A 13-year-old schoolboy allegedly murdered his classmate, sawed his body into pieces and ate them “out of curiosity”. The teenager killed his friend, Mohamed, by beating him with a wooden stick before using a power saw to cut his body into small parts that would fit into his school rucksack.
The killer reportedly lured his classmate to his family’s home in Ismailia’s Al-Mahatta Al-Jadida district on October 20, 2025. While alone, the child cannibal said he repeatedly hit the victim on the head with a stick until he died. The suspect, known as Youssef A, said he was reenacting the murder scenes which he saw in films and online games. The killer explained that he wanted to “try the way” he had seen online. Police officers were made aware of the attack after the victim’s remains were found near a shopping centre.
After conducting a search, the authorities then found further severed pieces of the victim under a bridge, in a pool and on an open field.
Youssef admitted to the killing and using an electric saw to dismember his victim. He also said he scattered his remains across the city in Egypt.
The suspect added that he ate part of the victim’s body “out of curiosity” and explained that it was “similar to breaded chicken”.
The child cannibal was made to re-enact the crime for investigators, leading police around the city to the places he had disposed of the body parts.
The suspect was transferred to a juvenile care facility after being detained for four days by Public Prosecution. He remained there for a week while judges reviewed his case.
Youssef also underwent a full physical examination, drug testing and forensic analysis to compare samples with Mohamed’s.
Investigators continue to look into the violent film and video content which he said influenced him to conduct the gruesome act. The case ignited calls for children to have greater protection from graphic content, with increased supervision from parents.
The case begs the question – plenty of children watch gruesome movies without then eating their friends. What did Youssef see in these media that led to his curiosity? The movies offered the blueprint for homicidal techniques, but behind all that is the isolation that saw two children on their own long enough for mayhem to ensue, and the constant reiteration of the cheapness of life, both human and non-human, that led a child to wonder what difference there might be between a friend, and a breaded chicken.
Delicious is a German horror film, a genre that has a proud history, but it’s also a psychological and socio-political drama that examines the many ways the rich eat the poor, and the potential for revenge. It is written and directed by Nele Mueller-Stöfen in her directorial debut, although it as well made as a work from far more experienced directors.
The film starts with social and class-based unrest. In the opening scene, a rich German family are in a car fitted with bulletproof glass as protesters swarm the streets of Paris, jumping on the car and fighting with police. The father is unworried – “they’re not interested in us.” Perhaps that’s true, but the protests are about poverty and the cost of living, and others are very interested in this family.
As they settle into their holiday home in Provence, another group of young working-class people watch them, the serving staff, who live impoverished lives as they wait on the rich, in a hotel room where they are lying on rich people’s beds and pissing in their fancy mineral water bottles. They work at a fancy hotel nearby, and observe as the family have dinner and a few drinks. On the way home, somewhat tipsy, they appear to hit a young woman walking across the road. In fact, we know that her friend has deliberately cut her arm to make the accident more believable. She reopens the wound when necessary, to maintain her connection to their guilt.
The next day, she tells them she has been fired for not being able to work after the accident, and asks for a job as a maid, but she gradually infiltrates the lives of each member of the family. They have designs on her body, but she and her friends have designs on theirs, and (this being a cannibal blog) you can probably work out what is going to happen well before they do.
Serving the rich (in some novel senses) is definitely on the menu, as blood and meat (eaten raw) feature in the early scenes. Less gory versions of eating too, including cunnilingus.
I’ll avoid spoilers, because it’s on Netflix, which means a lot of people will probably watch it. It’s beautifully filmed and well acted, but does tend to drag in the middle, although that is not unusual for European films – they never seem to be in the same hurry as Hollywood, which may explain some of the appalling reviews. But by the time the wife goes to a party with the young ones, we are right into it.
The way of the world is usually the rich squeezing the life out of the poor, and while there are many films about that (think Fresh, The Cannibal Club or What You Wish For), there are not many that look at the retaliation which the exploited must often crave. Eating Raoul captured that anger and propensity to violence well, and this one does it too, without the humour, but with a cast of fine young cannibals for whom the viewer may well feel some sympathy. The family, beset with their own issues to do with work and relationships, does not see disaster coming, and that is the basis for most good horror.
“You have high gates, but your perfect world cannot be separated from ours.”
The plot unravels slowly and by the time blood starts to flow, it’s almost time to finish the film. If you like plots where the invisible reclaim their power, you may enjoy this. Think Parasite or Saltburn, but with the added spice of cannibalism.
