“From the perspective of the virus, the human being is irrelevant” – ANTIVIRAL (Brandon Cronenberg, 2012)

On August 29, 2021March 24, 2023 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films2 Comments

I have in my (admittedly odd) library a title called The In Vitro Meat Cookbook. It has a series of recipes, none of which you can cook yet, because they require as their main ingredient meat grown in the laboratory rather than cut from the quivering corpse of an animal who probably lived her whole life in horrendous conditions. When this lab meat becomes commercially available, it will doubtlessly be great news for the billions of animals who die in terror for our plates each year, but these recipes go beyond the meats you might see at a butcher shop, to such suggested dishes as Dodo Nuggets and Dinosaur Leg and, yes, Celebrity Cubes:

“Forget autographs and posters. Prove that you’re the ultimate fan of a celebrity by eating him or her.”

Pop stars in whiskey glaze. If that isn’t intimate enough, how about “IN VITRO ME”? Yep, it’s grown from your own stem cells, and it’s “best shared with a lover as the ultimate expression of unity”.

I digress, but it is relevant to this week’s movie. Antiviral is a film even more relevant now than when it was released a decade ago. For a start, the daily news speaks of little else than viruses and antivirals, and when they do turn to other issues, these usually involve celebrities. This film covers both. It is set in an alternative present, where the obsession with celebrities has moved past adulation and stalking (and occasional cannibalism) to a lucrative business – selling their diseases. For a lot of money, you can suffer the same symptoms and weeping, bleeding pustules as your favourite star!

The movie is the first work by Brandon Cronenberg, the son of body-horror pioneer David Cronenberg (The Fly, The Dead Zone, A History of Violence, etc), sometimes known as “the King of Venereal Horror” or “the Baron of Blood”. Quite a legacy to live up to, but Brandon Cronenberg does it brilliantly in this work, which features cannibalism among its panoply of abjection. The imagery is stunning – bleak scenes in monochromes, then a flash of crimson – blood or lipstick. Needles sticking in arms and gums, lumps of meat grown from celebrities and sold to customers desperate for a touch and a taste of their favourite star.

The protagonist of the film is Syd (Caleb Landry Jones from Get Out, Nitram etc), an employee of the Lucas Clinic. Syd sells customers the dream of being close to their favourite celebrity. What does the avid fan do after already seeing all the movies, reading the magazines, collecting the images? In this world, they pay to get the same diseases as the celeb. Syd knows how to sell, he talks a fan into a dose of herpes simplex, collected by his employer from the superstar Hannah Geist, whom he describes as “more than human”. She had the pus-filled blisters on the right of her mouth, so you really want to be infected on the left, because

Syd is a trusted employee of Lucas (where the archivist is played by Lara Jean Chorostecki, who played Freddie Lounds in Hannibal!), but he is ambitious, hoping to sell the virus that is killing Hannah on the black market. He takes some of her blood (Lucas Clinic has exclusive rights to Hannah’s diseases) and infects himself, then waits, taking his temperature, doing things with cotton probes that we all now understand.

He is hoping to sell the new virus through the specialist butcher Arvid (Joe Pingue), whose business Astral Bodies does a thriving trade in celebrity cell steaks – edible flesh grown from the cells of celebrities.

Syd tells Arvid “I don’t understand how this is not considered cannibalism”. Arvid is more philosophical. What does it mean to be human, he asks – is the human “found in its materials” or is it something more religious, as the law currently tends to assume – a soul perhaps?

“But we’ll see what happens when we go from growing celebrity cell steaks to growing complete celebrity bodies.”

When Hannah’s death is announced, Syd’s diseased blood is suddenly in demand – those who have already eaten Hannah now want to either watch him die the way she did, or buy the virus and die along with her. Syd has to escape the virus coursing through his body, and the various business types who want it.

