Month: November 2023

“Every cannibal wants to be a director”: LONG PIGS (Nathan Hynes, Chris Power)

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Long Pigs is a 2007 “found footage” movie, in which two desperate filmmakers come across a cannibal, ask him if they can document his eating habits, and then are shocked when he starts killing people and eating them. It is presented as a documentary, with all the usual warnings about graphic scenes etc.

Bit silly, and found footage has rather been done to death, but it has some interesting ideas, particularly the sympathetic approach to the main character, even as he commits his crimes. Look, it seems to say, everyone needs a hobby and, to this cannibal, killing and eating people is no more ethically questionable than hunting or fishing. Stalk, catch, kill (as quickly and painlessly as possible) and then enjoy. He does his best to keep the movie interesting, with a patter of jokes, historical facts and philosophical observations as he slices and dices.

The cannibal is played by Anthony Alviano (Headcase, A Matter of Justice), and he presents the cannibal, also called Anthony, as a boy-next-door persona, one who kills and guts people. Like a farmer of animals, he starts the film explaining that it’s bad to frighten the victims, not for ethical reasons, but because the adrenaline ruins the taste of the meat. The filming starts as he drives around looking for a “certain kind of woman”, because he wants to make “long pig stew”. “Long pig” is a term supposedly used in the Pacific region before colonisation to designate human meat, although that definition is widely contested. Anyway, Anthony is looking for “marbled meat”, so he searches for a sex worker (traditionally victims who are not exhaustively looked for by police) who is, let’s say, of a heavy build.

“People who eat stew make perfect stew. It sounds obvious. Yeah, she looks like she eats well.”

As she smiles at the camera, he sneaks up behind with a sledgehammer and cracks her skull, resulting in the cameraman vomiting (which is actually rather more gross than the murder). They ask Anthony if gets a sexual thrill from killing women, but he dismisses this, in the same way a slaughterhouse worker might deny any pleasure in killing a different species of mammal.

“I’m not a freak or anything like that. This is all culinary, this is hard work!”

“Any hunter would recognise this position. We got the corpse hanging by the ankles. The first thing I’m gonna do here is make a little incision and tie off the anus. That’s to stop contamination from the feces. You would do that whether it was a deer carcass or a cow or a person… Absolutely necessary for health reasons.”

He cooks a stew from a portion of her thigh, then after dinner goes off to brawl in an ice-hockey game, an arena that seems the very essence of carnivorous virility.

Afterwards, he cooks ribs on a barbecue, assuring the viewers that there are “no animal by-products” used – just soymilk. And a woman’s ribs, of course, thus reinforcing the anthropocentric mythology of the human as not really animal, even though he has just butchered one in the same way as any other animal prepared for human consumption. He quotes the Arawak word barbaca, the grill on which human meat was supposedly cooked, according to explorers like Hans Staden and Jean de Léry, which became the Spanish word barbacoa, and eventually morphed into English as barbecue. Staden’s narratives were later illustrated by Theodor de Bry in his 1592 book Americae Tertia Pars, and the film sneaks in a quick peek at that glimpse of sixteenth century sensationalism.

There’s a lot of moral philosophy interwoven in the scenes of murder and gastronomy. Anthony the cannibal and his friend try to persuade the filmmakers to try some of the ribs, saying, it’s dead, and therefore cannot suffer, whereas we eat live vegetables, and “broccoli feels pain! Did you know that?” This is precisely the argument tossed at vegans by carnists, but in this case, it demonstrates the contention of the nutritionist Herbert M. Shelton:

The cannibal goes out and hunts, pursues and kills another man and proceeds to cook and eat him precisely as he would any other game. There is not a single argument nor a single fact that can be offered in favor of flesh eating that cannot be offered with equal strength, in favor of cannibalism.

