not imagined to be and absent the place it’s. It’s simply as eerie uncooked as it’s cooked.

The sequence, which can air its season finale on Sunday, follows actual property entrepreneur couple Asher and Whitney Siegel (performed by Fielder and Emma Stone) as they develop the town of Española, New Mexico. They construct artsy “passive homes,” attempt to fill them with patrons, and try and inject new enterprise into the realm, all whereas hoping to remain on good phrases with the locals and — above all else — be perceived nearly as good folks. And so they’re filming their work for a Fixer Higher-esque HGTV present known as Flipanthropy.

Rooster enters The Curse early. Within the first episode, Flipanthropy’s producer Dougie (performed by Safdie) instructs Asher to offer a younger lady in a parking zone some cash to movie B-roll. Asher offers the lady, named Nala, the lone $100 in his pockets, solely to grab it again a second later. Upset, Nala claims to place a curse on him. At dwelling that night time, Asher is dismayed to search out his meal-kit dinner lighter than normal: His rooster penne is lacking the rooster.

The rooster stays only a customer support grievance till the present’s third episode, when Asher is reunited with Nala and learns that her “curse” was for the rooster to vanish from his dinner. He turns into satisfied that the curse shouldn’t be a TikTok development as her household explains it however an actual hex, and he begins to see rooster nefariously, and in every single place. He finds rooster on the sink at a firehouse whereas filming a section for Flipanthropy, and he will get Dougie on-board sufficient that Dougie tries to get Nala to curse him and make his rooster dinner disappear too.

As foolish as rooster is as The Curse’s boogeyman — and it’s foolish, providing some much-needed levity amid Fielder’s signature cringe — it additionally makes whole sense. It wouldn’t hit the identical if Fielder had been haunted by, say, a steak; it’s rooster that manifests a really explicit nervousness within the cultural creativeness.

Starting within the 2010s, we had been haunted by city legends of rooster nuggets constructed from “pink slime,” placing forth a way that rooster couldn’t be trusted. There are frequent circumstances and warnings about chicken-related foodborne sickness (a few quarter of Salmonella infections yearly are poultry-related, in accordance with the USDA). Our rooster phobia has turn out to be so widespread that some folks have adopted the time period “rooster nervousness” to confer with their fears of undercooking rooster or of contaminating different meals and their kitchens with the uncooked meat.

Rooster’s manufacturing may make one additional queasy. Labor abuses, together with little one labor in poultry processing crops, have lengthy been documented. The chickens themselves, which have been bred to develop considerably bigger than they did lower than a century in the past, are additionally widespread case research when discussing the ills of manufacturing facility farming.

All these rooster anxieties labored their manner into popular culture lengthy earlier than The Curse. Take David Lynch’s 1977 surrealist horror movie Eraserhead. In a single scene, the protagonist is instructed by his host to carve a tiny rooster on the dinner desk. Earlier than he even cuts it, the rooster begins to ooze blood from its cavity and wriggle on the plate.

Equally, within the first season of Yellowjackets, the grim sequence a few highschool women’ soccer crew that will get stranded within the woods after a aircraft crash, one of many women desires that she offers start to a rotisserie rooster. She then takes a chunk out of the rooster’s leg, which not solely speaks to her starvation and trauma but additionally reinforces Yellowjackets’s cannibalism motif.

All of that is additionally mirrored in how we speak about rooster: To “be rooster,” in any case, is to worry, and as youngsters, we’re instructed of Rooster Little along with his fixed fear as a cautionary story. In The Curse, what precisely is there to worry?

It’s not likely in regards to the rooster as a lot because the rooster has come to represent all the things Asher and Dougie have executed flawed of their lives and the disgrace they really feel for it. Within the present’s penultimate episode, Asher has a revelation: He’s been so fixated on shifting his issues to Nala’s rooster “curse” as a result of it’s a simple scapegoat, that he’s failed to appreciate he’s been the issue all alongside. “I’m a horrible individual,” he admits. In the event that they had been higher folks, they wouldn’t should be so rooster.