2025: The Year in Cannibalism

On 01/01/202601/01/2026 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal NewsLeave a comment

Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
— Shakespeare – Troilus and Cressida Act 1, Scene 3

January

Violence in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea marred celebrations of the country’s 25^th anniversary of independence. Armed men were shown in videos holding body parts and saying “this is our meat.” The story brought back memories of former US President Joe Biden claiming his uncle’s body was never found during the Second World War as he had been eaten in PNG, stating that “there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea”.

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, already in hot water for sex trafficking and racketeering charges, has been accused of cannibalism now. In the Peacock documentary Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy – which covers the rise and dramatic fall of Combs, 55 – former Making the Band 2 contestant Sara Rivers revealed what she and others experienced when cameras weren’t rolling. When Diddy got angry, she says, he threatened her band member:

“You make me so mad I want to eat your flesh!”

In the North West Province of South Africa, one of a group of illegal miners (zama zamas, or “those who take a chance” inZulu) in the Stilfontein mine (which closed in 2013) has disclosed that he and his fellow miners turned to cannibalism when they ran out of food 2km (1.25 miles) underground. The police had cut off food supplies the previous August to ‘smoke out’ the illegal miners.

February

Two artists put on a show in Scotland where they made and cooked “black pudding” sausages from their own blood. Although they did not eat the sausages after this show due to legal considerations, they have done so in the past, although one of the artists has since become a vegetarian and has said he will not be eating them in the future.

Tyree Smith, the “Connecticut Cannibal”, was given conditional release by the Nutmeg State’s Psychiatric Security Review Board from the mental facility to which he was incarcerated. Smith was handed sixty years in 2013 for killing a homeless man and eating his brain and eyeball in a cemetery, washed down with sake. Doctors who have been treating Smith said he’s been fully rehabilitated, thanks to medications that quelled the voices in his head. Others, including the family of the man he killed and ate, are less optimistic about his future plans. Mr Gonzalez’s sister-in-law, Talitha Frazier, asked the review board “How do we know he’s not going to do this again?” Republican state Senator Paul Cicarella said “Murder and cannibalism and release in the same sentence … that’s a problem”.

What’s with all the eyeballs? A “preppy” Princeton grad was charged with murdering his brother at their luxury Princeton apartment, after which he ripped out the victim’s eyeball and ate it. He also reportedly set the family’s cat on fire. Even the Duke of Cornwall in King Lear would have blushed at that transgression.

March

A woman in Brazil barbecued and ate her victim’s heart and penis. Josefa Lima de Sousa, 65, left a blood-stained sign by the mutilated corpse with a message, using her street name, saying: “Gringa got rapist.” She told police the victim had been a child abuser.

A Texas embalmer with the wonderful name Amber Ludermilk was charged with the felony “abuse of a corpse” after cutting off the penis of a deceased sex offender and jamming it into his mouth. An arresting constable stated that “No matter what one thinks of his life, the law requires that he be treated with dignity in death.” In a world where thousands of humans die of starvation every day, and we casually torment, kill and then mutilate the corpses of billions of other animals every year for food, medical experiments, clothing or entertainment, are we expected to weep for this sex offender’s insentient corpse?

A South Carolina mental health facility was sued by family of a victim of murder and cannibalism. The lawsuit alleged that the killer, another inmate, had killed two men and eaten both the victims’ ears, as well as drinking their blood so he could “gain their power.”

In Rwanda, a minister said that persecution and cannibalism of Tutsi people are still “commonplace.” Readers may remember that just over thirty years ago, almost one million ethnic Tutsis in that country, some 75% of the Tutsi population, were slaughtered in the space of just 100 days. Although the word genocide has come to mean ‘anything done by someone you don’t like’, that one was a real genocide.