At one point Teodora, the “maid” quotes the Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, to her supposed boss.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”
In the time of the monsters, when humanity has turned the planet into a giant abattoir, assuming that some are edible and some are not is just a social construction, with little rational basis. Riding off on their motorbikes, the cannibals seem to have cast off such contingent social customs. But who, the film asks, are the monsters?
Kinds of Kindness is a black comedy drama, presented as a “triptych fable” – three separate stories which are nevertheless connected. The director, Yorgos Lanthimos, has made many celebrated films, including The Lobster,The Killing of a Sacred Deer and most recently Bugonia. He has won a BAFTA and been nominated for five Academy Awards. Kinds of Kindness has his regular extraordinary cast, including Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley.
When directors use ensemble casts, it usually means they use the same actors in a series of unrelated films, but this one is really three films in which the same actors play different roles. The one of interest to us is the middle section, “R.M.F. is flying”, which employs the theme of this blog, cannibalism. But the whole film is a entertaining (if somewhat lengthy), and there is a relationship between the three parts that makes an interesting, if somewhat disorienting and bewildering, whole. Life imitates art, in that the director and Stone have recently been involved in signing uninformed statements about international politics, an area in which they clearly are sadly ignorant. Imagined kindness becomes abusive behaviour, the theme of the film.
Spoiler alert – if you haven’t seen the movie, and plan to do so, maybe do that first.
The first part of the trilogy explores abusive relationships, particularly in the workplace, as Robert (Jesse Plemons) lets his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe) control every aspect of his life. Raymond is loving and generous (a kind of kindness), but only as long as Robert obeys every order Raymond gives him, including his daily food regime, his sexual activities, and the order to kill a person known only as R.M.F. Kindness is presented as a toxic attachment.
The second story, R.M.F. is Flying, follows a police officer named Daniel, (Plemons), whose wife Liz (Emma Stone) has disappeared at sea while on a biology research expedition. Despite all predictions, she is found and flown back home by R.M.F., but Daniel believes she is an imposter – her shoes don’t fit, she does not remember his favourite song, and she suddenly loves chocolate which she previously could not stand, telling of a dream where dogs were the master species and fed their pet humans on chocolate.
Flashbacks reveal how she survived – by cannibalising the other members of the team.
At one point, the distraught cop Daniel shoots a suspect in the hand, and starts licking up the blood from the wound, just as a dog might do. Like the dogs in her dream, Daniel becomes Liz’s pack leader and she accepts his humiliation and cruelty like a “beta dog” would. Demanding she prove her love, Daniel asks her to cook him one of her fingers or thumb, and we see her cut it off and fry it.
When she reveals she is pregnant, he beats her until she loses the baby.
Finally, he says he is still hungry, famished, and says he wants her liver. She removes it with a kitchen knife, dying in the process, and we see the ‘real’ Liz appear at the door, to be greeted lovingly by Daniel.
The closing credits show dogs driving a car, a dead human lying by the roadside like roadkill. This story exposes kindness as vulnerability in intimate relationships. Daniel is determined that Liz be exactly as he wants her and rejects all her overtures of love, eventually leading to her death and rebirth as his ideal wife.
The final story examines a sex cult led by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Hong Chau) where followers are purified by drinking water cleansed by the tears of the leaders, and can thereafter only have sex with Omi and Aka. Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons) are paired and sent out to find a messiah – a woman who can revive the dead. Emily, like many converts to cults, has left her family behind, although she sneaks into her old house sometimes to sit on her little girl’s bed. Eventually she goes to visit her family, but the daughter is asleep and her ex-husband drugs and rapes her, meaning that she is now, to the cult, ‘contaminated’, and so ejected from the compound. She perseveres and eventually finds the messiah, a veterinarian named Ruth (Margaret Qualley) who heals a stray dog whose paw Emily has cruelly cut. Liz drugs Ruth and takes her to the morgue, where Ruth brings back R.M.F. from the dead. Triumphant, Emily drives the still dazed Ruth to cult headquarters after doing a victory dance that appears in the trailer at the top of this blog. As the credits roll, though, her reckless driving ends up with her driving her Dodge Charger into a wall, killing Ruth. Abusive kindness again, this time as spiritual devotion turned toward thralldom and abuse.
