Simone (a bravura performance by 17-year-old Désirée Nosbusch) is a teenage fan obsessed with a pop singer known only as “R.” That obsession takes over her life – she drops out of school, waits outside the post office for a week for a reply to her letter, which will never come because his fan mail goes straight to the tip. She climbs to the top of the church steeple in her town of Ulm (it’s actually the tallest steeple in the world) and thinks about jumping off, splattering herself all over the town square, but with a letter to R in her pocket, so he will hear of her at last.
Nosbusch as Simone offers a fascinating glimpse of the modern cannibal – she looks and acts normal (for an angst-ridden teen) but underneath are irresistible currents of passion and voracious appetite for her idol. She attacks the postal worker who disappoints her by not having a letter for her, she attacks her father for turning off the TV show on which R is performing. The walls of her room are covered in pictures of R. The film shows parallel imagery to her obsessive love; images of Nazi salutes – the same obsessive love that led Germany and the world into catastrophe a few decades previously.
The word “fan” comes from “fanatic”. The fanatic believes he or she has found the answer, the one who knows us, cares for us. She feels that R, who has never heard of her, knows her inside out. And she will know him, inside out.
She drops out of school and hitchhikes to Munich, where R’s shows are recorded, being accosted on her way by a range of toxic men, but of course the worst of them is the one she is so desperate to meet. She sleeps in unlocked cars while she waits outside the studio, so frantic that, when she finally meets him, she faints.
R seems concerned and kind, invites her to his show, where he appears as a mannequin surrounded by store mannequins – a bald wig symbolically obscuring the divide between human and inhuman, life and death.
He takes Simone back to the apartment of a friend who has gone to the US for a year, where she finally achieves the intimacy she has craved. Nobody knows they are there, so anything can (and does) happen.
But R is a superstar – he is not interested in the meeting of the souls that she imagines will happen, and afterwards tells her he has to go back to his work, tries to fob her off with vague promises of future meetings. He tells her to leave the keys on her way out.
Simone wants to own him and his love, but he just wanted her young body. As he leaves, she picks up a figurine of the goddess Diana, the Huntress, and she then hunts him, killing him with a blow to the head.
Once he is dead, he is hers at last, to do with as she wishes. The imagery switches to that of a Christ, broken and crucified, and she cradles him in her lap like an erotic Pietà.
She sees a freezer, and she sees an electric knife.
R’s blood is, as the Bible says, his life, and she laps it up from the floor and from her knife.
When R is neatly packed in the freezer, Simone faints, but next day we see pots boiling on the stove, his foot being basted with his juices.
She eats him over a few weeks, then grinds his bones to dust and takes the dust back to the TV studio; pouring it out at the place she met him.
Her revenge involves ceremonial murder and cannibalism, to ensure he will always stay with her, and inside her. Leaving for home, her head shaved so she looks like one of the mannequins from his performance, she promises her parents to return to school.
She sits with them and watches the news – R’s disappearance weeks ago remains a mystery. But she knows where he is.
“I missed my period. I’m four weeks late. I will bring you into the world. We will be happy. I know you love me. And me too: I love you.”
He is inside her, and so is his seed. Like Christian mythology, R will be reborn, but this time totally dependent on her, loving only her.
The film did not garner a lot of interest or decent reviews, but has picked up a bit of a cult following in the years since. It is an excellent study of the monstrous-feminine, a figure often found in cannibal narratives, particularly around revenge and love. Mariana Enriquez’s recent collection of stories called The Dangers of Smoking in Bed has a similar story called “Meat”, in which two similarly obsessed fans dig up a dead pop idol and eat his rotting corpse. Well worth a read if, perhaps, not during mealtime.
Fuelled by a minimalist synth soundtrack from Rheingold and stunning photography, Der Fan is an engrossing and fascinating study of love, not in its sentimental, romantic form, but as possession, greed, rage and cannibalism. Much of lovemaking is expressed orally, through kissing, fellatio, cunnilingus, and licking or sucking and sometimes chewing of various body parts. Simone has taken this to its logical extreme. R is inside her, and so is an embryonic version of him, which she promises to love as she had hoped to love its father. It’s resurrection through transubstantiation.
On May 17, 2023, The Indiana Supreme Court in Indianapolis upheld the life sentence without parole for a 41-year-old Indiana man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and dismembering her body before partially eating several of her internal organs.
Joseph Oberhansley was convicted in September 2020 of murder and burglary in the slaying of 46-year-old Tammy Jo Blanton in Jeffersonville in September 2014. Clark Circuit Judge Vicki Carmichael sentenced Oberhansley to life in prison without parole, based on the jury’s recommendation.
Oberhansley’s legal team filed a brief for an appeal in June 2022. It is available at this link. His attorney, Victoria Casanova, argued before the court in April 2023 that her client’s mental health was not taken into consideration and that the jury did not return a proper verdict form in weighing aggravating and mitigating circumstances.
The opinion, written by Justice Christopher Goff, said the jury made “the necessary weighing determination.” Three other justices concurred and Justice Geoffrey Slaughter agreed in part.
The body of Blanton, 46, was found at her home the morning of Sept. 11, 2014, badly mutilated with more than 25 sharp force injuries and multiple blunt force injuries.
Jeffersonville Police reported that at approximately 9:30 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 11, 2014, officers responded to a call requesting a welfare check at Blanton’s home. Several hours earlier, Blanton had called 911 because an angry Oberhansley was upset about the end of their relationship—refusing to leave her home until ordered by several police officers.
Upon arriving at Blanton’s home, officers knocked on the door and Oberhansley answered. A detective on the scene noticed a cut on Oberhansley’s hand and searched him, finding in his pocket a brass knuckle and a knife that appeared to have hair and blood on it.
Investigators obtained a warrant for the home and inside the bathroom found a “big bloody mound of something in the bathtub.” It was Blanton’s body. She had been stabbed 25 times in the head, neck, and chest.
The body had also been extensively mutilated. The front portion of her skull, a portion of her brain, lung, and most of her heart had been removed. Further investigation revealed that parts of her organs were found on a dinner plate next to a frying pan, bloody knives, and a pair of tongs that had blood on them.
During a subsequent interview with police, Oberhansley “revealed to the detectives that he ate Tammy’s brain” and that he also “tried to pull the ‘third eye’ out with tongs,” police wrote. He also admitted to eating the organs that he removed from Blanton. Oberhansley was originally charged with murder, abuse of a corpse (because cannibalism is not a crime in 49 US states) and breaking and entering.
Oberhansley testified that two men had been at the victim’s home when he arrived around 4 a.m. that morning and said they were responsible for Blanton’s death. He said the men had knocked him out and that he awoke when police arrived.
Clark County Prosecutor Jeremy Mull told jurors Wednesday during opening statements in Oberhansley’s murder trial:
“Joseph Oberhansley butchered Tammy Blanton like you wouldn’t kill a livestock animal. But this lady died with dignity.”
Mull said Blanton locked herself in a bathroom before Oberhansley kicked a door down and attacked her — just one week after holding her captive and raping her. Oberhansley told police during a videotaped interview that Blanton “really wasn’t all that scared, surprisingly,” as if she knew she was about to die, Mull recalled. “In her last moments, she wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of seeing her scared,” the prosecutor said.
A psychologist testified at trial that Oberhansley was “the most severely mentally ill person whose case she had reviewed,” Oberhansley’s defence attorney Cara Schaefer Wieneke wrote:
“It would be easy to look at the horrors visited upon Tammy and conclude they were simply the actions of a monster. But doing so would be reductive, and this Court’s 7(B) review must look deeper. This Court must consider his actions in the context of his profound mental illness. There is also no question that Oberhansley was suffering from a severe mental illness when he committed this crime. What there is a question about, however, is whether Tammy would be alive today if Oberhansley were not so severely mentally ill. There are reasons to believe that she would. Because of that, Oberhansley asks this Court to find his sentence of life without parole is inappropriate.”
Oberhansley’s mental state was a recurring complication in the court process, in which he was found at different times competent and incompetent. For example, in 2017, his defence wrote that their client believed they were working for the devil, according to The Courier-Journal.
The case was originally declared a mistrial after witness testimony put forth information about Oberhansley’s past that parties had stipulated would not be introduced during the proceedings. For example, it was not specified in court that the defendant had spent a 12-year stint in a Utah prison for manslaughter because—while he was jealous and high on meth—he shot and killed his girlfriend Sabrina Elder, and shot his own mother (who later forgave him).