Anything related to a celeb is valuable. Lucas Clinic is even planning to sell ringworms from Hannah’s dog. Or if you don’t want a disease, you can get a skin graft from your favourite celebs, as Hannah’s doctor, Dr Abendroth (played by the magnificent Malcolm McDowell) shows Syd.

What does it mean to “go viral”? This humble blog has gone viral (a very mild, non-toxic one) in that it is viewed thousands of times a month, presumably because wonderful readers like you share it (please?) on social media, or perhaps (socially distanced) word of mouth. But a celebrity who goes viral has his or her impact measured not in the thousands of views but in the millions. Celebrity becomes the message in itself; as the head of Lucas Clinic says, when asked if the current crop of celebs deserve to have the levels of mania surrounding them,

“Anyone who’s famous deserves to be famous. It’s more like a collaboration that we choose to take part in. Celebrities are not people. They’re group hallucinations.”

Hannah’s doctor Abendroth is more metaphysical, musing that

“there is a power, something in the thrall of the collective eye, that can be consumed and appropriated.”

Certainly we devour our celebrities, with the paparazzi as the hunters and the rest of us sitting with a magazine or a tablet and consuming them – think of Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson and many, many more. Unlike most of us mere mortals, the celeb who has gone viral remains consumable after death, perhaps more so. So it is with Hannah.

The marketing of Hannah’s “afterlife” expresses the vulnerability of humans, the paragon of animals, to a virus, a type of genetic code so tiny that we are not even agreed on calling them “alive”.

“From the perspective of the virus, the human being is irrelevant. What matters is the system that allows it to function. Skin cells, nerve cells, the right home for the right disease.”

But no spoilers – go get this one out and watch it (if you’re not the squeamish type) – it is well worth it.

We long for connection. Cronenberg mentioned a moment of inspiration:

“A friend of mine said he was watching Jimmy Kimmell one night and Sarah Michelle Gellar was on the show. She said she was sick and if she sneezed she’d infect the whole audience, and everyone just started cheering.”

The philosopher Blaise Pascal said that there was, in every human, an “infinite abyss [which] can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object”. He suggested that this infinite and immutable object should be God. Humans are big on eating gods – Dionysus was torn apart and reborn by means of his mother eating his heart, which made her pregnant. Christians eat the Eucharist – the body and blood of Jesus, according to John 6:55-66

“For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.”

We live vicariously, by eating our gods. But in our culture, the celebrity is god. The viral, consumable, more-than-human celebrity.

Cannibal news: ALBERTO SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ BUTCHERED HIS MOTHER BEFORE SHARING HER BODY PARTS WITH HIS DOG

On April 25, 2021April 24, 2021 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News5 Comments

***Gómez ‘cut mother’s body into 1,000 pieces and shared her meat with his dog’***

The court case has finally begun of Alberto Sánchez Gómez, a Madrid waiter who told police he butchered his own mother before sharing her body parts with his dog. In February 2019, police arrived at the house which Gómez shared with his mother after family friends reported that they hadn’t seen her for several days. Gómez opened the door and reportedly told them that he had strangled his mother to death, then allegedly said “Me and the dog have been eating her, bit by bit.”

Officers found the 66-year-old mother’s limbs, wrapped in plastic, spread around various rooms, while other parts were in the fridge and in the oven. Some pieces had been cooked and were still in a pan. Several police officers were reportedly violently sick due to the overwhelming stench and shock of what they were seeing.

The suspect was arrested and has since admitted that he strangled his mother, dismembered her body using a carpenter’s saw and two kitchen knives, and then spent 15 days eating her remains whilst feeding the bits he did not want to his dog. Police found body parts in six large Tupperware containers. The 66-year-old pensioner was chopped into at least 1,000 pieces and her vital organs were missing. It is claimed that her intestines were found mixed with domestic waste inside the flat.

Former friends of the alleged cannibal told of how he had a number of problems after becoming addicted to drugs. According to local media, the court believes that the suspect is suffering from a mental illness, possibly borderline personality disorder, and was at the time consuming hard drugs. The cocktail of drugs and mental illness could have resulted in an outburst that led to him killing his mother. The results of psychiatric tests on the defendant are expected to be presented later in the trial. Friends reported Gómez used to spend his days hanging out on a park bench near his mum’s flat, drinking with local homeless people.