In all three stories, the characters seek fulfilment and, yes, kindness, going to excessive lengths to achieve it – Daniel kills a man to win his boss’ love, Liz cuts out her own liver to feed her husband and placate his repulsion, and Emily kidnaps her purported messiah to win back the love of her cult leader.
The film is an absurdist romp, reflecting the incongruity of human relationships and social behaviour. In each part, someone is being exploited and abused, a form of consumption, but the middle story makes cannibalism, inherent in all abuse, graphically apparent. There are many variations of cannibalism; Liz indulges in starvation cannibalism to survive as she waits to be rescued, Daniel becomes psychotic and licks blood from a wounded civilian, Daniel indulges in revenge cannibalism, ultimately killing Liz.
When he is convinced the woman that was rescued is not really Liz, he becomes contemptuous, and from that point, her death and consumption are inevitable. She has been, in his eyes, dehumanised, objectified like the animals sent to their deaths by the billions every year for human consumption. They are “de-animalised” – their flesh turned into commodities, made to look as little as possible as the living, feeling animals from which it came. For humans to be cannibalised, they must first be animalised, then de-animalised.
Thus, Daniel licks the wound of the man he shot like a dog might treat a wound; thus, Liz’s dream in which the dogs are in charge and feed the humans, not exactly what they want, but chocolate, of which there is plenty, probably because dogs cannot eat it (it’s toxic for them).
In relationships built on distrust and rage, we are animalised, and animals like dogs become the paradigm of civilisation. The humans are just wearing people masks.
Australian boxer Nikita Tszyu has revealed that he became a “cannibal” as he prepared to fight Lulzim Ismaili this month (August 2025). The boxer said he needed to be at his very best to win over his unbeaten opponent, and hoped that his new diet would boost his training.
Tszyu revealed that his change in nutritional sources was all thanks to his wife, Nikita Bedwell. The couple welcomed their first child earlier this month, named Curiosity after the NASA Mars Rover, and the birth allowed Tszyu to change his diet.
The Australian boxer is eating his wife’s placenta in capsule form as part of his training program, and feels like he is benefitting from the change in diet. He told a Sydney radio station:
“we freeze-dried her placenta and I’ve been supplementing on her placenta recently… in tablet form”
Does that make him a cannibal? Well, he thinks so. He added:
“I’ve technically become a cannibal. It’s actually like a superpower. I’ve done tests with my sparring – days where I’ve had it and days where I haven’t – and it feels like I got all this crazy amount of energy”
If you’re not convinced by that, he told the interviewers he is also including breast milk in his diet. Asked if he had tried it, he replied: “I have, I have… and it’s delicious as well!”
Consuming placentas is a growing trend in America, with mothers usually consuming them as part of their postpartum recovery. The practice dates back to Chinese medicine, though studies are yet to confirm that there are benefits to eating them.
The bout on August 20 was subtitled (based on Tszyu’s nickname):
THE BUTCHER IS BACK
So, is cannibalism the next big thing in athletic enhancements? Well, Tszyu knocked Ismaili, who was previously unbeaten, to the mat in just over one minute. The shaken opponent sat on his stool and refused to leave his corner, throwing in the towel before round two commenced.
Athletes often boast of eating meat to improve their fitness and stamina, although there are also plenty of vegan ones who swear that dropping meat and milk makes them faster, stronger and more alert. But if there is any truth in the meat myth, then I suppose we need to consider the words of Anthropologist Marvin Harris, who stated in his book Good to Eat: Riddles of Food Culture that, while humans are clearly not obligate carnivores,
“our species-given physiology and digestive processes predispose us to learn to prefer animal foods… strictly speaking, human flesh itself contains the highest-quality protein that one can eat”
There’s one to chew on, next time you enter the ring.
The immigration debate in the USA and in other countries has quickly polarised between those who see immigrants as pioneers, walking in the footsteps of all those who settled the lands during the period of colonialisation and their descendants (which is almost everyone except surviving indigenous people), and subhuman invaders who flood the country, take the good jobs, and rape and kill the innocent.
President Trump has referred to undocumented immigrants as being criminals and rapists (although he said some might be “good people”), who come from:
“… jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know insane asylums. That’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff. Hannibal Lecter…”
So we waited eagerly (or perhaps apprehensively) to meet these undocumented Hannibals. Now, the Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, has described how federal agents nabbed a purported cannibal illegal migrant who started to eat his own arms during a deportation flight.
