Awarded PhD from the University of Melbourne for a thesis questioning how cultural manifestations of cannibalism challenge the assumed anthropocentrism of our relationships to other animals.
This blog has laboured mightily to keep up with the constantly growing catalogue of cannibalism movies and TV shows, as well as the increasing number of actual cases reported in the media. So this week we are taking a rather exciting side-trip into the wonderful world of short stories, a place where the sets can be as lavish as the author wishes since there are no Producers cutting budgets, the protagonists can do anything the mind can conjure up without the need for stunt persons or insurance, and the whole thing requires no masks or social distancing.
The story considered in this week’s cannibalism blog is called DEAR MEAT, and it appears in the third Women of Horror Anthology, titled THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY.
The anthology contains an amazing assortment of thirty fresh looks at the wonderful world of horror. I have, naturally, chosen to review the cannibalism story by J Snow, since that’s what I do, for reasons best known to myself and the Department of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne.
Ms Snow has written and published five cannibalism stories; reassuring to know that others also labour in these fields. For those of you who wish to know how (or why) she writes, there is an interview at Paula Readman’s Clubhouse.
Dear Meat was written a few years before the pandemic, but reads like it could be taken from tomorrow’s newsfeed. It involves a small elite group of rich and powerful men who have decided that human population growth is threatening to destroy the biosphere, and so must be stopped and reversed. More than two thirds of the population, billions of people, must be “eliminated.”
Various ingenious and possibly prophetic strategies are mentioned such as introducing viruses and tainted vaccines, genetically modified foods and contaminated water supplies. Free tubal ligations and vasectomies are encouraged, and abortions allowed up to two months after birth. But the key plan in this story is to set the populace at each other’s throats, or more precisely at the barrels of guns. Yes, hunting season for humans becomes the only way to feed the family. Tags are issued, which is apparently the way hunting works in the USA, and the distribution is weighted according to the discriminatory preferences of these shadowy rulers – the “unworthy and unholy” are allotted the most tags meaning the poor and the non-Christians are most likely to be hunted and cooked. Illegal immigrants are always open season. The rich and the politicians, however, don’t ever seem to end up on the butcher’s slabs.
English cleric and economist Thomas Malthus pointed out in 1798 that population increases geometrically, but food availability increases only arithmetically. All things being equal, this means we must run out of food, unless there is a disaster or an intentional reduction in human population growth. Too many people and not enough food is likely to lead to cannibalism, although Malthus did not venture into such abject speculations. The ethologist John Calhoun crossed that bridge in his study of rats, where he found that putting rats into a utopian environment, with no shortage of food or shelter, and letting them breed unconstrained, ended up in a chaotic maelstrom of sexual deviance and cannibalism. A Malthusian/Calhounian scenario is the basis for the film Soylent Green which is set (honest, I’m not making this up) in 2022, when overpopulation has led to a situation where the enormous population of poor people can only be fed by recycling the bodies of those who die or can be persuaded to accept euthanasia.
Not so in Dear Meat. The people running the government know one thing that has been true since the start of humanity: when there is hunger,
“People turn on each other, become monsters, all for one tiny morsel.”
The people turning on each other in this story are from a family; a man, a woman and a child. Not even close to a large family by today’s standards, but in the world of the story, any increase in population (child) must be balanced by a decrease (a hunted tag). One person must die, be carted to the butcher and carried home as meat, just as the odd hunter does now to deer or kangaroos or anyone else that happens to move at the wrong moment.
I am introducing some levity because this is a grim scenario, skilfully crafted, beautifully written and with an ending that I absolutely will not spoil. The wonderful thing about eBooks is that they are ridiculously affordable and offer hours of reading pleasure. This collection, and particularly Dear Meat, is highly recommended.
In The Tempest, Shakespeare created a monstrous, malformed semi-human character named Caliban, the son of a witch, who is accused of trying to rape Miranda, the daughter of Prospero, the magician that took over Caliban’s island after losing the dukedom of Milan. Caliban has fascinated scholars over the years, with his name often taken to be an anagram of “canibal”, which was then starting to become the preferred term for humans who ate other humans, formerly known as “anthropophagi”. The word “canibal” or “cannibal” came from Christopher Columbus’ clumsy rendering of the name of the Caribs, a tribe he came across in the Lesser Antilles, and who, he was told, were man-eaters. Caliban, then, can perhaps be seen as a satire on the way colonial people were misrepresented and slandered by the imperialist explorers of the time. Post-colonialist versions of the play, including Julie Taymor’s version (you might remember her superb version of Titus), showed Caliban more as a “noble savage”, representing the indigenous inhabitants so rudely displaced from their homes during the period of European expansionism.
As Elvis said, “I said all that to say all this”. The semi-human monsters of our time are plentiful, and include neo-Nazis, whoever is on the other side of your political divide, and all the world’s various terrorist groups. One group that we (the West) went to war with (and lost) was the Taliban, who have taken over Afghanistan, a country now sliding into economic ruin and famine, since the withdrawal of international relief funds. This is not to say that there is anything noble about the Taliban – they are bunch of vicious thugs who apply mediaeval forms of punishment in their courts and slaughter, starve or otherwise deny basic rights to women and ethnic minorities. They are, in a sense, Caliban, and the media never tire of detailing their atrocities and transgressions, whether proven or dubious. The latest is, of course, the old favourite, cannibalism. Yep, the fourth cannibalism case we’ve reported so far in 2022.
Al Jazeera reported back in October 2021 that the Taliban, back in power after being routed by the US and its allies twenty years earlier, were arresting drug addicts and locking them up to make them go “cold turkey” (what they call “detoxification”). Former guerrilla fighters now raid Kabul’s drug-ravaged streets and bridges, rounding up hundreds of homeless men addicted to heroin and methamphetamines. They are beaten and marched to treatment centres as part of the Taliban’s pledge to clean up the drug trade.
Most of the world’s heroin comes from the vast poppy fields of Afghanistan and, while the crop has financed the Taliban for decades, it has also supplied cheap drugs to the domestic market, leading to a major problem of addiction. The Avicenna Medical Hospital for Drug Treatment, formerly the US military base Camp Phoenix, is chronically short of the alternative opioids, buprenorphine and methadone, typically used to treat heroin addiction. There is no money; the doctors have not been paid for months.
And there is little or no food. The Daily Mailhas reported, via a Danish journalist who asserts that he spoke to a recovering addict, that the patients are sleeping three to a bed. They are forced to eat grass just to stave off hunger pangs, and there are “rumours they have resorted to eating cats and even cannibalism in order to survive.” One addict told the journalist:
“They killed a man and made a fire. They took his intestines and ate them.”