Oberhansley’s sister had grabbed his and Elder’s infant son. He shot at them, but missed. Then Oberhansley shot himself in the head. He survived, but a psychiatrist wrote he’d given himself a “partial lobotomy.” He pleaded guilty to a manslaughter charge, down from murder. His family was reluctant to take the stand, prosecutors said.
In his first trial over Blanton’s death, Oberhansley’s defence asserted that their client’s mental state was a major factor. Lawyer Bart Betteau cited horrifying details of the murder, saying that jurors would hear that Oberhansley believed Blanton was going to kill him and that she could hear his thoughts.
“Think about the process and say to yourself, is this someone who’s thinking right? His thought was that someone was after him.”
Oberhansley’s attorneys couldn’t mount an insanity defence, however. They lost their ability to do so in return for the state declining to seek the death penalty. The attorneys’ previous attempt to lodge an insanity defence was thwarted when Oberhansley filed a motion to withdraw it. He denied living with a mental illness.
Oberhansley is incarcerated at the New Castle Psychiatric Unit of the Indiana Department of Correction.
The most interesting part of this extended legal battle (nine years) from the point of view of Cannibal Studies is the statement from the prosecutor about the victim being “butchered… like you wouldn’t kill a livestock animal.” Philosophers struggle with the inconsistency of our social customs – we cherish dogs and cats, protect whales, but accept the butchery in mind-boggling numbers of cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, and others. We know about the horrendous suffering in the slaughterhouse, but close our minds to it. We know that on top of its appalling cruelty, the meat industry is one of the largest sources of greenhouse emissions as well as a cause of several severe human health problems such as hypertension and colon cancer. Yet the meat industry remains exempt from much of the environmental and health debate that surrounds other issues. Stanley Cavell states that becoming part of a social contract requires becoming “conspirators”, agreeing implicitly what will be acceptable, disregarding its ethical conundrums. Such “perpetual failure of justice invites the threat of madness”.
Cannibals are routinely described as insane, as if their capricious psychotic episodes fully explain both their choices and the appalled revulsion of the rest of society. Oberhansley’s appeal described him as “detached from reality”. But the persistent portrayal of cannibalism as unthinkable and cannibals as insane relates to their refusal of the fissure between reality and the language able to describe it. The cannibal personifies ruthless attempts to satisfy voracious human appetites, while realising the animality of fellow humans; he puts the unthinkable into reality through the flesh and blood of his victim. His madness arises in the gap between the carefully expurgated language of the social contract and the reality of the world as a giant slaughterhouse.
Dreams (夢, Yume) is a 1990 magical realist anthology of eight stories, written and directed by Akira Kurosawa, inspired by his recurring dreams. An international co-production of Japan and the United States, Dreams was made with assistance from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
Akira Kurosawa (Japanese: 黒澤 明, March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese filmmaker and painter who directed thirty films in a career over fifty years. Kurosawa directed around one film per year throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, including a number of classics which were often adapted by other directors. These included Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954) – which was remade in 1960 by John Sturges as The Magnificent Seven, Throne of Blood (1957), Yojimbo (1961) and High and Low (1963). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema.
Kurosawa’s bold, dynamic style was strongly influenced by Western cinema, yet distinct. In 1990, the year Dreams was released, he accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Dreams is his most personal work, taken from his own life and unconscious mind. He addresses themes such as childhood, spirituality, art, death, and the mistakes and transgressions made by humans against nature. The episodes within Dreams do not have a single narrative, but are the fragmentary adventures of a “surrogate Kurosawa” (often recognizable by the character wearing Kurosawa’s trademark hat) through eight different segments, or “dreams”, each one with a title. Each is more a fairy tale than a dream in the filmic sense.
A child sees a forbidden fox wedding ceremony and is told he must suicide, another weeps as he witnesses the spirits of a peach orchard that has been cut down by his family, reflecting the human war on nature.
The fear of nature fighting back is a bleak dream of men struggling through a mountain blizzard. The horror of war is demonstrated as a Japanese officer is confronted by the ghosts of his annihilated platoon.
Our understanding of nature is questioned in “Crows”, the only dream not made in Japanese, where Vincent van Gogh is portrayed by American filmmaker Martin Scorsese, with a broad New York accent, and the protagonist travels through the images that fill van Gogh’s tortured imagination.
Our abuse of nature comes to its logical conclusion as we see nuclear power points explode behind Mount Fuji, human ingenuity able to create but not control these forces; in the end, all they can do is colour the toxic pollution so people know what is killing them.
“The Weeping Demon” is the seventh dream, and of particular interest in Cannibal Studies. It shows the aftermath of nuclear devastation, a fear that has haunted us all for eighty years, particularly the Japanese, who were the first and only people to experience nuclear weapon attacks.
A man is wandering around a misty, bleak mountainous terrain. He meets an oni(demon or ogre), who is a mutated human with a single horn on his head. Oni are known for indulging in murder and cannibalism when they get the chance. They are typically portrayed as hulking figures with one or more horns growing out of their heads, massive teeth, and occasionally a third eye in the centre of the forehead.
The demon tells him that there was a nuclear conflagration, which resulted in the destruction of nature and animals, the growth of dandelions taller than humans, and horns sprouting on the heads of those humans left. The horns cause them to feel excruciating pain each evening; but they cannot die, so they howl in agony all night. Many of these demons were formerly millionaires and government officials, who are now suffering through a hell befitting their sins.
Even in this apocalyptic post-war world, the social hierarchies continue to oppress – the demons with two or three horns eat those with only one.
“There’s no food! We feed on ourselves. The weak ones go first. It’s about my turn now. Even here we have grades. One-horn demons like myself always get eaten by those who have two or three horns. Before they were powerful and pretentious. And now they still throw their weight around as demons.”
The demon that the man meets is waiting to be eaten, seeing this as an escape from his agony and nagging hunger, but also as a punishment – before the wars, he was a farmer who poured milk into the river and buried vegetables to maintain market prices. He warns the man to flee, but when the man asks where he should go, the demon just asks if he too wants to become a demon. The terrified man runs away with the demon in pursuit.
The film finishes with a meditation on death, the final and irrevocable return to nature. Laying down our technology, our appetites and our bodies is celebrated – peace at last.
Condemned as disjointed by some critics, the film has a logic to it, a dream logic, in which things are out of place yet seem quite natural. It starts with a little boy witnessing the wedding procession of the foxes, a slow funereal procession that is forbidden for human viewing, and finishes in a village that has spurned technology and progress in favour of clean air and water and long, peaceful lives, where we witness a funeral procession that is pure colourful celebration.
Dreams is a sumptuous, thoughtful, dramatic, film from which I found it hard to look away. Although it is one of Kurosawa’s last films, it shows him at the height of his power and creativity, and offers a glimpse into his mind, just as he glimpses the mind of van Gogh.
Dreams is now a classic, as are all Kurosawa’s works, but it currently has only 66% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, proving that a lot of people can’t be bothered listening to (or even watching) other people’s dreams. The New York Times critic called it:
“…a collection of short, sometimes fragmentary films that are less like dreams than fairy tales of past, present and future”
But dreams, like the evening news, are always fragmentary – narratives jump from tragedy to kitsch to humour. Dreams often reflect and amplify our repressed emotions and fears, and fairy tales are mythic versions of dreams. Many, perhaps most, fairy tales include cannibalistic giants, wicked step-parents, witches and ogres, such as Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel or The Juniper Tree. Children wander, lost and hungry, through brooding forests and come across strange and fantastic creatures. Dreams reveal our repressed fears about the human attacks on nature and each other, the struggles and conflicts that lead to monsters or demons.
In dreams, we lose our rational sense of causality – anything can happen. We get lost, like in fairy tales, in forests or snowstorms or in the mind of Vincent van Gogh, seeing the world the way he had to, consuming it and reimagining it before he could paint it. We meet ghosts of people who don’t know they are dead. Nuclear power plants explode, a fear on everyone’s mind in 1990, four years after The Chernobyl disaster. In dreams, ethics become aesthetics, to quote from Hannibal. Dreams, like fairy tales, are episodic and disjointed, and the film captures this brilliantly.
Although fairy tales date back centuries, they remain ever popular, with new versions or completely new stories released to reflect the fears of each historical period. In our modern period, the growing and changing presence of media makes us all aware of the bloodshed on the battlefields and in the death camps and slaughterhouses of modern industrial societies, images that we desperately try to forget or repress. It is no wonder that dreams are full of cannibals.
