Month: February 2024

Cannibalism and ‘Satanic Panic’ in Utah

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News2 Comments

Utah lawmakers are attempting to pass a bill to criminalise the ‘ritual abuse of a child,’ bringing back memories of the satanic panic of the 1980s, when other states passed similar laws.

Critics of the bill, however, say it is unnecessary and potentially harmful.

Republican state Rep. Ken Ivory is sponsoring the bill, House Bill 196. It defines ritual abuse as abuse that occurs as “part of an event or act designed to commemorate, celebrate, or solemnize a particular occasion or significance in a religious, cultural, social, institutional, or other context.” The bill lists specific actions that fall under the proposed definition: abuse against children that includes rape and sodomy, involving them in animal torture, bestiality or cannibalism, or forcing a child to ingest urine or faeces, enter a coffin or grave containing a corpse, or take drugs as part of a ritual.

A hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on February 21 heard from several adults who described themselves as survivors of ritualistic child sexual abuse. They described devil worship, animal torture, forced bondage, rape, cannibalism, child prostitution and mind control, saying that the abuse was so physically and emotionally traumatic that they had repressed memories of it.

Kimberli Raya Koen, President and Founder of The Healing Center for Complex Trauma in Salt Lake City, told the Committee that she was trafficked into a family that ritually abused her for more than two decades.

She told them:

“I see the light and I have fought to be in this chair, to be in this moment, to have a chance to say this is real and this is happening.”

Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith spoke in favour of the bill, telling the committee that he began investigating a high-profile “ritual sex abuse” case two years ago.

The investigation (covered by this blog at the time) became embroiled in politics after then-Utah County Attorney David Leavitt accused him of dredging up an old, unverified witness statement that accused Leavitt and 14 others of “cannibalizing young children” and participating in a “ritualistic” sex ring. Leavitt subsequently lost his re-election bid.

Several states passed similar laws in the 1980s and 1990s, during the height of furore over satanic ritual abuse, but few, if any, prosecutions came from them. Since then, federal law enforcement agencies, scholars and historians have pointed to the scarcity of evidence for the claims of widespread ritual abuse and warned that such legislation risks generating false allegations, wrongful imprisonments and wasting law enforcement resources.

Mary deYoung, professor emeritus of sociology at Grand Valley State University, has documented the harms of the satanic panic.

“This bill is a very good example of panic legislation, hastily cobbled together, on the basis of testimony from a couple of women recollecting childhood histories of satanic ritual abuse. It’s a bill that responds with the kind of approach where we get really angry and say, ‘There ought to be a law.’ And we don’t think about whether it can be enforced in such a way that adds any benefit to society or that ensures that justice is done.”

County Sheriff Smith acted on the reports, but his prosecutions have lagged in court for years, plagued by accusations that investigators mishandled witness statements and that the investigation was politically motivated from the start. He says:

“I was attacked, I was ridiculed, I’ve had memes made about me because of it. Without a doubt, these things do happen in Utah. I believe they’re happening, I believe they have happened.”

Utah’s proposed bill and the county sheriff’s investigation have attracted national interest from conservative media and online conspiracy theorists who believe this case will prove that the allegations in the satanic panic of the 1980s were true, and that cabals of satanists are still sexually abusing, murdering and cannibalising children. Several self-described internet investigators have, in blogs, videos and podcasts, accused hundreds of Utahns of participating in satanic ritual abuse rings.

Many of the claims in the 1980s were made in Utah, amid claims that local therapists used hypnosis and manipulative interview techniques to recover memories from alleged child victims. These were some of the earliest claims of widespread satanic ritual abuse.

Utah’s governor formed a task force in 1990 which spent $250,000 to address pervasive ritual abuse. Investigators interviewed hundreds of victims in more than 125 alleged cases, only one of which ended in prosecution. A final report from the state’s Attorney General in 1995 suggested that there was evidence of isolated instances of abuse involving rituals, but not a widespread plot to abuse children in this way.

National studies from the Department of Justice and the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect found no evidence to support claims of widespread ritual abuse. Child sexual abuse, however, is staggeringly common; about 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys in the United States are victims, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Utah, the Judiciary Committee voted 10 to 1 to advance the ritual abuse bill to the full House; if passed there, it will advance to the Senate. No one testified in opposition to the bill. Rep. Brian King, one of the two Democrats on the committee, cast a dissenting vote and questioned its necessity, noting that state law already criminalises physical and sexual child abuse. Ivory, the sponsor, conceded the offenses were already criminal, but said a specific law was necessary because the crimes are “so heinous.”

​​Rep. Kera Birkeland, a Republican, cried as she addressed the people who spoke during the hearing.

“I had no idea that this was happening in our state. We believe you.”