June

A young woman who calls herself pterodactylhunny disclosed on TikTok that her doctors had given her one her ribs which had been surgically removed. She took it home, boiled it to remove the meat, then ate the meat to see what it tasted like. Spoiler: the formaldehyde in which it had been soaked made it taste pretty bad. The cannibalism of eating her own flesh, however, she described as “cool” and “not that weird”. Viewers responses ranged from shocked to approving, pointing out that eating one’s own meat could be considered vegan, since the animal from which it came had given her consent.

@pterodactylhunny
this is a true story
♬ original sound – evil trickster woman

July

16 men were arrested in the West Pokot region of Kenya after human remains were found including the bodies of several children. One boy was found in a maize field with his organs removed. Police say the suspects have confessed to killing and eating eight people.

Relatives of the victims of a mass-murderer in Idaho were outraged to find that he had taken a plea deal for the stabbing of four students in 2022, thus avoiding the death penalty. No indication of him eating his victims, but a forensic psychologist reported that he had become a strict vegan before that, because:

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.”

In Kenya, a man recently released from prison for killing his wife, murdered his second wife, cooked her flesh and fed it to his children. Irate members of the community lynched him and set him on fire. The incident elicited sharp debate among Kenyans over the old claims of cannibalism among members of the community. Samuel Bosire Angwenyi, the Secretary General of Abagusii Council of Elders, dismissed the claims saying it was a myth which some people blindly believed. “If there is a person who can eat a fellow human being, then that must be Satan.”

August

An Australian boxer whose nickname is “the Butcher” told fans he had “become a cannibal”. What he meant was that, as part of his training for a big fight, he had taken advantage of the birth of his child by eating his wife’s placenta, in tablet form, washing it down with a little breast milk. He said:

“I’ve technically become a cannibal. It’s actually like a superpower”

In Cuba, a man arrested for murder was found to have a jar filled with human fat, jars of fried meat, and a bag of ribs in his refrigerators. Cannibalism was suspected but never officially confirmed. Meanwhile, other residents of Santiago de Cuba, seeing an unusual level of police activity in September, fear that the case may be linked to the disappearance of other residents from the Abel Santamaría neighbourhood.

In Zimbabwe, a woman allegedly poisoned her four-year-old granddaughter, Tawanayasha Kadhene, before mutilating her body in Shurugwi on 26 August. Police said: “The suspect gave the victim a maheu drink laced with a maize pesticide pill. The child collapsed and died instantly. The suspect then cut flesh from the victim’s cheek, mixed it with herbs prescribed by a sangoma, cooked it and ate the mixture.” The ritual killing allegedly happened following the woman’s consultation of a traditional healer.

September

In an unusual case of auto-cannibalism, a patient at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine received intravenous lorazepam to treat anxiety and claustrophobia in order to facilitate an MRI. He subsequently developed acute psychosis, performed self-inflicted digital enucleation of his left eye, and then ingested it. Lorazepam is a benzodiazepine that has been FDA-approved as a fast-acting anxiolytic and sedative. It is one of the most commonly used medications for these indications. The studies of the case claim that it is an “extremely rare paradoxical reactions to benzodiazepines.” Worth keeping an eye on though.

October

A thirteen-year-old boy in Egypt was arrested after reports he had murdered his classmate, sawed his body into pieces and ate them “out of curiosity”. He told the police that he that he found human flesh was “similar to breaded chicken”.

November

The strange case of Gabriela Rico Jiménez, a 21-year-old model from Mexico who disappeared in 2009 after raging against alleged cannibalistic captors while outside a fancy hotel in Monterrey Nuevo Leon, has been rediscovered by TikTok posters. Didn’t know this was happening until my blog on the story suddenly started to take wings recently.

@hfnkw1
She warned us… and then vanished. The Gabriela Rico Jimenez case gets DARK.#scary #scarystories #horrortok #fyp
♬ original sound – hfnkw1

In New Zealand, a mortuary technician lost his licence due to posting online talks ‘promoting cannibalism. He offered to obtain human tissue to interested readers, and added “When we have burn victims…. They smell so good sometimes”. The man also engaged in online conversations about rape and sexualising children, his own alleged drug use and ways of making explosives.