On July 1 2025, Noem was visiting the “Alligator Alcatraz” deportation camp in the South Florida Everglades alongside President Trump. This is a the detention centre located about 40 miles west of Miami and surrounded by alligator- and python-infested swampland.
At a press conference, she said:
“The other day I was talking to some Marshals that had been partnering with ICE. They said that they had detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself, and they had to get him off and get him medical attention. These are the kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America that we’re trying to target and get out of our country because they are so deranged, they don’t belong here. They shouldn’t be walking the streets with our children, and they shouldn’t be living in the communities with our families who just want to grow up, go to [their] job, raise their children to grow up and get a job, and to live the American dream…. We are going after murderers and rapists and traffickers and drug dealers and getting them off the streets and getting them out of this country.”
Hard to know what to make of this, since the Department of Homeland Security could not immediately provide corroborating details of any case to match Noem’s story. Was this person a cannibal, and if so, who did he eat? Why did he chew on himself? Is airline food that bad?
The story of human evolution: get eaten, or eat ourselves.
ICE Agent: Hey, knock that off. Save it for the gators!
Family members of one of the victims of a gruesome murder of four college students in Idaho are furious that Bryan Kohberger has been offered and accepted a plea deal.
Kohberger was accused of stabbing Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, and Ethan Chapin to death in November 2022 in Moscow, Idaho. The students were found with fatal stab wounds in an off-campus rental home in the early morning hours. Investigators believe the four students, thought to be sleeping at the time, were fatally stabbed between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. According to the coroner, there was no sign of sexual assault.
A little over a month after the killings, Kohberger, a 28-year-old Ph.D. student and teaching assistant in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University, was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania on Dec. 30, 2022, and extradited to Idaho.
Kohberger was facing a possible death sentence if convicted in a trial that was scheduled to begin Aug. 18, 2025.
A letter sent to families of the victims to inform them of the deal said Kohberger will appear in court Wednesday to enter his guilty plea and be sentenced in late July to life in prison, according to the Idaho Statesman. Kohberger will forfeit his right to appeal as part of the deal. The letter from Moscow Prosecuting Attorney Bill Thompson said:
“We cannot fathom the toll that this case has taken on your family. This resolution is our sincere attempt to seek justice for your family. This agreement ensures that the defendant will be convicted, will spend the rest of his life in prison, and will not be able to put you and the other families through the uncertainty of decades of post-conviction appeals.”
Goncalves’s family had an angry reply on their Facebook page.
“We are beyond furious at the State of Idaho. They have failed us. Please give us some time. This was very unexpected. We appreciate all your love and support.”
The family issued a later post explaining what had been taking place.
“I would like to clarify a couple of things…we DID talk to the prosecution on Friday about the POSSIBILITY of a plea deal and it was a HARD NO from our family. It was very nonchalant and barely discussed as the majority of the conversation was surrounding the upcoming trial. NOTHING in our conversation prepared us for the next steps.”
A family member of one victim told NewsNation that upon hearing of the plea deal, she felt like “all the power had been given back to Kohberger.”
Why is this case featured in a blog about cannibalism? Well, A forensic psychiatrist told Newsweek after the arrest that Kohberger had battled with “cannibalistic urges“.
Reports then surfaced that Kohberger had followed a strict vegan diet, and had reportedly struggled with heroin addiction in the past.
Forensic psychiatrist Carole Lieberman told Newsweek that Kohberger’s “obsessive-compulsive eating habits” indicate he was afraid he would become addicted to meat if he ate it.
“He was not only vegan, he refused to eat off of pots or plates that had had meat on them. Psychologically, this represents his struggle against his cannibalistic urges. He was afraid that if he let himself go to taste meat once, he would become addicted to it—like he had become to heroin—and start killing and eating people.”
A relative told the New York Post that Kohberger’s dietary restrictions were “very, very weird” and that he seemed “very OCD,” referring to obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The woman, who asked not to be named, but said she was previously married into Kohberger’s family, said:
“It was above and beyond being vegan. His aunt and uncle had to buy new pots and pans because he would not eat from anything that had ever had meat cooked in them.”
Casey Arntz, who was friends with Kohberger in middle and high school, said in a video posted on TikTok that he had been “a heavy heroin user” in high school. Kohberger’s struggles with drug addiction continued into his college years, a friend from Northampton Community College told Fox News. Criminal profiler John Kelly told Fox News,
“This kind of person has this volcanic rage inside that’s going to explode on its victim of choice.”
