Tag: human flesh

Mark Haydon, who was involved in Snowtown murders, being released from jail. SNOWTOWN (Justin Kurzel, 2011)

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SNOWTOWN is back in the news at the moment, due to one of the perpetrators being granted parole after serving his 25-year sentence. Mark Haydon was convicted of assisting John Bunting and Robert Wagner in the murders of 11 people, including his wife, between 1992 and 1999.

Haydon reportedly rented the abandoned state bank building at Snowtown in which the bodies were stored in barrels of acid.  A jury deadlocked on the charge that he was involved in the murders of his own wife, Elizabeth Haydon, and of Troy Youde, and he was never retried. His 25-year sentence was completed this year, and he will be freed into the community with no restrictions in May 2024 (unless the government succeeds in attempts to change the law to broaden the definition of a “high-risk offender”).

Above: the real Mark Haydon – then and now.

Relatives of the victims have long voiced their anguish and fear at any prospect of any of the perpetrators being released.

The film Snowtown is a recreation of this case, the most famous serial killer case in Australia (with the exception of the attempted genocide of the Indigenous population). A total of twelve victims were identified, and eight of the bodies were eventually found by police in barrels filled with acid, which were stored in an abandoned bank vault in the small town of Snowtown, in South Australia.

Although the press called this the “bodies in barrels” murders, it soon became known, to the sorrow of that little town, as THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS, even though only one of the murders had taken place there, the rest happening in the big city, Adelaide, between 1992 and 1999.

The final murder that took place in Snowtown, however, involved CANNIBALISM. We’ll have a look at that in this blog, although unfortunately the film doesn’t.

The film is a true Crime retelling, which means that none of the names have been changed to protect – anyone, and of course the dialogue has to be imagined to some extent. But we know a lot of what went on, and so did the film makers.

True Crime has been a popular genre for centuries, and transgressed the line between fiction and non-fiction in 1965, when Truman Capote released In Cold Blood, a “non-fiction novel”, relating or interpreting a 1959 Kansas murder. Modern versions of the genre extend beyond literature to films, podcasts, vodcasts and television shows. They tend to concentrate on the most sensationalistic cases and are grittily and brutally realistic in portraying the violence and gore.

In Australia, where this film originates, a survey found that some 44 percent of podcast listeners had listened to true crime podcasts, with an considerable proportion of them being women.

The protagonist of the film is Jamie Vlassakis, a teenager living with his single mother and two siblings. The mother’s boyfriend is a helpful sort of bloke who makes the kids dinner when mum has to go out, then strips them and takes photos of them for his own gratification. The mother deals quite effectively with this, beating him up and kicking him repeatedly, but soon a new man comes into their lives – John Bunting.

Bunting has a winning smile and a certitude that gets him into the family, and he takes Jamie under his wing. John also has a burning hatred of gay men and paedophiles, two rather different beasts whom he conflates into one evil figure. When Jamie tells him that he was raped by his older half-brother Troy, John tells Jamie he needs to “grow a pair” and take revenge. He involves Jamie in his plans to identify, capture and kill a range of people he considers monsters. He collects detailed information on a “spider wall” in his house. “Rock spider” is Australian slang for a paedophile.

But John Bunting has clearly not read Nietzsche:

He starts by involving Jamie in his plans to drive the erring boyfriend out of town. Jamie finds him in the garden, chopping up and mincing kangaroo body parts to toss onto the neighbour’s front door and sofa.

He involves Jamie in a raucous discussion of paedophile teachers, asking him what he thinks should be done with them. Jamie follows the fatal logic.

John takes Jamie under his wing, teaching him to ride a bike, shaving his head, showing him the spider wall, giving him a gun, and getting him to shoot John’s dog, a brutal blooding. When he introduces Jamie to the act of killing humans, there is also the accompanying deception: each victim is made to record a message that will be played on the answering phone of their loved ones. Jamie’s mum hears Troy say he hates her, and Jamie lies to her, letting her believe that forced call was true. Jamie goes off to doctors and government offices to collect payments, posing as the people they have killed. He doesn’t look happy about it, but he is sinking deeper and deeper into John’s machinations. After a while, collecting the government support payments becomes the motive as in the murder of Gary O’Dwyer; the vigilante pretext is forgotten. O’Dwyer invites the men to his place to watch him feed rats to his python, a process we see in slow motion in which the snake unhinges his jaw to swallow the prey whole, just as the men become unhinged in their growing lust to kill.

So John makes a man of Jamie, in the most toxic sense. He teaches him carnivorous virility – in order to be a man, you have to kill and eat. Not always the same carcass, but that does seem the logical consequence of the objectification of all victims.

The film traces the increasingly violent actions in which Jamie becomes involved, unwillingly at first, but totally under the control of John. He is made to watch them torture his half-brother Troy, who was earlier shown sodomising Jamie, and he finally steps in to finish the killing, tears rolling down his face, while John strokes his cheek and murmurs “good boy.”

Jamie is now a fully-fledged killer and a vigilante, not just an observer and helper the way Mark Haydon (the man currently being released on bail) is portrayed. Mark is a minor character, buying rubbish bags and digging holes for corpses, until near the end of the film, when he tells John he got into a fight with his wife, who called him a pussy. He told her what a big man he was – burying bodies. John brushes the story off, but we know she is next.

Although this murder is not shown in the film, evidence was given that Haydon saw his wife’s body and laughed. Her body was one of the ones found in barrels in the Snowtown bank building.

The final murder was Jamie’s half-brother (through a different father) David Johnson, whose only offence was his fastidiousness and unwillingness to go along with John’s rhetoric of violence. The final scene of the movie shows Jamie persuading David (one of the few wholesome characters in the film) to check out a computer supposedly offered for sale in Snowtown. They stop for a beer, they stop again so Jamie can urinate in a creek. He runs back to the car to accompany David to his death; the car is parked at a crossroads, clearly a symbol, a suggestion that Jamie, who is depicted as hating all the violence, could have chosen a different path at any time.

John Bunting, Australia’s most prolific serial killer, was convicted of eleven murders and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Robert Wagner, his main accomplice, was convicted of ten murders and sentenced also to life without parole. Mark Haydon was initially charged with two murders but was only convicted on five counts of assisting. The jury did not come to a decision on two murder charges against Haydon, and another charge of assisting murder, which never came to retrial.