Anthony works as a valet in a fancy restaurant, parking cars for rude people, and if you follow the lore of Hannibal Lecter, you will know that rude people are prime targets of cannibals. They park the car of a particularly rude man, take down his address from his licence and, next day, shoot him and load him in their car trunk. Unfortunately, they have a flat tyre and have to head to a pig farm for help, where they witness pigs being slaughtered and prepared for sale, in identical ways to Anthony’s own processes, but with rather better technology, and, oh yes, totally legally.

Most of the film is a spoof on cooking shows, which regularly have smiling chefs, or hopeful chefs, preparing lumps of animal flesh, hoping to win prizes. Anthony shows, in high-speed motion accompanied by the music of the Sugarplum Fairy, exactly how he prepares a body, stripping it and dismembering it until all that is left is two feet (still in socks) and the long femurs. He demonstrates how to get rid of the bones, cutting them up and putting them in a kiln at 2600 degrees – he even uses the line “these are some we prepared earlier.” This is a cooking show for cannibals.

Anthony is a typical modern cognate cannibal; as he says, people expect Hannibal Lecter, so “no one is going to suspect the valet”. This gives him the invisibility that we saw in cases like Jeffrey Dahmer. He loves his old mother who is in a nursing home, and is bewildered by a doctor’s request to do a post mortem analysis brain when she dies, a sophisticated update of cannibalism. He sadly tells the filmmakers that she has Alzheimer’s, but we eventually find that she died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob spongiform encephalopathy, a human version of mad-cow disease, probably from eating human meat that he fed her. He also admits to eating a five-year-old girl called Ashley, because people prefer meat from young animals, but was subsequently perturbed by the extensive police searches, and now avoids playgrounds and schools: “It’s like a supermarket, man.” As New Year celebrations explode outside, he comes to realise the filmmakers are going to release the movie, which will detail all his criminal history, and goes to get his sledgehammer. The rest, as Shakespeare says, is silence.

Anthony has a philosophy that rejects anthropocentrism and sees nothing wrong with cannibalism, or at least nothing that does not apply to any other meat. It’s a cannibalistic rejection of what Richard Ryder and later Peter Singer called “speciesism”.

“It’s only human beings that are so arrogant that they believe they are better than every other kind of animal out there. Worms don’t think about, you know, oh my god, why did mama worm get eaten by a fish; fish eats the worm and that’s that, it’s completely accepted by the worm, and the fish, and small fish gets eaten by the big fish, and if it was so wrong to eat it, then why would it taste so good?”

At the end, he is in jail, but he has published a cookbook. His cooking show has finally paid off.

This is a low-budget film, but is a lot better than might be expected. The creators were lucky enough to secure the services of Chris Bridges, the special effects artist whose credits include the Dawn of the Dead remake, Saw III & IV, 300 and Star Trek Discovery. Unless they actually killed and dismembered people, the result is spectacularly authentic. Anthony Alviano is brilliant in the role, which was written with him in mind.

The full movie (although slashed drastically from 81 minutes to 56 minutes) can, at the time of writing, be seen at https://youtube.com/watch?v=vnGXBRkxXuo.

Accused Nithari cannibal serial killers go free: “THE SLUMDOG CANNIBALS”

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The 2006 Nithari serial murders case was alleged to have taken place in the house of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher in Noida near Nithari village, Uttar Pradesh, India between 2005 and 2006. Moninder Singh was convicted in two out of the five cases against him, while his servant Surinder Koli, accused of assisting him or possibly instigating the killings, was convicted in 10 out of the 16 cases against him.

Koli admitted to killing six children and a 20-year-old woman referred to as “Payal” after sexually assaulting them. He later confessed to eating their livers and other parts of their bodies. Both men were sentenced to death, Koli ten times, but eventually, in October 2023, after some 2,000 hearings, Allahabad High Court acquitted them both, citing lack of evidence.

Despite being from a family of Hindu vegetarians, Koli was from the Dalit, the Untouchable caste, who are considered subhuman by much of society, marginalised, excluded, with their human rights routinely violated. They survive by doing the jobs no one else wants. From 14, Koli worked as a butcher’s assistant, learning to slaughter and dismember large mammals, which seems to have been a useful skill later in his life. He apparently developed a taste for meat at this time.

