Feeling Peckish? Cannibalism Goes To The Movies
Horror filmmakers have long delighted in confronting audiences with their very worst fears. And yet in all of horror history one action still has the power to put punters off their popcorn. Though our sensibilities are a lot less delicate these days, cannibalism still carries with it a cultural taboo that can make it both deeply uncomfortable viewing, and sickly fascinating.
The Prelude
The figure of Sweeney Todd, demon barber of Fleet Street, looms large over the history of cannibalism on-screen. He first appeared in 1926, and his pies were back on sale only 2 years later in a 1928 film. Since then, no fewer than 9 films have adapted the grisly tale of Todd, although thankfully not all of them are musicals.
Even in the lawless outback that was Hollywood before 1930’s Motion Picture Production Code, cannibalism was seldom seen on-screen. When it was implied, it was generally to add tension to stirring adventures about white men taming the wilderness and saving white women from being cooked in large pots, such as in the 1922 film The Jungle Goddess.
Cheerfully racist adventure films aside, there are a few films of the era that more closely resemble the modern horror template. Doctor X (1932) focused on the hunt for a murderer who kills and cannibalises his victims by the light of the full moon. Once the code was put in place (it was only enforced after 1934), films like these would all but disappear. Cannibalism would remain untouched by filmmakers until audiences began to demand bigger and better scares.
Always ahead of his time, Alfred Hitchock saw the potential in cannibalism as a source of horror as early as 1957. An episode of his TV Show Alfred Hitchcock Presents featured an elite dining society who inadvertently consume human flesh.
In the horror boom of the 1960’s human was very much back on the menu, but the thought of subject matter that extreme still left most directors feeling nauseous. Cult classic Blood Feast (1963) proved that director Herschell Gordon Lewis had what it takes. Singlehandedly inventing the Splatter horror genre overnight, Blood Feast tells the story of an Egyptian caterer who collects the body parts of young women in order to reanimate his beloved goddess Ishtar. It is difficult to imagine how a 1963 audience would have reacted to a movie that revels in depravity as Blood Feast did, prompting one reviewer to label it: “The sickest film ever made.”
Blood Feast, and films like it, cleared the way for the opening salvos of gory exploitation cinema, a movement as grotty as it was influential. Among these films was Spider Baby (1967), which saw bona fide horror legend Lon Cheney Jr. return as chauffeur and caretaker to the inbred Merrye family, whose eldest members live in the cellar and have developed a taste for human flesh.
These early experiments aside, cannibalism would not enjoy mass appeal until the 1970’s, when exploitation cinema began to seek out new boundaries to push.
Dinner Is Served
The initial 70’s cannibal boom followed the success of The Man From Deep River (1972), which took the plot of Hollywood western A Man Called Horse, transplanted it to the jungles of Thailand and added a healthy dose of man-eating tribesmen. Within a year, sleazy Canadian exploitation flick Cannibal Girls and dystopian SF Soylent Green would get in on the act, both released in 1973.
1973 also saw the release of Raw Meat (also known as Deathline), a much-underrated British movie that saw an exasperated detective, in the form of Donald Pleasance, hunting for a cannibal twosome on the London Underground. Having been trapped in the subway system for their entire lives, the confused cannibals only know how to say “mind the doors”.
1974 was a landmark year for horror in general (and cannibalism in particular) due to the release of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The man-eating Sawyer clan take centre stage, alongside Leatherface, cementing themselves forever as the poster-children for human-only diets.
The same year Britain struck back with Pete Watkins’ Frightmare. British horror was at a pivotal stage in the mid-70’s, with the gothic allure of Hammer looking outdated next to the brutality of Italian and American exports.
Pete Watkins, with his unpretentious grindhouse attitudes, was a key innovator in this era. Looking back on his work, he would later say: “You know what? They’re not as bad as I thought. But searching for hidden meaning . . . they were just films. All I wanted to do was create a bit of mischief.”
