Tag: cannibalism

Cannibalism news July 2023: Two men arrested for eating partially-cremated human flesh

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Two men in Odisha (eastern India, formerly known as Orissa) have been arrested and accused of cannibalism after locals found them eating half-burnt flesh from the body of a woman who was being cremated at a funeral in Mayurbhanj, Odisha. 

The incident happened in a tribal village called Bandhasahi. The accused were identified as Sundar Mohan Singh, 58, and Narendra Singh, 25, both from Dantuni village. The deceased woman was identified as Madhusmita Singh, 25, who had died in the Bandhasahi village hospital. The family took her body to the cremation ground and performed the last rites. In Hinduism, the preferred way of disposing of the dead is Antyeṣṭi (अन्त्येष्टि), a composite Sanskrit word of antya and iṣṭi, meaning “final sacrifice.”

The two men, who were said to be drunk, were overseeing the proper burning of the body. As the cremation progressed, the body had been burnt almost entirely to ashes, except for a single unburnt piece of flesh. Mohan and Narendra claimed that it wouldn’t burn unless it was cut into smaller pieces and then thrown back into the fire.

Lobo Singh, the grandfather of the deceased girl, watched the men pull the unburnt flesh out of the fire. Narendra proceeded to divide it into three pieces, with Mohan tossing two pieces back into the flames. However, Lobo Singh said he witnessed Mohan concealing the remaining piece in his left hand, He questioned Mohan about this, to which Mohan casually replied that he would discard it later.

The woman’s uncle said that, when he asked them what they would do with the flesh, one of the accused, Sundar Mohan Singh, replied, “You don’t know about witchcraft.” After around 10 minutes, he announced that he would eat the piece of flesh. Before the others could do anything, Mohan put the piece in his mouth and began chewing it; he also offered a portion of flesh to Narendra, who also commenced eating it. 

The villagers caught and beat the accused duo, tied them up in rugs, and informed the local police. Both accused admitted committing the crime, claiming that they had consumed the flesh in an inebriated condition. They were charged under section 297 of the Indian Penal Code. Senior police officer Sanjay Kumar Parida stated that the accused were arrested based on the complaints of the villagers, but no trace of human flesh was found on them. Further investigation into the case continues.

This sort of phantasy, that eating human flesh will give the eater special powers, is not uncommon in Cannibal Studies texts; essentialist speculations that some part of the ‘donor’ remains imbued – such as the courage embodied in the brave enemy’s heart or strength in his or her limbs. Brigid Brophy, one of the seminal voices in the animal justice movement, called this “the primitive superstition that eating the flesh of bulls endows you with the strength of the bull”. Even Freud seemed to have subscribed to such thoughts, claiming in Totem and Taboo that the birth of civilisation occurred when a group of young prehumans came to resent their father’s monopolisation of the tribe’s females (common among primates) and rose up, killing the father to take their mothers and sisters for themselves. “Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well” and, Freud added, as well as the protein they ingested from the fresh meat, the brothers would each have “acquired a portion of his strength”. Freud went on to speculate  that their sense of remorse created the first ethical basis for civilisation, which seems rather far-fetched, and there is no evidence that the Singhs, even when they sober up, will be creating a new form of civilisation in Odisha. Although, to counter my obvious scepticism, there are reports that Armin Meiwes, currently in prison in Germany, allegedly claimed that, after he ate his bilingual lover in 2001, his own English improved considerably. We absorb the nutrition of our food, why should cannibals not absorb the strength, spirit and experiences of their victims?

The Orissa Post called the incident “extremely rare”, but this blog has reported on similar incidents in the past. In Assam in 2022, another inebriated man found edible flesh within the cremation flames.

In 2019, The Global Report on Food Crises estimated that there were some 135 million “acutely food-insecure people in crisis or worse”, including 17 million acutely malnourished children under 5 years old. The changing climate, or future pandemics, could easily double that number, leading to what the head of the UN’s food relief agency warned could be “a famine of biblical proportions”. Globally, over a million people die each (normal) week, many of them still covered in healthy flesh; if human meat is similar to that of other animals, why not let those who are starving eat some of the corpses, at least those who are minimally diseased? Is an agonising death by starvation less abject than eating human meat? And if, as most societies (not including Hindus) seem to believe, it’s OK to eat animals, and humans are animals (a species of Great Ape), then from carnivory to cannibalism is only a very thin red line.

Cannibal News July 2023: THE CANNIBAL OF PUEBLA

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A 32-year-old Mexican man, identified only as Alvaro N, and also known now as the CANNIBAL OF PUEBLA and the CANNIBAL OF RESURRECCIÓN (a town in the Municipality of Puebla), has allegedly killed his wife while under the influence of drugs. He is accused of dismembering her body, consuming parts of her brain inside some tacos, and using her shattered skull as an ashtray.