In 2005, Koli became a servant to Pandher, where he witnessed some pretty lively parties involving Pandher’s friends and visiting sex workers. In March that year, a little girl went missing in Nithari, and a couple of weeks later it happened again. Between 2005-06, a child went missing in Nithari every six weeks on average.

Police told parents they had probably run away (although the youngest was three years old) and would return by themselves. Frustrated by police inaction, parents and local residents in December 2006 organised the excavation of the reeking drains behind Pandher’s house where they found bags of bones, which proved to the hands and legs of small children. Skulls were found on the other side of the house. Police arrested the two men, and found some of the children’s belongings in the house. Police put the number of child victims at more than 31. Locals rioted outside the house, claiming that the police were corrupt and had concealed evidence of crimes involving rich people; the father of one girl alleged that the police had threatened and harassed him.

They demanded that the local police force be replaced by the Federal Government agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation. In 2007, six police were suspended for incompetence and the CBI filed sixteen cases against the two men involving abduction, rape, murder, criminal conspiracy and trafficking.

The CBI investigated the case, which by now was surrounded by accusations that tried to explain the disappearances – an organ transplant racket, or a child pornography ring. Pandher’s laptop was found to contain images of naked children, but they turned out to be his grandchildren. The logistics of harvesting and selling organs of small children turned out to be almost certainly insurmountable. Extensive psychological evaluations found that Koli was obsessed with young girls aged 5-7, while Pandher had a thing for 18-19 year old sex workers (one victim was twenty, the rest were children). Koli admitted on tape to luring the little girls into the house, strangling them and having sex with them before killing them, then cutting up their corpses and eating body parts. The way he dismembered them was similar to what he would have learned as a butcher’s assistant when he was a teenager. Yet investigators found that he had behaved entirely normally with his own children back in his home village, where his wife and family lived.

On 12 February 2009, both the accused—Moninder Singh Pandher and his domestic servant Surinder Koli—were found guilty of the 8 February 2005 murder of Rimpa Haldar, 14, by a special sessions court in Ghaziabad. This verdict embarrassed the CBI, as they had earlier given a clean bill of health to Pandher in all their charge-sheets. Both were given the death sentence. Other victims were identified, including:

  • On 4 May 2010, Koli was found guilty of the 25 October 2006 murder of Arti Prasad, 7, and given a second death sentence eight days later.
  • On 27 September 2010, Koli was found guilty of the 10 April 2006 murder of Rachna Lal, 9, and given a third death sentence the following day.
  • On 22 December 2010, Koli was found guilty of the June 2006 murder of Deepali Sarkar, 12, and given a fourth death sentence.
  • On 24 December 2012, Koli was found guilty of the 4 June 2005 murder of Chhoti Kavita, 5, and given a fifth death sentence.

On 16 October 2023, 17 years after the crimes first came to light, Koli and Pandher were acquitted of all charges against them due to insufficient and largely circumstantial evidence, despite the recorded confessions of Koli. The parents were naturally shattered.

It seems likely that between the animalisation of lower caste humans and the sacralisation of certain species of cattle in India, some people are unable to discern any line between humans (except for their kin) and other large mammals.

“Moninder used to have call-girls coming home all the time. Seeing them, I wanted to have sex as well. Slowly, these feelings turned into my wanting to murder and eat them. A girl from Sector 30 called Dimple was passing in front of the house. I called her inside. I then strangled her with her chunni. When she was unconscious, I tried to have sex with her but failed. So I killed her. I wanted to eat her. So I took her body into the bathroom upstairs. I got a knife from the kitchen and cut her body into little pieces. I then cooked a piece of her arm and chest and ate it.”

Koli later denied any involvement in the murders, saying that the CBI made him “remember” names and details to frame him, as they were protecting rich men who were raping and killing girls and selling their organs (a high-tech form of cannibalism). Pandher is now free; Koli remains in jail. The victims’ families continue suffering, even as some of them were given houses and cash settlements. When money talks, nothing and no one is off the menu.