More than 250 suppression orders originally prevented publication of the details of this case at the time. In early 2011, a judge lifted the remaining orders in response to a request by the producers of the film Snowtown. Haydon was sentenced to 25 years, which he has now completed; he is back in the community on parole, with the head of the parole board saying he’s well behaved and poses no risk to the community. He has been moved to the Adelaide Pre-Release Centre – a low security facility where prisoners can participate in accompanied and unaccompanied leave, including for work and education. The usual conditions of parole apply (no binge drinking – yet), but he will be a free man in May 2024 when his sentence expires.  

Jamie, presented in the film as an unwilling and even sympathetic killer, pleaded guilty to four murders and provided testimony against the other men, in exchange for a lesser sentence. He testified about the cannibalism that is not shown in this film — that Bunting and Wagner hacked at David’s body to make sure it would fit in the barrel and then sliced off a sliver of flesh from the right thigh. They heated a frying pan, cooked the flesh, and handed it around. Jamie’s testimony was the only evidence police had that cannibalism had taken place, and was presented by his attorney as proof that he was fully cooperating and deserved a lighter sentence. In 2005, when Haydon’s murder charges were dropped by the Director of Public Prosecutions, several suppression orders were lifted. These detailed the murder and cannibalism of the final victim, David Johnson.

Jamie Vlassakis was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences with a non-parole period of 26 years, which means it is possible he could be released on parole in 2025. He will be 45 years old.

The film is gritty and brutal, particularly the scenes of Jamie’s rape, and the torture of their victims. But it is compelling watching, and the acting and directing are quite brilliant, capturing the loss of innocence that starts with abuse and ends with brutality. Bunting’s early life reportedly was very rough; he said he enjoyed killing ants with acid, an idea he later transposed to those humans he saw as vermin. When he grew up, he worked at a slaughterhouse, where he would brag about slaughtering animals, saying that’s what he enjoyed the most. Later, when he moved in on Jamie’s family, he would kill cats and dogs and skin them while making Jamie watch. We see Jamie transform from the innocent teenager who stands around smoking at the start of the film to a shaven-headed killer, and even his little brother is shown with his head shaved, starting his short journey from childhood abuse to callousness.

The film is all about that loss of innocence. At an early age, these kids are introduced to poverty, abuse and violence that is a hallmark of violent, carnivorous society. Children famously love “animals” when they are little, recognising their own infant state of being helpless and unable to communicate, yet are socialised into carnivory by the peer pressure to conform and their recruitment into the ceaseless human war on nature. Animals, particularly the chattel slave animals generally referred to by their monetary value, “livestock”, are nothing and nobody. It is only a small step for John Bunting to assume the same about those he hunts, and so why would he flinch at eating them? It is the logical next step.

The film closes as Jamie shuts the door of the vault, trapping the unfortunate David Johnson with the killer gang. We don’t see the murder, or the frying pan. Unfortunately, that final step over the thin red line between humans and other animals appears to have been a bridge, or a meal, too far for this film.

Cannibalism and ‘Satanic Panic’ in Utah

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Utah lawmakers are attempting to pass a bill to criminalise the ‘ritual abuse of a child,’ bringing back memories of the satanic panic of the 1980s, when other states passed similar laws.

Critics of the bill, however, say it is unnecessary and potentially harmful.

Republican state Rep. Ken Ivory is sponsoring the bill, House Bill 196. It defines ritual abuse as abuse that occurs as “part of an event or act designed to commemorate, celebrate, or solemnize a particular occasion or significance in a religious, cultural, social, institutional, or other context.” The bill lists specific actions that fall under the proposed definition: abuse against children that includes rape and sodomy, involving them in animal torture, bestiality or cannibalism, or forcing a child to ingest urine or faeces, enter a coffin or grave containing a corpse, or take drugs as part of a ritual.

A hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on February 21 heard from several adults who described themselves as survivors of ritualistic child sexual abuse. They described devil worship, animal torture, forced bondage, rape, cannibalism, child prostitution and mind control, saying that the abuse was so physically and emotionally traumatic that they had repressed memories of it.

Kimberli Raya Koen, President and Founder of The Healing Center for Complex Trauma in Salt Lake City, told the Committee that she was trafficked into a family that ritually abused her for more than two decades.

She told them:

“I see the light and I have fought to be in this chair, to be in this moment, to have a chance to say this is real and this is happening.”

Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith spoke in favour of the bill, telling the committee that he began investigating a high-profile “ritual sex abuse” case two years ago.

The investigation (covered by this blog at the time) became embroiled in politics after then-Utah County Attorney David Leavitt accused him of dredging up an old, unverified witness statement that accused Leavitt and 14 others of “cannibalizing young children” and participating in a “ritualistic” sex ring. Leavitt subsequently lost his re-election bid.

Several states passed similar laws in the 1980s and 1990s, during the height of furore over satanic ritual abuse, but few, if any, prosecutions came from them. Since then, federal law enforcement agencies, scholars and historians have pointed to the scarcity of evidence for the claims of widespread ritual abuse and warned that such legislation risks generating false allegations, wrongful imprisonments and wasting law enforcement resources.

Mary deYoung, professor emeritus of sociology at Grand Valley State University, has documented the harms of the satanic panic.

“This bill is a very good example of panic legislation, hastily cobbled together, on the basis of testimony from a couple of women recollecting childhood histories of satanic ritual abuse. It’s a bill that responds with the kind of approach where we get really angry and say, ‘There ought to be a law.’ And we don’t think about whether it can be enforced in such a way that adds any benefit to society or that ensures that justice is done.”

County Sheriff Smith acted on the reports, but his prosecutions have lagged in court for years, plagued by accusations that investigators mishandled witness statements and that the investigation was politically motivated from the start. He says:

“I was attacked, I was ridiculed, I’ve had memes made about me because of it. Without a doubt, these things do happen in Utah. I believe they’re happening, I believe they have happened.”