The incident occurred on June 29 2023, and Alvaro was apprehended at their home in Puebla on July 2. Authorities say that he claimed he committed the crime under the orders of Santa Muerte (Our Lady of Holy Death) and the devil. Death and the devil were contacted for comment, but have not responded.

His wife, known as Montserrat, was the mother of five daughters, aged 12 to 23. She and Alvaro had been married less than a year.

After committing the murder, Alvaro alegedly called the victim’s mother, Maria Alicia Montiel Serran, and said one of the victim’s daughters should come and collect their mother because “I already killed her and put her in bags”.

Grieving Maria Alicia added that Alvaro chopped up the 38-year-old victim’s body ‘with a machete, a chisel, and a hammer’. She went on: ‘I called him crying, asking why he did that to her if she wasn’t a bad person.’

According to Maria Alicia, the suspect confessed: ‘I killed her, I cut her into pieces, and I threw her into the ravine in bags.’ She added that he claimed: ‘She didn’t suffer.’

Alvaro’s family have requested his release, presumably on the basis that, you know,

Montserrat’s family believe otherwise, and he will be held in custody for at least two months while investigations continue. The victim’s mother, Maria Alicia Montiel Serran, said that Alvaro subjected her daughter and the youngest two stepdaughters (who lived with them) to violence and sexual abuse. She described instances of voyeurism while they showered, and lamented that her daughter often sided with Alvaro, despite the offensive behaviour.

The family claims that Alvaro, a builder, struggled with substance abuse and was often violent towards his wife.

The couple frequently posted about their devotion to Santa Muerte on social media, and the police reportedly found a black magic altar in their home. Maria Alicia mentioned Alvaro’s drug use, including cocaine, and said she had expressed concerns about his mental state. She disclosed that her daughter had a tattoo of Santa Muerte.

The victim’s family is still awaiting the opportunity to lay Maria Montserrat to rest as authorities continue their search for some of her remains. These remaining body parts need to undergo DNA testing for identification. Maria Alicia has called for justice, urging that her daughter be buried with dignity and emphasising that no mother would want her child sent back in pieces.

Mexico has a proud record of acts of cannibalism. Last year, we learned that eating rival sicarios is standard training to graduate as a fully-fledged member of certain Mexican cartels. Refugees from South and Central America are sometimes kidnapped by criminal gangs as they try to enter the United States, and sometimes eaten if a ransom is not paid. In 2021, a 72-year-old man was arrested in the Mexican municipality of Atizapan de Zaragoza and reportedly admitted to slaughtering around thirty women over the last twenty years, eating their body parts and saving their faces and scalps. And don’t forget the wonderful Mexican cannibalism film We Are What We Are (Somos lo que hay) in which a family in Mexico City live on human flesh, and the coroner famously says “It’s shocking how many people eat one another in this city”.

Of course, the taco is now enjoyed internationally, and particularly in the US, where a man who calls himself Incrediblyshinyshart, served his friends tacos, made from his own amputated leg.

One news report used an image of a taco to illustrate the story of the Cannibal of Puebla, noting only that it was a “representative image”. In other words, this particular taco contains no human brains (as far as can be ascertained), but certainly includes body parts of some other unfortunate earthling. There is a thin red line between eating humans and eating other animals, and the difference is very hard to distinguish once the meat cooked, and particularly when minced and thrust into a taco.

Buen apetito!

Peter Jackson’s first feature film: BAD TASTE (1987)

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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.

MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD (Sergio Martino, 1978)

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“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.

The review from Allmovie said:

“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.

The complete movie, at the time of writing, was available on YouTube.

200 And don’t miss “The Horror Geek” Mike Bracken’s hilarious review at Sick Flicks:

Vegan eats his own blood as a meringue

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I don’t usually put warnings about graphic images in my blogs; I figure if you are reading a blog called “thecannibalguy.com” that you are probably not expecting unicorns and fairies. But this short clip has its own trigger warning, so I’ll just reproduce it here.

Vegans are often told by caring or sanctimonious friends and relatives that they need animal protein or they will get sick and die. This can be a bit wearisome, particularly for long-term vegans. Now here’s a novel solution.

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete (I wonder who his parents’ favourite film star was?) has been vegan or vegetarian for almost 20 years (and clearly has not died yet). After years of carnivorous peer-pressure, he’s decided to consume animal products from what he calls the only truly ethical source: himself.

Jamie seeks advice from “Blood for Food” activist, Laura Schälchli, about her recipes, which are made with blood from other animals. He follows her recipe for blood meringues, substituting his own blood for whatever unfortunate animal is usually slaughtered and bled.

And eats the results.

He starts by whisking the blood, because blood tends to clot, which even he describes as “disgusting”. But,

“I find the thought of it less gross than if I were eating the blood of an animal.”