The BBC released a documentary on the case called The Slumdog Cannibal in 2012. This was after the initial trials, but before the several appeals. The documentary, which concentrates on the background and motivations of Surinder Koli, can be watched (at the time of writing) on YouTube.

The most famous Australian (non)cannibal: KATHERINE KNIGHT

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In the year 2000, 44-year-old slaughterhouse worker Katherine Knight had a night of passion with her partner, John Price, then stabbed him 37 times, professionally skinned him, hung his hide on a meat hook over the lounge room door, decapitated him, butchered his corpse and cooked parts of him. She served up his meat with baked potato, carrot, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, squash and gravy in neat settings at the dinner table, putting beside each plate place-names for Price’s children. Another meal was tossed into the backyard; it appears she intended to eat it but couldn’t do so. The police arrived before Price’s children so, as far as we know, none of him was consumed (by humans anyway).

Knight pleaded guilty to murder and the judge ordered that her papers be marked “never to be released.” An appeal was quickly denied, and she is still serving her life sentence at Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre in Sydney.

Shoreline Entertainment planned to make a film of the incident based on Peter Lalor’s book Blood Stain, but so far it has not surfaced.

It appears that Knight was NOT a cannibal, despite one of the favourite media labels about her being “Kathy the Cannibal”. Other reports called her “The Woman Hannibal Lecter”, a comparison that makes no sense at all, since Hannibal did not use 37 strokes to kill people, definitely did eat parts of them, and did not (as Knight did) take a cocktail of sleeping tablets afterwards while lying in bed with the mutilated corpse.

Darren O’Sullivan, whose documentary is linked at the top of this blog, commented,

 “this is possibly the most horrific thing I have ever discovered”.

Although the series is called “Real Twisted Tales”, I suspect O’Sullivan must have led a sheltered life. Knight was a slaughterhouse worker, recognised for her skills in knife work. She grew up in the NSW town of Aberdeen, where everyone in her family and most of the town were employed in the abattoir. Her job, from a young age, was to kill and cut up animals. She did to John Price what she was trained to do to other animals – slaughter them, cut them up, cook them. She did try to feed bits to his children, which is what farmers did in the UK (feeding cattle bone-meal to cattle), an act of cannibalism which led to Mad Cow Disease. But there is little evidence that she herself ate any of him.

The documentary above states that Katherine Knight is “one of the most evil people in the world”, because she was found sane enough to stand trial. But really, what she did was what she was paid to do every day, just to a different species than those who usually suffered and died under her hand.

Superstitious anthropocentric beliefs put humans on a tier somewhere between angels and animals, but really we are a species of Great Ape, closely related to the chimpanzee. Rationally speaking, there really is only a thin red line between killing and eating any species of animal.

Revenge cannibalism: LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (Wes Craven, 1972)

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“Revenge is a dish best served cold”

Don Corleone said it in The Godfather, as did  Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but the saying goes back at least 100 years before that. It doesn’t seem to apply so much in cannibalism movies though, because if you’re really mad at someone, I suppose you’d want him to be warm and watching as you devour him, like Hannibal eating Abel Gideon, after feeding him oysters and acorns and sweet wine to improve his taste. Or Titus feeding Tamora, the queen of the Goths, a pie made of her own sons.

Revenge cannibalism is an exquisite form of retribution, going beyond murder to total destruction of the enemies (or his loved ones), incorporation of their essence, and conversion of their physicality into your excrement. Dante’s Inferno (Canto 33) depicts Count Ugolino in hell, gnawing eternally on the head of Archbishop Ruggieri, the man who had walled him up in a cell with his sons, whom he had eventually cannibalised. Perhaps the earliest narratives of revenge cannibalism appear in Greek legends, particularly that of Thyestes, who was fed the flesh of his sons by his pissed-off brother.