Lieberman told Newsweek that Kohberger had probably studied criminology both to “calm the demons inside him that were telling him to kill” but also to “learn how to commit the perfect crime.”
Kohlberger may have corresponded with Rader (a lot of criminology students do) but we don’t know that for sure. We have to wonder if Rader would have told him about working in the meat department of a Wichita IGA a few years before his murder spree began.
Kohlberger’s obsession with meat reflects a lot of issues considered in Cannibal Studies. Firstly, the question of human meat: there really is no significant difference between the meat of humans and other large mammals such as cows, pigs or sheep. Hannibal Lecter takes delight in feeding human meat to his guests, such as the flesh of the flautist of the Baltimore Philharmonic, whose Board members subsequently enjoy the meal immensely in the book and film Red Dragon, thus becoming “innocent cannibals”.
But the point is that once meat is prepared (cooked, seasoned, presented) it is very hard to tell its provenance. Cannibals who have been asked have mostly compared it to pork or veal, with Armin Meiwes telling an interviewer
“It would have made no difference in somebody else had tasted it; he wouldn’t have questioned the meat…. During preparation, it is not as dark, but bright and fresh as pork, and tastes so very close to pork.”
Kohlberger’s belief that he might like human flesh if he tried any meat at all therefore has some logic to it. Since Charles Darwin’s writings overthrew the special status of humans as closer to angels than other animals, anthropocentrism has been amended to offer a story of humans as the culmination of evolution and thereby continues, rather less successfully, to obscure human animality. Should such beliefs falter, as happens repeatedly in many cases of contemporary cannibalism, it becomes a very short step from eating other animals to eating the human one.
But why should he become addicted to any meat? Well, we know Kohlberger has an addictive personality, shown by his very heavy usage of heroin. But we’re not talking drugs of addiction but lumps of protein, aren’t we? Well, there are plenty of studies about that. Marta Zaraska, for example, wrote in her book Meathooked that meat is highly addictive on several fronts – genetic, cultural, historic and commercial, and coined the term “meathooked” for the incongruous compulsion to eat meat despite the pangs of cognitive dissonance – the repressed feeling of guilt when considering oneself an animal-lover while also paying big corporations to kill them. Then there is the mythology of the Wendigo, a creature from Algonquin legend who starts off as a human but becomes a being who can only live on human flesh, which makes him grow bigger and at the same time hungrier. If you believe in Wendigos, then the slippery slope from carnivore to cannibal seems reasonably clear.
This leads us to the issue of Kohlberger’s apparently very strict veganism. Most people seem to believe (or want to believe) that vegans are fanatics, obsessed with animal welfare (or the environment, or their own health) who therefore compulsively avoid meat. But in fact most vegans would certainly wash a pot thoroughly after a relative had cooked meat, but are unlikely to throw it out as irretrievably ruined, as Kohlberger purportedly did. Veganism is an ethical system that attempts to minimise harm to sentient animals, which includes humans (yes, Virginia, humans are animals). If there is a slippery slope from the flesh of other animals to the flesh of Homo sapiens, then the vegan is furthest from the edge of that slope. When Kohlberger killed those students, he was not following any known vegan code of ethics, even if he didn’t sample their flesh on the way out.
June 2025: The Sutter County District Attorney has issued a statement declaring that, on June 10, 2025, the California Board of Parole Hearings rescinded a February 2025 grant of parole for Leslie Closner. Mr. Closner will remain incarcerated until another parole hearing is required by law.
Closner was sentenced to 25 years to life after pleading guilty to first degree murder in 1988.
The statement noted that:
Closner strangled his girlfriend to death on the evening after her daughter’s wedding. Once the victim was dead, Closner raped her corpse. He then mutilated and consumed part of her body. He then raped the corpse again. The Sutter County District Attorney believes that this offender should remain behind bars for the remainder of his life. The People would like to thank the victim’s family for their dedication all these years, for attending every hearing and representing their loved one so fiercely. The Sutter County District Attorney’s Office will continue to represent the People of the State of California in these hearings, speaking up for justice for the family of his victim and the well-being of the community.
In October 1987, Closner and his girlfriend, Jan Ferguson, checked into a motel to attend her daughter’s wedding. During a fight, Closner threw Ferguson onto the floor and strangled her to death, according to a parole review document.
After the murder, Closner moved her body to a bed, ripped her clothes off and raped her corpse. He attempted to give Ferguson mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but when that was unsuccessful, he fled from the room.