Utah’s proposed bill and the county sheriff’s investigation have attracted national interest from conservative media and online conspiracy theorists who believe this case will prove that the allegations in the satanic panic of the 1980s were true, and that cabals of satanists are still sexually abusing, murdering and cannibalising children. Several self-described internet investigators have, in blogs, videos and podcasts, accused hundreds of Utahns of participating in satanic ritual abuse rings.

Many of the claims in the 1980s were made in Utah, amid claims that local therapists used hypnosis and manipulative interview techniques to recover memories from alleged child victims. These were some of the earliest claims of widespread satanic ritual abuse.

Utah’s governor formed a task force in 1990 which spent $250,000 to address pervasive ritual abuse. Investigators interviewed hundreds of victims in more than 125 alleged cases, only one of which ended in prosecution. A final report from the state’s Attorney General in 1995 suggested that there was evidence of isolated instances of abuse involving rituals, but not a widespread plot to abuse children in this way.

National studies from the Department of Justice and the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect found no evidence to support claims of widespread ritual abuse. Child sexual abuse, however, is staggeringly common; about 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys in the United States are victims, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Utah, the Judiciary Committee voted 10 to 1 to advance the ritual abuse bill to the full House; if passed there, it will advance to the Senate. No one testified in opposition to the bill. Rep. Brian King, one of the two Democrats on the committee, cast a dissenting vote and questioned its necessity, noting that state law already criminalises physical and sexual child abuse. Ivory, the sponsor, conceded the offenses were already criminal, but said a specific law was necessary because the crimes are “so heinous.”

​​Rep. Kera Birkeland, a Republican, cried as she addressed the people who spoke during the hearing.

“I had no idea that this was happening in our state. We believe you.”

Do we? Are children in Utah or elsewhere being forced to eat human flesh (the focus of this blog) or other matter usually considered inedible in polite society? One of the most famous allegations is the conspiracy theory #Frazzledrip which maintains that a video is circulating showing Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, a former aide, ripping off a child’s face and wearing it as a mask before drinking the child’s blood in a satanic ritual sacrifice. No claims were made about making the child eat flesh though. So I guess that’s not covered by the bill.

Utah has a bit of a record here, with the ill-fated team eaten by Alferd (or Alfred) Packer leaving from the Bingham Canyon mines near Salt Lake City in November 1873 for the gold fields of Breckenridge in the Colorado Territory. They met Packer some 25 miles from their starting point, near Provo. Unrelated (I guess) is the story of a Utah man who was charged in September 2021 over the Capitol riots and later threatened to “eat the flesh” of a probation officer.

We might also wonder if these laws might be used against churches that practise the Eucharist, the eating and drinking of the wafer and wine in church, which is seen by some (particularly the Catholics) as a literal transubstantiation of wafer and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ. Children are usually expected to take communion, that is, eat the flesh and blood of Christ (in the form of wafer and wine), from the age of about seven. This does sound a lot like what the bill describes as “ingestion… of human bones, blood, or flesh”. I wonder what the churches might say about that?

Idaho is the only state to have a law against cannibalism, but it has never been used. Seems a terrible oversight, really, and perhaps the good folk of Utah can set it right.

Meat is meat: THE MAD BUTCHER (Guido Zurli,1971)

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Some months ago, I reviewed a film called Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies, in which I asked readers “What’s in your pie?” This film, The Mad Butcher (Lo strangolatore di Vienna), asks a far more profound question: “What’s in your sausage?” In each case, a better pronoun might have been “who”.

Guido Zurli was an Italian director but this film was made in English, set in Vienna and starred the wonderful, larger-than-life Hollywood actor Victor Buono, who plays the “Mad Butcher” of the title. In the USA, it was released as Meat is Meat, a better title IMHO – describing cannibals as “mad” is such a lazy approach, an intellectual shrug of avoidance. And to the butcher of this film, meat really is… just meat.

Otto (Buono) is dedicated to his calling – cutting up and selling animal flesh, and to him, the women he kills and minces are just that – meat. Otto has anger issues, which caused him to be confined to an asylum for three years, after slapping a customer with a piece of liver. But now he is being released, with an official certificate allowing him to say, “I’m not crazy now.”

His wife, who had had him committed (to save him going to jail, she claims) wants him to come home with her, worried about what the neighbours will say, but he wants to move into his butcher store where, he tells anyone who will listen, he is “the best butcher in Vienna”.

While throwing from his window the rubbish left by his wife’s brother who was running the store in his absence, Otto sees a neighbour as she showers, in silhouette. She looks, well, edible to him.

His wife catches him staring at the neighbour and, during the resulting row, he strangles her. At first horrified, he realises that there is only one way to get rid of the evidence. After that, he has to dispose of a sex worker brought home by the brother-in-law, and then the brother-in-law, who he has spent much of the film calling a “pig”. Well, he is a very popular butcher, the best in Vienna, and after all, as he opines, “I need this meat.”

But then, when he manages to abduct the neighbour (she of the long showers with the lights on and the blinds open), he has to deal with the American protagonist – a journalist who inexplicably is allowed to hang out with the police and investigate their cases. Otto rips off her clothes (there’s a lot of that sort of thing) and promises her

“I’m not just the best BUTCHER in Vienna!”

As the logline says, in one of those double-entendres that haunt cannibal movies, “His sausage was a cut above the others!“

This is more black comedy than traditional horror – Otto relishes turning his customers into innocent cannibals. They, in turn, rave about his sausages, lining up to buy them from his push-cart in the park.

When his activities are disclosed, the police chief, who has been happily eating other animals all movie, is suddenly smitten by a serious bout of nausea.

“Those sausages that I ate! They were made of human flesh!”

The innocent cannibal theme has been popular since Sweeney Todd, who first appeared on film in 1928. Forty years earlier, Jack the Ripper had terrified the citizens of the heaving metropolis of London, brimming with workers drawn to the dark Satanic mills, driven into town by the centralisation of agriculture and the promise of gainful employment. Social cohesion seemed to be failing (isn’t it always?) and the cannibal was the figure who best represented the city as voracious beast. Henry James described London as “an ogress who devours human flesh to keep herself alive to do her tremendous work”. The “savage” of foreign climes who had so thrillingly filled the imaginative accounts of the colonial explorers had come home personfied as their own city, and the unknown faces dwelling within it were chief suspects. This was reflected in H.G. Wells’ first novel, The Time Machine, in which the proletariat, thousands of years in the future, have evolved into a highly technological cannibalistic tribe who feed off the soft, effete gentle people who are all that remain of the bourgeoisie.