In scenes reminiscent of last century’s genocides, men in prison uniforms sit in despair. Denmark Radio reported that a prisoner told them that:
“People ate cats out in the park yesterday. One cut off the cat’s head and ate it.”
Of course, one report from a tabloid does not a cannibalism outbreak make. But it is undeniable that the sudden collapse of the old regime and sweeping to power of the Taliban has been followed by political and economic chaos as Western funding was suddenly withdrawn, and relief agencies struggle with ways to supply support without simply enriching the new Taliban Calibans. Where there is starvation, be it on a shipwrecked lifeboat, a crashed plane, a region facing famine, or a future post-apocalyptic landscape, there will eventually be cannibalism. People will do what they must in order to stay alive, be they Caliban or Prospera.
In 1967, Valerie Solanas self-published the SCUM Manifesto, a document which began:
“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”
SCUM stood for Society for Cutting Up Men, and its manifesto was considered on its release something of a parody, satirising patriarchy; an exaggerated propaganda diatribe for Women’s Liberation, which was making men a little nervous by then (or at least making us reassess some of the previously unquestioned societal beliefs). That changed in 1968, when Solanas bought a gun and shot Andy Warhol in The Factory, his studio in New York City. Apparently, she really did want to cut up men.
This German-language German-French-Italian made film Die Wiebchen, translated variously as “The Females” or “The Bitches” or “Feminine Carnivores” came out a couple of years later, and was certainly influenced by Solanas and her manifesto, and her gun.
Zbyněk Brynych was a Czech director of the New Wave, which emphasised improvisational film-making rather than punctilious adherence to narrative scripts. Die Wiebchen starts with Eve (Uschi Glas) suffering from anxiety attacks. She is sent off to the Van Marens psychiatric retreat, which turns out to be staffed almost exclusively by women, except for a giant who is the gardener, an almost archetypal monster, toothless and with a long scar on his face. Incidentally (fun fact time), When Eve arrives at the health spa, the first woman to greet her is carrying a German translation of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto. She is examined in stirrups by the head of the clinic, Dr Barbara (Gisela Fischer from Torn Curtain, in which she was also a doctor).
Drugged and disorientated, Eve wanders out of her room and opens a cupboard, out of which falls a man with a knife in his back. Yep, SCUM it is. Men are welcome though – particularly an extremely sleazy guy with open shirt and gold chain who thinks he’s landed in heaven, only to end up in male hell, and a hot oven. Men are lured in for sex and then killed, in the manner of the praying mantis or black widow spider.
Eve wants to warn the other men about the female man-eaters, but, of course, no one believes her. The police chief is, admittedly, male, but also chronically alcoholic, and certainly not interested in investigating murders. “I have three murders a day; they have to wait their turn.”
Dr Barbara diagnoses Eve as suffering from post-traumatic hallucinations and we, the audience, can never be sure whether this is actually the case. There’s certainly meat on the dinner menu, but from which species of animal? No spoilers, but the question of reality is settled at the conclusion, with a surprisingly graphic scene for 1970.
Just in case we haven’t got the point, the women hold a joyous bra-burning ceremony. This movie really has something for everyone. The music is jazzy sixties and the photography tends to the gimmicky with extreme fisheye lenses and trippy montages. It gets a bit annoying, but overall it’s a lot of fun.
Die Weibchen is an interesting entry in the all too brief list of female cannibal films because, while the male reaction against feminism or “women’s lib” as it was known in 1970 is obvious with every slash of the knife and every burnt bra, nonetheless the protagonists are all strong women, with the only men being drooling idiots or sex-obsessed sleazebags.
Uschi Glas wrote in her memoir Mit einem Lächeln (With a Smile) that she was glad to be able to play a new type of woman for the first time, a “beautiful change”. But she regretted that the film never became a big success.
“If ever a film were guilty of sending out mixed messages, this would be it – but, surprisingly, I didn’t feel that hurt it much.”
My preferred title was the Italian version: Femmine Carnivore: Carnivorous Females. Eating meat is usually considered a male pursuit (strange, in that men don’t menstruate), yet there is a terror of the female, and particularly the fact that we emerge from the womb, and subconsciously fear that we could be reabsorbed into it. Professor Barbara Creed writes about the archaic mother as a “primordial abyss”, the place we all came from, and to which we fear we will return. Unlike Freud’s insistence that boys are terrified of what they see as their potential castration when they perceive their mother’s genitals as “a lack”, the female cannibal with her knife or teeth or her vagina dentata (toothed vagina) demonstrates the real fear felt by men – their cannibalisation by the strong woman. Often she is presented as a monster or possessed by an evil entity, such as in Inseminoid or Jennifer’s Body, or turned into a zombie by some contagious virus such as in Doghouse. But it’s nice to see a movie like Die Wiebchen, where the female cannibals are just – enjoying their dinners.
Last week we looked at the case of the German cannibal Stefan R. who made the early 2022 news when was finally sentenced to life imprisonment for killing and probably eating a man he met on a dating site in September 2020. Justice takes its time. That was our first cannibalism news story for 2022.
Two weeks before THAT, I reviewed 2021 and declared it “THE YEAR OF THE CANNIBAL.” I guess that was tempting fate, since we now have three cannibalism stories in the news in the first two weeks of 2022. Looks like in 11.5 months, we may have to call 2022 the YEAR OF EVEN MORE CANNIBALS.
The German cannibal
Stefan R and mystery of the missing penis. Read about it here.
The Brazilian cannibal
Serial killer who ‘ate eyes and ears of victims’ captured in Brazil.
Djalma Campos Figueiredo, 46, was arrested in Brazil this week. Figueiredo had already been sentenced to 42 years in prison for several other murders and was on the run.
9th Military Police Battalion officers (Brazil’s preventive police force) captured Figueiredo, 46, in the city of Cuiaba in Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, on Tuesday night, January 11. He had already been sentenced by the Court of Justice of Rondonia in the city of Porto Velho to 42 years in prison for several counts of aggravated murder. An arrest warrant for a pending sentence of 26 years and four months in prison was issued against him on September 30 last year. The total number of his victims is still unknown.
According to the Civil Police (Brazil’s investigative police force), Figueiredo would eat his victims’ eyes and ears and drink their blood after killing them. Most of the killings took place in and around the city of Ji-Parana, in the state of Rondonia.
The Nigerian cannibal
Meanwhile, the Zamfara (NW Nigeria) State Police Command arrested a 57-year-old man, Aminu Baba, for allegedly eating and selling human body parts.
Ayuba Elkana, the state Commissioner of Police, paraded the suspect before journalists on Thursday, where Baba stated that he had conspired with three other people, who usually sold the parts to him at the rate of 500,000 nairas per body (about $1,200 US).