Even those who are not True Crime aficionados know of Jack the Ripper, a mysterious serial killer who slaughtered women in the Whitechapel district of London in 1888, took body parts for trophies, and on one occasion wrote to the authorities boasting of having eaten a victim’s kidney. Well, half a kidney – the other half was enclosed in the letter, and was positively identified as human tissue. The letter was entitled “FROM HELL”.
In my thesis, I date modern, domestic cannibalism from 1888, when Jack the Ripper murdered five or more women in the summer and autumn of that year.
The From Hell letter was sent to the Chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in October with a box containing half a kidney. The letter stated that the writer had taken the kidney from a woman, and half of it was enclosed as proof. “tother piece I fried and ate it very nise” (sic).
This letter, and the half-kidney, are featured in this week’s movie.
A huge literature has developed on the history and likely identity of Jack, but none of it is conclusive; the crime writer Patricia Cornwell argued that the Ripper was the famous artist Walter Sickert. Others have written credible accounts of other suspects, including Prince Edward Albert Victor, second in line to the British throne. The enduring mythology of Jack the Ripper, though, depends on the fact that he remains unknown, a figure hidden by his presumed uniformity with those of his milieu. Jack was the domestic cannibal – murderous, voracious, and indistinguishable from any other citizen, just another face in the street, as demonstrated by the fact that he was never apprehended, or even conclusively identified.
Jack rapidly became an international phenomenon. A Chicago doctor wrote in the Medical Standard that,
… the Whitechapel murderer is a cannibal pure and simple. The Whitechapel murders are clearly the work of a lunatic of the so-called “sexual pervert” type, fortunately rare in Anglo-Saxon lands but not infrequently met with in Russia, Germany, Bohemia and France. In these lunatics there is a return to the animal passions of the lowest cannibalistic savage races. Cannibalism is shown in a thirst for blood, and these animal passions come to the surface when the checks imposed by centuries of civilization are removed either by disease or by the defects inherited from degenerate parents.
So critical to the creation of the domestic monster was The Ripper that almost a century and a half later, books and films are still investigating and theorising on his acts and identity.
Jack went “viral” long before the internet was around to invent the term. Jack conventions are held around the world offering attendees the opportunity to view and buy merch and listen to “experts” tell them who Jack (maybe) was. Many books have offered definitive proof of Jack’s secret identity, only to have other experts contradict them. One writer actually bought at auction a shawl belonging to one of the victims, Catherine Eddowes, and had it forensically examined, finding, through links to the DNA of descendants, that it contained her blood, and the semen of a long-suspected Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski. Seems conclusive, doesn’t it, but other Jack-fans were sceptical; DNA can be contaminated. Richard Cobb, who organizes Jack the Ripper conventions, told the Guardian that the shawl had been “openly handled by loads of people and been touched, breathed on, spat upon.”
This film, From Hell, has a somewhat more circuitous lineage, being based on a graphic novel (formerly called comic book series) by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell which was published from 1989-1998 and then collected into book form. That novel is based on a 1976 non-fiction book by Stephen Knight with the rather unfortunate title of Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.Knight’s theory proposes a conspiracy by the Freemasons, in which high-ranking Freemason Sir William Gull, royal surgeon to Queen Victoria, is told to cover up the marriage of a shopgirl, Annie Crook to Prince Albert Victor, the heir to the throne, which had resulted in a baby who would be in line for the crown, particularly as the Prince was dying of syphilis. The murders themselves were not the crimes of passion common in impoverished London, particularly from the pimps that the women feared most, but involved the careful dissection of the bodies and removal of organs and often vulvas. The basis of many theories was that these were clearly the work of an educated man with medical or at least anatomical training.
“Martha Tabram was raped, tortured and killed. This is methodical. The butchery is irrational, yet meticulous and deliberate. Altogether a different breed of killer.”
The film had mixed reviews, getting a 57% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I found it an easy to watch, interesting tale told with some gusto, by a stellar cast: Sir William Gull, physician to His Maj and presumed serial killer, is played by the late lamented Ian Holm, who was playing a sweet, doddery, 111 year old Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring the same year he played Jack.
Johnny Depp plays Inspector Abberline, the cop searching for Jack, with his usual brooding sensual close-ups, while Heather Graham (Boogie Nights) is quite luminous as the sex worker Mary Kelly, who becomes his love interest as well as a target of Jack. Then there’s a delightful performance by Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid from the Harry Potter films) as Abberline’s sergeant, who quotes Shakespeare as he tries to revive Abberline from his opium den dreams, where he imbibes absinthe laced with laudanum and “sees” the murders as they happen.
Ian McNeice (Bert Large from Doc Martin) pops up as the coroner, and there are a host of other familiar faces. If you like a boisterous story and some great performances, you might enjoy this. But if you are serious Jack groupie, you will wince at the anachronism that puts the receipt of the kidney some time before the murder of Catherine Eddowes, from whom that kidney is likely to have been taken.
Like any fictional recreation of history, there is inevitably exaggeration and speculation. The film depicts an all-powerful Freemason movement infiltrating the police and medical establishment and threatening or killing anyone in their way. There is an evocative depiction of the life of late nineteenth century sex workers (called “whores” by the police, and often themselves, and “unfortunates” in official language). There is also some cursory mention of the classism and racism that English society exhibited in the age of Empire (and still does), seeking to blame the American natives in “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show” (perhaps a wink to the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs?), foreigners, Orientals, Jews, Socialists – anyone other than the rich and powerful. Several scenes feature the hatred of Jews that saw the police and the populace open to antisemitic provocation when looking for a scapegoat. The chasm between the respectable killer and the honest but disreputable poor is made by means of an (otherwise gratuitous) appearance by the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick who, like Jack, was a famous denizen of Whitechapel. He stands surrounded by respectable white men, wondering at his ugliness, but having no inkling of his humanity.
Foreigners, the disfigured, the “unfortunates” and Jews were outsiders in English society, and outsiders are denied the protection that other citizens expect, and so are easily accused, attacked, killed and sometimes even eaten. The “unfortunate” mother of the royal baby is kidnapped and given a frontal lobotomy, a new scientific technique which was instantly turned to the advantage of the elite.
In Victorian England, the poor were blamed for any and all of society’s ills, with the idea of suspecting a rich, educated man excluded from consideration. Of course, the Indigenous people in Queen Victoria’s empire were similarly objectified, enslaved or slaughtered, also using the benefits of modern technology such as the gunboat and machine-gun.
The movie opens with a quote, Jack, saying “One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century.”
I can see no other reference to such a quote in any source other than this movie, but it has a certain ring to it, it makes sense of this modern drama between the rich, who only ever want more, and the poor, who scrabble just to stay alive. At a time when the environment has been appropriated and cannibalised by the ruling class, has Jack’s comment in 1888 proved prophetic?
Jack the Ripper was less “a return to the animal passions of the lowest cannibalistic savage races” and more a manifestation of the voracious appetite and greed of modern capitalist industrial society, where the value of everything, including the life of humans and other animals, is counted only in monetary terms, and the marginalised and objectified are cast out and consumed.
Winnie-the-Pooh is a much-loved (but sometimes intensely disliked) fictional bear who evolved from the childhood stories told to his son (Christopher Robin) by A. A. Milne, the author of a series of books first published almost a century ago. The original Pooh was an actual toy bear bought in Harrods in 1921. Other toys belonging to the little boy, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, and Tigger, were incorporated into Milne’s stories as friends of Pooh, who was presented as “a bear of very little brain”. Pooh and his friends lived in the 100 Acre Wood, where they got into all sorts of scrapes.
The anthropomorphic bear, his name now without hyphens, was licensed by the Disney company in 1961 for a very successful series of features that became one of their most popular franchises. I loved the books as a child, and hated what the cartoons had done to him, but maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, Milne’s U.S. copyright in Winnie-the-Pooh expired at the end of 2021, 95 years since publication of the first story. The character therefore entered the public domain in the United States, with Disney no longer holding exclusive rights. Independent filmmaker Rhys Frake-Wakefield seized on this opportunity to create a horror film titled Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.
The premise, told through a cartoon opening, is that Winnie and Piglet feel betrayed and abandoned by Christopher, who has grown up and moved on to big-boy things like college and sex. (For a wonderful discussion of the difference between being “lost” and being “abandoned”, I recommend Hayley Singer’s new book, Abandon Every Hope). They have gone feral.
During a particularly cold winter, they are starving, and decide to kill and eat their old friend Eeyore the donkey, which drives them to detest humanity. They make a pact:
“they renounced their humanity and returned to their animalistic roots, swearing never to talk again.”