Sweeney Todd took this to a new level, showing that even a “gentleman”, an apparently respectable member of society, could kill people. But Sweeney is never shown eating anyone; it is his customers, or the customers of his girlfriend who owns a pie-shop, who enjoy (immensely) the flesh of his victims. This could be done for revenge, as in the later, Tim Burton version of Sweeney, or for profit, particularly in times of shortage, such as Ulli Lomel’s Tenderness of Wolves concerning the German serial killer and cannibal Fritz Haarmann, who supplied meat of many species, particularly human, to his unwitting and grateful neighbours.

The outer limits of the world were still full of cannibalistic savages, but now they were in the same country – Texas Chain Saw Massacre featured a bunch of rednecks who captured tourists and fed them to other tourists (as well as catering to the extended family of course). But we were more worried about the cannibal in our midst, driven by the spectre of Ed Gein, an unassuming if eccentric man who dug up graves and used the bodies for ornaments, graduating into killing people and possibly feeding their flesh to neighbours as venison, an accurate term for animals hunted down for food and fun. A later version was Farmer Vincent in Motel Hell who collected tourists to serve in his motel, quoting his motto “meat’s meat and a man’s gotta eat!). Another slightly less light-hearted group of entrepreneurial cannibals like Vincent were the merry animal liberationists who farmed, milked, slaughtered and sold the flesh of those observed eating animals (to others who pay to eat animals) in The Farm.

Other films from all around the world feature butchers profitably selling human flesh for human consumption: The Butchers, Ebola Syndrome (from Hong Kong), Delicatessen from France, The Green Butchers from Denmark, and Barbaque (Some Like it Rare), also from France. In most of these films, the flesh of humans is found to be irresistibly delicious, until its provenance is discovered (although in Barbaque, only flesh from vegans has that special something). This is also the theme of Sweeney Todd even in the latest personification, The Horror of Delores Roach, in which New Yorkers line up around the block to buy the most delicious empanadas, unaware they are made of the chef’s landlord. Hitchcock had explored the same territory in 1959 with his episode called Specialty of the House, in which members of an exclusive men’s club crave the specialty “lamb Armistran”, which turns out to be the flesh of patrons who had enquired too deeply into the methods of the chef. Just so in this film, The Mad Butcher, which was the subject of this blog before I embarked on one of my legendary tangents.

Hannibal Lecter, untypically, did not eat humans because they were irresistibly delicious, but because they were another species of edible mammals, inferior to Hannibal the Übermensch and those few he considered his equals, no more or less acceptable morally and gustatorily than any other meat animal. Hannibal found amusement watching his guests enjoy his cooking, not because of the type of the meat, but because of his gastronomical skills. Hannibal’s meals were just as delicious whether filled with human, cow, pig, sheep, or anyone else. It’s the preparation, what Claude Lévi-Strauss called “the cultural transformation of the raw”. Hannibal refined the rude into delicious concoctions. Otto feels the same way about refining annoying people through the artistry of his butchery.

“Let me explain. Animals tear meat. Butchers carve.”

Rotten Tomatoes gives this film a solid 42%, based on the wordless review of one critic. I think as cannibal films go it would be forgettable, except for the amazing performance of the great Victor Buono, who turns it into a melodrama, or even a pantomime. It is, whatever its critical failings, very watchable and a lot of fun, and for those who are interested in such things, there is no gore but lots of meat, and lots of dresses being ripped from female bodies. To the protagonist, Otto, sex is one more appetite, like hunger, easily satisfied by violence, and not to be denied by the stultifying conventions of society.

If you speak Italian, the full movie can, at the time of writing, be seen at: https://ok.ru/video/1511628212842

Cannibalism News 2024: Putin pardons more cannibals

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Another Russian convicted of murder and cannibalism has been pardoned by Vladimir Putin after fighting in the Ukraine.

Denis Gorin (Денис Горин), from the city of Aniva, Sakhalin region, was recruited into a private military company after signing a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defence. He is known to have been convicted three times for murdering at least four people between 2003 and 2022. He and his brother were also convicted of eating the remains of his victims. Gorin killed his victims, then washed and refrigerated the remains. After his last conviction in 2018, Gorin was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

However, at least seventeen convicted murderers have been pardoned by the Russian President since 2022 for agreeing to serve in the war on Ukraine. A neighbour of Gorin, Dmitry Vladimirovich, said that Gorin was now free and had been admitted to a military hospital in the eastern Russian city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk due to a moderate injury. The neighbour added that the victims’ relatives are likely to arrange a lynching.

“He’s basically free, pardoned, and half his sentence has been wiped out. But I don’t think he’ll stay free for long. His victims’ relatives remember everything.”

The first murder was in 2003.

“At the trial, he admitted that they ate the murdered man; he was their acquaintance. They killed him because they were drunk, and then the elder brother, Evgeniy (he had already tasted human flesh by that time), tried to force his wife to eat it. Then – his younger brother, Denis. According to Denis, he refused, but his brother threatened to kill him too. Then he started eating.”

After that first murder, Gorin was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, but released after seven years due to “exemplary behaviour”. Gorin returned to Aniva where he stabbed to death the brother of another prisoner with whom he was in the pre-trial detention centre. After the murder, according to the case file, he “decided to remember the past, namely, to cut off the meat from [the victim] and subsequently eat it.”

In 2011, Denis Gorin and his brother killed a man and hid his body on the banks of the Lyutoga River, and at the beginning of 2012 they committed another murder, according to the regional prosecutor’s office. This was proven five years later. In 2018, the court sentenced Denis Gorin to 22 years of imprisonment in a special regime colony for the last three murders. The neighbour reported that:

“This came up by chance; they also tried to kill one local while they were drunk, but they couldn’t. When they were detained, (I was present), they opened the refrigerator, and it was filled to the brim with human meat! He told us right there how he cut meat from the legs of the dead, looked at the biceps to see if there was meat there. They showed the hole where the remains were buried – there were 12 people there. Not three, as stated in the verdict! And among the skeletons there was a very small one – some girl was killed. But we couldn’t prove it in court.”