The suspected accomplices were identified as Abdulshakur Mohammed, 20; Buba, 17; and Tukur, 14. The suspect and his collaborators were apprehended based on information from the public. Elkana said,
“On December 12, 2021, around 2pm, one Ali Yakubu Aliyu reported at the Central Police Station, Gusau, that his son, Ahmad Yakubu, 9, was missing. On December 28, 2021, around 9.30am, police detectives received an intelligence report with regards to the earlier report, that on the same date around 9am, the corpse of a human being was found in an uncompleted building at the Barakallahu area, Gusau, with the two hands and legs tied with rags, and the head covered with a polythene bag.”
An autopsy on the body found that some of the little boy’s body parts had been removed. Baba was arrested on January 4. The second suspect, Abdulshakur Mohammed, confessed that he had procured the body for Baba and received N500,000, the third time he had done so. Mohammed, Buba and Tukur had tricked a victim into going with them into an uncompleted building, where they killed him and removed his intestines, oesophagus, genitals and eyes.
Mohammed claimed that the parts were taken to Baba, who gave them N500,000.
Aminu Baba is a father of 19 and husband of three women, and a prominent businessman dealing in cars and other vehicles at Aminchi Motors Gusau. The police commissioner said Baba had confessed to the crime, adding that his admissions were assisting the police in the arrest of other members of his gang. He added:
“The suspect further confessed that he usually ate the body parts and identified the throat as the most delicious part. He also sold some of the human parts to his customers. Exhibits recovered from the suspect included intestines, oesophagus, penis and two eyes.”
“By being vigilant, we could save lives of those who may be lured into the abyss and also protect the main victims whose blood will be used to water the fortune of their prosecutors.”
The carnival of cannibals
Brazil has been a centre of cannibal stories since the term was invented by Columbus, mispronouncing the name of the Caribs, a little further north in the Lesser Antilles. Brazil is the home of the Tupinambás, a nation for whom cannibalism has never been a source of shame. They were depicted in the film Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (How tasty was my little Frenchman) and, rather less sympathetically, in slasher cannibal soft-porn movies like Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. Cannibalism as a metaphor for the rich exploiting the workers was presented in a Brazilian context in the 2018 movie The Cannibal Club. Away from the silver screen, a gang of people calling themselves “The Cartel” were sentenced recently for killing young women and selling their flesh in salgados (salty, deep-fried pastries).
Africa is also a favourite site for fantasies of cannibalism since colonial times. The movie District 9 portrays Nigerian criminal gangs who trade with captive aliens from another planet, and hope to learn how to use their weapons. They want to eat the protagonist of the movie, because he is turning into an alien. From the newspaper headlines, we had reports last year of a commercial driver in Ebonyi biting off and swallowing the fingers of a urban planning inspector, as well as a propaganda war over who was responsible for the cooked human carcasses found at the camp of a separatist group, the Indigenous People of Biafra.
Why are there so many reports of cannibalism these days? As we lurch from crisis to crisis, is our faith in the modern religion of humanism being eroded, so that we become just another prey animal for those who seek flesh? Is the voracious hunger that is the heart of modern consumerism overflowing the artificial walls of species?
‘Cannibal teacher’ hid his victim’s penis to avoid being outed
A man dubbed by the press a ‘cannibal teacher’ has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. The judge said the murder was carried out as part of his “cannibalism fantasies”. The 42-year-old, identified only as Stefan R, was also convicted of disturbing the peace of the dead, after a trial that opened in August 2021 and concluded this week.
German prosecutors described evidence of cannibalism in the killing of 44-year-old high-voltage technician, Stefan Trogisch, on 6 September 2020.
Stefan R. allegedly ate parts of his lover after sex, and subsequently concealed somehow the victim’s penis, so he wouldn’t be “outed” as gay. German police arrested the 41-year-old maths and chemistry teacher in November 2020 on suspicion of “sado-cannibalism for sexual gratification” after they found human bones stripped completely of flesh in a Berlin suburb. Under German law, the man’s surname cannot be revealed, yet there are pictures of him everywhere, so I’m guessing this is not a serious privacy issue.
A Berlin prosecutor’s office spokesperson said
“The suspect had an interest in cannibalism. He searched online for the topic.”
Well, hello! So do I, and maybe you, dear reader. I also look up COVID and cricket, but that doesn’t mean I caught one or played the other. Maybe he was writing a PhD thesis?
No one knows whether the victim, the other Stefan, had an interest in cannibalism, but we know that the two men were communicating on a gay dating website called Planet Romeo, according to a report in Der Spiegel. Stefan R. called himself “Spieltrieb1976” (roughly translated as “instinct to play”) and Stefan T. (now deceased) was “Dosenöffner79” (tin opener). Stefan R. also used the handle “Masterbutcher79” which prosecutors claimed was a reference to Armin Meiwes, who was dubbed the “Master Butcher of Rotenberg.”
The bones of Trogisch were found a couple of months after the murder, and showed signs of bite marks, although having been out in a field for a couple of months, it’s hard to say what species of animal had been biting them. A police officer told the newspaper Bild:
“Based on the bones found, which were completely stripped of flesh, and further evidence, we strongly suspect that Stefan T was the victim of a cannibal.”
Sniffer dogs led police to the apartment of the suspect, where they discovered knives, a medical bone saw, and a large freezer. Investigators also discovered 25kg of sodium hydroxide, a reagent that can be used to dissolve bodily tissue. It can also be used to make soap, which the accused claimed he bought it for. Traces of blood were discovered in the hallway of the suspect’s flat. The defendant had previously erected a sex swing in the living room and had a sign on the window ledge that read: “Instructions for emasculating and slaughtering a person.” He reportedly searched terms associated with cannibalism on the dark web such as “long pig” and “fatten and slaughter people” before Trogisch arrived at his residence. According to German newspaper Bild, he had also previously searched whether or not a person could survive after having their penis cut off.
Stefan R. told the court that Trogisch had died in his sleep on the sofa after a (presumably vigorous) sexual tryst. He claimed that Trogisch had consumed a cocktail of drugs and alcohol, and that he tried to revive him, but did not call emergency services “because it would have come out that I am homosexual”, according to Bild.
He said he decided to dispose of the body, and opted to separate Trogisch’s genitals “since my DNA could still have possibly been present due to the oral sex I performed”. But hours after the death, he logged back into the human slaughter forum where he proudly told a man from the city of Bremen: “I have it [the penis] now!”
In the sensitive style that we have come to expect from British news media, The Sun wrote
“the victim’s manhood has not yet been found.”