However, after leaving, Closner realised that he left his wallet in the hotel room. He climbed through an open window to get it, then had sex with Ferguson’s corpse again, bit off both of her nipples and swallowed them.
According to the parole review document, Closner then fled the motel but turned himself in to Oregon police two days later.
This is not the first time Closner was granted parole which was later rescinded. In a 2018 decision to deny Closner parole, former California Governor Jerry Brown wrote that this wasn’t Closner’s first aggressive crime. During Closner and Ferguson’s five-year relationship, he allegedly inflicted repeated emotional and physical abuse on her.
During a short separation, Closner followed Ferguson around “to the point of obsessing over her,” the parole review document said.
Closner told the board during a parole hearing, “I was really obsessed with her, and this obsession was sexual, um, and it just — it spiralled into even more and more heightened tension between us.”
He was also in an abusive relationship with his ex-wife, the parole review document said. In one instance, he attempted to strangle her to the point where she couldn’t breathe. Their marriage ended in divorce, after his ex-wife filed for a restraining order.
Brown wrote in his decision to deny Closner parole that he didn’t think Closner knew why he has violent tendencies. When the board asked him why he committed such an appalling crime, Closner said, “My view is that I was dealing with some, you know, negative core issues that extend back from early childhood and in relationship with my mother.”
Closner said during a parole review that he believes his violent tendencies came from the fact that he was physically abused as a child and saw his mother’s naked body.
A psychologist said in 2014 that Closner spoke about his mother differently, “sometimes with anger and sometimes with a lustful voice” and that at some point during their interview, he “seemed to become sexually excited as he described watching his mother undress,” the parole review document said.
Former Governor Brown wrote that Closner poses an unreasonable danger to society if he was to be released.
Cosner has been in jail for almost forty years. Under California law, Closner could be scheduled for future parole reviews, but given his threat profile, denials are likely.
Be careful what you wish for! Aesop warned us of that over two thousand years ago, in his fable “The Old Man and Death.” In that story, an old man is so sick of picking up wood in the forest that he drops his bundle and calls on death to free him from his never-ending labours. But when Death appears, he reconsiders, and asks Death just to replace the bundle of sticks onto his back. In this movie, the sticks are gambling debts, and Death is a catering agency that pays chefs to kill people and cook them for rich people. Can his request be retracted like Aesop’s old man?
Look, many of us have sat in a restaurant, even (perhaps especially) the expensive ones, wondering what the hell we were eating. We rarely ask though – too polite, too squeamish, or too indifferent. If it’s on the menu, we figure, it must be OK. Once we’ve asked the waiter for the dish, it’s usually too late to retract. In Mark Mylod’s 2022 film The Menu, audiences speculated on whether the Chef (Ralph Fiennes) had served up humans in his exquisite banquets, including perhaps the Sous Chef and even his own mother, but it was never spelled out, so has not graced this cannibalism blog.
But in this week’s film, Nicholas Tomnay’s What You Wish For, the cannibalism is much more open, particularly for the diners, who are willing to pay big bucks for this, shall we say, unorthodox cuisine. Nicholas Tomnay is an Aussie (like the author of this blog) who works out of Sydney, New York and San Francisco. His first feature film was The Perfect Host (2010) which also included a lot of dining, and What You Wish For follows in this vein, but with a lot of human flesh involved.
Ryan (Nick Stahl from Man Without a Face) arrives in Colombia (South America) at the invitation of his old friend Jack (Brian Groh). Ryan is on the run from massive gambling debts he has foolishly amassed. Although the debt collectors don’t know where he is, they do know where his mother is, and send him pictures to prove it. He needs lots of money and quickly. His friend Jack seems to have it all – a fancy house where he just has to cook one meal for the agency that contracts him, a fortune in his bank, and big pay cheques delivered after each meal.
But Jack is troubled by conscience, telling Ryan,
“The reward always matches the atrocity”
While Ryan is still coveting Jack’s lifestyle, Jack hangs himself. Recovering from the shock, Ryan realises that all he needs is a fake driver’s licence and a new password to become Jack and access all his money.
But when the agency people arrive – Imogen (Tamsin Topolski) and Maurice (Juan Carlos Messier) – they think he is Jack, and assume he knows what they want him to cook, are angry that he has not yet harvested the meat.