In 2023, Putin pardoned him. Pro-Kremlin media has ignored the news of the cannibal’s pardon. Nevertheless, it appears sporadically on social networks and instant messengers.

“Maniacs are real. His brother was killed while still in prison, and this brother didn’t even serve five years, but is already free. Maybe he’ll be patient for a year, and then he’ll start killing again.”

A photo on Gorin’s social media profile on Odnoklassniki – a Russian social media platform shows him wearing a military uniform with the letter Z emblazoned on the sleeve, a pro-war symbol for conflicts in Ukraine and abroad widely used in Russia.

Another man, Nikolai Ogolobyak, a self-confessed Satanist, was convicted of ritual murders, and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2019 for murdering four teenagers and then consuming their remains. The 33-year-old man was reportedly pardoned by the Russian president for fighting in Ukraine.

This blog reported on another jailed cannibal, Yegor Komarov, who was purportedly released to fight in Ukraine in 2022. 

Russia’s Defence Ministry and the Wagner mercenary group have recruited heavily from Russian prisons to the notorious “Storm Z” unit of convicts, to bolster their manpower in Ukraine, promising convicts a pardon in exchange for military service. Several of these pardoned convicts have reportedly committed new crimes after returning from Ukraine. And returned soldiers do tend to come home undernourished and voraciously hungry.

THE HUNGER GAMES: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes [and Cannibals] (Francis Lawrence, 2023)

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The Hunger Games began as trilogy of novels by American author Suzanne Collins (2008-2010). The prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, was released in 2020. The first three were adapted into four films (annually from 2012-15), all of which set various box office records. The first film, The Hunger Games (2012), recorded for biggest opening day and biggest opening weekend for an original IP. In 2023, the prequel to the trilogy, titled The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, was released as a film.

The Hunger Games is a post-apocalyptic dystopia set in Panem, a North American country consisting of the wealthy Capitol and 13 districts in varying states of poverty, punished for rebelling against the Capitol. Every year, children from the first 12 districts are selected via lottery to participate in a compulsory, televised battle to the death called The Hunger Games. The name Panem derives from the Latin phrase Panem et circenses, which literally translates into “bread and circuses”, the ideology used by the Roman emperors to distract the citizens from their daily struggles and the obscene indulgence of the elites. One of the highlights of the Roman circuses was the gladiators, who would fight to the death, as a popular form of entertainment.

There are not really any rules to the Hunger Games (except kill everyone else) but cannibalism is frowned on, as the audience find it a bit gross. Compared to just, you know, chopping people up. Titus (named after one of the crazier Roman Emperors) kills combatants in the 66th Games by tearing out their throats and eating their organs; he is killed in an avalanche, presumably created by the organisers because of his threat to their ratings. Like many cannibals, he is dismissed as just plumb crazy.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a prequel, starting 64 years before the Hunger Games, during the ‘Dark Days’ which led up to the failed rebellion in Panem. How, it wonders, did we get this way? Well, cannibalism of course is part of the answer. In the novel, the narrator says:

“…the siege had reduced the Capitol to cannibalism and despair.”

But this is a movie, and you know the golden rule: show don’t tell. So the opening reveals two children, a young Coriolanus and his cousin Tigris, running through the snowy streets of the Capitol during the rebellion, hunting for food. A man appears with a cleaver and chops the arm from the corpse of a woman.

“Why is doing that?” asks the boy. Tigris replies simply:

So, the scene is set for the rise of Coriolanus Snow, who eventually becomes the ruthless President of Panem (played by Tom Blyth in this film, and later the incomparable Donald Sutherland). To him, the ends justifies the means, and what ends are more important than staying alive, even if it requires killing and sometimes eating people? It’s the human condition, particularly in post-apocalyptic dystopias. That’s entertainment!

“See how quickly we become predator? See how quickly civilisation disappears?”

“Every cannibal wants to be a director”: LONG PIGS (Nathan Hynes, Chris Power)

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Long Pigs is a 2007 “found footage” movie, in which two desperate filmmakers come across a cannibal, ask him if they can document his eating habits, and then are shocked when he starts killing people and eating them. It is presented as a documentary, with all the usual warnings about graphic scenes etc.

Bit silly, and found footage has rather been done to death, but it has some interesting ideas, particularly the sympathetic approach to the main character, even as he commits his crimes. Look, it seems to say, everyone needs a hobby and, to this cannibal, killing and eating people is no more ethically questionable than hunting or fishing. Stalk, catch, kill (as quickly and painlessly as possible) and then enjoy. He does his best to keep the movie interesting, with a patter of jokes, historical facts and philosophical observations as he slices and dices.

The cannibal is played by Anthony Alviano (Headcase, A Matter of Justice), and he presents the cannibal, also called Anthony, as a boy-next-door persona, one who kills and guts people. Like a farmer of animals, he starts the film explaining that it’s bad to frighten the victims, not for ethical reasons, but because the adrenaline ruins the taste of the meat. The filming starts as he drives around looking for a “certain kind of woman”, because he wants to make “long pig stew”. “Long pig” is a term supposedly used in the Pacific region before colonisation to designate human meat, although that definition is widely contested. Anyway, Anthony is looking for “marbled meat”, so he searches for a sex worker (traditionally victims who are not exhaustively looked for by police) who is, let’s say, of a heavy build.

“People who eat stew make perfect stew. It sounds obvious. Yeah, she looks like she eats well.”

As she smiles at the camera, he sneaks up behind with a sledgehammer and cracks her skull, resulting in the cameraman vomiting (which is actually rather more gross than the murder). They ask Anthony if gets a sexual thrill from killing women, but he dismisses this, in the same way a slaughterhouse worker might deny any pleasure in killing a different species of mammal.

“I’m not a freak or anything like that. This is all culinary, this is hard work!”

“Any hunter would recognise this position. We got the corpse hanging by the ankles. The first thing I’m gonna do here is make a little incision and tie off the anus. That’s to stop contamination from the feces. You would do that whether it was a deer carcass or a cow or a person… Absolutely necessary for health reasons.”

He cooks a stew from a portion of her thigh, then after dinner goes off to brawl in an ice-hockey game, an arena that seems the very essence of carnivorous virility.