When Christopher comes to the 100 Acre Woods with his fiancée Mary five years later, he looks for his old friends, telling her “It’s going to be OK, alright, I promise.” Only of course it isn’t. Pooh and Piglet kill her and capture him, and chain him up in their old house, where he can see his (late) fiancée hanging defleshed (eaten?) from a meat-hook, while Pooh flogs him with the late Eeyore’s tail.
Pooh and Piglet then proceed to hunt and kill a group of women students who have come to a holiday house in the woods to help one of them recover from a stalking incident (clever poetic irony) and then Pooh kills some men who try to help them. There is a lot of extreme violence involved including strangling, crushing with cars, mauling (by piglet of all people), insertion into a wood-chipper, and bludgeoning with a sledge-hammer.
At this point, I need to come clean and admit that I am having trouble classifying this as a cannibal film. Lots of people get killed (it’s definitely a slasher), and toys eat another toy at the beginning, which is a sort of cannibalism (but only in the way that Woodstock from Peanuts is a cannibal for eating turkey on Thanksgiving). I don’t know that toys are a discrete “species”, but if not then even a real pig and bear eating a donkey is nowhere near cannibalism. But the introduction says they “renounced their humanity”, so I’m taking that as a licence to include this in a cannibalism blog; they were anthropomorphically human when they ate the human donkey, right? Hey, even Princess Fiona from Shrek wasn’t really human (she was a secret ogre) but we wrote up her exploits, eating brave knights who came to save her. So we have some fun ontological challenges like “what is cannibalism?” what is “eating?” and “what is human?” Apparently they believe that not talking is the way to renounce humanity, which both bolsters anthropocentric arguments about human superiority (we are often described as the only species with a language, to the annoyance of the whales), but also raises some interesting questions for the voiceless, or those who choose not to talk. Does a vow of silence mean a renunciation of humanity? A question for another time and, hopefully, a different blog.
But from a Cannibal Studies point of view, there are some other interesting ideas in the back-story. It starts with starvation cannibalism (if we allow that name) in that, like survivors of plane crashes, shipwrecks, or ill-considered trips across the Sierra Nevada, Pooh and Piglet are driven to eat their friend Eeyore through extreme deprivation. But then we move to a new motivation – social degeneration, where the formerly very civilised, polite toys become psychotic murderers, much like the feral humans in Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes or Death Line. Look, we don’t really see them eat humans, although we see a skull and jars of blood, and hear reports of mutilated bodies being found in the woods, so there is a certain implication. But they are not human, so that’s OK. They’re not even officially animate, although you wouldn’t say that if they were swinging a sledge-hammer toward your head. And just when did they learn to drive cars?
The film has had almost universally awful reviews, collecting a woeful 4% “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes, with The Times critic saying:
“Rhys Frake-Waterfield cloddishly desecrates your childhood, and AA Milne’s beloved classic, with a dimly written, shoddily realised, sub-standard slasher whose artistic aspirations never reach beyond making a fast buck.”
The Guardian was even less impressed, describing the film as:
“…a terrifying combination of not-scary and not-funny, and a cast of Love Island types on Xanax apparently reading the dialogue off an optician’s chart held up behind the camera.”
Look, it’s not that bad – the woods look nice but also somewhat ominous, and while some of the acting is wooden, they all have great death scenes, and the violence is enough to attract any gorehound. Anyway, the film was a big success on its release in January (in Mexico) and February (US, UK). As of 23 February 2023, Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey had grossed $1.8 million in the United States and Canada, and $2.4 million in other territories, including over $1 million in Mexico, for a worldwide total of $4.2 million. The budget was apparently less than $100,000, making it proportionally one of the most profitable films ever made, surprising even the film-maker.
Is it surprising though? Fan fiction has been rewriting classic stories for a while now (have you seen what sexual gymnastics some Fannibals have created for Hannibal and Will?), while stories of the perils of civilisation being brought down by thoughtless dedication to progress and neo-liberalism are the zeitgeist. Winnie-The-Pooh is our abandoned childhood, coming back to haunt us.
The Last of Us is an HBO original TV series which was released to streaming on January 15, 2023. It was adapted by Neil Druckmann, the writer and creative director of the video game of the same name, and Craig Mazin, the showrunner of the highly acclaimed miniseries Chernobyl.
The show opens with a panel discussion; a couple of epidemiologists arguing about what sort of organism will wipe out humanity. Turns out bacteria and viruses can be terrible, but we always beat them. But fungi – one of them, cordyceps, can take over the brain, make you a slave, dedicated to one thing – spreading its spores to everyone else. Apparently, part of this fungal strategy is to kill other people and eat bits of their bodies, a lot like, y’know, zombies!
Some of this is factual – the fungus quoted, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, is sometimes called the “zombie ant fungus” because it takes over the bodies of ants and forces them to climb to a high place and wait for spores to sprout from their heads, to be spread by the wind.
That’s one smart fungus but, as the epidemiologist says, fungus cannot live at human body temperature. Unless of course they are forced to evolve heat-tolerant forms – if, for example, hypothetically, the planet started warming. Yes, we’re talking yet another side-effect of the global warming caused by our voracious consumption of the resources of the planet. Human cannibalism of Mother Earth.
The good news is that Scientific American says there is zero chance of Ophiocordyceps surviving in our warm bodies and taking over our brains. The bad news is that there are plenty of other new strains developing, including Candida auris, which has spread to fifty countries so far and there are no drugs that treat it effectively. It won’t turn us into flesh-eating zombies, but it can do lots of other bad stuff.
From the cranky 1960s epidemiologists we jump forward to 2003, when the fungus suddenly takes hold. The nice, senile old lady next door starts eating her family, and our protagonist, Joel (Pedro Pascal from Game of Thrones and Mandalorian) tries to escape the city with his brother and daughter, as civilisation collapses around their ears. I won’t tell you how that turns out, in case you are planning to watch it (or play the game), but the plot then jumps twenty years to 2023, a terrible year, in which people live in quarantine zones under martial law, which provides the gallows for anyone who tries to escape, or to break in.
The authoritarian government is at war with the infected, but also with a rebel group called Fireflies. The gallows, the walls, the restrictions seem perhaps a comment on the COVID lockdowns that took place only a little before this series was made, but whether in favour or against is not clear. In a pandemic, no one knows what to do, but everyone has an opinion, and whatever course is chosen will likely be seen as either ineptitude or oppression. The fungus is not COVID, which is a virus but, like COVID and other pandemics, it has the effect of causing everyone to be at the throats of everyone else. In this case, literally.
So in 2023, Joel, has a nice steady job (gig economy, but still earning a bit, and trading drugs as a side-hustle), burning corpses and cleaning sewers, neither of which tasks seem likely to become obsolete any time soon. But he’s a professional smuggler, and finds himself transporting a young girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsey, also from Game of Thrones) across the country. Ellie is valuable cargo – she is apparently immune from the fungus, and lots of people would love to cut her up and find out why and how. Heading cross-country does not (just) mean finding affordable gas (or solar chargers?), food and weapons (the basis for most games), but also has problems since the areas outside the quarantine zones are full of “the infected” (what the show calls the zombies) as well as raiders and slavers. Well, it’s based on a computer game, so there are sure to be obstacles.
The question of nomenclature keeps coming up in reviews. Assuming “zombie” can be defined clearly, many reviews argue that these dudes are not zombies because they are not ‘undead’, which seems to be a prerequisite for graduating to zombiehood. In fact, Eben Bolter, the cinematographer who shot four episodes of the first season, said that the term “zombie” (AKA the “Z-word”) was strictly forbidden on set. To me, it seems to be splitting hairs – the “infected” twitch like zombies, kill like zombies, eat (other people) like zombies. If it walks like a zombie, attacks like a zombie, and eats like a zombie, to me it’s a zombie, even if it doesn’t smell like one. What never became clear to me was why these particular zombies, their minds controlled by the fungus, insisted on killing and eating people (there is a good discussion of this on Reddit). Most parasitic organisms keep their hosts alive, because when the body dies, so do they. But I guess with billions of people alive (or not undead) in the twenty years of the fungus, eating a few can be understood. Even a zombie (infected) has to eat.
There are plenty of films and TV shows about people turning into cannibal zombies through some external threat. 28 Days Later showed a virus that was developed in a laboratory (London, not Wuhan) that turned people into rage-filled consumers. Doghouse showed all the women of a small English village turning into mindless zombies through a virus that was being tested by the military for germ warfare. Drive In from American Horror Stories suggested that just seeing a movie with the right subliminal suggestions could do it.
