Beware multiple spoilers from last night’s Euphoria are in the caption.
Sam Levinson told Esquire that Nate Jacobs’ death in Season 3, Episode 7 (“Rise and Shine”) is a direct homage to The Candy Snatchers, a 1973 grindhouse thriller in which kidnappers bury a young girl alive in a box with a breathing pipe sticking out of the ground while they wait for ransom.
In the episode, loan shark Naz buries Nate (Jacob Elordi) in a wooden coffin on Nate’s own half-developed property with a single air pipe to the surface, giving him 72 hours to die of dehydration and heat. That was Levinson’s original plan for the death, lifted straight from The Candy Snatchers. The rattlesnake came later.
Levinson said the snake idea hit him on a drive to Warner Bros. with his wife, windows down, Otis Redding playing. He pictured the snake sensing Nate’s banging through the ground, crawling into the pipe, and dropping in. Real rattlesnakes were used for the pipe shots, with handlers on set warning the crew not to get too close.
Elordi has said the coffin was punishingly tight. His shoulders were pinned against the sides, his arms couldn’t move, and the lid was drilled shut for real during filming. By the time Maddy, Cassie, and crime boss Alamo dig Nate up with a backhoe, his body is bloated, his tongue swollen, and the snake is still coiled on his chest doing the maraca rattle.
The build to this moment ran the whole season. Naz’s crew cut off Nate’s pinky toe at the Episode 3 wedding, then later mailed him his own severed finger in a box. Episode 5 had Alamo’s crew bury Rue (Zendaya) up to her neck in a Western-style scene, a motif Levinson has leaned on hard this year.
The sequence also pulls from a deep bench of buried-alive horror. Buried (2010) put Ryan Reynolds in a wooden box in the desert with a snake crawling in beside him, the closest mechanical match to Nate’s death. Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) gave us The Bride punching her way out of a coffin. Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) buried its hero alive with a tarantula. The “premature burial” trope itself goes back to Edgar Allan Poe and runs through Roger Corman’s 1962 adaptation and decades of exploitation cinema.
The final shot of Nate’s decaying body with the snake still on him plays like a Lucio Fulci practical-effects gag from the late 70s. Levinson basically fused The Candy Snatchers’ ransom burial with the snake-in-the-box terror of Buried and a hit of Kill Bill claustrophobia.
