I can’t believe this hasn’t been discussed here before, but I couldn’t find anything by searching, so here goes.
What was in that damn box anyway? From the moment we found out who Charlie really was, I thought it was Audrey’s head, but that should have started to… get olfactorily noticeable pretty quickly in the Californian climate. Any ideas?
There are certainly enough indicators that it’s a head, and no hint that it might be something else, specifically. Maybe it’s packed in salt.
Or maybe it’s Marcellus Wallace’s soul.
Yes, it was a head, but oddly enough, turns out it belonged to Gwyneth Paltrow.
Jewels said it was his dirty laundry. 
I forget the name for it but didn’t Alfred Hitchcock come up with this idea for not revealing what’s in the box, bag etc… Leaving the viewer to decide what may be in there?
Damn! Beat me to it!
I thought it was kind of obvious. She was the only one who knew how to write. She disappeared, leaving a pool of blood where she’d been. Without her, he couldn’t write. But when he set the box on his desk, he suddenly wrote up a storm. When he shook the box, the clunky sound from inside seemed consistent with an object the size and weight of a head rattling inside a box.
I agree. And that you seem to have a basis for comparison frightens me 
MacGuffin.
But it was pretty obviously a head in this movie. I don’t think the time frame of the movie was long enough that it necessarily would have gotten stinky.
It was his sled.
The box should have gotten somewhat stinky after the hotel got really hot when Charlie returns and kills the police officers. The whole floor is on fire and the wallpaper all peels off.
You both beat me to it. I swear, it was just too easy.
Head gets my vote. Great movie. Great roles for both Turturro and Goodman.
The top-secret Death Star plans, of course.
It was full of the stuff that dreams are made of.
It was the point of the movie. That’s why it couldn’t be seen.
[nitpick]Actually, Jules said it was his boss’s dirty laundry.[/nitpick]
It was the same thing that was in trunk in Repo-man, and in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. MacGuffin’s golden head. You can also catch a glimpse of it for a second in the monolith at the end of 2000, a Space Odyssey.
Was it Jerry Seinfeld that said…“I used to think the brain was the most importaint organ in the human body. Then I realized who was telling me that.”
And just how the heck did that end up here? Crap. Meant for the brain thread over in the pit. Gah.
Oh yes. It was me in the box, by the way.