Do we? Are children in Utah or elsewhere being forced to eat human flesh (the focus of this blog) or other matter usually considered inedible in polite society? One of the most famous allegations is the conspiracy theory #Frazzledrip which maintains that a video is circulating showing Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, a former aide, ripping off a child’s face and wearing it as a mask before drinking the child’s blood in a satanic ritual sacrifice. No claims were made about making the child eat flesh though. So I guess that’s not covered by the bill.

Utah has a bit of a record here, with the ill-fated team eaten by Alferd (or Alfred) Packer leaving from the Bingham Canyon mines near Salt Lake City in November 1873 for the gold fields of Breckenridge in the Colorado Territory. They met Packer some 25 miles from their starting point, near Provo. Unrelated (I guess) is the story of a Utah man who was charged in September 2021 over the Capitol riots and later threatened to “eat the flesh” of a probation officer.

We might also wonder if these laws might be used against churches that practise the Eucharist, the eating and drinking of the wafer and wine in church, which is seen by some (particularly the Catholics) as a literal transubstantiation of wafer and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ. Children are usually expected to take communion, that is, eat the flesh and blood of Christ (in the form of wafer and wine), from the age of about seven. This does sound a lot like what the bill describes as “ingestion… of human bones, blood, or flesh”. I wonder what the churches might say about that?

Idaho is the only state to have a law against cannibalism, but it has never been used. Seems a terrible oversight, really, and perhaps the good folk of Utah can set it right.

It’s just meat: SOCIETY OF THE SNOW (La sociedad de la nieve)  (J.A. Bayona, 2024)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films2 Comments

Society of the Snow is a new account of the 1972 Andes plane crash. It is an adaptation of Pablo Vierci‘s book of the same name,which included detailed accounts of all sixteen survivors, many of whom Vierci had known from his earliest years.

The twist here (not really a spoiler as they keep presaging it) is that the narrator of the film is one of those who were not among the sixteen.

Uruguayan Air Force flight 571, chartered to transport the “Old Christians” rugby team to Santiago, Chile, crashed into a glacier in the heart of the Andes. Of the 45 passengers on board, only 16 survived for the 72 days before they were rescued. Trapped in one of the most inaccessible and hostile environments on the planet, they had to choose cannibalism to stay alive. In this blog, we are most interested in the debate that led to the decision to eat their friends and crew, but the whole story of their pursuit of survival goes beyond what they ate and is equally fascinating.

We see a group of very devout young people, laughing and joking as they organise the trip to Chile, horsing around as the plane gets most of the way over the Andes, and then their reactions as the plane just does not reach the required altitude.

After a week without food, their urine turning black from lack of protein, they start exploring their very limited options. One group believe they will be rescued, even though their plane is painted white and they are in one of the biggest snowfields in the world. But most of them start to think about the only realistic way to survive, particularly after they find a portable radio and hear that the search for them has been called off.

The film has some interesting discussions regarding the ethics of cannibalism.

“What’ll happen to us? Will God forgive us?”
“He’ll understand we’re doing everything we can to survive.”

Roberto, the medical student who has been trying to keep the injured alive, explains what happens to the body without food – it dries up, starts to absorb the organs. There is reference to the “God of the Mountains”, a different being to the one in the city. Arturo, one of the wounded, has a fascinating soliloquy about this God:

“That God tells me what to do back home, but not what to do out here…. I believe in another God. In the God that Roberto has in his head when he treats my wounds. In the God that Nando has in his legs when he keeps walking no matter what. I believe in Daniel’s hands when he cuts the meat, and Fito when he gives it to us, without saying which of our friends it belonged to. So we can eat it, without having to remember the life in their eyes.”

They discuss the legality and the practicality of cutting up bodies, the similarity to organ donation, but of course without consent. So that inspires them to make a pledge.

And so they begin to eat. There are scenes of skeletons being picked clean as the three Strauch cousins offer to cut up the bodies in an area that is hidden from the plane, “to keep the ones who eat from losing their minds”.

What the film glosses over is the Catholicism that permeates much of Latino culture. While they make the point that the bodies are now “just meat”, they do not look for the parallels of their cannibalism to the Eucharist, the eating and drinking of the wafer and wine in church which is supposed to transubstantiate into the blood and body of Christ. It is a theme explored in more detail in the earlier film, as well as in the memoirs of the survivors.

“Drawing life from the bodies of their dead friends was like drawing spiritual strength from the body of Christ when they took Communion”
(Parrado & Rause 2006. Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home, p.117.)

They quote to each other Matthew 26:26: “Take and eat, this is my body.”
(Canessa & Vierci 2016. I Had to Survive: How a Plane Crash In The Andes Inspired My Calling to Save Lives,  p.27).