Afterwards, he cooks ribs on a barbecue, assuring the viewers that there are “no animal by-products” used – just soymilk. And a woman’s ribs, of course, thus reinforcing the anthropocentric mythology of the human as not really animal, even though he has just butchered one in the same way as any other animal prepared for human consumption. He quotes the Arawak word barbaca, the grill on which human meat was supposedly cooked, according to explorers like Hans Staden and Jean de Léry, which became the Spanish word barbacoa, and eventually morphed into English as barbecue. Staden’s narratives were later illustrated by Theodor de Bry in his 1592 book Americae Tertia Pars, and the film sneaks in a quick peek at that glimpse of sixteenth century sensationalism.

There’s a lot of moral philosophy interwoven in the scenes of murder and gastronomy. Anthony the cannibal and his friend try to persuade the filmmakers to try some of the ribs, saying, it’s dead, and therefore cannot suffer, whereas we eat live vegetables, and “broccoli feels pain! Did you know that?” This is precisely the argument tossed at vegans by carnists, but in this case, it demonstrates the contention of the nutritionist Herbert M. Shelton:

The cannibal goes out and hunts, pursues and kills another man and proceeds to cook and eat him precisely as he would any other game. There is not a single argument nor a single fact that can be offered in favor of flesh eating that cannot be offered with equal strength, in favor of cannibalism.

Anthony works as a valet in a fancy restaurant, parking cars for rude people, and if you follow the lore of Hannibal Lecter, you will know that rude people are prime targets of cannibals. They park the car of a particularly rude man, take down his address from his licence and, next day, shoot him and load him in their car trunk. Unfortunately, they have a flat tyre and have to head to a pig farm for help, where they witness pigs being slaughtered and prepared for sale, in identical ways to Anthony’s own processes, but with rather better technology, and, oh yes, totally legally.

Most of the film is a spoof on cooking shows, which regularly have smiling chefs, or hopeful chefs, preparing lumps of animal flesh, hoping to win prizes. Anthony shows, in high-speed motion accompanied by the music of the Sugarplum Fairy, exactly how he prepares a body, stripping it and dismembering it until all that is left is two feet (still in socks) and the long femurs. He demonstrates how to get rid of the bones, cutting them up and putting them in a kiln at 2600 degrees – he even uses the line “these are some we prepared earlier.” This is a cooking show for cannibals.

Anthony is a typical modern cognate cannibal; as he says, people expect Hannibal Lecter, so “no one is going to suspect the valet”. This gives him the invisibility that we saw in cases like Jeffrey Dahmer. He loves his old mother who is in a nursing home, and is bewildered by a doctor’s request to do a post mortem analysis brain when she dies, a sophisticated update of cannibalism. He sadly tells the filmmakers that she has Alzheimer’s, but we eventually find that she died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob spongiform encephalopathy, a human version of mad-cow disease, probably from eating human meat that he fed her. He also admits to eating a five-year-old girl called Ashley, because people prefer meat from young animals, but was subsequently perturbed by the extensive police searches, and now avoids playgrounds and schools: “It’s like a supermarket, man.” As New Year celebrations explode outside, he comes to realise the filmmakers are going to release the movie, which will detail all his criminal history, and goes to get his sledgehammer. The rest, as Shakespeare says, is silence.

Anthony has a philosophy that rejects anthropocentrism and sees nothing wrong with cannibalism, or at least nothing that does not apply to any other meat. It’s a cannibalistic rejection of what Richard Ryder and later Peter Singer called “speciesism”.

“It’s only human beings that are so arrogant that they believe they are better than every other kind of animal out there. Worms don’t think about, you know, oh my god, why did mama worm get eaten by a fish; fish eats the worm and that’s that, it’s completely accepted by the worm, and the fish, and small fish gets eaten by the big fish, and if it was so wrong to eat it, then why would it taste so good?”

At the end, he is in jail, but he has published a cookbook. His cooking show has finally paid off.

This is a low-budget film, but is a lot better than might be expected. The creators were lucky enough to secure the services of Chris Bridges, the special effects artist whose credits include the Dawn of the Dead remake, Saw III & IV, 300 and Star Trek Discovery. Unless they actually killed and dismembered people, the result is spectacularly authentic. Anthony Alviano is brilliant in the role, which was written with him in mind.

The full movie (although slashed drastically from 81 minutes to 56 minutes) can, at the time of writing, be seen at https://youtube.com/watch?v=vnGXBRkxXuo.

The most famous Australian (non)cannibal: KATHERINE KNIGHT

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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.

“You draw the line there?”: DOLORES ROACH episodes 7 & 8

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The climax. The denouement. The final two episodes of this quite brilliant podcast that became a Broadway show that became a television series about an untrue true crime, and includes podcasts and Broadway shows. If you need to catch up on the earlier episodes, I would suggest watching them, but if you can’t wait, here are my earlier blogs.

Episode 1

Episode 2 & 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

And here is the very brief synopsis.

  • In episode 1, Dolores has just been released from prison after 16 years – she took the fall for her boyfriend, who has since disappeared. She heads back to Washington Heights New York. but it’s all gentrified now, except for Empanada Loca, the shop of her old friend Luis, who offers her a room and sets her up as a masseuse, a skill she learnt in jail.
  • In episodes 2 and 3, Dolores kills the landlord who has been harassing Luis for his overdue rent, which he can’t afford because the neighbourhood is now fancy, and people don’t buy empanadas much. Luis creates a new empanada, MUY LOCO. It is hugely successful, because it contains, yep, human flesh, in this case, the landlord, Mr Pearlman, whose son, Jonah, appears in the shop at the end of episode 3, with two cops behind him.
  • In episode 4, Dolores is shocked to find what Luis has done with the body of the landlord she murdered, and disgusted by the secret contents of the muy loco empanadas—Mr Pearlman. She is particularly horrified when Luis offers Jonah an empanada to try, a muy loco, which she knows is a “mouthful of daddy”. Meanwhile, the local drug dealer, Marcie, has pissed off Dolores, and now she is also in Luis’ fridge, and bits of her are now in the empanadas.
  • In episode 5, Dolores hires a private eye called Ruthie, played by Cyndi Lauper, to trace her ex, who cheated on her and let her take the fall in a drug bust. Ruthie’s motto (or perhaps mission statement) is I NEVER DON’T FIND THEM. But the last thing Dolores wants is for Ruthie to find Mr Pearlman.
  • In episode 6, we see cannibalism as a business. Luis has been clear-eyed about this all along – he gets rid of the annoying landlord, he thoroughly destroys the evidence (in customers’ stomachs) and he makes money from the meat, which is apparently delicious and hugely popular, while saving money by not buying the flesh of other animals from the food-services man, Jeremiah, the only sympathetic character in the story so far.

