Two hundred years ago (July 19 1824), Alexander Pearce was hanged in Hobart, Tasmania, and his body dissected for research. He was a cannibal.

Australia has a bit of a dearth of cannibal stories (compared to places like the USA and Russia). Ask Aussies about cannibalism and they will often make a joke about state or federal politicians. Then they may search their memories and come up with Katherine Knight, a slaughterhouse worker who in 2000 had passionate sex 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 some of his flesh. 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 placenames for Price’s children. Another meal was tossed into the backyard; it appears she intended to eat it but decided against it. So, no points on that one I’m afraid – no one got eaten, so no cannibals. More recently, the Snowtown bodies in the barrels case was revealed to have an element of cannibalism in the final murder, but this was very much an afterthought to the killings, and not even mentioned in the film of the events.

Most of the real cannibals in Australian history were in fact convicts sent to the worst penal settlements the British could devise (and they were very good at that) then escaping, only to eat their comrades when other food sources were exhausted. Edward Broughton did just that in 1830, as did Thomas Jeffrey, who became a murderous bushranger, in 1836. But before them, a cannibalistic pioneer one might say, there was Alexander Pearce.

Pearce escaped the brutal penal colony only to eat his companions, not once but twice (he confessed when recaptured the first time, but the authorities didn’t believe him). He is shown very briefly in this movie as a historical flashback before the opening title, an escapee who is cornered by a very angry soldier whose gun misfires. Pearce tears the man’s throat out, swallows some and throws a bit to a thylacine (Tamanian Tiger) who is stalking him, to allow him time to escape.

The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial who was endemic only to Tasmania, until wiped out by European colonists, the last one dying in Hobart zoo in 1936. There is no evidence of them eating humans. Thylacines were not the only targets of white settlers: Tasmanian Indigenous peoples were also rounded up and subjected to genocide in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Anyhow, the plot of this movie revolves around a biologist named Nina and her friends, who are trying to find proof that the thylacine is not extinct – her sister found a paw print, but was killed mysteriously near the Pieman River on the west coast. The film and other sources often claim that Alexander Pearce was known as the pieman due to his love of the meat of a wide variety of animals, although in fact it seems it was named after a pastry cook named Thomas Kent.

They get a punt across the river, driven by a cranky old man with a small girl who is playing with bones and reciting bloodthirsty rhymes. She bites the boyfriend.

They get to the town, where the locals are killing puppies and who knows who else.

Long story short, as they say, these are a cannibal family descended from Alexander Pearce, who they call the Pieman. The city slickers, mocking the locals as they depart, head down the river where, at the midpoint of the film (where the really good or really bad stuff happens) Nina finally but briefly sights a thylacine!

Of course, she doesn’t have her camera, so she grabs it and they go look for the animal, splitting up to search, proving without a doubt that none of them has ever watched a horror film before. You don’t split up! The other girl meets the creepy child from the punt, then is grabbed from behind and killed, and we get to watch her tongue torn out and eaten. The others find her strung up on a meat hook and butchered like any prey animal.

There’s plenty of gore and somewhat predictable jump scares (or maybe I’ve just seen too many of these types of movies) but the plot is interesting, the acting great, the direction and photography first-rate, and the scenery is spectacular, although the depiction of the Deliverance-like locals may reduce the usefulness of this film for promoting Tasmanian tourism.

“What did you hope to find? We’ve been here a long time. Almost as long as the nation. We have a life to protect, a tradition. You tourists have no tradition.”

The cannibals in this film capture tourists and either eat them or breed them, not that different to what humans do to other animals. When modern twenty-first century humans eat others they are often referred to as degenerate cannibals – they are accused of devolving into the cannibalistic savages that early humans are portrayed as, even though there is little evidence that earlier cultures were into cannibalism or that modern ones have outgrown it.

Humans often turn to cannibalism when food runs out. The Biblical story of the siege of Samaria in Israel some 3,000 years ago (2 Kings 6) relates that, unable to afford asses’ heads and doves’ dung, two women agreed to boil their babies for sustenance. But after they’d eaten the first one, his mother found that the second woman had hidden her child, a shocking breach of contract.  Such starvation cannibalism became common in the day of sailing ships, but even on land, Sawney Bean in fifteenth or sixteenth century Scotland is supposed to have stopped tourists as they passed through his wild lands and taken them home for dinner. Some of these stories seem to stray from cannibalism into something like an aversion to getting a job, which is how the modern versions like Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Hills Have Eyes are sometimes framed. We eat flesh because we need to or want to, and because we can. That still applies in the meat section of every supermarket. We don’t degenerate to cannibalism, we simply objectify the prey, be it human or any other animal. This objectification is at the heart of all politics.

The moral of these stories (they all have one, even the most basic slasher), is that there are other worlds out there, away from what we are used to in our own little niche. There are people outside our ways of understanding life and morality, whose daily existence may be inconceivable to those looking in. Coetzee said that the “upper intelligentsia” (Nina is a scientist) live lives irrelevant to most people, who may be “devoted to brawling and guzzling and fucking”. That’s whom we meet in the unexplored wilderness of Deliverance or Sawney’s Scotland or the Texas of the forgotten, and in this film; they fight, they kill, they eat and they reproduce. They survive and breed: the basis of all evolution. It’s what animals do, and a good cannibal film like this reminds us that we are, beneath our veneer of civilisation, just another brawling, guzzling, fucking animal.