I suspect this might have been considered a bit too close to the bone (apologies for the pun) for the Spanish speaking audience to whom the film is mainly addressed. Or else they wanted to appeal to a wider audience than just the Catholics. Or perhaps a bit of both.

The story is best known in print for Piers Paul Read’s 1974 book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which was turned into the film Alive in 1993 by Frank Marshall. Since then, several of the survivors have written their own accounts, to set straight some of the alleged inaccuracies in Alive, but none are as well known. Outside of the Hannibal story and perhaps Soylent Green, Alive is the film most people seem to recall when they hear I have written a thesis on cannibalism.

Alive had a few problems that this film nicely avoids. For one thing, it was very Hollywood, or “Anglo” as the politically aware like to say. It starred American actors who did not look like they were starving, even when they were fondly reminiscing and lusting for the food they missed, which seemed to be mainly pizza. Society of the Snow has Uruguayan and Argentinean actors speaking in Spanish, and makeup and special effects have improved markedly in the thirty years between the films, so they look hungry, and their wounds look ghastly. It is a more authentic look at the situation in which a group of deeply religious young men could decide to eat their dead fellow passengers and friends, who conveniently lay around them, preserved in the snow.

The film closed the 80th Venice International Film Festival in an ‘Out of Competition’ slot. It was theatrically released in Uruguay on 13 December 2023, in Spain on 15 December 2023, and in the US on 22 December 2023, before streaming on Netflix in January 2024.

Society of the Snow received positive reviews. At the 96th Academy Awards, it was nominated for the Best International Feature Film, representing Spain, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

Society of the Snow is arguably a better movie than Alive, although at two hours forty minutes, I thought a bit more editing might have been useful. Still, sitting through that 160 minutes gave a miniscule sense of the despair of sitting in a wrecked plane in freezing conditions for 72 days, so we cannot complain!

But I was sorry to see them drop the cannibalism/communion issue, even though there is a hint in the final scene where the survivors sit around a dinner table like the Disciples at the Last Supper, their dead friends being the bread of life, transubstantiated from sacred to edible, the reverse of what is supposed to happen to the church wafer. Whether you consider this a cannibal movie or an epic of survival (and yes, there is controversy raging about that), exploring why people do or don’t eat each other is endless fascinating, and the question of cannibalising the body of Christ is, or should be, at the heart of this story.

Meat is meat: THE MAD BUTCHER (Guido Zurli,1971)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal filmsLeave a comment

Some months ago, I reviewed a film called Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies, in which I asked readers “What’s in your pie?” This film, The Mad Butcher (Lo strangolatore di Vienna), asks a far more profound question: “What’s in your sausage?” In each case, a better pronoun might have been “who”.

Guido Zurli was an Italian director but this film was made in English, set in Vienna and starred the wonderful, larger-than-life Hollywood actor Victor Buono, who plays the “Mad Butcher” of the title. In the USA, it was released as Meat is Meat, a better title IMHO – describing cannibals as “mad” is such a lazy approach, an intellectual shrug of avoidance. And to the butcher of this film, meat really is… just meat.

Otto (Buono) is dedicated to his calling – cutting up and selling animal flesh, and to him, the women he kills and minces are just that – meat. Otto has anger issues, which caused him to be confined to an asylum for three years, after slapping a customer with a piece of liver. But now he is being released, with an official certificate allowing him to say, “I’m not crazy now.”

His wife, who had had him committed (to save him going to jail, she claims) wants him to come home with her, worried about what the neighbours will say, but he wants to move into his butcher store where, he tells anyone who will listen, he is “the best butcher in Vienna”.

While throwing from his window the rubbish left by his wife’s brother who was running the store in his absence, Otto sees a neighbour as she showers, in silhouette. She looks, well, edible to him.

His wife catches him staring at the neighbour and, during the resulting row, he strangles her. At first horrified, he realises that there is only one way to get rid of the evidence. After that, he has to dispose of a sex worker brought home by the brother-in-law, and then the brother-in-law, who he has spent much of the film calling a “pig”. Well, he is a very popular butcher, the best in Vienna, and after all, as he opines, “I need this meat.”

But then, when he manages to abduct the neighbour (she of the long showers with the lights on and the blinds open), he has to deal with the American protagonist – a journalist who inexplicably is allowed to hang out with the police and investigate their cases. Otto rips off her clothes (there’s a lot of that sort of thing) and promises her

“I’m not just the best BUTCHER in Vienna!”

As the logline says, in one of those double-entendres that haunt cannibal movies, “His sausage was a cut above the others!“

This is more black comedy than traditional horror – Otto relishes turning his customers into innocent cannibals. They, in turn, rave about his sausages, lining up to buy them from his push-cart in the park.