Judge Schertz said that, in 30 years as a judge, “nothing like this has come across my desk before”. He added that the defendant’s version of events was “unbelievable from start to finish”, noting the “very careful separation of testicles and penis” as evidence of a cannibalistic ritual.
The trial began in August 8 2021 and heard an autopsy report which revealed that the cause of death was a fatal loss of blood from the pelvic area due to a severed artery. This would seem to indicate that Trogisch bled to death after his penis was chopped off. The autopsy also ruled out the defendant’s claim that the victim was affected by alcohol or drugs, causing his death.
It’s a sensitive subject in Germany, where cannibalism was not uncommon between the world wars and was made into the subject of Fritz Lang’s masterpiece – “M – EINE STADT SUCHT EINEN MÖRDER” one of my favourite cannibalism movies. More recently, Armin Meiwes in 2001 met Bernd Jürgen Brandes on a site called Cannibal Café, and after a romantic interlude, agreed to Brandes’ request to kill him and eat him. The first act of the killing (all captured on video) was Meiwes cutting off Brandes’ penis, which he then cooked and the two men attempted to eat, very unsuccessfully. Meiwes subsequently killed Brandes and ate an estimated 45-65 pounds of flesh (20-30kg) from him. Meiwes is still in jail, and Brandes is still in Meiwes (well, only in spirit, unless he has a very slow digestive tract). Unlike Brandes, there is no evidence that Trogisch had “consented” to his killing.
Then in 2013, Detlev Guenzel, a German police forensic specialist (you couldn’t make this stuff up), chopped up a man he met on a cannibalism fetish website and buried the pieces in the garden, taking a picture of himself standing next to a skeleton and holding an axe, wearing nothing but socks and sandals. There is little evidence to show that Guenzel ate any of the victim, although the victim’s penis and one testicle were not found in the flowerbed where the other pieces of the puzzle were unearthed.
There is probably another thesis to be written on the proportion of cannibalism reports that involve queer sexuality. Meiwes, of course, and Jeffrey Dahmer, who collected young men and killed them to keep them close. The film The Silence of the Lambs was heavily criticised when it was released for showing the serial killer Jame Gumb (“Buffalo Bill”) as a transsexual, although the plot was all about how he wasn’t authentically trans, and was killing women because he was rejected for gender reassignment surgery, and so was making himself a woman suit out of the skin of his victims. The film’s cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, was not gay in that series of films and books (he fancied the hell out of Clarice Starling), although Krendler, the nasty dude from the Justice Department in the book Hannibal, said he “figured he [Hannibal] was a homosexual” because, you know, he had good taste in food and wine and music – “artsy-fartsy stuff”. Krendler’s brain is later eaten by Hannibal and Clarice, so we have no reason to take him too seriously. But there was certainly plenty of homoerotic interaction in the twenty-first century reboot of Hannibal on TV, particularly when Hannibal is holding Will tenderly while cutting him up.
Is this tendency to depict cannibals as queer a reflection on the traumas experienced by gay youths and where they may lead behaviourally, or simply a noxious reaction against the lifting of restrictions on gay couples? Someone will write a paper on that one day. They probably already have.
The other issue raised by this case if of course the persistent theme (Meiwes and Guenzel again) of the chopping off and consumption of the male penis. Stefan R. discussed on one forum whether it was possible to survive a genital amputation – saying that some people desired it in order to feel like women, or else take masochistic pleasure in it. Prosecutors argued that Stefan R. had cut off the victim’s genitals with the intention of eating them, and the judge agreed, but it could not be established whether he had carried out that plan.
Freud had a lot to say about this! When little boys discover that their mothers or sisters have no penis, they assume the women were castrated, and as a result fear their own castration by their father (whom they suspect of the act). This is supposed to be the basis of the repression that eats away at the male mind and drives us to our various deviant behaviours.
Subsequent psychological studies as well as feminist analyses have demolished much of Freud’s speculative theories, but there is one thing we still don’t know – where is Stefan Trogisch’s penis?
The presiding judge, Matthias Schertz, told Stefan R. “What you did was inhuman”. But another German, Friedrich Nietzsche, might have called it “Human, all too human”.
“Egoism is not evil, for the idea of one’s “neighbour” (the word has a Christian origin and does not reflect the truth) is very weak in us; and we feel toward him almost as free and irresponsible as toward plants and stones. That the other suffers must be learned; and it can never be learned completely.”
The Chinese title of this movie apparently translates to HUMAN PORK BUNS which is a more accurate description of the film, and also a lot more fun.
It’s a 1993 Hong Kong crime-thriller directed by Herman Yau who has made a few “cult classics” including EBOLA SYNDROME which I reviewed a while ago, and which the director said was his best work.
Both movies revolve around restaurants which serve human meat to unsuspecting diners.
This film is based on a true story – the so-called PORK BUN MURDERS which took place in August 1985 at the Eight Immortals restaurant in Mutya, Macau. A gambler named Huang Zhiheng was charged with the murder of a family of ten in their restaurant, after the father failed to repay gambling debts. Huang moved into their house and took over the restaurant, which he ran for eight months. Body parts from family members were washed up on local beaches and proved to have been severed with precision (discounting the original theory that they had been victims of a shark attack).
As Huang had cut the bodies up, and run the restaurant for some months, rumours naturally started that the flesh of the murdered family had ended up in the pork buns. After all, we (humans) apparently taste pretty similar to pigs. There is no evidence that he actually did this, and he committed suicide before his trial, but anyway, it’s the premise of this movie, which claims to be no more than a fictionalised version of the Pork Bun Murders.
Look, it’s pretty graphic – there are beatings, torture, a rape (involving chopsticks), murders with broken bottles and cleavers and even a stationery spike, a guy gets burnt alive, and small children get chopped up,
…and of course a lot of meat gets put into buns and fed to “innocent cannibals” dining in the restaurant.
If that’s not your thing, you might want to skip this one, but it’s somehow mixed in (minced?) with a light-hearted humour, and there are great, over the top performances from Anthony Wong as the perp Wong Chi-hang and Danny Lee as Inspector Lee, the cop on his trail.
Inspector Lee is right – you can never really be sure what meat you are being served. The killing industry is a business, and always puts profits first. Find out what people want, then sell it to them. Even if it’s made out of them.
“I used the flesh to make what you guys loved to eat and didn’t pay for … HUMAN MEAT BUNS”
The full movie, when last checked, can be streamed on-line.
Or you could just watch the always entertaining review by Mike Bracken at THE HORROR GEEK.
You might also enjoy Herman Yau’s later film, Ebola Syndrome.