Jamie is perhaps using shorthand, or forgetting that we are all animals?

The protein albumin comprises about fifty percent of human blood plasma, and is similar to egg whites, so the obvious choice for Jamie was to make a meringue, which is usually made from the whites of chicken eggs or, far less often, in the recipe he has chosen, the blood of goats or cows.

“I was expecting a sugary bowl of gore, but this looks like it could be real food.”

So look, autocannibalism is not an appetising prospect, but most vegans would say the same about dishes made from the organs, muscles or blood of an animal who was unwillingly slaughtered for the purpose.

 “I think I probably enjoyed this more than if I had made it using animal blood, because there was no death involved. I am really the only ethical source of animal products, because I can give my consent to myself in a way that a sheep can’t.”

Here are some of the comments from YouTube:

Some suggested that Jamie would end up a cannibal, a common thread through the literature – if you eat human flesh (or blood I guess), you will become addicted, because we are somehow irresistible. It is absolute nonsense of course. Others felt like it had made the point: eating any animal product, including from the ape known as Homo sapiens, is a bit disgusting. I have seen people flinch as they pull a piece of meat out of the fridge and pour out the blood that pools under it.

As Jamie says, if you must eat animal protein, use the nearest animal, and the only one that is able to consent, although the occasional cannibal like Armin Meiwes manages to find a willing third party to sate his cannibalistic desires. Remember the scene from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, when the “dish of the day” offers them his shoulder to eat, braised in a little white wine sauce, saying “naturally mine, sir, nobody else’s in mine to offer!”

Jamie is not unique in this – remember Gwen van der Zwan, who made blood sausages out of her own blood, commenting, “Why is my idea considered disgusting, but doing the same thing with pigs’ blood isn’t?”

Jamie has the final summation, commenting perhaps on the flesh and blood of himself, and every other sentient being:

“It’s like eating a little baked nightmare.”

THE LONE RANGER (Verbinski, 2013)

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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.

All-consuming teenage desire: “DER FAN” (Eckhart Schmidt, 1982)

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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.

“they were cannibals, and they were going to eat him” – Texas teen arrested for killing family

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A Texas teen has been arrested on murder charges, accused of slaughtering his parents and two siblings — including a 5-year-old brother — because he believed they were all “cannibals” planning to eat him.

Cesar Olalde, 18, was arrested after a standoff with police on Tuesday May 23 in suburban Texarkana and charged with capital murder — punishable by the death penalty or life in prison without parole.

Police in the town of Nash — population about 3,800 — went to Olalde’s home after getting a report that a man had harmed his family and was threatening to kill himself.

When they arrived, they found the teen holed up, while family members were inside.

An affidavit by Nash Police Officer Craig Buster, said that the teen, barricaded inside, had called police, saying “he had pulled the trigger, and shot his family.”

After persuading Olalde to end his standoff and surrender, police went inside the home and found the bodies of his parents, Reuben Olalde and Aida Garcia, older sister, Lisbet Olalde, and 5-year-old brother, Oliver Olalde — all in a bathroom.

“It appeared as if the victims had been shot at various places in the residence and [had been dragged] to the bathroom,” according to the affidavit. Multiple spent cartridge casings were found throughout the home, and “blood spatter on multiple surfaces.”

The affidavit said Joseph Flieder, a colleague of Lisbet Olalde, had gone to the house because she’d missed work that day. He knocked on the door but got no response.

Flieder, together with a family member who had also arrived to check on the family, forced his way inside, where he was confronted by Cesar Olalde. The teen allegedly pointed a gun at the man several times and brandished a knife.

Flieder told responding police officers that Cesar Olalde said,

“he had killed his family because they were cannibals, and they were going to eat him”

Olalde was jailed on a $10 million bond.

Neighbour Robert Ward described the victims as a “beautiful family” made up of “extremely nice” and “hardworking people.” He said the daughter had recently graduated from college and planned to become a teacher, and that Cesar was “such a good kid. He was going to get into an apprentice program to be a plumber.”

There is no actual cannibalism involved in this story (unless Cesar Olalde was right about his family, as suggested by several people online).

But what is interesting is the fear of cannibalism that must have been strong enough to drive him to this desperate act, killing those closest to him. There are clearly major mental problems involved, but that’s not a sufficient explanation. Why see them as cannibals – why not aliens or pirates or something else?

The terror of cannibalism relates directly to our experience as babies, when we are altricial – totally dependent on caregivers, for far longer than any other animal of similar size. We gestate as cannibals, eating from the placenta – our mother’s body. We are born and fed from a breast (usually human or bovine), which is more eating of the body. As we grow, we experience rage when our needs are not immediately recognised and satisfied, and this rage may be homicidal in nature (Freud called the first six months of a child’s life the “cannibalistic stage”). We want to eat our mother, and are terrified that, being so much larger and more powerful, she may feel like eating us first. We fear, in other words, reabsorption into the maternal body from which we emerged.