Then there’s The Girl with All the Gifts, in which a fungus (cordyceps, the same one as Last of Us) takes over infected humans, turns them into mindless zombies called “hungries”, and makes their bodies feeding stations for its spores. And yes, there is a young girl who is the main character, who ends up having to face off with the bad guy. Well worth watching if you get a chance. There has been some reasonably polite (for the Internet) debate over which came first, and if either stole the idea from the other. The Girl with All the Gifts was released in 2016, obviously well before the TV series of TLOA. But the game came out in 2013. But the book TGWATG was based on a short story by M.R.Carey called Iphigenia in Aulis, which was published in 2012 as part of a short-story collection called An Apple for the Creature.
Maybe it was just coincidence – the zeitgeist of the time. Innovations like 3D printing of body parts and cloning of stem cells were shaking faith in the anthropocentric division of the world into nature/culture and animal/human. Out of this fog of indistinction came two stories of cultural collapse and redemption through nature, their central characters young girls (Ellie and Melanie) who were both vulnerable but strong, warriors, hunters and protectors like Artemis, the Greek goddess at the centre of the myth of Iphigenia in Aulis. With nature fighting back in the form of climate change, perhaps our cultural consciousness recalled Artemis to lead us out of the mess. In the shape of Ellie and Melanie.
The word “zombie”, like the word “cannibal”, comes from the invasion, genocide and cultural obliteration of the nations colonised by the Europeans. Roger Luckhurst’s excellent review of the zombie trope points out that the slave labourers in the cane fields of Haiti were called zombies, but were definitely living humans who were certainly not undead but rather exhausted by endless toil, and perhaps shackled so they walked in a shuffling pace. They, like the “infected” of Last of Us, were slaves of an alien master.
Look, the show’s well made, and the reviews keep emphasising that it’s the best adaptation ever made of a computer game, which I think may be damning it with faint praise. The acting is very good, the photography superb and the graphics are terrific, as you would expect in a big-budget show. It is currently scoring 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with most critics praising the suspense, the narrative and the relationships of the main characters, Joel and Ellie. Rebecca Nicholson, the critic from The Guardian, called it
“…one of the finest TV shows you will see this year”
Of course, it is being watched by many gamers who are dedicated to Joel’s story, having lived and died with, or as him, in their hours spent playing the game. They may not be aware of the many, many zombie apocalypse movies and shows that have graced the screen since George Romero introduced us to characters lurching around the graveyard and smashing open windows hoping to find fresh brains in Night of the Living Dead in 1968 (he called them “ghouls” rather than zombies, but that never caught on). The zombie film goes back even further, to The White Zombie (1932), in which Bela Lugosi turned Madge Bellamy into a mindless love object – returned to life, but as a slave with no will of her own, precisely what Jeffrey Dahmer was hoping to achieve by pouring muriatic acid into the brains of his hoped-for sex slaves.
Storytelling in games is a very different beast to a film or TV show. In games, we have a goal and many obstacles to overcome, crash through or kill. On screen, we have (hopefully) realistic, sympathetic characters who interact, clash, and begin to love. The premise of a game is action, of a film or show, interaction. For a good summary of all the things a gamer might hate about the adaptation to screen, check out Ian Bogost’s review in The Atlantic. He sums up,
“It’s just not interesting to watch an angry man escort an irritable girl across the country amid a cartoonish zombie apocalypse cosplaying a credible global pandemic.”
But most critics felt that the writers had overcome this minefield and turned the characters, particularly Joel and Ellie, into real, sympathetic people.
Like games, a series of discrete episodes, some barely involving Joel and Ellie, take place during their journey across a devastated America. This is how games and TV shows have to be – gamers and bingers have to stop and sleep sometimes (well, maybe not gamers).
Then we get to episode eight, titled “When We Are in Need”, which Belen Edwards of Mashable predicted would “mess you up”. Joel and Ellie meet a cannibal (yes, you are on the right blog, sorry it took us a while to get here). Ellie is seeking penicillin for a wounded Joel, and finds it through a preacher named David (Scott Shepherd) and his off-sider James (Troy Baker, who played Joel in the video game!) who are trying to carry off the carcass of a deer that Ellie wounded. David the cannibal is a preacher; these cannibals are Christian devotees. In the game, they were ‘just’ psychopaths, but the show has added some backstory.
The episode starts with David reading from Revelation 21:1-4, which talks about “a new heaven and a new earth”, in which there will be no more death, mourning, crying or pain. Quite a promise for an apocalyptic series. Ellie is not impressed.
The advantage of being religious is that almost anything can be justified with a quote, out of context, from the holy books. David rationalises his attempted rape of Ellie with John 4:18 – “There is no fear in love”. Nice try. The context, trying to rape a young girl in a burning building, is definitely Satanic imagery. David is presented as the devil, because he feeds his flock the only meat available to him. Also because he is a murderer and a rapist, but that doesn’t seem so unusual in post-fungus world.
There’s a lot written about the moral twists and turns in this episode, mostly people being horrified by the cannibalism (although it is the standard operating procedure of the “infected”), and pointing out that only a preacher adept at using (twisting?) the teachings of the Bible could justify the eating of human flesh by his flock. But let’s not forget that Catholic Communion insists that it involves eating the actual body and drinking the actual blood of Christ. The Old Testament also has incidents of cannibalism during the siege of Jerusalem. Yet there is a strange consensus that shooting a living deer, wounding him so he dies later in agony, then eating him, is perfectly acceptable, while eating dead humans, who have probably died from lack of food, is somehow the work of the devil. One website says:
“David and the others are engaging in an unspeakably disgusting practice, and the fact that he’s okay with it demonstrates his moral rot.”
David tells Ellie he does not hate the fungus cordyceps, because it fights and kills for its own preservation. He feels he must do the same, be a strong, even violent leader, to protect his “flock”.
“What does cordyceps do? Is it evil? No. It’s fruitful, it multiplies. It feeds and protects its children, and it secures its future with violence if it must. It loves.”
Do David’s followers know they are eating people? The cold room is full of corpses hung and ready, as Joel discovers when he stumbles in hoping to save Ellie, so it seems probable.
David tells Ellie that he keeps the cannibalism secret, because the followers (or “sheep” as he calls them) are too weak to accept what is necessary. Or perhaps David’s followers didn’t a) know or b) care that the flesh they are eating is from one mammal rather than another. There’s a scene where they all solemnly chow down on plates of what seems obviously to be the meat of the guy Joel killed last episode. Here’s a summary from the Digital Mafia website, which believes that they knew but pretended not to:
“People had turned into animals, but they still wanted to reassure themselves that they had strict regard for what was morally right.”
Killing of deer or rabbits is presented as totally uncontroversial in the show. Yet Ellie shouts at David:
“You’re an animal!”
He replies:
“Well yes, we all are. That’s sorta the point. But what was I supposed to do? Let them starve? These people who put their lives in my hands. Who expect me to keep them safe. Who love me!”
I found the killing of the stag, which I hope was sophisticated computer graphics, far more shocking than the images of hungry people eating a human corpse, which after all is a dead animal who can no longer feel any harm.
Joel and Ellie also kill to survive. Joel killed a member of David’s community in the previous episode, the one who was that night’s main course at David’s diner, and he gratuitously kills two of David’s men after he has tortured them to find out where Ellie had been taken, beats them to death as they beg for their lives. But Joel doesn’t eat the resultant corpses; human life is not sacred in this ruined earth, nor was it ever, only human flesh is sacrosanct. David sees that we are animals, “That’s sorta the point”, and so would consider Joel’s casual disposal of the corpses a shocking waste of good food. If we are happy to eat animals, and humans are animals, I guess he has a point.
The “infected” lost their humanity when they were taken over by the fungus. Joel maintains a thin red line between killing people and eating them. David’s followers have tried to retain their obsolete humanism even though threatened with starvation. David, the teacher turned preacher, sees the hypocrisy of such arbitrary distinctions. When civilisation goes up in smoke, so does its normative ethics. And when you’re in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and hungry, maybe caring is an anthropocentric luxury that most people cannot afford?
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is an American psychological crime film directed and co-written by John McNaughton that depicts a random crime spree by Henry and his protégé Otis, who torture and kill with impunity. Michael Rooker in his debut film plays the nomadic killer Henry, Tom Towles plays Otis, a prison ‘friend’ who lives with Henry, and Tracy Arnold is Becky, Otis’s sister.