When his activities are disclosed, the police chief, who has been happily eating other animals all movie, is suddenly smitten by a serious bout of nausea.

“Those sausages that I ate! They were made of human flesh!”

The innocent cannibal theme has been popular since Sweeney Todd, who first appeared on film in 1928. Forty years earlier, Jack the Ripper had terrified the citizens of the heaving metropolis of London, brimming with workers drawn to the dark Satanic mills, driven into town by the centralisation of agriculture and the promise of gainful employment. Social cohesion seemed to be failing (isn’t it always?) and the cannibal was the figure who best represented the city as voracious beast. Henry James described London as “an ogress who devours human flesh to keep herself alive to do her tremendous work”. The “savage” of foreign climes who had so thrillingly filled the imaginative accounts of the colonial explorers had come home personfied as their own city, and the unknown faces dwelling within it were chief suspects. This was reflected in H.G. Wells’ first novel, The Time Machine, in which the proletariat, thousands of years in the future, have evolved into a highly technological cannibalistic tribe who feed off the soft, effete gentle people who are all that remain of the bourgeoisie.

Sweeney Todd took this to a new level, showing that even a “gentleman”, an apparently respectable member of society, could kill people. But Sweeney is never shown eating anyone; it is his customers, or the customers of his girlfriend who owns a pie-shop, who enjoy (immensely) the flesh of his victims. This could be done for revenge, as in the later, Tim Burton version of Sweeney, or for profit, particularly in times of shortage, such as Ulli Lomel’s Tenderness of Wolves concerning the German serial killer and cannibal Fritz Haarmann, who supplied meat of many species, particularly human, to his unwitting and grateful neighbours.

The outer limits of the world were still full of cannibalistic savages, but now they were in the same country – Texas Chain Saw Massacre featured a bunch of rednecks who captured tourists and fed them to other tourists (as well as catering to the extended family of course). But we were more worried about the cannibal in our midst, driven by the spectre of Ed Gein, an unassuming if eccentric man who dug up graves and used the bodies for ornaments, graduating into killing people and possibly feeding their flesh to neighbours as venison, an accurate term for animals hunted down for food and fun. A later version was Farmer Vincent in Motel Hell who collected tourists to serve in his motel, quoting his motto “meat’s meat and a man’s gotta eat!). Another slightly less light-hearted group of entrepreneurial cannibals like Vincent were the merry animal liberationists who farmed, milked, slaughtered and sold the flesh of those observed eating animals (to others who pay to eat animals) in The Farm.

Other films from all around the world feature butchers profitably selling human flesh for human consumption: The Butchers, Ebola Syndrome (from Hong Kong), Delicatessen from France, The Green Butchers from Denmark, and Barbaque (Some Like it Rare), also from France. In most of these films, the flesh of humans is found to be irresistibly delicious, until its provenance is discovered (although in Barbaque, only flesh from vegans has that special something). This is also the theme of Sweeney Todd even in the latest personification, The Horror of Delores Roach, in which New Yorkers line up around the block to buy the most delicious empanadas, unaware they are made of the chef’s landlord. Hitchcock had explored the same territory in 1959 with his episode called Specialty of the House, in which members of an exclusive men’s club crave the specialty “lamb Armistran”, which turns out to be the flesh of patrons who had enquired too deeply into the methods of the chef. Just so in this film, The Mad Butcher, which was the subject of this blog before I embarked on one of my legendary tangents.

Hannibal Lecter, untypically, did not eat humans because they were irresistibly delicious, but because they were another species of edible mammals, inferior to Hannibal the Übermensch and those few he considered his equals, no more or less acceptable morally and gustatorily than any other meat animal. Hannibal found amusement watching his guests enjoy his cooking, not because of the type of the meat, but because of his gastronomical skills. Hannibal’s meals were just as delicious whether filled with human, cow, pig, sheep, or anyone else. It’s the preparation, what Claude Lévi-Strauss called “the cultural transformation of the raw”. Hannibal refined the rude into delicious concoctions. Otto feels the same way about refining annoying people through the artistry of his butchery.

“Let me explain. Animals tear meat. Butchers carve.”

Rotten Tomatoes gives this film a solid 42%, based on the wordless review of one critic. I think as cannibal films go it would be forgettable, except for the amazing performance of the great Victor Buono, who turns it into a melodrama, or even a pantomime. It is, whatever its critical failings, very watchable and a lot of fun, and for those who are interested in such things, there is no gore but lots of meat, and lots of dresses being ripped from female bodies. To the protagonist, Otto, sex is one more appetite, like hunger, easily satisfied by violence, and not to be denied by the stultifying conventions of society.

If you speak Italian, the full movie can, at the time of writing, be seen at: https://ok.ru/video/1511628212842