December

We closed the year with allegations from the Ukrainian government that Russian troops trying to occupy Zaporizhzhia in eastern Ukraine have run out of food and are killing and eating each other. The Ukrainian spy service GUR reported that:

“Due to a lack of food, the occupiers are sharpening their knives and preparing to eat their younger comrades”

Intercepted radio messages apparently include soldiers saying “We’ll eat each other, it’s all fucked up here. We’re already looking for someone younger” and “I’ve sharpened my knives. I don’t give a shit who I have to cut up. I just want to eat. Fuck everyone else”.

Around this time last year, this blog reported on several convicted Russian murderers who had admitted to cannibalism but been offered pardons if they agreed to serve in the Russian forces in Ukraine for six months. Later reports have noted that the pardons and repatriations may not ever have happened.

Back in Russia, “Perm cannibal” Mikhail Malyshev died at the age of 65 in a clinic, while waiting for a doctor. Malyshev was arrested in 2000 for two proven murders, although a polygraph test claims that he was involved in at least eight: he killed, dismembered and partially ate a man and a woman. Malyshev reportedly used the soft tissue to fry cutlets and threw away the rest. He often made kebabs out of stray dogs. He was sentenced to 25 years and served his sentence in the Perm region, undergoing mandatory psychiatric treatment. He was released from prison in October 2022. Some reports stated that after his release from prison, Malyshev had found work at a shelter for homeless animals. That part may be the most disturbing aspect of the 2025 story!

New cannibalism movies

A veritable swathe of new releases this year, showing again that cannibalism is the flavour of the month (sorry about the pun) or the year, or indeed the whole damn century:

Know Me: A True-Life Drama	Story of the “Causeway Cannibal” and media response
Devour	All female metal band called “The Virginia Bitches” come across a town full of cannibals
Human Hibachi 3: The Last Supper	Cult of devout followers eat human sacrifices in a “last supper”
Cannibal Comedian	Cannibal takes a stab at stand-up
Cannibal Mukbang	She makes vodcasts of voracious eating – mixed with cannibalism of bad men
Delicious	Young working people work for, then eat, the rich
The Wager	True story of a mutiny in the British Royal Navy in 1741 and the events that followed for those who survived
Red Night at Skye’s	Zombie meth cannibals led by a mad scientist
40 Acres	Descendants of African American farmers fight roving cannibal gangs
Forgive Us All	NZ film – survivors flee through cannibal infested forest
River of Blood	Four kayakers take wrong river into jungle of a cannibal tribe
No Tears in Hell	Mother and son kill and eat poor people – based on Alexander Spesivtsev
Lone Samurai	Samurai battles cannibal tribe on island
Stephen	Serial killer’s victims are eaten by mysterious person
The Boatyard	Atrociously acted ripoff of Hills Have Eyes
The Priest-Thanksgiving Massacre	Depraved priest from earliest European settlement comes back to life to kill and eat people
The Weed Eaters	NZ film – new strain of marijuana turns users into cannibals
Quarantine Cannibal	Working man fired from job cannot control cannibalism urges in quarantine

What a year. Can’t wait to see what 2026 is going to bring!

New Zealand mortuary technician loses licence after ‘promoting cannibalism’ online

On 28/12/202526/12/2025 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal NewsLeave a comment

A few years ago, I got chatting to a couple who owned a business in New Zealand – they were undertakers. When I mentioned my doctoral thesis, the thin red line between cannibalism and carnivorism, they told me they often received calls and emails seeking body parts. I doubted the story at the time – after all, cannibalism was a convenient story in the early days of British colonialism, and while Maoris have agreed it happened occasionally, it seemed unlikely to be a regular commercial proposition in the twenty-first century.

But the story lives on. In November 2025, The New Zealand Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal found that a former mortuary technician had posted comments to social media “promoting cannibalism” and boasted that he could “literally steal an entire heart”.

The man – who cannot be named for legal reasons – also shared an image online of a dissected human skull with a handwritten message inside: “We’re inside your head”.