For a more recent case of murder (and maybe cannibalism) in Hong Kong, check out the killing of Abby Choi.
What a year it was – if a virus wasn’t invading your body, your neighbour might well be.
Thank you!
First of all, a big thanks for reading and sometimes commenting on my blog. Eighteen months ago, I was very excited at seeing over 1,000 views in a month. In December 2021, we had over 6,000 views.
The year by year growth of readership (59,002 in 2021) has been going, pardon the term, viral. So, thank you!!
Cannibals and rumours of cannibals in 2021
I decided to postpone this blog post until January 2022 because, at the end of 2021, new cannibalism cases were still being reported. In the previous year’s summary, I had missed THE GRANNY RIPPER, because she died of COVID on December 29 2020 while awaiting trial. So we’re sneaking her in to the section at the end – cannibals sentenced in 2021, although her judge and executioner was a tiny virus.
There were so many cannibal stories in 2021 that I am listing them alphabetically by country. I should point out for my American readers that the good ol’ USA won gold in the number and strangeness of cannibal acts last year, with Russia, Mexico and Nigeria tied for silver.
Australia
A Tasmanian man pleaded guilty to assault and attempted abduction of a five-year-old girl, telling the court that he just wanted a cuddle (albeit from a screaming child, whom he had just attempted to strangle) and later telling prison officers that he had wanted to eat her, and that he had been wanting to eat people since he was a child.
Bolivia
A woman chowed down on a burger in Santa Cruz de la Sierra only to find that she was chewing on a severed and decomposing human finger. The unfortunate incident (you’d have to call her an innocent cannibal) was the source of some semi-amusing puns from the world’s press, plus a hilarious unintentional pun from the burger company who told her “the issue is out of our hands”.
France
A man in Tarascon, a town between Avignon and Arles, was shot by police after the decapitated and partly consumed corpse of young boy was found in his apartment.
Ghana
Richard Appiah of Abesim near Sunyani in the Bono Region, allegedly lured three boys to his house, killed them and kept their mutilated bodies in his fridge. He is said to have cooked for them, before cooking them.
Indonesia
A family in Gowa allegedly gouged out their six-year-old daughter’s eye as part of a black magic cannibal ritual that was supposed to bring them wealth, before her mother ate her eyelid. Police also arrested a shaman, who allegedly convinced the family to sacrifice children.
Malawi
Patrick Gome from Ntcheu was allegedly found biting a nine-month old baby on her cheek and thigh. A police spokesperson said Gome acted “like a wild animal”.
Mexico
David Sanabria and his young daughter, trying to cross Mexico from Honduras in the hope of entering the United States, was kidnapped by a Mexican cartel and held for ransom. Those refugees who did not pay, he later told Noticias Telemundo Investiga, were murdered and cooked and the surviving migrants were made to eat the meat.
Andres Filomeno Mendoza Celis, 72, was arrested in Calle Margaritas, in the municipality of Atizapan de Zaragoza. Detectives arrived at Mendoza’s home to interview him about the suspicious disappearance of a woman, Reyna González, a mother of two, only to find her mutilated remains on a table. Mendoza reportedly admitted to slaughtering and eating parts of around thirty women over the last twenty years.
Nigeria
The cannibal of Ebonyi was the name given to a commercial driver in Abakaliki, the Ebonyi State capital, who reportedly bit off and swallowed the finger of a member of the taskforce raised by the state’s Ministry of Capital City Development to enforce compliance with urban planning regulations.
A video has surfaced online purporting to show the Eastern Security Network (ESN), the security wing of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), celebrating the abduction, beheading and cannibalisation of two police officers. The Director of State Security said “We saw human flesh being roasted, it was an eye-sore.” An IPOB spokesperson, Emma Powerful, denied claims that their members eat human flesh and engage in barbaric acts, saying that the claim by the DSS was meant to demonise IPOB and ESN operatives and tag them as criminals.
Russia
Vladimir Yadne killed three people in Siberia and ate their flesh, washed down with vodka.
On the other side of Russia, Yegor Komarov was seen running from his car, which he had crashed into a road safety barrier. The problem was not the accident, but the headless body which fell from the car boot. Komarov admitted to being a cannibal and stated that he ‘likes killing people’. He confessed to stabbing and killing another man in a park in St Petersburg last year for the sole purpose of tasting human flesh, and said he had sliced off the tongue and fried it in butter.
South Africa
A community leader told the Financial Times newspaper that rioting and looting have caused food shortages which have led people to consider cannibalism.
Spain
National Police officers in Sevilla were deployed on Saturday, September 18, to deal with what they have described as one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of the force, a case involving African witchcraft and cannibalism. Allegedly, a fight had broken out between two women after one threw a bottle of water containing salt at the other, and accused her of witchcraft. Believing that her roommate was possessed, she struck her on the head with a stone, and then bit off and ate two of the woman’s fingers. After this, the aggressor, in an attempt to rid the other woman of the supposed demon, inserted the stone into her anus in an attempt to extract her guts.
USA
The biggest cannibalism story in the USA in 2021 was about a man who almost certainly has not eaten anyone. He did, however, boast about it in text messages to some very pissed off girlfriends, who reported it widely. Yep, the actor (maybe former actor) Armie Hammer. Arguably now more famous for his cannibalism posts than for his movies.
On February 9 2021, Chickasha (Oklahoma) police responded to a 911 call. They found Leon Pye dead and his four-year-old granddaughter Kaeos critically injured. She died in the back of the ambulance. Delsie Pye, Leon’s wife, was alive, but had knife wounds to both eyes. Lawrence Anderson confessed to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation that before slaughtering his family, he had broken into the home of a neighbour and butchered the woman who lived there, cut out her heart, and cooked it with potatoes to feed to his family, to release the demons. Apparently unsuccessfully.
Landon Copeland, an Army veteran from Utah who had been accused of assaulting police during the Capitol insurrection, was refused bail after he threatened to “eat the flesh” of a probation officer. He is said to have shouted “I will eat your flesh for nutrients. I don’t think you don’t know what I am!”
James Phelps, 58, and Timothy Norton, 56, were arrested and charged with kidnapping a young woman named Cassidy Rainwater in September. The County Sheriff said that Rainwater was disembowelled and dismembered after she was strangled. Some of her remains were found in a freezer. Conspiracies are floating around that both Norton and Phelps were involved in cannibalistic activities.
Just squeaking into 2021 before the ball falls in Times Square, Idaho man James David Russell, 39, of Oldtown in Bonner County had cannibalism charges added to his accusations of first-degree murder. Police found pieces of the neighbour, some of which appeared to have been cooked in a microwave oven. According to the supplemental probable cause affidavit, Russell believed that he could “heal himself by cutting off portions of flesh” in order to “cure his brain.”