The court heard that Gómez, 26, had frequently been violent towards his mother Maria Soledad Gómez, 66, who had taken out a restraining order against him, yet she would always take him back, telling friends: “What can I do, he is my son”.

Gómez has been charged with murder and the desecration of a corpse, for which he is facing 15 years and five months in prison along with EUR 90,000 compensation to be paid to his brother. Local media have called Gómez the ‘Cannibal of Guindalera’, which is a Madrid barrio dominated by Las Ventas, a 1920s bullring with a striking Moorish-influenced design. Bullfighting is a barbaric spectacle in which each year thousands of bulls are violently killed for the entertainment of the largely inebriated crowd. Here is PETA’s description of the “fight”:

In a typical bullfight, the bull enters the arena and is approached by picadors—men on horses who drive lances into his back and neck muscles. This attack impairs his ability to lift his head and defend himself. The picadors twist and gouge the lances to ensure significant blood loss…
Finally, the matador appears and—after provoking a few exhausted charges from the dying animal—tries to sever the bull’s aorta with his sword. If he misses, succeeding only in further mutilating the animal, he exchanges his sword for a dagger to try to cut the spinal cord. If he blunders this stroke, the bull may be conscious but paralysed when chained by the horns and dragged out of the arena.
If the crowd is happy with the matador, the bull’s ears—and sometimes his tail—are cut off and presented as trophies. A few minutes later, another bull enters the arena, and the sadistic cycle starts again.

The remains of the tortured bull are sold for meat after the event.

Interesting how many cannibalism cases we have already reported this year: the guy who kidnapped a little girl, claiming he wanted to eat her, the woman who chopped off her mother’s head after a fight, the guy in Oklahoma who cut up a neighbour to cook for his family, the “Arkhangelsk Cannibal” who killed and ate three friends, and of course the “Granny Ripper” who killed and ate several people before dying of COVID-19. And, at the time of writing, the year is barely one third through.

Globally, millions of people are reported missing each year, just like Maria Gomez. Many are never found – could some have been eaten? And why are we surprised when what is done to other animals is done to humans, particularly so near a bullring, which specialises in the torment and consumption of sentient animals?

Fun fact: **this week, as the court case began, IFL Science reported that “New evidence has shed light on an** 800,000-year-old cannibalistic murder” – the skeletal remains of a young female from the species Homo antecessor, perhaps the last common ancestors of Neanderthals and us. Researchers found on her bones teeth marks, butchering marks, and signs of marrow extraction – fairly solid evidence she was chopped up and eaten.

Nice to know how much progress we’ve made in the last 800,000 years.

Meat is meat! THE BUTCHERS (Paulmichel Mielche, 1973)

On March 21, 2021March 20, 2021 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films1 Comment

Since at least the time of Sweeney Todd, the barber who killed his customers and turned them into pies in the early 19^th century, enterprising business people have been selling human meat to their customers. In Soylent Green, the US government does a roaring trade in it, and demonstrates sustainable recycling, well before it became fashionable. It’s a trope that is enduringly popular, because it offers metaphors for the fears people hold about their own society. Who among us has not suspected we have been exploited, chewed up and spat out at some time? Except for those doing the chewing up of course.

The movie was originally called Maxie, but that must have been a bit subtle, as it was renamed for marketing purposes to The Butchers or sometimes Murderer’s Keep. The lead character is a young girl named Maxie (K.T. Baumann) – a difficult role as Maxie is a deaf mute who witnesses the local butcher chopping up dead people for his shop, and is kidnapped by his assistant to ensure her “silence”. They’re afraid she is going to learn to talk. It’s complicated (not really). Baumann expresses what most actors get to say by using her face, movements and sounds, and she is very impressive.

