Food for Thought on Cannibal Movies:

Bite Me

Film essay for The Stranger, 1/31/96

In the horror and horror-farce genres, vampirism is widely considered much cooler than cannibalism. Cannibals are messy and dismember their prey. Vampires simply exchange bodily fluids, in the process converting their prey into new members of the vampire species.

Yet in real life, vampirism is at best a matter of legend and historical conjecture. Cannibalism, on the other limb, is a well-documented practice of historic and indigenous societies around the world. Yes, devouring one’s own species violates the cardinal rule of the food chain; but people have gotten around that through the familiar-to-this-day shtick of declaring enemy tribes to be something less than human. Indeed, in some ancient communities consuming the flesh of a vanquished enemy warrior was/is said to give your warriors the strength or magic the enemy had.

Over the years, many directors have understood the shock potential of cannibalism as one of the cruelest one-on-one crimes imaginable, a crime that robs its perpetrators of their last claim to membership in their own species. In the docudrama Alive (1993) and the PBS documentary The Donner Party (1991), groups of people are trapped in the wilderness and must save their lives by eating their dead comrades, keeping their own bodies alive but destroying their souls. In Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989), the eating of human flesh is the only violent act the Thief can’t bring himself to commit.

Let’s examine some of the film formulae that have incorporated cannibalism. Note that I don’t count films like Little Shop of Horrors,Lair of the White Worm, or the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man;” the victims in those stories are eaten but by non-human creatures.

Sociological drama. The native cannibal-warrior tradition was, of course, exploited and spoofed in countless Hollywood adventure features as recently as Conan the Barbarian (1982). It’s also the theme of what I feel is the best cannibal movie ever made, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971; just now on video). Set in the early years of Brazil’s colonization as seen through Brazilian director Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s modern anti-colonial eyes, it’s the comic tragedy of a French sailor who gets captured by an Amazon tribe. He’s given a wife and lives as one of the villagers until the next ritual feast, when he’s scheduled to be communally devoured. He learns the local language and tries to sell himself as a shaman of European war magic (gunpowder), but all efforts to convince the tribe he’s worth more to them alive than dead prove futile. The “fleshy” aspect of the story is enhanced by the fact that everybody’s nude (including, after the first half hour, the Frenchman).

Thomas Harris’s character Hannibal Lecter is partly a return to the warrior notion of cannibalism. In Silence of the Lambs (1991) and its lesser-known predecessor Manhunter (1986), Hannibal is a rogue warrior without a tribe. He gnaws on his still-living prey (a quite inefficient way to kill) not for sustenance but to uncage the animalistic spirit that makes him capable of his crimes.

In a different modernization of the warrior-cannibal theme, the middle-class revolutionaries of the Seine and Oise Liberation Front in Godard’s satire Weekend (1967) took the then-emerging hippie notion of “going native” to its logical extreme. Proclaiming that “the horror of the state can only be answered by horror,” these terrorist wannabes proclaim their return to a “natural,” anti-industrial way of life by dining on captured bourgeois picnickers.

Big-budget exploitation. Richard Fleischer should’ve been happy to live off the Betty Boop merchandising he inherited from his dad Max. Instead, he became a hack director of grim action films. When Fleischer fils adapted Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! into Soylent Green (1973), he decided the book’s way-overpopulated world wasn’t grim enough. So he added cannibalism. In the novel, “Soylent Green” is a foodstuff made of soybeans and lentils. In the movie, as grim detective Charlton Heston discovers, it’s secretly made from reprocessed humans. Why’s it a secret? Imagine the shock when you tell your vegan friend about the beef gelatin in the Altoid she’s sucking, and multiply it by 40 million irritable 21st Century New Yorkers.

Low-budget exploitation. In a trend starting in 1963 and peaking around 1973-74, cheapo-horror makers found cannibalism a good excuse for gore effects the big studios wouldn’t dare. Herschell Gordon Lewis has said that he turned from directing nudies to gore movies like Blood Feast (1963) and The Undertaker and his Pals (1967) as a marketable genre the big studios wouldn’t muscle in on. After Lewis left films for a more “legitimate” career in direct-mail marketing, his legacy was continued in Deranged, Red Meat, Cannibals in the Streets, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Shriek of the Mutilated, The Folks at Red Wolf Inn (a.k.a. Terror on the Menu), and a score of direct-to-video shockers.

Foreigners got into the game too, like Jess Franco (White Cannibal Queen) and Joe D’Amato (Grim Reaper). Even Peter Cushing, in his pre- Star Wars career lull, chased after a people-eating killer in The Ghoul (1975).

From within this cycle of trashy flesh-feast films came the cannibal zombies of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968; followed by two sequels and one remake). Romero’s filmmaking skills (and sense of dark humor) set his work several notches above most others. He also gave a purpose to his gore. His speechless, pathetic killers are essentially grosser versions of vampires, gnawing on the still-living less to feed than to infect, to convert them to the zombie way. In a twist on the food-chain paradigm, the zombies enlarge their species by dining on ours. Romero’s cannibal lore was parodied in the Return of the Living Dead series, but his own films contain enough sick gags to make any spoofs superfluous.

Comedy and satire. Indeed, people-meat has often been treated for high and low humor. Some films use cannibalism for non-nutritive guffaws and sick sight gags, such as in the Rory Calhoun/ Wolfman Jack vehicle Motel Hell (1980).

But it can also be used for fun with a purpose, to reveal human nature by depicting inhuman acts. In Parents (1989), people-eating is a metaphor for the messy realities hidden behind ’50s suburban “family values.” In Eating Raoul (1982), it’s the logical extreme of an emerging yuppie class proclaiming itself a superior species to (and hence higher in the food chain than) those crude unsophisticate masses.

The Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd (1979) was based on a British legend (filmed as straight horror by UK horror master Tod Slaughter in 1936). Sondheim turned a story of deviance into a celebration of survival, with his downtrodden, disenfranchised London street people learning to literally “eat the rich.”

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s elegant Delicatessen (1993) posits a post-apocalyptic future similar to Sweeney Todd‘s Victorian past, but without the class consciousness. Without class solidarity the survivors have to settle for small-group solidarity, with anyone from outside the delicatessen and its upstairs apartments treated literally as fair “game.” Made during the rise of the global financier-led Right and after the fall of socialism, it posits a future where only love and laughter can free us from the futility of rugged individualism. That’s a warning one can really sink one’s teeth into.