Sentenced
Some cannibals sit in jail for a while before they are finally sentenced. Here are a few who ate people in earlier years, but were sentenced in 2021.
On Friday, 18 June, a Swiss court sentenced 46-year-old Alieu Kosiah, a West African rebel leader, to 20 years in prison for rape, murder and cannibalism.
Bulawayo man, Rodney Tongai Jindu, has just lodged an appeal to the Zimbabwean Supreme Court against a High Court ruling which sentenced him to death for murdering two of his friends. Jindu had told the court, in gruesome detail, how he had eaten the men’s livers raw, and cooked and eaten their brains.
Alberto Sánchez Gómez, a Madrid waiter, was jailed for 15 years in June. He had told police he butchered his own mother before sharing her body parts with his dog. The 66-year-old pensioner had been chopped into at least 1,000 pieces and her vital organs were missing.
Sunil Rama Kuchkoravi (35) of Kolhapur India was found guilty of murder for killing his mother after she refused to give him money to buy liquor. He later chopped up parts of her body and ate them, after frying them in a pan.
A Sydney (Australia) woman who cut her 57-year-old mother’s head off with kitchen knives in July 2019 was found guilty of manslaughter in the NSW Supreme Court in March, and sentenced to 21 years imprisonment, after pleading not guilty to murder due to mental impairment. The court was told that Jessica Camilleri – who had a history of refusing to take psychiatric medications – had only stopped the attack when her mother’s head fell off and her eyeballs came out of their sockets. The judge said Camilleri had engaged in “acts of decapitation and cannibalism”.
Eduard Seleznev, known as the “Arkhangelsk Cannibal”, who killed and ate the flesh of three men, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Russian Supreme Court. Seleznev admitted the murders, and added that he had then sliced their bodies up, kept the meat in plastic bags, and disposed of the bodies in the Volokhnitsa river. He subsequently boiled and ate the flesh.
At the end of the year, we heard that Mark Latunski, who allegedly killed his Grindr date, hung him upside down and ate his testicles on Christmas Eve 2019 (thus missing out on my 2020 update), will go to trial early 2022. Very inconsiderate.
Sofia Zhukova, known as the ‘Granny Ripper’, who supposedly gave children sweets made from the flesh of her victims, died in Russia of COVID-19 on December 29 2020, at the age of 81, before the conclusion of her murder trial. You may have noticed that most of the 5,351,812 people who died of COVID up to December 20 (plus millions more whose deaths were not reported to WHO) did not have articles written about them. Sofia had heaps of media coverage though, because, you know, cannibalism.
2022
Well, I hope you can see why I nominated 2021 as THE YEAR OF THE CANNIBAL. But what does 2022 have in store for us? Well, if you follow the prophecies of Nostradamus, which a surprising number of people do, 2022 offers, yep, even more cannibalism, this time because of inflation and the price of food.
“So high the price of wheat that man is stirred his fellow man to eat in his despair.”
Looking further ahead, a professor of astrobiology at Edinburgh University has warned that humans who attempt to colonise other worlds such as Jupiter’s moon Callisto and Saturn’s moon Titan could well find themselves running out of food and resorting to cannibalism. It happens – think of the “Starving Time” in the Virginia colony of Jamestown in 1609-10, or Sir John Franklin’s 1845 exploration of the Arctic that resulted in the crew cannibalising each other.
“As I stand before you, I’ve never had the urge to eat anyone, and it will never happen. So, what people are saying about the vaccine making people want to eat others… of being part of 5G technology, or linked to the work of the devil, is all nothing but a myth. It is not true.”
Hope you enjoyed your New Year festivities! Next year you might need a barbeque. Please keep reading and liking, and commenting! If you need some light reading, here’s my complete listing of Hannibal films and episodes.
In case you are breathing a sigh of relief that Christmas has been and gone, here’s the latest news – it goes for twelve days, and involves a lot of odd things like lords leaping and pear trees containing medium sized birds. This film covers the twelve days, but omits French hens and turtle doves, etc, in favour of lots of blood and gore.
“Bah! Humbug” always seems like a pretty good response to the confected cheer of Christmas, particularly to those who do not, for various reasons, celebrate the event or conform to the voracious consumerism that accompanies it. If you are one of the many who is over the Christmas rom-coms and tear-jerkers, you may have already come across the German Christmas demon Krampus, who appeared in a 2015 movie from Michael Dougherty, involving goblins, killer toys, malicious snowmen and a jack-in-the-box that eats a child whole, although he has been punishing naughty children for a lot longer than that, and may date back to pre-Christian folklore.
The cannibal movie reviewed today, though, was originally called The 12 Deaths of Christmas and features a different villain – a Christmas witch named Frau Perchtawho, according to legend, steals a child each of the twelve nights of Christmas. The witch is also said to slit open the bellies of disobedient children (not dissimilar to the threats of cannibalism which Andre Chikatilo’s mother used to keep him in line). The film’s name was changed to Mother Krampus for the American audience, many of whom have adopted Krampus as a sort of anti-Santa. Frau Perchta does not have nearly the same fan base.
The Santa Claus dogma is of course about socialisation – children are told that a large stranger will sneak into their houses at night and reward them if they are “good”. What if they are not good? Who will sneak into their house then, and what mayhem will ensue? Krampus was one answer, Frau Perchta another. Then there was Santa’s assistant, Père Fouettard who, like the Australian Prime Minister, hands out lumps of coal to children who are not deemed to have been good, and sometimes whips them too (the name Père Fouettard translates as “Father Whipper”. Following Santa around appears to have been his punishment for engaging in a bit of entrepreneurial cannibalism, in which he and his wife drugged three children, slit their throats, cut them into pieces, and stewed them in a barrel, to be sold as Christmas hams. The taste, allegedly, is almost identical.
But today’s film is not just about stealing the bad children, and perhaps killing them, no, it’s all about the punishment of the wicked being extended to the following generations – a popular theme in the Bible (check out Deuteronomy 5:9 for some unfair shit). Perchta is coming for the children of adults who wronged her.
One of these children, and the protagonist of what passes for the plot, is Amy (Faye Goodwin – Mandy the Doll). Her mum is Vanessa (Claire-Maria Fox of Suicide Club and Bride of Scarecrow), and Vanessa’s dad – Amy’s grandpa – (Tony Manders, from The Young Cannibals) lives outside the village, near a scary forest in Belgrave (the UK one), and asks her to drive him, on Christmas no less (no Ubers I guess) to the Church, where a bunch of locals want to discuss the focal local issue – lots of village children are disappearing. There we finally get to hear the legend of the witch:
“Frau Perchta was a witch, who over Christmas stole the souls of children.”