By the mid-70’s cannibalism was a fixture of horror cinema. Although it had not entirely lost its power to shock, it wasn’t the unbreakable taboo it once was. As ever, the horror world looked to Italy to up the ante.
Feeling Queasy
1977 was the launch of the true cannibal boom. Initially kicked off by Italian director Umberto Lenzi with 1972’s The Man From Deep River, and it would be a new generation of Italian directors who took the torch from him and ran with it.
In the 1970’s Italy was awash with organised crime and political violence. The exploitation scene reflected this turmoil, presenting viewers with amoral, bleak and brutal offerings that made American equivalents look laughably tame.
Ruggero Deodato and Joe D’amato terrorised audiences throughout the 70’s and 80’s with a series of films that revolved around death, rape, torture and, of course, cannibalism. Many of the films even delved into animal cruelty in order to shock their audiences. For the first time, the cannibal movie became a genre in and of itself, and the act of cannibalism was the focus (the films were notoriously lacking in plot) rather than a chilling motif.
Often (particularly in the case of D’amato’s films) mixing pornography with violence, films like Jungle Holocaust, Mountain of the Cannibal God, Papaya: Love Goddess of the Cannibals and Emanuelle and The Last Cannibals would return to those 1920’s themes, with civilised westerners being captured by primitive tribespeople. Many of their directors would claim that they were ironic metaphors for western imperialism rather than excuses to watch naked people eat each other. While it’s certainly true that the westerners in these films tend to behave absolutely despicably to native people, the jury’s still out on that.
In 1980 the cannibal craze reached its crescendo with perhaps its most notorious film: Cannibal Holocaust. Director Ruggero Deodato was hauled up in court after many people believed that he had created an actual snuff film. Instead, what he’d done was single-handedly invent the found footage sub-genre, for which he should be either lauded or crucified, depending on your point of view.
For the next few years, Italy would churn out bucketloads of cannibal movies, each trying to outcompete the other for shocks and gore. Among them were notable entries Cannibal Ferox, White Slave and Eaten Alive.
More Discerning Palates
The cannibal film craze burned fiercely but briefly, petering out by around 1986 with Massacre in Dinosaur Valley, also billed as Cannibal Ferox 2.
Outside of the Italian extreme cannibal bubble, cannibalism had lost a lot of its sting, with cult favourites like Motel Hell (1980) and Microwave Massacre (1983) playing their gore for laughs. HG Lewis was back at it again in 1987 with Blood Diner, another movie about a body-part feast to resurrect an ancient goddess, this time at the behest of a brain in a jar.
By the nineties and noughties the cannibal genre would begin to cannibalise itself, with directors plundering horror history to create hybrid genre mashups. Most successful were bleak comedies like Ravenous (1991) and Delicatessen (1999).
At the turn of the 2000’s, more and more directors were waking up to the potential of cannibalism as metaphor. The French Extreme wave of the 2000’s married shocking, visceral violence with expert film-making and occasional political messages. Xavier Gens’ Frontiers (2007) used cannibalism as an excoriation of neofascism.
Many films of this period were extremely aware of their place in horror history, some embracing and paying homage to the cannibal boom, such as Bruno Mattei’s attempt to revive the genre in 2004 with Cannibal World, while others decided to try and subvert the traditions of cannibal cinema, such as 2011’s The Woman. The most effective movies to come out in recent years have used the shocking nature of the act not as an end in itself, but to underscore other themes.
For example, 2016’s The Neon Demon used cannibalism to underline the inhuman nature of the fashion industry, while films like Raw (2016) use cannibalism to explore themes of sexual maturity and the development of fetishes.
These days, the proliferation of cannibals in cinema means that an audience will no longer be surprised to encounter a flesh-eater. On the other hand, we’ve also seen a huge growth of different takes on the trope, meaning that cannibalism, when used correctly, can still appear fresh.