The Tribunal ruled that this constitutes professional misconduct, stating that he:

“engaged in conversations … promoting cannibalism and eating post mortem tissue”

Their ruling noted the man identified himself online as someone who worked in forensic pathology and/or was involved in post-mortems.

The man also engaged in online conversations about rape and sexualising children, his own alleged drug use and ways of making explosives, offering to show others how to make explosives.

One online conversation saw the man claim:

“When we have burn victims…. They smell so good sometimes”

In another online discussion about cannibalism, he discussed the provision of human (post-mortem) tissue to others.

“When you’re working here. We got enough [muscle] to go around. Save your muscle”

He also boasted about being able to access body parts.

“I mean. It’s not actually that hard. I could literally steal an entire heart. It all just goes back into a bag we stitch back inside them not like anyone checks it”

He told one online user he could “sneak a little heart slice next week. It’ll be me conveying my love to you. Sending some actual human heart.”

The man also claimed that he’d decapitated a corpse “to boil her head”.

The Tribunal ruling noted the man “accepts that his rhetoric, comments and information about post-mortems, post-mortem procedures, and dissections that he posted and/or circulated in his social media posts was inappropriate and that his conduct fell below the expected ethical and professional standards that apply to members of his profession”.

The Tribunal also noted the “charge of professional misconduct is established”.

No charges have been laid regarding the man actually carrying out any of these acts. What happened to free speech and entrepreneurialism in New Zealand?

Schoolboy cannibal kills and eats classmate

On 19/11/202516/11/2025 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal NewsLeave a comment

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.

A Fear in Provence – DELICIOUS (Nele Mueller-Stöfen, 2025)

On 08/10/202507/10/2025 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films1 Comment

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?

“Your fingers are revolting”: KINDS OF KINDNESS (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024)

On 10/09/202513/09/2025 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal filmsLeave a comment

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.

Boxer: “I’ve become a cannibal”

On 24/08/202523/08/2025 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News1 Comment

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.

“WHAT YOU WISH FOR” (Nicholas Tomnay, 2024)

On 11/05/202524/05/2025 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films1 Comment

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”.

The most famous Australian (non)cannibal: KATHERINE KNIGHT – 25 years on

On 02/04/202501/04/2025 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News, On cannibalsLeave a comment

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.

South Carolina mental health facility sued by family of an alleged victim of murder and cannibalism

On 19/03/202515/03/2025 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News1 Comment

A South Carolina mental health facility is being sued by the family of an alleged victim of a man who has been accused of murdering and cannibalising patients.

A lawsuit filed by the family of 22-year-old Jared Ondrea claims Richland County’s New Hope Home Solutions, facility owner Brittany Reynolds-Jackson and the South Carolina Department of Mental Health (SCDMH) are responsible for his death.

According to documents, Ondrea suffered mental disabilities which led to his placement in 2023 into an assisted living facility, New Hope’s Harper Street facility, which had been recommended to his grandmother by SCDMH. Ondrea was meant to learn independent living and socialization skills there.

Ondrea’s grandmother noticed bruising on his neck and face when she picked him up for a visit in March of that year, but he did not divulge the cause. He also appeared to be “unkempt, his hair was not combed, his clothes were dirty, and his nails were long and dirty,” which seemed odd considering the facility’s undertaking to help him learn independent living skills.

Ondrea was dropped off at the facility later that evening, the last time his family saw him. When his grandfather arrived to pick him up for an appointment two days later, he was not there. The next day, the facility called to let his grandmother know that he had been missing since that night he had been dropped off. Staff was reportedly alerted to his disappearance by another patient who told them they “should be alarmed that Jared was missing.”

That patient was Marc-Anthony Cantrell, who has a violent history, including multiple instances of animal cruelty and arson, allegedly to cover up the torture and killing of his family’s three dogs. He was interviewed during the search for Ondrea and reportedly displayed strange behaviour, which was subsequently reported to law enforcement.

