Consuming Passions is a black-comedy film directed by Giles Foster (Hotel du Lac). The film is based on the stage play Secrets by two of the Monty Python greats, Michael Palin and Terry Jones, which was filmed and shown on the BBC in 1973.
This is what I call entrepreneurial cannibalism, with a subgroup of accidental or fortuitous circumstances. A chocolate factory is preparing to launch a new luxury range, Passionelles. However, during production, the new management trainee causes three of the workers to fall into the giant vat of chocolate, where their flesh is mixed into the first batch.
The horrified boss tries to recall the chocolates, but they have already gone on sale. They prove a huge hit with the public. Market feedback says:
“Pleasantly nutty subtle and delicious addictive, compulsive tasted full of goodness…”
They try to replicate the taste with meat from other animals, including a horrific scene where the guileless protagonist, Ian, orders a mountain of meat from the local butcher, including:
“three young porkers, with heads, ears and trotters”
But this bombs – only human flesh will give the chocolate that something special. As the secretary of the company (played by the wonderful Prunella Scales) says:
“People don’t want to eat chocolates with cows and pigs in them. People want to eat chocolates with people in them.”
They contemplate various ways to obtain dead bodies to use in their chocolate, including murder and/or chucking unemployed people in the vat. The new boss, played by the wonderful actor Jonathan Pryce (Brazil, The Two Popes, and many more) states the ultimate in neolib rationalisation:
“Think of all those millions and millions of unemployed school-leavers, yeah? A tragic, tragic situation. But we can give them a chance to do their bit for society yeah… think how it will shorten the dole queues.”
This seems to be based on Jonathan Swift’s 1729 pamphlet A Modest Proposal, in which he satirically suggested that the Irish, who were already being devoured economically by the landlords, should now sell the oppressors their children to make “a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked or Boiled.”
In fact, the whole film is a commentary on the neoliberal ideologies that were dominating political policy at the time under Reagan and Thatcher. This toxic reasoning, which is still rampant, aspired to free up corporations while crippling any resistance from workers. Profit became the only determinant of policy – here the new owner of the company rejects the idea of putting real chocolate in the product, preferring artificial flavours and colours. When the market demands human bodies, that’s what they must have. Ian has to trawl morgues, hospitals, funeral parlours and medical schools. When his girlfriend, the quality control chemist, discovers there is human flesh in the chocolates, he assumes she will leave him, but she tells him,
“doesn’t hurt them if they’re dead. They’d probably be glad to know they’re being useful, like!”
By the end of the film, Ian is chocolate man of the year, knighted by the Queen, and made chairman of the company. He is no longer disgusted by cannibalism, but in fact is appraising everyone he meets, including his fiancée, for their weight, fat content and likely edibility. In an extreme example of what Marx called commodity fetishism, we have all become comestible commodities. Nancy Fraser writes and speaks convincingly about the way Cannibal Capitalism systematically destroys and consumes the sectors of society on which its own survival depends. In order to sell more commodities to the public, corporations will consume any resource, including the air we breathe, and our bodies too.
The Danes used a similar plot device later with The Green Butchers, starring Mads Mikkelsen (yep, it’s Hannibal, but not as we know him) as a butcher who accidentally locks the electrician in the freezer overnight and finds his customers love the resulting offcuts. The French tried it more recently with Some Like it Rare, in which a couple who own a butcher store accidentally run over and kill a vegan who has been protesting against their store for selling the flesh of animals. They too find their customers love human flesh, but only if it is uncontaminated by eating the meat of other animals – they only kill and cook vegans, a consummation (or consumption) of which Annie Potts and Jovian Parry have found, on social media, many carnists dream.
Talking about human body parts in chocolates, do you remember choc fingers? I used to scoff them down as a child. I was somewhat surprised to see they were still available, and were subject of a scandal in the UK in 2015 – Cadbury had reduced the size of the packet by two biscuits!
The headline is somewhat unfortunate, and that’s not what this movie is about. But I’d forgotten their very existence, until a recent ‘news’ report that a Sri Lankan woman bit into a chocolate and found the inside rather hard. Thinking it was a ‘fruit and nut’ variety, she persevered, but when the nut still did not crack she decided to check it out by holding the piece of chocolate under tap water.
In case her tweet has been removed, here is the photo:
It was a bit of a finger, and it reminded me of this long-forgotten (perhaps deservedly) movie. That news, story, like the film, reminds us that, like the ouroboros, our society is busy eating its own tail, it’s workers.