The characters of Henry and Otis are loosely based on convicted real life serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, who was famous for his claims to have cannibalised many of their victims, claiming that they also supplied women and children for human sacrifice to a cult called “The Hand of Death”.
Henry confessed to over 600 murders, which supposedly were committed between his release from prison in 1975 to his arrest in 1983, a pace that would have required a murder every week. A detailed investigation by the Texas attorney general’s office ruled out Lucas as a suspect in most of his confessions by comparing his known whereabouts to the dates of the murders to which he had confessed. It appears that the police would bring any cold case to his attention, feed him information about it, and then let him take responsibility. He had nothing to lose, and global fame and notoriety to gain. He was convicted of 11 murders and sentenced to death for the murder of an unidentified female victim known only as “Orange Socks.” His death sentence was commuted to life in prison by Texas Governor George W. Bush in 1998 due to evidence that Lucas was in Florida at the time “Orange Socks” was killed in Texas. Lucas later recanted all his confessions except for the murder of his mother, and died in prison of heart failure on March 13, 2001.
The film involves a lot of scenes of Henry driving his battered old Chevy Impala around the grey streets of Chicago, finding people to kill. Images of bloody mayhem are offered for their shock value and become repetitive, and rather fake, but then the film was made on a tiny budget.
Some narratives in the film run parallel to what we know of the real serial killers. Henry did meet Ottis, but in a soup kitchen in Jacksonville, Florida, not in prison. Henry’s father really did lose both of his legs after being struck by a freight train, leaving Henry at his mother’s mercy. But the film largely omits the long-term homosexual relationship between them (shyly hinting at it when they share the last can of beer) and, sadly, totally omits Ottis’ predilection for cannibalism.
Henry did sexually abuse Ottis’ 12-year-old niece Frieda Powell, who lived with them for many years. As in the film, Powell preferred to be addressed as Becky rather than Frieda. However, in the film Becky is Otis’s younger sister, and is presented as a considerably older single mother, not the real 12-year-old Powell.
Sexual neurosis is presented as the root cause of the violent tendencies of both men. Otis, who is shown attempting to sexually abuse his sister, tells her that Henry killed his own mother, and when Becky asks Henry about it, he tells her his mother was a sadist and a “whore”, who forced him to watch her having sex with clients, sometimes making him wear girls’ clothing for further humiliation.
Becky in response tells Henry of her childhood, in which she was regularly raped by her father, with her mother claiming not to believe her.
“He told me he had a right, because he was my daddy and I was his daughter, and he fed me and let me live in his house, and he could do whatever he wanted. And he did… I didn’t fight him, because when I did he just hit me.”
Henry introduces Otis to his world of serial killing when they pick up two sex workers and Henry snaps their necks during sex, suggesting that he is revenging his mother’s abuse. To Henry, the world is against him, and murder is “always the same, and it’s always different.”
Otis gets a taste for murder when they kill a fence who mocks them when they try to buy a television from him, and then actively seeks out opportunities when a high school boy he comes on to punches him in the mouth. Henry says it would be a mistake to kill the boy, since they’ve been seen together, but Henry wants to kill someone. It’s the world being against them, again.
Henry schools Otis to make sure every murder is different – that way there can be no M.O. for the police to follow. A particularly brutal scene of the murder of a family is videotaped by the pair (on a camera stolen from the dead fence) and Otis enjoys re-watching himself molesting the screaming woman, breaking her neck and then attempting necrophilia, until Henry orders him to stop, just as he forced him to desist from molesting Becky when she arrived. When Henry finds Otis raping his own sister, he fights him and with Becky’s help, kills him.
Henry has his own moral code, in which murder is fine, but incest, family violence and necrophilia are forbidden. The real Henry’s paedophilic involvement with twelve-year-old Becky, and the real Ottis’ interest in eating people, are never mentioned.
Incest, murder and cannibalism are the three great taboos of our civilisation according to Freud, the driving forces behind the creation of laws and morals, which stop us destroying our communities by doing those things. The movie sadly concentrates on the murders and has references to incest, but totally ignores the cannibalism.
Unlike the film, the real Henry did not kill Ottis – both men died in separate prisons, Ottis in Florida State Prison in 1996 and Henry in Ellis Unit, Huntsville, Texas in 2001.
Due to the violent imagery, the film was censored in many markets and the original poster (above) was banned. The controversy brought it some very valuable publicity. The reviews were also mostly positive – it has an 89% “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Roger Ebert observing that the film does not “sugar-coat” or trivialise violence as most slashers tend to do, and calling it:
“a very good film, a low-budget tour de force that provides an unforgettable portrait of the pathology of a man for whom killing is not a crime but simply a way of passing time and relieving boredom.”
It’s well made (considering the miniscule budget), the cast are terrific (in both senses of the word) and the plot, if somewhat out of step with the reality of the case, is well presented and never dull. But why should it stick to the “facts” of the case, when clearly neither Henry nor Ottis were too sure what was real and what simply bravado?
Peter Kürten was a German serial killer, often called “The Vampire of Düsseldorf” and the “Düsseldorf Monster”. Described as “the king of sexual perverts”, Kürten was beheaded in July 1931 at the age of 48.
He perpetrated at least nine murders and a number of sexual assaults between February and November 1929 in the city of Düsseldorf. Previous to this, Kürten had accrued a long criminal record for offences including arson and attempted murder. He also confessed to the 1913 murder of a ten-year-old girl in Mülheim am Rhein and the attempted murder of a 17-year-old girl in Düsseldorf.
Kürten was called the “Vampire of Düsseldorf” because he occasionally drank the blood of his victims. He was also known for decapitating swans in the Düsseldorf Hofgarten to drink their blood.
This week’s movie, The Vampire of Düsseldorf or, in French, Le Vampire de Düsseldorf, was a joint production between Spain, France and Italy, filmed in 1964. Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M – Eine Stadt Sucht Einen Mörderwas loosely based on Kürten (who had been beheaded the year the film was made), but also on the other German serial killers of the time: Haarmann, Großmann, and Denke. Fritz Haarmann had killed at least 24 boys and young men between 1918 and 1924, often by biting their throats, and then allegedly eating or selling the meat from their corpses as pork or horse-meat. Carl Großmann was arrested in 1921, suspected of up to 100 murders of women and girls, whose flesh he was supposedly selling on the black market and from a hot-dog stand in Berlin during the Great War. Karl Denke killed and sold the flesh of dozens of homeless vagrants and travellers from 1903-1924. So Peter Kürten was far from unique in famine-stricken Germany between the wars.
The Director of this film, Robert Hossein, cast himself in the title role of this and several of his films, which is not that unusual among auteur filmmakers. He didn’t look much like Peter Kürten, who was a remarkably nondescript individual (as are so many modern, domestic cannibals), but that’s not the problem. The film twists the story but ends up turning it into a fairly pedestrian slasher rather than the psychological profile of a cannibal serial killer, which it could have been. It also sanitises the story, ignoring the many murdered children and in fact the whole aspect of cannibalism by clinical vampirism(his consumption of blood).
Kürten started his killing well before anyone had heard of Hitler, and even before the First World War, which led to the economic crises that presaged fascism. But by 1929, when most of Kürten’s murders took place, the darkened streets of German cities were full of violence: fascists battling communists, unemployed workers demanding bread and work, and killers like Kürten taking advantage of the chaos.
It is not therefore totally unfair for the film to present Kürten as the embodiment of the sickness that led to the growth of totalitarianism. We see several faces of Europe between the wars – Kürten helping an old neighbour with her groceries, the crowded music halls so popular in Weimar Germany, and the killer, still dressed as respectable citizen, stalking the streets. Kürten, had he survived a bit longer, might have made a very powerful Nazi, with his penchants for smart clothes and extreme violence.
The plot is much simplified. Kürten kills young women and writes letters to the police boasting of his exploits (much as Jack the Ripper did around forty years before him).
He falls in love with a nightclub singer, Anna, who mocks him, sparking his misogynistic rage. He meets two young girls from the countryside who should know better than to open their doors to strangers.
Anna eventually becomes his lover, but then she finds the latest letter he is writing to the police.
Anna must die, much to Kürten’s regret, and his rage is expressed in arson attacks on the nightclub.
The real Kürten was of course a serial killer whose toll was far higher, and whose preferred victims were often very young girls. He was also an arsonist, and he achieved orgasm both through the act of killing and the burning of the body or buildings. Murderpedia has a full account of his acts if you want to read further. It’s pretty gruesome.