The only difference between eating human meat and that of other animals is that we fear consumption by other humans, whereas the animals we eat – cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, fish, etc, are generally herbivorous or gentle, peaceful animals. We don’t recognise this fear at a conscious level, but under stress or psychic collapse, we find ourselves back inside our mental image of Freud’s primal “cannibalistic phase”.

Indiana court upholds life sentence for man convicted of murder and cannibalism

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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.

Spanish influencer “practiced cannibalism”: eats part of her own knee

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@paulagonu

no me dio poderes

♬ sonido original – Paulagonu

Cannibalism is usually defined as eating the flesh of another animal of the same species. In the case of humans, this of course means eating the flesh of another human. But sometimes people eat their own flesh. Is this still cannibalism, and is there anything wrong with it?

The answers usually given seem to be yes and yes. I agree that eating your own flesh is, by definition, a form of cannibalism, but I really cannot see what all the fuss is about. What about people that chew their fingernails, called onychophagia, or (oww!) their cuticles? Or perhaps more extreme is the fashion of eating placentas after childbirth – some women take them home and cook them, or there are companies that offer to sterilise and morcelise placentas and make pills from them. There is not, unfortunately, universal agreement on the supposed health benefits.

British social anthropologist Alfred Gell reported that in the 1970s he was conducting fieldwork among the Umeda people of West Sepik in Papua New Guinea, when he accidentally cut his finger and, as people often do, put it in his mouth to suck the wound. The locals were horrified and considered him a cannibal:

“the shocked countenances and expressions of disgust evinced by my Umeda companions told me soon enough…”

If Gell was thought a cannibal for sucking his own blood, what would the Umeda think of Spanish ‘influencer’ Paula Gonu, who announced that she ate some cartilage that was removed from her knee during surgery? In an interview with the Club 113 podcast, Gonu, who had opted for local anaesthesia, spoke of watching the doctor operate on her knee in real-time on a screen. After the doctor finished the procedure, the influencer said he asked her if she wanted to keep the part of her meniscus that he had removed. Gonu said yes and the doctor put the piece of cartilage in a small bottle filled with preservative.

Gonu explained that she had to undergo surgery to remove her meniscus (cartilage in the knee joint) following an injury. A week after the surgery, Gonu decided she wanted to eat the cartilage.

“I was talking with the boyfriend I had at the time, and I told him, ‘I want to eat it. It’s mine and I have to reinsert it into my body’. He asked, ‘But why do you want to eat it?’ I answered, ‘Why not? It’s not going to hurt me.’ So, then I made a Bolognese sauce, I added it in, and I ate it.”

Gonu previously shared the story in a viral TikTok last November, which has been viewed more than 4.3 million times, with the caption: “It didn’t give me super powers.” However, after Gonu retold the story on the Club 113 podcast, it entered the news cycle again.

Spanish media was quick to trumpet Gonu’s cannibalism. “Paula Gonu practiced cannibalism: She ate her own meniscus,” read one headline. Another headline from November, when the influencer originally shared the story, stated: “The rich eat meniscus.”

One Twitter user  called it “Bizarre”. This was one of the more moderate comments.

Autocannibalism or autosarcophagy is in a sense universal, in that we all consume dead cells from our tongue and cheeks all the time. But autocannibalism is not always voluntary. The Hungarian noblewoman Erzsébet Báthory (the one who allegedly used to bathe in the blood of virgins in the early 17th century) is supposed to have forced some of her servants to eat their own flesh. In 1934, Claude Neal, a 23-year-old African-American, was brutally lynched by a group of white men who had stormed the county jail in Brewton, Alabama where he was being held after confessing to the murder of a 20-year-old white woman in Greenwood, Florida. One member of the mob told an NAACP investigator that during the lynching, which lasted ten-to-twelve hours, the men cut off Neal’s penis and testicles and forced him to eat them. Other incidents of coerced autocannibalism were reported in the years following the 1991 Haitian coup d’état. and in the 1990s, young people in Sudan were forced to eat their own ears.

As for the other kind, voluntary autocannibalism, there are many cases documented, well before Paula Gonu thought of the idea. A recent one was the case of Incrediblyshinyshart who told Vice that he had served his friends tacos, made from his own amputated leg.

So Gonu’s idea was far from original. But nor is there much wrong with it. Cannibalism is frowned upon when it involves disturbing a corpse, and definitely disapproved when it involves killing someone as prey. But Gonu did none of that – she merely ate a part of herself, with her own full consent, instead of throwing it away. You could almost say she was into recycling.