For me, the only really repulsive bit was the dead piglets being dropped into the vat. I’m going to assume they were very realistic models, perhaps made of marzipan, but I’m aware that in a world that kills 1.3 billion pigs a year, buying real corpses would be a lot cheaper for a low-budget movie.
Consuming Passions received a 20% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a nice idea, but they play it as farce, hanging the comedy on the assumption that we will all be so disgusted by the thought of eating human flesh that we will ignore the often silly dialogue and the occasionally appalling acting, particularly Vanessa Redgrave who, totally unnecessarily, flounces through the film proclaiming herself a “loose woman” and butchering a Maltese accent.
But there are some interesting ideas about masculinist theories of meat-eating, with one woman saying she was going to buy those chocs for her husband to “put the lead back in his pencil”. The idea that men somehow need meat for virility is a basic plank of meat marketing, despite the clear links to heart disease, colon cancer, environmental crises, and of course appalling animal cruelty. And the film’s basic principle, that we are all edible in our consumerist culture, is apposite and well argued, as more and more bodies are sucked into that vat of delicious brown ooze.
Peter Jackson is a New Zealander, and the fourth-highest-grossing film director of all time, behind only Spielberg, Cameron and the Russo brothers. He is best known for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, as well as movies like King Kong and the documentary The Beatles: Get Back.
But we all have to start somewhere, and Jackson’s first feature was Bad Taste, a splatter comedy which took years to make as it began life self-funded and only later received a grant from the NZ Film Commission. Many of Jackson’s friends acted and worked on it for no charge. Shooting was mostly done on weekends since Jackson was then working full-time for a newspaper in Wellington, the NZ capital.
Bad Taste is about aliens who plan to capture humans for food. They take over a (fictional) NZ town called Kaihoro (which means something like “fast food” in Maori) and butcher all the residents.
“There’s no glowing fingers on these bastards. We’ve got a bunch of extra-terrestrial psychopaths on our hands.”
It turns out that they are not just hungry but entrepreneurs from the “Crumbs Crunchy Delights” company, and need to collect human flesh for the home planet market, and get it there before competing alien corporations.
“I am certain that when the Homo sapiens taste takes the galaxy by storm, as it will, Crumbs Crunchy Delights will be back at the top”
They are disguised as humans until they drop the pretence and, luckily for us, they speak English to each other to reveal their plans. Their plans are foiled by a team of agents from the Astro Investigation and Defence Service (AIDS) entering the town to take down the invaders.
The action sequences are actually very well done, long before Jackson had access to special effects studios, with choreographed fight sequences and buckets of gore and brains and other body parts. Jackson took two roles, a nerdy scientist who is a member of the government agents, and a leader of the aliens, including a famous scene in which he fights himself on top of a cliff.
The film is most famous for its unapologetic gore, including half-eaten bodies, heads coming off, and brains leaking out of skulls. The brave Kiwis mow the aliens down in an interminable gun-fight, which culminates in Derek (Jackson) killing the alien leader, Lord Crumb, by jumping on him from the floor above while wielding a chainsaw, a favourite of cannibal films, cutting the alien’s body in half and disappearing inside the corpse. The film was banned in Queensland briefly, which did wonders for its publicity; the video release proudly proclaimed on the cover “Banned in Queensland”.
But is it cannibalism? It is after all a completely alien species from another world eating humans, or at least trying to. So not strictly cannibalism, but humans being eaten by aliens dressed as humans is a popular narrative in science fiction texts (see for example Under The Skin), and raises some interesting questions. Anthropocentric humanism maintains that we are somehow on a higher level than “animals”, even though we are animals, a species of Hominidae (Great Apes). Because of this ontological division, bolstered in past centuries by religious beliefs about humans being made in the image of the divine, we tend to judge other animals as possessions, inferior beings to whom we can do as we wish, so we kill them, skin them, shear them, eat them, experiment on them, race them, and so on. Not just other animals; the colonisers of Africa, South America and other parts of the world felt the same way about the indigenous peoples who lived in the areas they coveted, and so they were conquered, enslaved, converted or simply exterminated.
What if travellers from another planet, considering themselves far superior to us (not an entirely unreasonable proposition if they have conquered deep space travel), decide to colonise, exploit or even eat us? If we could take them to the Galactic High Court, the learned judges might rule that the aliens were simply doing to us what we do to billions of other earthlings each year. As John Harris wrote:
Suppose that tomorrow a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth, beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals. Would they have the right to treat you as you treat the animals you breed, keep and kill for food?