In July, a few months after Ondrea’s disappearance, another resident named Deshea Butler went missing. This time, Cantrell was caught on video removing that victim’s body from the facility. When interviewed, he confessed to the killing and told police that he also killed Ondrea, providing “specific, graphic details as to how the murder was conducted” including that he had strangled both men.

Cantrell reportedly told police that he was compelled by his “alternate personality”, called Robert Baldwin, to kill the victims and consume parts of their bodies “so he could gain their power.” While Ondrea’s body was never found, an autopsy of the second victim was consistent with Cantrell’s description of the killing.

The lawsuit alleges that Cantrell ate both the victims’ ears after killing them and,

…after he had strangled Deshea, he hit him in the head with his lifting weights so he could drink his blood, which he did over several days from a coffee cup.”

A grand jury indicted Cantrell for both killings.

The lawsuit brought by Ondrea’s family blames the facility and SCDMH for allowing what they describe as “a budding serial killer” to be placed in a home with vulnerable adults. Law enforcement and SCDMH were aware of Cantrell’s violent history, and attorneys argue that “SCDMH failed to take any appropriate steps to treat Cantrell or to otherwise prevent the obvious danger that he posed to the public and to those living in close proximity to him.”

The lawsuit also claims New Hope did not have the proper license to be operating as a mental health facility, and “had no business housing mental health patients of any sort — much less ones with the type of violent tendencies displayed by Cantrell.” It also faults staff for failing to notice Ondrea’s disappearance for three days, which was allegedly only brought to their attention after the man accused of murdering him told them they should be concerned.

The defendants are being sued for several claims, including negligence, gross negligence, and wrongful death. The plaintiffs offered to settle with SCDMH for $600,000, but the offer was rejected. A jury trial roster meeting has been scheduled for April 7.

Murder is not unusual in the USA, peaking at 2,000 per month in 2020. Although the rate has decreased a little, murder is still so quotidian that it is rare to see it reported widely in the media. Unless, like this one, it includes cannibalism, which Freud described as one of “the two original prohibitions of mankind” (the other, he thought, was incest). Cantrell believes he had an alternative personality, a wendigo perhaps, who maintained that eating human flesh bestows power. Such a psychotic belief stems from anthropocentrism, the faith in human transcendence, that we are somehow ‘more’ than other animals, so even our flesh must have magical properties. But there is nothing special about us, and no power is imparted by eating human ears, any more than eating a pig’s ear. We are made of red meat, like most mammals, and eating any animal causes appalling suffering, environmental catastrophe and quite often dangerous maladies.

Trick or meat: SECTOR 36 (Aditya Nimbalkar, 2024)

On 19/02/202517/02/2025 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal filmsLeave a comment

Children wandering door to door, sometimes unsupervised, is often likely to end in tears. In this film Sector 36, immigrant parents, struggling to survive, have not the time to keep a watchful eye on the kids, resulting in sexual abuse, murder, organ trafficking, and cannibalism.

The words “inspired by true events” allow for all sorts of poetic licence, offering the fascination of actual criminality without the need to prove the veracity of each scene. This one is fairly close to the facts, being based on the 2006 Noida serial murders, in which over thirty children disappeared from a town in Uttar Pradesh in northern India. Evidence was presented, in the trial of the two alleged perpetrators, that the children had been sexually abused and murdered, had their organs sold to traffickers, and in some cases were eaten. The charges included abduction, rape, murder, criminal conspiracy and trafficking. The two men involved, a rich man and his servant, were found guilty of murder in 2009 and sentenced to death but were later (2023) acquitted of all charges against them due to insufficient and largely circumstantial evidence, despite the servant’s recorded confessions, which included admissions of cannibalism.

Before the acquittals, the BBC released a documentary called The Slumdog Cannibal, which tried to examine the motivations of the servant who had admitted to the crimes. The legal position becomes a lot more complicated once convictions are quashed, so in the two-hour Netflix special Sector 36, the original names have been changed, and various details are embellished for dramatic effect. The twists and turns of the plot at the end are completely fictitious. But the direction is sure and never intrusive, the plot is taut and engrossing, and the acting excellent, from the smallest victim to the extraordinary interactions of the two main characters, Prem and Ram.