It turns out that his “ingredients” are local poor people, preferably ones who won’t be missed, and Imogen warns him that preparing and serving one bad course will be fatal not just to the person being cooked, but to the chef as well. The guests pay $1.5 million for the meal, including the exotic location, the private jets, and the specially sourced meat. They have special requests too – Imogen tells him “make sure you harvest the tongue.” So any thought of Ryan skipping out before the feast is extremely unpalatable (sorry).
The rationalisation is the same one found in most capitalist enterprises. It is the utilitarian argument in favour of the greatest good for the greatest number. Imogen tells Ryan:
“We kill on average fifty people a year, plus twenty-five in the clean-up. So, 75 deaths a year, and we generate over one hundred million dollars. We funnel 100% of our profits back into the communities. The farming, the infrastructure. We ensure clean drinking water for the entire population. You might say that’s simply self-interest. But we don’t eat everybody. Not even one percent. Now, you tell me what company makes that amount of money, has global presence, assists more than 99% of the people in the communities within which it operates, and their footprint has only ever killed 75 people a year? Oil companies kill on average 110 people a year, farmers are on about 250. Groundskeepers, truck drivers, roofers, they all thrash us in fatalities.”
The rest of the discussion is phrased in the same vocabulary as used by the meat industries. Old ones will taste disgusting, fear will taint the meat, the butcher will be covered in blood.
The victims are “produce” and become no more or less than “livestock”. Maurice, the agency killer who goes hunting with Jack, assures him “they won’t feel a thing”. When Ryan asks him if he feels bad, the reply is,
“Do you feel sad for a pig when you eat the bacon?”
Jack does what he has to do, after all his attempts to escape or alert the police are foiled.
Imogen sympathises with his nagging conscience, telling him what every soldier, assassin, slaughterhouse worker or meat eater is told at first:
“No one likes it at the beginning. But after a while, it does stop bothering you”.
There is a popular meme about “eating the rich”, and even a few movies about it (e.g. Eat the Rich and Eating Raoul). But the facts of nature, humanity and economics are that the rich and powerful get to choose what, and who, they eat. In the film The Cannibal Club, rich Brazilians watch poor people fight to the death and then eat the loser, in Fresh, the protagonist chats up young women then drugs them and sells their flesh and their underwear to the “one percent of the one percent” who want what no one else can have, and can afford to pay for it. Jeffrey Epstein had a similar gig, supplying sex rather than meat.
The people with the power, the rich, eat the poor: they swallow their surplus labour, they squeeze rent from them, they sell them their shoddy products paid for by lending them money at ruinous rates, and they send their children off to war. Why not go the next step and literally cook them for dinner? It’s what we do to other animals, purely because we can.
The film is sumptuously presented, the direction is assured and convincing, and the actors are all first rate, including the wealthy guests and the police who pop by and share the main course. The film is rated 80% “Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes.
One reviewer opined, “What You Wish For will convert you to vegetarianism forever”.
In the year 2000, 44-year-old slaughterhouse worker Katherine Knight had a night of passion with her partner, John Price, then stabbed him 37 times, professionally skinned him, hung his hide on a meat hook over the lounge room door, decapitated him, butchered his corpse and cooked parts of him. She served up his meat with baked potato, carrot, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, squash and gravy in neat settings at the dinner table, putting beside each plate place-names for Price’s children. Another meal was tossed into the backyard; it appears she intended to eat it but couldn’t do so. The police arrived before Price’s children so, as far as we know, none of him was consumed (by humans anyway).
Knight pleaded guilty to murder and the judge ordered that her papers be marked “never to be released.” An appeal was quickly denied, and she is still serving her life sentence at Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre in Sydney.
Shoreline Entertainment planned to make a film of the incident based on Peter Lalor’s book Blood Stain, but so far it has not surfaced.
It appears that Knight was NOT a cannibal, despite one of the favourite media labels about her being “Kathy the Cannibal”. Other reports called her “The Woman Hannibal Lecter”, a comparison that makes no sense at all, since Hannibal did not use 37 strokes to kill people, definitely did eat parts of them, and did not (as Knight did) take a cocktail of sleeping tablets afterwards while lying in bed with the mutilated corpse.
Darren O’Sullivan, whose documentary is linked at the top of this blog, commented,
“this is possibly the most horrific thing I have ever discovered”.