I’m adding this old classic film to the catalogue of cannibal texts as there is some human flesh eaten in anger, although it is not the main course of the film (puns are so hard to avoid in cannibalism blogs). The film starts with a couple of young girls heading to a rock concert, being abducted on the way, raped and murdered. If you are sensitive to such things (I hope most people are) or traumatised by recent news events, you may wish to give this film a miss.

I had forgotten about this movie until the Supernova Festival in which over 260 young people were abducted, raped and murdered, with a savagery reminiscent of that which befalls Mari and Phyllis in this week’s film. The barbaric slaughter of some 1,400 Israelis on October 7 2023 was followed by the IDF’s massive revenge, the extent of which shocked some of the world and impressed the rest. “Well, what would you do?” many online commentators asked.

Well, what would you do if, like the parents of one of the girls, you offered a warm welcome and overnight accommodation to some travellers who, you later discovered, were a gang of escaped criminals who had raped and murdered your child? The film answers that with a shotgun, a chainsaw, and an electric booby-trap.

Not what the UN would call a “proportionate response” (whatever that means), but many in the audience cheered at each gruesome death when it finally made it into cinemas (not until 2004 in Australia). Oh yes, one other form of killing that qualifies this otherwise simple slasher as a cannibal film—the girl’s mother, Estelle, pretends to seduce one of the gang members, then bites off his penis and swallows it.

The film critic Robin Wood spoke of what he called “the return of the repressed”. We repress our animal instincts to live in community, but beneath that veneer of respectability and normative morality lies “the monster”, the one we take out to exercise in the comparative safety of the cinema screen. Horror films such as this one depict the overcoming of repression, the shedding of the façade of respectability, in both the escaped psychopaths and then the vengeful parents, who shed their polite decorum to slash and kill. Craven shows the same thing in his later movie The Hills Have Eyes. Films from the seventies routinely explored a moral equivalence, a Vietnam War era pacifism that assumed any violence was equally appalling. Cannibal Holocaust, made at the end of that decade, sums up this view of the cycle of violence and the moral degeneracy of revenge when the anthropologist asks, “I wonder who the real cannibals are?” Later films from more cynical times tended to depict the killer or cannibal as either an irredeemable monster or a heroic figure, taking on bankrupt social imperatives. Right and wrong has come back into fashion but divides the viewers, depending on what their social media bubble tells them.

The film starts with a statement that it is a true story, which I guess used to be all the fashion—think Punishment Park, Cannibal Holocaust and the Blair Witch Project. The good old days, when truth was optional… oh forget I even started that sentence.

Anyway, this film wasn’t a true story, it was a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film The Virgin Spring, in which a father takes merciless vengeance of a group that has raped and murdered his daughter. That was in turn based on a mediaeval Swedish ballad called “Töres döttrar i Wänge” (“Per Tyrsson’s daughters in Vänge”) in which the vengeful father discovers that the rapists he has just killed were actually his sons, sent off by him into the cruel world.

But it was Wes Craven’s film that introduced a bit of cannibalism into the revenge recipe. Wes Craven is best known for the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and the first films of the Scream franchise. Last House on the Left was his first feature film, and he had such low expectations of its success that he felt he could be as outrageous as he liked and no one would ever hear about it, particularly his conservative family. But it did a lot better than he expected, to the extent that,

“I literally had people who would no longer leave their children alone with me. Or people that would, when they found out I had directed the film, say “That was the most despicable thing I had ever seen,” and walk out of the room.”

Audience members would get into fistfights, have heart attacks, and in many cases invaded the projection room to slash the film. Well, consider yourself warned.

Craven decided he would avoid horror, but was a complete failure at his attempts at more socially acceptable work. He had become known as the master of the slasher, leading him to another revenge cannibalism film in 1977 which became a cult classic, The Hills Have Eyes, in which a group of mutant cannibals kidnap, rape and slaughter (and eat) a ‘normal’ American family, who then inflict massive retaliation on them, adopting their savagery and raising the stakes.

In early 2023, a viral video seemed to show a couple of hunters gloating over a lion they had killed, and then being attacked and eaten by another lion, supposedly the dead lion’s brother.

Well, what would you do?