We start by meeting the hungry servant, in this case called Prem Singh (played by Vikrant Massey), who is looking after the house of his boss, Balbir Singh Bassi (Akash Khurana). He calls his family, tenderly tells his wife he loves her, and then goes off to a storeroom where he starts chopping up a dead woman.

We then we meet a policeman, Ram Charan Pandey (played by Deepak Dobriyal) who is also a loving family man, driving his daughter to school on his scooter, but he turns out to be corrupt and lazy at work, not bothering to investigate the reports of the many small children who have gone missing in the town. They’ll turn up, he tells the distraught parents. He believes it too, until Prem tries to abduct his daughter. Then he takes the cases seriously, only to be hindered and suspended by his superior officer who is a friend or perhaps employee of the rich man, Bassi. When the father of one of the abducted girls appears at Bassi’s house screaming about murder and rape, Bassi reveals that the father was the girl’s pimp.

But then, a child from a wealthy family is taken, a nationwide manhunt is launched, and the child is found almost immediately. One cop tells his colleagues that while Gandhi freed the country, the picture of Gandhi’s face on Indian banknotes will free this rich child. Eventually, Ram’s new superior officer reinstates him and lets him arrest Prem, but only because he wants his temporary posting in Delhi to become permanent.

Is everyone corrupt in this story? The theme, stated at the beginning, is Isaac Newton’s third law of thermodynamic: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, which has become in social interactions a “system”. The system means that when a crook gives Pandey a box of cash, he is allowed to leave, while others who have no funds are beaten up and incarcerated. When a rotting child’s hand is found in a sewer, Pandey declares it is a monkey’s paw and gives a reward to the boy who found it.

This boy is then captured by Prem who has his own system, capturing little kids to be abused and then slaughtered for their flesh and organs. Prem tells the boy that the police will forget about him after a few days, and even his parents will eventually just replace him. But someone else, someone rich and worthy, will live longer through the appropriation of his organs.

Why, we wonder, is he like this? We have a flashback to Prem’s early life – he is working in his uncle’s butcher shop, chopping up goats and “servicing” his uncle, who enjoys raping little boys. We see him fight back, killing the uncle and then chopping him up, presumably getting rid of the evidence by bundling it up with the goat flesh, and eating his uncle’s liver, raw.

I cut that fucker up and fed him to the dogs. Had a few pieces myself!

As an adult, he has no scruples doing the same thing to kids (human ones), for his own pleasure and profit. Ram, the policeman, arrests Prem who immediately confesses, boasts, that he kidnaps kids, rapes them, chops them up after killing them, eats some of the meat, disposes of the rest, and sells their organs. His “business” involved all the missing children that the police have been ignoring. He tells the police,

Sir, the thing is that after killing Uncle, I got a taste for human flesh. I used to crave it. I needed it every couple of months…. I avoided it for a year, I tried to quit. But that craving wouldn’t go away.

He admits to abducting Ram’s daughter, but says it was an accident. He just didn’t know her father was a cop. Ram asks, “what’s the difference between them and my child?” Prem is outraged – there is no comparison, the kids he kidnapped and slaughtered were nobodies, who would never amount to anything.

While Prem is a bit naïve (one might say stupid), his question is real. No one cares about the sheep, goats or chickens that he chopped up in his Uncle’s shop as a child, nor would they be able to tell the difference if he added Uncle to the mince. Prem’s argument that he became addicted to human flesh is just an excuse – those who have tried the meat of humans report it is hard to distinguish from veal or pork. But poverty, homelessness and alienation is real, and if we can utterly disregard the moral value of any sentient being, we can do the same to those humans who seem, to criminals and authorities alike, outside our scope of care. Those whose lives don’t matter become disposable, and ultimately edible.

The Cannibal Guy

Tag: human flesh