Bad Taste is well made, entertaining and, if you are not worried by lots of gore and brains, very watchable. It debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1987, which is not bad for a first movie, a splatter comedy, made on a shoestring. It currently has 71% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is far better than many far better financed films. A number of critics made great sport of the title, saying that “bad taste” described the film well, but that was deliberate, a clever combination that tells the audience that it is bad taste cinema (may leave a bad taste in your mouth) and that human meat tastes bad, which according to all the cannibals who have testified about it, is simply not true. We taste somewhere between veal and pork, and would certainly be very popular in galactic fast-food joints.
“Why is everyone so scared of the Pooka?” “In their language, Rara Me means mountain of the cannibal god”
Well that explains it then. Why Susan (Ursula Andress, who was the first “Bond Girl” in Dr No), is tied up in the jungle naked, being smeared with cream by some local girls. Why her husband’s skeleton is being worshipped as a god because his Geiger counter is still ticking within his bones. Why Professor Foster (Stacy Keach) is admitting to having been a cannibal (spoiler: he didn’t like the taste much).
Hey, that pretty much sums up the whole movie. The film starts with stock footage of animals, intended to persuade us we are in the jungles of PNG, but they seem to be chosen at random. The grey-headed flying fox, for example, is native to Australia. Close, but no points.
Like all the Italian horror movies of the seventies, this one has the obligatory scene of real animals being cut up and eaten, some of them while still alive. It was intended to add “realism” to what were pretty dumb plots, but just managed to put a lot of people off watching the films. There is an inordinately long scene of a python eating a monkey alive, and then humans eating a lizard, which Foster tells us is “part of their religion”. Just like eating meat is part of the religion called ‘Humanism’. I guess these scenes also try to teach us that the law of the jungle applies just as much to humans as to other animals. Or else it teaches us to appreciate the fast-forward button.
Manolo (Claudio Cassinelli), a wandering adventurer, joins the merry band and tells them:
“Animals only follow their instincts. That of all living beings – killing and eating. Man too has the same instincts. To satisfy them, he uses more subtle means. Lying, trickery.”
He also tells them he doesn’t kill animals, which would probably make living in the jungle difficult (not many vegan restaurants), but they all seem to enjoy coconuts, so who knows?
The first half of the film is about a motley bunch of white people heading for Papua New Guinea (it was actually filmed in Sri Lanka) on a Pakistani plane, to explore a heavily wooded island inhabited by cannibals called the Pookas, and the various reasons they are there (uranium, that sort of thing, yawn).
The title card explains that “life has remained at its primordial level” – meaning the rest of us have advanced? Just turn on the news channel any time to fact-check that.
Cannibalism doesn’t get a look in until after the first half, when Foster admits to having lived with the Pooka tribe, where he had to eat human flesh. It haunts him still, and he wants to exterminate them. Sure, eating dead humans is horrifying, but killing live ones is fine.
Thirty minutes before the end, they finally agree that the Pooka exist, when they stumble into their pantry.
They are soon captured and the Chief checks them out for meat quality, but then he remembers that he has a photo of her with her husband who, I may have already mentioned, is being worshipped due to his clicking Geiger counter, a proof of his immortality, despite being a rotting corpse.
So now Susan is the new god, and gets dolled up for the occasion, while her brother, luckily dead, is disembowelled for the coronation feast.
Susan gets to eat some of her brother, while the girls who so enjoyed smearing her with whipped cream lie around pleasuring themselves, and the guys engage in bestiality with a totally uninterested pig. This is getting sillier and sillier.
One of the men, perhaps tiring of being ignored by the pig, tries some hanky-panky with the new goddess, and is pulled off and given a rather extreme form of circumcision. Following which, the tribesmen all start eating snakes, for no apparent reason, but with considerable gusto. The film by now is longing to reach some conclusion, so Manolo has a snack with his new friends (seems to be Kentucky Fried Lizard).
Susan is invited to chop up the rapist, but chooses to stick the knife in the Chief instead, and there is now so much meat to go around that everyone goes for a post-prandial nap. Except for Manolo, who watches a bird fight a snake (Pooka version of Netflix perhaps). Finally bored silly, Manolo and Susan fight their way out, kill a lot of cannibals on their way, and escape on a floating log into a river that we have been shown is full of crocodiles. Yes, it’s a happy ending. Maybe more so for the crocs.