Although the series is called “Real Twisted Tales”, I suspect O’Sullivan must have led a sheltered life. Knight was a slaughterhouse worker, recognised for her skills in knife work. She grew up in the NSW town of Aberdeen, where everyone in her family and most of the town were employed in the abattoir. Her job, from a young age, was to kill and cut up animals. She did to John Price what she was trained to do to other animals – slaughter them, cut them up, cook them. She did try to feed bits to his children, which is what farmers did in the UK (feeding cattle bone-meal to cattle), an act of cannibalism which led to Mad Cow Disease. But there is little evidence that she herself ate any of him.
The documentary above states that Katherine Knight is “one of the most evil people in the world”, because she was found sane enough to stand trial. But really, what she did was what she was paid to do every day, just to a different species than those who usually suffered and died under her hand.
Superstitious anthropocentric beliefs put humans on a tier somewhere between angels and animals, but really we are a species of Great Ape, closely related to the chimpanzee. Rationally speaking, there really is only a thin red line between killing and eating any species of animal.
The ultimate story of our sins coming back to bite us?
Amber Paige Laudermilk, a 34-year-old licensed embalmer from Texas, has been accused of castrating the corpse of a sex offender.
Laudermilk is behind bars at the Harris County Jail after turning herself in on Tuesday. She’s been charged with Abuse of a Corpse – a felony – and remains in jail on a $5,000 bond.
According to a press release from Harris County Constable Alan Rosen, Laudermilk worked for Memorial Mortuary & Crematory and is accused of, in January 2025, “mutilating the body of a dead sex offender.”
The 58-year-old registered sex offender, Charles Roy Rodriguez, had received 10 years of Deferred Adjudication after being charged with Sexual Assault in 2001. Rodriguez died from natural causes in January.
Laudermilk’s alleged action, according to charging documents, was brought to the attention of the funeral director by two employees who said they witnessed the crime. One witness said they saw her stab Rodriguez’s body twice in the groin with a scalpel, before cutting off his penis, after learning Rodriguez was a sex offender.
She then “stuffed it in his mouth,” and allegedly told a trainee in the cremation room, who saw it happen, that they “didn’t see anything.” The witness reported that Laudermilk’s demeanour was threatening. When other employees went to see the body, Laudermilk allegedly covered his groin area with a sheet and said he had “a lot going on with him.”
Precinct One Constable Alan Rosen said in a statement:
“This case is about two troubled people: the victim who was a registered sex offender and the defendant, who is accused of viciously attacking his dead body. No matter what one thinks of his life, the law requires that he be treated with dignity in death.”
Laudermilk’s license was suspended by the Texas Funeral Service Commission, and the Memorial Mortuary & Crematory confirmed that Laudermilk is no longer employed by them.
In their statement, they said:
“We are deeply troubled and saddened by the unlawful and horrifying actions of this individual ex-employee. Our thoughts are with the family and loved ones of the deceased.”
Now, why is this story on a cannibalism blog, I hear you ask? Well, cannibalism is not just about swallowing another person’s flesh or organs. It is also an act of dominance, and often revenge or intimidation. Gerald Linderman in his book on Americans at war in WW2 writes that the Japanese would disembowel captured Americans and leave the bodies “with their severed genitals stuffed in their mouths.” Tim Blackmore, in his book detailing modern military technology and its dehumanising effects, comments,
“Where there was a tongue, now there is a useless penis, a double castration and silencing. Putting flesh in the mouth also suggests that the enemy can be eaten. Cannibalism makes the soldier strong at the attacker’s expense.”
So this was, in a way, the embalmer expressing her opinion, her freedom of speech, using a scalpel instead of a keyboard (which would have been protected by her First Amendment rights I guess). Plenty of written opinions deny the dignity or humanity of the person being described. Does a dead sex offender deserve “dignity in death”, even though he may have had little or none in life?
The fact is that the dead human is just meat. Starving survivors of catastrophes, ship wrecks or plane crashes quickly realise this and soon eat the dead and sometimes even the living – think the Donner Party. Remember the words of a famished Chris Hemsworth saying to his dying crewmen “No right minded sailor discards what might yet save him.” Or the debate in the crashed plane as a group of young men slowly starve to death surrounded by snap-frozen corpses:
“if the soul leaves the body when we die, then the body is just a carcass… What’s there in the snow is just meat, Antonio. Food.”
There are thousands of people dying of starvation every day around the globe, and what dignity do we offer them, even in their last moments of life? As for dignifying the dead, we casually torment, kill and then mutilate the corpses of billions of other animals every year for our food, our medical experiments, our clothing or our entertainment. Yet we are expected to weep for this sex offender’s insentient corpse?
The Cannibal Guy 