Not a lot of human flesh being eaten in these final two episodes, because everything is turning to shit, largely due to the impulsive plans of Luis, and the tendency of Dolores to snap the neck of anyone who annoys her. Police are looking for the drug dealer Dolores killed back in episode 4, and threatening to call in the DEA. Luis is still chopping up the bodies of Dolores’ victims to fill his empanadas, but he doesn’t want anyone to find the marijuana he is growing. THAT would be incriminating. Dolores points out that his fridge and apartment are full of chopped up bodies, and asks him the question that defines all ethical discussions.

 She’s much more upset about the cannibalism than the increasing number of corpses she is leaving all over the shop. Odd that. Luis sees meat as his business, and Dolores’ steady body count as his (very reasonably priced) supplier. He’s not too fussed about all the killing, as long as he doesn’t have to do it – like customers in a butcher shop. When he finally kills a man, he is upset: “Look what you made me do!”

Luis cracks some of the best jokes in this show, in the middle of the street (much to Dolores’ fury) about the “fat fuck” she killed last episode, and how he is going to use the body fat in his pastry.

And some of the worst.

Lots of interesting Freudian things going on here – in earlier episodes, they discussed the difference between edible and Oedipal, and then there’s the whole thing with Luis only wanting to give Dolores cunnilingus, not penetrative sex, even though she has her period. She considers that eating her menstrual blood makes him a cannibal, even though he has been snacking on human empanadas all through the show, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise.

And his pet name is Mami. It’s apparently the Spanish equivalent of “baby” or “darling”, but is also used for, yep, mother. Freud said the two primary taboos are incest and cannibalism, and Luis definitely has an edible complex.

We find out why Luis doesn’t want sex – he fell in love with his father’s girlfriend when he was 12, had sex with her (so now we have another taboo covered) and then tried to castrate himself in punishment. He couldn’t cut through his penis (Meiwes and Brandes found it was much harder than you might think) and poured hot oil on the wound, leaving him horribly disfigured. Yes, Dr Freud, the threat of castration can be as big a motivation for mental illness as you thought.

Dolores just thinks she is a monster. But one of the fascinating things about cannibalism is that unlike other horror movie tropes, they are not supernatural or even particularly superhuman. And they really exist.

“I’m a monster. Worse, I’m real.”

Luis ends up “deep fried, like everybody else” in one of the most dramatic scenes, and Dolores escapes:

She goes looking for the showrunner of the play, a nice piece of postmodern complication as he clearly represents the creator of the show we are watching, Aaron Mark.

He is accused of humanising a serial killer, but hey, Dolores is very human, just like Macbeth and Oedipus and every tragic protagonist in literature. She’s not even a cannibal; in the whole eight episodes, we have not even seen her eat a human empanada! She’s just a misunderstood serial killer.

As she says, you have to draw a line somewhere.

She forces the showrunner to take her to a house where, he says, someone knows the whereabouts of the man who betrayed her and left her to rot in jail. When the door opens, she roars with laughter, and then pounces, but at whom? All we know is that, like Georgina in The Cook, The Thief, she is directing her invective at us, the audience! We may not know where her ex is living. But we do know that cannibalism starts at home.

“Do not contaminate my meat!”: DELORES ROACH episode 6

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Delores is still killing people, Luis is still chopping them up to fill his empanadas. It’s becoming an industry, but Delores still gets queasy, and not real happy about the killings, but she’s much more upset about the cannibalism. Odd that.

If you haven’t read my blogs on the earlier episodes, here is a brief summary. In episode 1, Delores has just been released from prison after 16 years – she took the fall for her boyfriend, who has since disappeared. She heads back to Washington Heights New York. but it’s all gentrified now, except for Empanada Loca, the shop of her old friend Luis, who offers her a room and sets her up as a masseuse, a skill she learnt in jail. In episodes 2 and 3, Delores kills the landlord who has been harassing Luis for his overdue rent, which he can’t afford because the neighbourhood is now fancy, and people don’t buy empanadas much. Luis creates a new empanada, MUY LOCO. It is hugely successful, because it contains, yep, human flesh, in this case, the landlord, Mr Pearlman, whose son, Jonah, appears in the shop at the end of episode 3, with two cops behind him. In episode 4, Delores is shocked to find what Luis has done with the body of the landlord she murdered, and disgusted by the secret contents of the muy loco empanadas—Mr Pearlman. She is particularly horrified when Luis offers Jonah an empanada to try, a muy loco, which she knows is a “mouthful of daddy”. Meanwhile, the local drug dealer, Marcie, has pissed off Delores, and now she is also in Luis’ fridge, and bits of her are now in the empanadas.

In episode 5, Delores hires a private eye called Ruthie, played by the wonderful Cyndi Lauper, to trace her ex, who cheated on her and let her take the fall in a drug bust. Ruthie’s motto (or perhaps mission statement) is I NEVER DON’T FIND THEM. But the last thing Delores wants is for Ruthie to find Mr Pearlman.

In this episode, number 6, we see cannibalism as a business. Luis has been clear-eyed about this all along – he gets rid of the annoying landlord, he thoroughly destroys the evidence (in customers’ stomachs) and he makes money from the meat, which is apparently delicious and hugely popular, while saving money by not buying the flesh of other animals from the food-services man, Jeremiah, the only sympathetic character in the story so far. It’s a win-win-win for Luis.

But now Delores has two more victims for him – the drug dealer, Hector, who has an allergic reaction to her massage oil, and Ruthie, who sees what is going on. Delores has “doubled the body count”.

Luis is pretty happy about the situation. “Mami’s been busy” he says, as he finds the bodies.