Little attempt is made in the film to portray the real Kürten, and even less to explain why he was the way he was. But the film was made in 1965 when sensitivities were somewhat more pronounced than now, particularly in Germany which had only shed the Nazis twenty years earlier. But it’s a masterfully made film, and the music by Hossein’s father, André, is particularly affecting. Worth seeing, if you can lay your hands on it.
As he was led to the guillotine, Kürten asked the prison psychiatrist,
“Tell me, after my head has been chopped off will I still be able to hear; at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck? …That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.”
After he was beheaded, Kürten’s head was preserved and his brain removed for examination, to see if there were any anatomical anomalies (there weren’t). The mummified and bisected head can still be viewed, if you feel so inclined, in the “Odditorium” of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! At 115 Broadway, Wisconsin Dells.
The modern cannibal is usually hard to identify. Jeffrey Dahmer was the all-American boy next door. Armin Meiwes used to mow his neighbours’ lawns to be helpful. Issei Sagawa was so small and helpless that he seemed vulnerable rather than threatening. Albert Fish was a sweet old man, so charming that the Budd’s let him take their little girl to a party.
They were normal, everyday people, a bit weird, but not monsters.
At least, not in appearance. This is a recent phenomenon – the original cannibals were called anthropophagi (Greek for man-eaters) and were humanoid in shape, but were usually some sort of hybrid – a mix of humans and gods or other animals – strong, ferocious, and clearly not quite human. From the 15th century, the alleged cannibals found by Columbus and other explorers were different in culture and skin colouring, so were easily distinguished, defamed and exterminated. It is only recently, since Jack the Ripper in 1888, that the cannibal walked among us, undetected until the victims were found (or what was left of them).
Bones and All presents as a coming of age cannibal romance, taking a sharp turn back into cannibal history for its themes. Maren (Taylor Russell from Lost in Space) is finishing high school, a spectacular end of term in which she is invited to her friend’s sleepover and bites a girl’s finger off, instead of, you know, just admiring the nail polish, as she had been invited to do.
She then goes on the run with her father, who has been keeping her ahead of the law as she grew up (her first human meat was her babysitter when she was three) but now ditches her, with a few hundred dollars and a birth certificate.
It then becomes a road movie, as she travels through the American Mid-West trying to find her mother, attracting suspicion not because of her eating habits but just because she looks too young to be on the road. She comes across another cannibal (they are called “eaters”) in the shape of a weird old man named Sully (Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies) before meeting up with Lee, played by the love interest of seemingly everyone nowadays, Timothée Chalamet. Chalamet appeared in the third instalment of Guadagnino’s “Desire Trilogy”, Call Me by Your Name), in which he was the love interest of Oliver, played by Armie Hammer, who has recently been generating his own cannibalism headlines.
As a road movie it’s Thelma and Louise mixed with Romeo and Juliet, if they had been cannibals. In other words outsiders, star-crossed lovers, and lots of flesh being torn off dead (and sometimes living) bodies. Road movies rely on meeting new and weird people, and learning about the protagonists (and ourselves) from their stories.
Sully is a lonely old man who teaches Maren about being an eater, and how an eater has a super-power – like a vampire, they have a nose that can smell other eaters at great distances, and can also smell dying people, which allows him to feast on them fairly inculpably, although Maren rather wonders if they should be calling 911 rather than letting them gasp their last breaths. So they are anthropophagi, they smell different, have a strong sense of smell, and so are not quite human. We subsequently discover that the cannibal gene is passed on – Lee’s dad and Maren’s mother were also eaters. They are a breed apart, hybrid humans, who can mate with non-eaters.
They are also presented as ‘savages’ – related to the colonised peoples who were declared cannibal by the imperial powers. Maren is biracial, and Sully (although played by a classical British Shakespearean actor) seems to be presented as a Native American, with a long ponytail and a feather in his hat. The marginalised and disenfranchised are regularly presented as dangerous, thieves, murders, cannibals, regardless of any evidence.
An interesting character from colonial times is the wendigo, a figure from Algonquin mythology who eats his fellow humans and draws on their strength to grow huge and powerful, which only makes him hungrier and deadlier. Sully tells Maren that her fate is to need more and more flesh as she gets older.
Just like the wendigo, who is an indigenous version of the anthropophagus, and one that was used by the victims to characterise the European invaders and their voracious appetite for land and gold. The phrase “bones and all” reminds us of the colonial greed that denied the humanity of those invaded and insisted on taking everything, leaving nothing and nowhere to go but a few reservations or missions in remote, unprofitable areas. Eating bones and all is also a perfect way of getting rid of the evidence.
The title Bones and All is taken from the book of the same name by Camille DeAngelis, but the phrase was not used in the book – it just meant that Maren and the other eaters would automatically eat the whole person, bones and all. Except for her first, the babysitter, because she was too small to swallow bones – she left a pile of them, a pool of blood, and the hammer from an eardrum. In a movie, though, it can be harder for the viewer to maintain a willing suspension of disbelief, so eating the victim bones and all becomes a rite of passage – the next level of being an eater. Maren and Lee don’t know how to eat a person bones and all, so they are not yet postgrad eaters. Maren puts it succinctly – “that’s impossible.” But what about eating the flesh? Armin Meiwes took ten months to eat 20 kilograms (44 lb) of Brandes, but we are asked to accept that Maren and Lee can eat a whole body in a night.
But then, everything is ambiguous in this story, which has been widely described as a metaphor for otherness and queerness. The story is set in 1981, as Ronald Reagan is entering the White House. Being different, queer, compassionate, seeking social justice were all considered laughable or dangerous. Greed was good, and so eating a victim bones and all might have seemed laudable. Drug addiction was escalating, and some have seen the cannibalism in this film as a metaphor for this as well – Maren and Lee can’t go too long without their feed, and will do whatever they need to in order to get it.
Some of the ambiguities are more subtle: Maren looks young, which bothers various people she deals with, although she is 18 and technically an adult in most places. Lee falls in love with her, but is also capable of appearing to be cruising for gay sex.
He chooses a carnival worker who has been mean to a child, leads him into the bushes and masturbates him, slitting the man’s throat as he orgasms. It was not until twenty years later that gay sex was legalised in the US, and this man’s secret desire for same sex petite mort becomes his real mort. They then discover that the man had a wife and family, and are stricken with guilt, because apparently eating some people is OK, but not family people.
Then we have the eaters – Maren is naïve and caring, horrified by her need to feed. Lee is a puny dude who kills seemingly effortlessly, but like Hannibal Lecter, Lee prefers to eat rude people – when we first meet him, he challenges a rude person in a supermarket and leads him to a deserted shed where he kills and eats him. Sully is an senior eater, so has to eat regularly, but says he tries not to kill people – sniffs out those who are dying, but later he gets violent when Maren rejects his advances.
Jake (Michael Stuhlbarg) is an eater who has graduated to eating bones and all, but he is accompanied by a friend named Brad (David Gordon Green), a cop (!), who is not a natural eater, but just likes doing it. Maren accepts that she and Lee have to eat people, but is revolted by Jake’s wish to do the same. We’re back to the old debate of nature versus nurture. Are people born queer? Or with addictive personalities? Or psychopathic? Or cannibalistic?
The Director, Luca Guadagnino, has made a number of changes from the book, which are examined elsewhere. The most obvious one, though, is that Maren is brought up and then eventually abandoned by her mother in the book, but her father in the film. This changes the dynamic considerably, because we now have two eaters in the family, both female. The eater parent in both versions is locked up in an asylum, having eaten their own hands, but in the movie it’s her mother, (a short but superb appearance by Chloë Sevigny). We arrive at last at the modern horror archetype, the “monstrous-feminine”, the figure that confronts the male viewer with his fears of being castrated (Freud’s favourite explanation), as well as “the monstrous womb” – a terrifying image of a “black hole which threatens to reabsorb what it once birthed” (Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 27). The female cannibal is quintessentially monstrous-feminine, terrifying men with the antithesis of popular female stereotypes of giving life and nurturing. In the book, Maren only eats boys or men (after the initial babysitter) – she is drawn to eat those who seek to be close to her. In both versions of the story, the ambiguity is clear to us and the female cannibals – they have a compulsion to eat, but don’t want to hurt others.
Maren’s solution is to try to act normal, fall in love, get a job, get “clean” of the eating. Her mother’s was to lock herself away, and even then she chewed off her own hands.