Dad admits to Vanessa that the peaceful villagers got together to kill an old woman 25 years ago (in 1992). We, the audience, know the background, through an endless voiceover accompanied by cards at the start of the movie. 12 kids disappeared over the 12 days of Christmas in 1921, and none were found, except for one girl whose mind was gone, and she could only scream “the witch! The witch!”
Then, in 1992, five more kids disappeared, their bodies were found in the forest, and the villagers believed, for reasons far from clear, that a nice old lady was the killer and was in fact Frau Perchta the witch, so they stabbed her and lynched her, as you do if the local constable is on leave, in a backward and primitive town like Belgrave, which apparently hosts the National Space Centre!
But as she died, she shouted a curse – that Frau Perchta would be back to wreak revenge on them, and their children. So, maybe she wasn’t quite so nice. Yeah, that’s about it for plot – we see (several times) the stringing up of the old woman, we see the risen witch. The witch kills lots of people in creative ways, including one who is cut up and made into a Christmas light show, another whose flesh is pressed into a cookie cutter to make Christmas peoplebread men, while another is trussed up like a Christmas turkey with an apple in her mouth and carved up, and her flesh cooked and fed to her boyfriend, who is Amy’s absentee dad. Then dad has his heart pulled out and eaten (not uncommon in cannibal stories – think Fresh Meat or even Hannibal).
The climax of a horror film (or any action movie) is usually the last ten minutes, in which the story is resolved and the bad guy defeated (until the sequel). This one goes on (and on and on) for about half an hour, presumably to ensure the film is considered a full-length feature, and it resolves nothing much, with a twist at the end that makes no sense at all. But lots of people get killed, and several have parts of them eaten, which is enough to get a mention in this blog, I guess. The plot is thin, the acting is often appalling, the continuity director in some parts seems to have been taken into the forest and eaten. But it’s presented as a low-budget slasher, and that’s what they are often like – they are not dramatic masterworks, but gruesome pantomimes. The idea of one child’s aunt walking him home through the dark forest at night when bodies are turning up everywhere is narratively absurd but, in a panto, we want to anticipate the villain, we want to guess what is going to happen, and yell at the actors to “look behind you!” And the gore, and the fright factors, are quite well done.
The moral of the story, if there is such a thing, is pronounced by a mysterious woman who turns out to be Amy’s grandma, not that it does her much good.
“Taking it into our own hands, playing God. That’s why all this is happening.”
Isn’t that exactly what humans do – play God? Nietzsche told us that God is dead, we killed him, so we have to become God. We play God in so many ways – the Christmas story in essence is about a Jewish family trying to escape one of the many psychopaths who have played God over the centuries. We play God when we nominate ourselves as above nature, more angel than animal, and proceed to destroy our own ecosystem. Who bears the suffering from such follies? The children, who are the ultimate examples of what Judith Butler calls “precarious life”. Like Frau Perchta, our vicious brutality usually comes back to haunt us, through the generations.
At the time of writing, the full movie (should you wish to bother) was available on YouTube.
A man from Oldtown in Bonner County has had cannibalism charges added to his accusations of first-degree murder.
The Bonner County Prosecutor amended the criminal complaint on Wednesday, December 15, charging James David Russell, 39, of cannibalism in relation to the September 10 murder of David Flaget.
Police searched Russell’s home the day after the murder and found portions of Flaget’s body, including a “thermal artifact” which is an observational finding showing that heat has been applied to only a portion of the remains, rather than the entire body.
Dr. Veena Singh of the Spokane Medical Examiner’s Office completed an autopsy on September 13, finding that the tissue found in Russell’s residence belonged to Flaget. Some of Flaget’s remains have not been found.
Police seized a bloodied microwave oven and glass bowl and a bloodied knife and duffel bag. Bonner County Detective Phillip Stella said on Thursday
“When dealing with death and carnage it’s a shock to our conscience. As far as I know this is the first cannibalism charge in Idaho.”
Sheriff’s deputies had been called to a possible murder on Lower Mosquito Creek Road on September 10. They found Flaget upside down in the passenger’s seat of his truck, unresponsive. Russell eluded the officers, barricading himself in the loft space of the garage on the property.
After a brief stand-off, Russell was apprehended. According to court documents, Russell was unable to understand his Miranda rights after they were repeatedly read to him. Russell made only one statement to law enforcement in which he repeated more than twice: “It’s private property and we don’t like non-family on it.”
“Flaget had several conflict-like run-ins with Russell and told the family about them,” Detective Stella said. “The family had enough warning signs that Mr. Russell was a danger to himself or others.”
According to the supplemental probable cause affidavit, Russell believed that he could “heal himself by cutting off portions of flesh” in order to “cure his brain.”
The Detective added:
“There’s a lot of facets we will certainly never know. It wasn’t the bloodiest crime scene, but it’s more of the psychological, ‘what the heck is going on here?’ and ‘why am I picking up pieces?’ It’s a walk down the dark path that we don’t see very often.”
Court proceedings were paused in late October after First District Magistrate Judge Tara Harden found Russell unfit to stand trial for first-degree murder and ordered him to the Idaho Security Medical Program. The results of the mental health evaluation on October 5 remain sealed by court order.
Oldtown is on the state border of Washington, and is a suburb of Newport, Washington, but is but is officially a city in Bonner County, Idaho, with a population of 184 at the 2010 census.
Idaho is the only state of the United States which has laws against cannibalism, having introduced legislation in 1990 aimed at stopping Satanic rituals.
TITLE 18 CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS CHAPTER 50 MAYHEM 18-5003. CANNIBALISM DEFINED — PUNISHMENT. (1) Any person who wilfully ingests the flesh or blood of a human being is guilty of cannibalism. (2) It shall be an affirmative defense to a violation of the provisions of this section that the action was taken under extreme life-threatening conditions as the only apparent means of survival. (3) Cannibalism is punishable by imprisonment in the state prison not exceeding fourteen (14) years.
This is not to say that you should all start eating each other. The Legal Information Institute points out that
…most, if not all, states have enacted laws that indirectly make it impossible to legally obtain and consume the body matter. Murder, for instance, is a likely criminal charge, regardless of any consent. Further, even if someone consents to being eaten and kills himself, the cannibal may still be liable for criminal or civil actions based on laws governing the abuse or desecration of a corpse, which vary from state to state.
What you may do under the law of most states of the world is pay someone to kill pretty much any other animal for your dinner. As philosophy Professor William B. Irvine of Wright State University (Ohio) says:
“in America and in much of the world a human corpse is more of a sacred thing than is a living cow: to defile a corpse – which of course is incapable of suffering – is a far greater crime than is causing a cow significant discomfort and suffering simply so that one can enjoy a Big Mac.”