The butchers are Smedke (Vic Tayback from Bullitt as well as bit parts in almost every TV show ever made) and his half-witted assistant Finn, played with gusto by Robert Walden (Lou Grant and lots of other shows). The problem is that, as horror movie villains, they are neither scary nor villainous. Except for their business practices, they are quite sympathetic characters. The gore we usually associate (expect?) with cannibal movies is mainly the result of Finn, the apprentice butcher, screwing up the slaughter of some unfortunate hens. We see that in gory detail, as if the director wants us to question whether it’s worse to eat a living, breathing animal fighting for her life, or a dead body who can feel nothing. The scene reminded me of the gratuitous animal cruelty in Cannibal Holocaust and other Italian cannibal movies, which were supposedly added to make the audience think the violence and cannibalism were real. No such pretence here – they just kill chickens. Life is cheap.

Smedke is buying human corpses, wrapped in brown paper, from a shipping yard (no further explanation is offered) and happily chopping them up for customers who don’t want to pay the prices he charges for the regular cuts. His refrain is:

“Meat is meat! And a man has to make a living.”

A refrain that is lost in this film, but was used to great effect a few years later (“meat is meat and a man’s gotta eat!”) by the ever-cheerful Rory Calhoun in Motel Hell. Smedke is an entrepreneur in Nixon’s America, which is careering toward neo-liberalism, Reagan and “greed is good”. Although he doesn’t get to expand on his philosophy, it seems clear that a dead body is worthless buried, so it might as well be bought and sold.

The interesting aspect of the ‘plot’ is that Maxie cannot tell anyone what she has seen (basically a human foot sticking out of the brown paper) and has no social skills since her father has kept her at home rather than risk her humiliation at school. Yet she can take an ethical position – she tosses out all the meat in her father’s fridge, choosing vegetarianism.

This barely ranks as a B movie, and while I have reviewed a few films on this blog that got a fat zero on Rotten Tomatoes, this might be the first that did not even get onto the site at all. Check this less than glowing review:

“Miekhe… ends up creating the cinematic equivalent of a staph infection, an oblique mess that just spreads and oozes across the screen like fissures on an untreated leg gash. By the end, you aren’t hoping for closure so much as a conclusion – ANY conclusion – just to get us out of this asylum as anti-horror film… And yet, for all its baffling movie machinations, its lack of gory goodness and substantially less than successful storytelling, The Butchers is still a fascinating film experience.”

Indeed, it has a certain fascination if you can navigate through the paper-thin plot – it is a glimpse of small-town America in 1970 as it moves from the optimism of the sixties to the rapacity of the seventies. The cast are mostly great, particularly Baumann and Walden. Talia Coppola, (aka Talia Shire, the sister of Francis Ford Coppola) is shown as a star on the credits, although she has a minor role in the film. She played Connie Corleone in the Godfather series, and Adrian Pennino in the Rocky films, and was nominated for an Oscar in both roles. She is a bit wasted here.

The music is quirky, sometimes totally inappropriate and never boring or obvious like so many horror films. And sometimes it’s just fun to watch a film that no one has heard of, and probably no one ever will. And it asks the key question of cannibal studies: why do people find the killing and eating of some animals unremarkable and others repulsive?

“…to keep your family alive”, CADAVER (Herdal, 2020)

On November 22, 2020November 22, 2020 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films2 Comments

New cannibal movies keep arriving, thick and fast. This one is from a young Norwegian director, Jarand Herdal, and was released on Netflix in October 2020. It is a traditional dystopian story, a genre in which people are driven to cannibalism by desperate circumstances – think Soylent Green, Delicatessen, or 28 Days Later. Dystopian films sometimes don’t bother telling you what happened to destroy our civilisation, for example We Are The Flesh or The Road. Others spell it out, and nuclear war is always a popular explanation, as is the case in Cadaver.