Mountain of the Cannibal God is the translation of the Italian title (La montagna del dio cannibale). The movie was released in the US as Slave of the Cannibal God in 1979 and the UK as Prisoner of the Cannibal God, but not until 2001 due to its “graphic violence”. Can’t see the problem myself, but maybe I have watched too many cannibal movies.
“a graphic and unpleasant film, with all the noxious trademarks intact: gratuitous violence, real-life atrocities committed against live animals, and an uncomfortably imperialist attitude towards underprivileged peoples.”
I found it a bit dull, with long scenes of exposition and lingering images of the cast struggling through the jungle or over waterfalls. I guess they had to pad it out somehow, considering all the action takes place in the last ten minutes.
This film had a lot of publicity due to the cast – Armie Hammer (since mired in cannibalism scandals as detailed elsewhere) plays the Lone Ranger and, wait for it, Johnny Depp (mired in different scandals altogether) plays his Native American off-sider Tonto. Depp claims he has Native American ancestry, perhaps a great-grandmother, so I guess that’s fine. Helena Bonham-Carter is in there somewhere too, as a brothel madam with an ivory leg – she has certainly graced this blog before, and with Johnny Depp! The director, Gore Verbinski, directed The Ring and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, at least one of which I recall walking out of, but so forgettable were they that I can’t remember which one.
Set in the Wild West in 1869, the Lone Ranger starts off as a lawyer named John Reid, coming to Texas as DA to impose law on a savage land, like Jimmy Stewart in High Noon. His “bible” (he tells the Presbyterians on the train) is John Locke’s Treatises, which insist that
“Whenever men unite into society, they must quit the laws of nature and assume the laws of men, so that society as a whole may prosper.”
Good luck with that.
Reid’s brother, a Texas Ranger, deputises him to help catch an escaped outlaw named Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner from Armageddon, Black Hawk Down and many more). All the deputies are killed by Butch’s gang, except the old drunk, who is working with the outlaws and leads them into an ambush. That could easily (and perhaps mercifully) have been the end of the movie, but Reid is awakened by a “Spirit Horse” and Tonto explains he cannot be killed in battle. He also tells Reid that Butch, the outlaw, is a Wendigo, a figure from Algonquin legend – the tribes from the north of America, and nothing to do with Comanche mythology, but hey, maybe Tonto read this blog.
A Wendigo eats people and gets bigger and stronger as a result, but also hungrier. According to Tonto, he can only be killed with a silver bullet (I think that’s actually vampires, kemosabe). Incidentally, Tonto in the original radio series was not a Comanche but from the Potawatomi nation (who might have referenced Wendigos), but let’s not bother too much with, you know, facts. After all, a spirit horse may have edited the script.
So Reid is still alive and puts on his mask (about an hour into the film), Butch captures his dead brother’s wife and child, a whole tribe of Comanches are massacred by the US Cavalry (that has a ring of truth to it at least), but why on earth is this nonsense being reviewed in a blog about cannibalism?
Well, Butch may or may not be a Wendigo, and may or may not require a silver bullet to kill him (he doesn’t), but he is a cannibal. He is pretty keen on eating people’s hearts, or eyes, or maybe his own foot, according to rumour.
The problem with the movie is that it really can’t decide if it’s a Western drama or a comedy. The bad guys are the essence of evil, but the good guys are clowns. Then in the middle they put a gratuitous massacre of Comanches which at least adds a touch of historical realism.
The special effects are pretty great, with people on horses chasing trains, jumping on trains from horses, jumping on horses from trains, and trains getting derailed and crashing spectacularly. The scenery is gorgeous (Monument Valley of course, even though the film is purportedly set in Texas).
But it flopped at the box office, grossing $260 million against the $650 million that it was estimated to need to break even. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a miserable 31% ‘rotten’ rating, with those 31% mainly loving it, and the rest totally trashing it. The New York Post called it a
“bloated, misshapen mess, a stillborn franchise loaded with metaphors for its feeble attempts to amuse, excite and entertain.”
Then again, the San Jose Mercury News was more forgiving, describing it as a “one hot mess”, but an entertaining one.
If you have two and a half hours to waste, I guess it will keep you amused or shocked or sickened or whatever you take from it. I reviewed it here because it has a bit of cannibalism (Butch eats the Lone Ranger’s brother’s heart) and because Tonto calls him a Wendigo. And there’s not much that’s better than a Wendigo movie.
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?
The Cannibal Guy 