We end 2021 with yet one more proof that Aristotle’s claim that humans are rational animals was vastly over-optimistic.
Three years ago (where has the time gone?) I reviewed a pretty great movie called Child 44, with Tom Hardy as a Soviet investigator in pursuit of a murderer, based on the most prolific serial killer of the Soviet Union (excluding Stalin), Andre Chikatilo. Yes, pretty great, but it had some problems; from the point of view of this blog, it barely mentioned cannibalism. The murderer was “just” a psychopathic sadist. It also changed all the names and dates, presumably to protect the guilty.
But ten years earlier, today’s film Citizen X was made as an HBO television movie, based on Robert Cullen’s non-fiction book The Killer Department. This is a much more accurate rendering of the career of Andrei Chikatilo, the “Rostov Ripper”, who was eventually convicted of 52 murders, although he confessed to several more.
Chikatilo was able to continue killing for seventeen years, from 1978 to 1995, due to a combination of general ineptitude, official denial of the possibility of such a thing as a Soviet serial killer (they considered it a bourgeois American crime, inconceivable in the workers’ paradise), and luck (apparently his semen was found to have a different grouping to his blood). The authorities preferred to round up the Rostov homosexual community because of some absurd reasoning that homosexuals are also paedophiles, and some of the victims had been boys, which resulted in some gay men committing suicide in custody.
Chikatilo claimed that his mother had told him that his older brother had been kidnapped and cannibalised by starving neighbours when he was little. This may have been her way of trying to scare him into behaving, but he had been born in Ukraine at the time of the Holodomor, when Stalin was busy starving millions of people to death as part of the process of Collectivisation, so could well have been true. Chikatilo was a self-confessed cannibal, stating that he gained sexual satisfaction from torturing his victims, and would sometimes drink their blood and eat their genitals, nipples and tongues.
This film is presented as a true-crime documentary. The viewer knows very early who the killer is – Chikatilo, a loser driven insane by rejection and humiliation at work and in bed.
Chikatilo is played with nerdish rage by Jeffrey DeMunn, who we know now as Charles Rhoades, Sr. in Billions; no wonder he captures a psychopath perfectly. The rest of the cast is just as impressive – the forensic cop is played with tightened jaw and occasional tears by Stephen Rea (The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire), his wife is played by the iconic actress Imelda Staunton, and his boss, Colonel Fetisov, is the wonderful Donald Sutherland, looking uncomfortable in a Soviet army uniform yet getting away with it due to his devilish grin.
The psychiatrist who helps them crack the case is played by the doyen of cinema Max von Sydow, who played chess with Death in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, played Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told and even got an Emmy nomination for his role in Game of Thrones. With a cast like that, what could go wrong?
Roger Ebert nominated Citizen X as his example of a movie that totally immerses the viewer in a believable reality:
“We experience the hopelessness, self-loathing, fear, and bleak reality displayed by most of the characters, regardless of station, age, self-discipline, or level of humanity.”
Chikatilo, the very image of the alienated outsider, preys on society’s lost and abandoned, befriending them (like Fritz Haarmann in Germany in the 1920s) and then luring them to their death.
The story shows a lot of murders, children falling backwards, blood dribbling from their mouths, knife plunged into their defenceless breasts.
We see graphic scenes of their post mortem examinations after the bodies are eventually found.
But that’s not really what the film is about – it takes us into the stultifying atmosphere of a grey bureaucracy in which truth is determined not by facts but by favouritism, prejudice and nepotism. In that sense, it is a fascinating portrait of the closing years of the Soviet Union, but it also jolts us into the realisation that we have all been there, a system where, in order to make any progress, you have to play along with the idiots in charge. A world where who you know is more important than what you do, a frustration that is felt universally. It is really a psychological thriller more than a murder procedural. The militsia make little progress, stymied by the bureaucracy, the unwillingness to admit to the fact that a serial killer could inhabit the workers’ paradise, by the apparent blunder in typing Chikatilo’s blood and semen, and by the insistence that the hectoring interrogation is the only way to succeed in getting the truth.
Ultimately, it is the psychiatrist, reading his paper, in which he had earlier tried to profile the killer, that makes Chikatilo confess, recognising that someone has finally understood the torments churning inside him.
The story is not about Chikatilo’s hunger for flesh, but his appetite for compliant sex, for a partners unable to resist his sexual appetite, because they are dead or squirming in agony. Children were ideal objects for his cravings, particularly young ones who were lost, homeless or runaways.
“Citizen X has probably had a tendency towards isolation since childhood. His internal world, filled with fantasy, is closed to those around him, even those close to him. The adolescence of such a person is, as a rule, painful, because he is often subjected to the laughter of his peers, at a time when success among them is the subject of his secret dreams. His sexuality is not noticeable to those around him, however it is an external asexuality that frequently coincides with steady masturbation and wild erotic fantasies. He is painfully sensitive in company, incapable of flirting and courtship, however it cannot be excluded that he has fathered a family.
There is reason to think that Citizen X has a weakness of sexual potency.… He sits or squats astride his victim. The orgasm and ejaculation most likely occur at this stage of the act and in this position, sitting on the victim in the period of her agony…. You ejaculated while stabbing them.”
The film scored an 86% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The director, Chris Gerolmo, also wrote the screenplay, which earned him an Emmy nomination, a Writers Guild of America Award, and an Edgar Award. It’s an absorbing film, the acting is great (although the fake Russian accents don’t really convince anyone), but I still have an issue. Chikatilo is known for being the most prolific serial killer in the Soviet Union. But he is most notorious for being a cannibal, and that is barely mentioned.
What is it about cannibalism that makes it so comprehensively abject that a film about a serial killer who admitted to murdering over 53 people, 35 of them children, cannot bring itself to mention his regular feasting on the bodies? Evidence aplenty spoke of the mutilation of the victims, particularly their eyes and sexual organs, and Chikatilo admitted in court that he had eaten the sexual organs. Yet the film, like the later Child 44, skipped over this aspect except for one brief glimpse.
Freud wrote that the two primary taboos of humanity are incest and cannibalism. It seems that his words are still accurate. We routinely see murder in films and television series – but it happens to someone else, and our attention is usually on the authority figure solving the crime. Cannibalism though is different – it opens up the human body and shows that we are made of meat, just like the animals we so carelessly torment and kill by the billions. Unlike the sometimes shocking, sometimes light-hearted killing of other people, cannibalism shows us what is inside us. It shows us our own mortality.
The Cannibal Guy 