The film starts with children running into a vast room, playing among huge piles of clothes and bags. They try things on, and one girl discards a shirt, when she finds a stain on it. A bloodstain of course. We see a family making its way through a street where bodies lie in the road and survivors fight for food.

Discarded newspapers tell of a nuclear disaster. A family, Leonora and Jacob (Gitte Witt and Thomas Gullestad) and their daughter Alice (Tuva Olivia Remman) are desperate and terrified, down to their last tin of food, when they are offered tickets to dinner and a show at a grand hotel. Who hasn’t fallen for that line?

The showman is the suave, beautifully dressed Mathias (Thorbjørn Harr) who seats the crowd at dinner tables where waiters bring steaming plates of meat. Mathias welcomes them to the show, and tells them that

“everything that takes place tonight is staged. Everything is a show. Everything.”

The show is the theatre itself. The “audience” are told to wander the corridors, explore the rooms, but they have to wear bronze masks in order to distinguish themselves from the “actors”, who look like normal (maskless) people, and act out dramatic scenes of conflict and sex and suicide.

Alice disappears and, as Leonora and Jacob search, they ditch their masks, making them indistinguishable – they become actors instead of audience. Just as well, as the audience keep disappearing. And given the plates of meat served up in the middle of mass starvation, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out where they are disappearing to. Our protagonists, however, are clueless.

They witness Mathias addressing his actors, like a pope or king, as they kneel before him.

“You know where you came from. You know what we have here. If we don’t stick together like family, it will devour us.”

The rest of the movie is Leonora wandering around the wonderfully atmospheric corridors, trying to work out what is going on, and where the hell Alice has got to. There’s a plot reveal: Mathias is running a factory farm, with the only mammal still available in large numbers. The actors’ job is to put on a show so audience members will split up and follow them into rooms where they will fall through trapdoors, to an unknown fate. At the bottom of the trapdoor are the brawny butchers. It’s Sweeney Todd, in Norwegian.

When the actors and audience follow Leonora into the kitchens, they are shocked and horrified. I mean come on, where did they think all this meat was coming from?

We also find out why the audience must wear masks – because the actors might know some of them, and:

“as long as they are masked, you won’t be able to tell.
It makes it easier.”

The identical masks give them an air of indifference and facelessness – they look like victims. It’s the same reason farmers will tell you they never give names to the animals they plan to kill. Anonymity is essential for objectification. You don’t want to meet your meat.

When Leonora confronts Mathias, he offers her the opportunity to join the cast, asking her

“What would you do to keep your family alive?”

The title “CADAVER” (“Kadaver” in Norwegian) is an interesting choice. According to Dictionary.com, it means “a dead body, especially a human body to be dissected”. It is therefore a scientific term, implying research or study. Mathias and his merry men are chopping up the guests for dinner, but there is a way out for a talented person like Leonora – like Theseus and the Minotaur, she can navigate the maze of corridors and trapdoors and confront the beast, or even choose to join him. Survival depends on her choices and decisions. Almost certain starvation outside or murder and cannibalism inside. You can watch on Netflix to see which way she goes.

The Digital Spy review (which, I warn you, is full of spoilers) has a poll at the end, which asks:

“Would you have joined Mathias’ cannibal cast?”

The possible answers are:

1. Look… it’s the apocalypse, OK?
2. No way, I’m a vegetarian.

When last checked, the vote was about 50/50.

Cannibals and Cops: “EATER” (Fear Itself S1E5, 2008)

On July 26, 2020July 25, 2020 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibals on TV2 Comments

“Eater” is the fifth episode of season one of the TV horror series Fear Itself, an American horror/suspense anthology television series shot in Canada. This episode, “Eater”, aired on NBC on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008. A later episode featured a Wendigo, and was reviewed last year.

Officer Danny Bannerman (Elisabeth Moss from Mad Men, Handmaid’s Tale and Invisible Man) is a rookie cop assigned to watch a new prisoner in the Chesterton police holding cell.

pic-00001

The prisoner, Duane Mellor (Stephen R. Hart), is an “eater” who has murdered 32 people in five different states, killing the men outright but torturing the women before finally killing and eating them, not necessarily in that order.