To me, the most fascinating ambiguity in this film and in our societies generally is the question “who can you eat?” Eating some animals is considered just “normal” – Lee is chewing on bacon (pig flesh) served to him in a very respectable café, and has been working in an abattoir. When they need money, he and Maren rob the abattoir at night, later sitting on the overhead walkway watching the cows who are to be killed for legal, non-controversial eating, when Maren observes
“every one of them has a mom and a dad, sisters, brothers, cousins, kids. Friends even.”
The real question, Derrida says, is not what to eat but how to eat well. Perhaps, as Chalamet has said, it is impossible to live ethically – every act of consumption or energy usage wrecks the environment a little bit more. For some carnivores, this is seen as a ‘bones and all’ issue, they call it “nose to tail” – killing is OK, but wasting any part of the animal is the real crime. But as Maren says, cows also feel terror, pain, bereavement when their babies are taken from them. The author of the book, Camille DeAngelis, went vegan before writing it, indicating that the problem of who to eat, the rude or dying, the human or the cow, weighed on her, and the scene filmed in the slaughterhouse indicates that Guadagnino may have felt the same. Cat Woods’ review in Salon reminds us that Brad, the off duty policeman, chooses to be a cannibal:
“Why would he hunt, slaughter, and feast upon human flesh if he doesn’t need to? And, if we the audience can be repulsed by that – and his evident choice to slaughter and eat flesh when there is abundant satiety that doesn’t cause violence, pain and loss – then perhaps we need to venture a little deeper into our own psyches and ask: Why would we feast upon flesh if we don’t need to?”
This is a seriously good film, with a great cast and, in the midst of all this carnage, we are treated to magnificent scenery beautifully captured by cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan. I have not revealed the ending, and hope I have not revealed too many other plot points. I recommend you go see it.
Black Christmas is the middle film in what is sometimes called the “Black Christmas series” – three films that actually have very little to do with each other, except that they bear the same title, one made in 1974, one in 2006, and one in 2019. The original was made in 1974 and widely panned, but has since been revived as the proverbial “cult classic” and hailed as one of the earliest slasher movies – it was released on the same day as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and is considered an influence on the making of the Halloween series (crazy killer, young women, buckets of gore). The remake in 2019 presented a completely different story and character list.
I am reviewing the middle, 2006 movie not because it’s the best of them, but it is the only one featuring CANNIBALISM, which is what this blog is all about. Also because I needed something uplifting to review on Christmas Day, 2022.
The films all involve a group of co-eds (young female college students for those of you who don’t speak American) being slaughtered by a serial killer. The 1974 film was about to be released for television in 1978 but was withdrawn because serial killer Ted Bundy had just murdered two young co-eds sleeping in their sorority house on the campus of Florida State University in Tallahassee. Bundy had started his killing spree in 1974 before being captured in 1975, incarcerated and then escaping, and there is some speculation that the film was based around his brutal murders, and that he in turn, might have been motivated to escape and return to his pathological ways by the imminent TV release of the film. The film may also be partly based on the exploits of Ed Kemper, who killed his family and then a number of co-eds in 1972-73, although his M.O. was to offer them lifts as they hitchhiked which, as we all know (I hope), is a very bad choice of transportation.
But Bundy was not a cannibal to the best of our knowledge, and nor was cannibalism mentioned in the 1974 film. Ed Kemper did admit under truth serum to slicing flesh from the legs of his victims and eating it in a casserole, although he later changed his mind and denied it. So Kemper, who is still locked up the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, may well have been an inspiration for this 2006 version. It is a very loose reimagining of the 1974 film, with the added frisson of child abuse and a bit of paedophilia, as well as incest and cannibalism – the taboos that Freud described as “the two original prohibitions of mankind”. Director Glen Morgan, who wrote several episodes of X-Files and The Twilight Zone reboot, is not skimping on any taboos in this one.
It starts off with a murder of course, then moves swiftly to an asylum for the criminally insane (a nice nod to Hannibal’s residence through all of Red Dragon and most of Silence of the Lambs, and quite a bit of the third season of Hannibal too). Here we come across Santa Claus, as you’d expect in a movie called Black Christmas, and we get the back story on the dude who killed his family many years ago, and is, we expect, going to kill lots more people before this movie drags itself to a gruesome end.
The asylum caterer, a very careless man who lets the high security door get jammed open with a carton of milk, says they are giving him a special Christmas dinner.
“It tastes like chicken, because it’s chicken. It’s the closest we could get to how Mom used to taste.”
Billy Lenz is clinically insane, so that may explain why he thinks his Mom tasted like chicken (humans are red meat, and most cannibals claim the taste is like pork or veal). Anyway, he scoffs his chicken/Mom substitute through the feed-hole on his door, pockets the candy cane as a handy weapon, and we are told that he tries to escape each year; he wants to go home for Christmas. And the Delta Alpha Kappa co-eds, whose sorority house at Clement University in New Hampshire is Billy’s old house, are not going to enjoy his visit.
Well, we don’t have to sit through all the jump scares, because they are just slasher gore with no one getting eaten (as far as we can see). There are some amusing rants against Christmas though. The girls know the history of the house, and their “Secret Santa” ritual includes someone having to buy a present for Billy each year. It’s a pagan sacrifice to ward off evil spirits on Christmas.
“What Christmas shit in this room resembles anything Christian, huh? It’s all neo-pagan magic. Christmas tree – a magical rite ensuring the return of the crops. The mistletoe is nothing but a conception charm. Fifth century Christians jacked a Roman winter festival – twelve days in December where the nights were long – and the Earth was roamed by the demons of chaos. And fucking Santa Claus? This fat voyeur that watches you all year long to make sure you live up to his standards of decency, before breaking into your house? And that is different from what Billy did – how?”
So what, we wonder, did Billy do?
“Billy Edward Lenz was born with a rare liver disease that gave him yellow skin. His parents hated each other. The mother hated Billy. He was not the child she always wanted.”
When Billy is five, on Christmas Eve, his mother tells him the Russians shot down Santa.
He then witnesses his mother’s new boyfriend kill Billy’s father, who is the only one who ever loved him. Realising he saw it all, they lock Billy in the basement (did they see Tommy?), where he spends his time rocking (as in, in a rocking chair, not engaging in popular music).
When he is twelve, his mother, frustrated by her new husband who falls asleep mid-coitus, climbs up into the basement, drops her gown and reinstates the original meaning of “rock and roll”, adding incest to insult and injury. Not to mention paedophilia. This show has it all!
So Billy has a sister and a daughter and Mom has a granddaughter and a daughter, and step-dad is still snoring through copulation, so everyone lives happily ever after.
Just kidding – nine years later, Billy has been driven insane by isolation, while his sister/daughter is doted on by his mother, who constantly tells her “you’re my family now”:
Billy escapes from the attic and disfigures his eight-year-old sister by gouging her eye out, and then eating it.
Much of the terminology of love and sex derives from cannibalism. When we tell a child “I could eat you up” or (at a different time and place presumably) perform oral sex on a lover, we use the metaphors of cannibalism.
Billy murders his mother and her sleepy lover, and the cops find him eating cookies made out of his mother’s flesh. There’s a cookie-cutter involved, and a hot oven. Not sure where he got the recipe.
The rest is pretty standard slasher stuff, with some inventive deaths, but at least Billy has qualified as a cannibal, and it’s about time, because we’re 36 minutes into the film by now. If you can’t be bothered watching the whole thing, there is a trailer at the top of this blog that covers a lot of the good bits, plus a whole lot of other stuff that never made it into the movie, apparently filmed at the insistence of the distributor, Dimension Films, run by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who have, between them, much expertise on matters of horror, family discord, and the abuse of young women.
Look, if you want an entertaining slasher with lots of gore, you might like this. From the point of view of Cannibal Studies, the film is interesting mainly as an example of revenge cannibalism – eating the rude and abusive, like Son or Titus or even Sweeney Todd. Also, horror movies timed to coincide with Christmas are very often based on some aspect of revenge, such as The Twelve Deaths of Christmas, also featuring a cookie-cutter used to make people-bread men. It’s a fascinating genre, in which the audience is offered the opportunity to sympathise with, or at least understand, the act of cannibalism as homicide and anthropophagy justified by grievance.
Not so much with Billy. The sorority sisters are treated the way humans treat animals contingently labelled as “vermin” – they are swarming around his house, and he exterminates them but, significantly, he doesn’t eat them. His Mom and his sister/daughter, though, they’re family, and the only way to keep them with him, restrained, constrained and compliant, is to eat them. It’s Billy’s version of love.
Merry Christmas and Gory in Excelsis to all my readers!
The full movie is available (at the time of writing) on YouTube:
The Cannibal Guy 