We finally get to see Luis’ artistry. He needs to butcher both bodies before they start to decompose, reproaching Delores:

“You could have spread these two out. Cause this is going to be, like, a challenge, even for me!”

We see him slit Hector’s throat in graphic detail, exactly as happens millions of times a week to other animals in abattoirs, fisheries and farms. But Delores, who was OK killing them, gets pretty nauseous at the sight of blood; apparently there are eight quarts (7.6 litres) in a body the size of Hector, Luis tells her, and we see it gurgling down the drain.

He orders Delores to leave, because he’s a conscientious butcher, telling her,

“This is a food prep space, OK? Do not contaminate my meat!”

She runs into Jeremiah (actually, her runs into her), the nice, normal food services delivery man, who tells her he knows what’s going on.

“You’re not back here a week, before the landlord goes missing. Food services like mine are getting squeezed out.”

Jeremiah isn’t interested in her conscience or her legal position, he has people to whom he owes money, and he’d like them disappeared too, please.

This is modern commodity capitalism. Everything, everyone, is assessed by monetary value, everything, everyone, is a commodity. To Luis, the victims are just meat to be butchered and sold in empanadas, to Jeremiah, they are creditors who are making his life difficult. For both, they are just ‘livestock’.

The basic precept of capitalism, as film critic Robin Wood warns in his paper “Return of the Repressed” is that “people have the right to live off other people”. In Washington Heights, thanks to the ready temper of Delores Roach, that is exactly what they are doing.

“It’s a mouthful of daddy”: DELORES ROACH episode 4

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This is such a great show. I was going to blog a couple of episodes at a time, but there is so much content in the short episodes that I had to do this one, the fourth, in splendid isolation. Also, I’m uploading it on father’s day (in Australia and probably some other places), and having a character eat some of his father just seems so pertinent!

If you haven’t read my blogs on the first episodes, you might want to do that first. In a nutshell, in episode 1, Delores has just been released from prison after 16 years. She heads back to Washington Heights NY but it’s all gentrified now, except for the Empanada Loca shop of her old friend Luis, who offers her a room and sets her up as a masseuse, a skill she learnt in jail.

In episodes 2 and 3, Delores kills the landlord who has been harassing Luis for his overdue rent, which he can’t afford because the neighbourhood is now fancy, and people don’t buy empanadas much. Luis creates a new empanada, MUY LOCO. It is hugely successful, like the chocolates in last week’s blog, because it contains, yep, human flesh, in this case, the landlord. Whose son, Jonah, appears in the shop at the end of episode 3, with two cops behind him.

All caught up, and now we’re at episode 4. It turns out Jonah does not know his dad is missing, and the cops are just waiting for their empanadas. But Delores does not want to go back to jail, having just got out after sixteen years, so you might think that finding Luis destroying (or actually cooking and selling) the evidence should be good news, but (call her old fashioned) she is horrified by the idea of cannibalism (although, funnily, not so much the murder she committed) and disgusted by the secret contents of the muy loco empanadas.

This dissonance between getting rid of the evidence of her rather serious crime and disgust at the fact that the evidence is being fed to an enthusiastic clientele is aggravated when Luis offers Jonah an empanada to try, a muy loco, reminding us of the lyrics of the old Stanley Holloway song about Sweeney Todd, on whom this story is based:

“For many a poor orphan lad
The first square meal he ever had
Was a hot meat pie made out of his dad
From Sweeney Todd the Barber”

Luis tells Jonah “the meat’s locally sourced” which is particularly true for him. Jonah loves the taste, asks if the meat is duck.

No, it’s no duck. We hear Delores’ thoughts:

Furious at Luis for feeding the landlord to his son, Delores takes the rest of the meat and sets fire to it, putting the muy loco off the menu. Luis is furious, and cannot see what the problem is, and then comes one of the great double entendres of the cannibal genre –

Luis barks at her:

“Hey, it’s edible! Like the Greek myth.”

Now we’re getting to the meat of the cannibalism debate!

Quick refresher: Oedipus was a mythological figure depicted in the play Oedipus Rex written by Sophocles some 2500 years ago. Oedipus became king of Thebes after unwittingly fulfilling a prophecy that he would kill his father, Laius (the previous king), and marry his mother, Jocasta (whom Oedipus took as his queen). It was more a case of mistaken identity and road rage than some deep psychosexual drive, but Sigmund Freud used it as the basis of what he called the Oedipus complex. This referred to a child’s sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and hatred for the same-sex parent which, if not reconciled, leads to neurosis. Freud wrote that,

“It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.”

Oedipus didn’t eat his father, but Freud believed that cannibalism is a foundation of the human unconscious. He asserted that cannibalism is one of the two original prohibitions of humankind, the other being incest. Freud’s conception was that the origin of human civilisation was an act of incestuous patricide and cannibalism by a group of pre-sapien savages, which became the origin of cooperative civilisation. In Totem and Taboo, he speculated that a prehuman group of brothers in a “primal horde” had come to resent their father’s monopolisation of the tribe’s females (common among primates) and conspired to kill the father and take their mothers and sisters for themselves. “Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well”. A later wave of remorse led these conspirators to create “out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism”, the proscription of cannibalism and incest. This father/son guilt, he argued, corresponds with the Oedipus complex, which he called “the nuclear complex of the neuroses”.

So Jonah, like Oedipus has unwittingly eaten human flesh, the flesh of his father, not knowing what it was. If Luis had said it was duck, he would have believed him, and accepted that contentedly, because social conventions say we can eat ducks, but not dads. Yet the taste is so close that he couldn’t tell the difference. And since his dad was already dead, was this worse than deliberately killing a living, sentient duck?

Meanwhile, the local drug dealer, Marcie, accuses Delores of selling drugs and stealing her customers, because of the long queues of people waiting for muy loco empanadas. Delores tries to persuade her she is running a massage business and takes her downstairs for a massage, where Marcie starts to vandalise her room looking for drugs, and mocks her for protecting her old boyfriend, revealing that he cheated on her and eventually turned her in to the DEA to save his own hide. They fight, and Marcie becomes the new supply for the next batch of muy locos.

Delores is determined to find the cheating boyfriend. When she does, she promises,