In his wardrobe, they found garments made from the skins of his victims. “Just like Hannibal Lecter” says slob cop Marty (Stephen Lee), but Bannerman (her name is straight out of several Stephen King stories) puts them straight – it was Buffalo Bill of course. Hannibal just liked the flesh. As a keen fan of horror, she asks to see the arrest report.

The Sergeant (Russell Hornsby) warns her: “Hannibal the Cannibal is make believe. This guy isn’t.” Except he is, and rather derivative too – he deconstructs the binary of gustatory (Hannibal) and sartorial (Bill) cannibalism. How postmodern can you get?

Mellor, it turns out, is Cajun, so of course there’s going to be voodoo. He starts chanting in his cell, the lights flicker, and Marty gives her a lecture on Cajun culture and cannibal theory:

“Down on the Bayou, the Cajun, they use every part of their kill. They’ll take a big, ol’, fat ‘gator, they’ll eat all the flesh, they’ll take the hide, use it for shelter, for clothing, they’ll take the bones, use them for utensils, weapons. I think Mellor’s doing the exact same thing, just doing it with human beings, that’s all… Waste not, want not.”

They discuss the key questions of cannibal studies: why does he do it? “Sexual turn-on” suggests Bannerman, making Marty go all sweaty and silent. Until he sneaks up behind her as she tries to ask the killer about such things, and asks “have you ever wondered what it tastes like… human flesh?”

She replies “just like any other meat I guess”.

“No. I think it’s the power that gets them off… There’s an old voodoo saying that if you cut a man’s heart out and eat it before it stops beating, not only do you gain his strength, but you gain his spirit”.

Marty goes off to investigate a strange noise, Bannerman fetches the keys to the cell (which oddly I found the most disturbing part of the show) and goes to open the cell, and finds the cell unlocked, but the other cop, Mattingly (Pablo Schreiber from The Wire) tells the scared rookie “Stop being such a… woman”. Yes, fear is a female thing, apparently, or at least admitting to it. But shape-shifting – that’s a guy thing, in voodoo at least, and all the men are really Mellor. Maybe all men are eaters?

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The story is tight and taut, and the cast is superb. Elisabeth Moss, like Jodi Foster in Silence of the Lambs, is young and small enough for her vulnerability to engage our sympathy, but also smart, tough, resourceful and brave. Since being kidnapped in West Wing, Moss seems to have making a career in TV and movies where women take on vicious, violent men. This one is as vicious and violent as most of her Gilead mates. Scott Tobias of AV Club said: “If there’s ever been a gorier, nastier hour of network television, then I certainly can’t recall it”.

Now there’s a recommendation.

Director of this episode, Stuart Gordon, also did play about Armin Meiwes, the Rotenburg Cannibal, on the LA stage.

Eater is available (in four parts for some reason) on Youtube.

A complete listing of my Hannibal blogs can be accessed here.

THE CANNIBAL CLUB – O Clube dos Canibais (Guto Parente, 2018)

On November 10, 2019November 8, 2019 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films3 Comments

This is a movie about privilege – the rich literally eating the poor. It may be a metaphor, but it is particularly apposite to current Brazilian politics, where the destruction of the Amazon is threatening to kill and consume us all. But is there a nation, even a community, where someone is not eating someone else, if not literally then practically? The film was made in 2018, before President Jair Bolsonaro was sworn in and gave the green light for the burning of the Amazon rainforest. But the cannibalism of this club is not just political – it is about the consumption of the poor by those who own the wealth. It would have made the same points whatever the results of the election.

Otavio (Tavinho Teixeira) and Gilda (Ana Luiza Rois) have a hobby – Gilda seduces members of their staff and Otavio watches from a distance then kills the worker with an axe as they both climax. They then prepare the meat for their dinner.

A bit over a year ago, this blog looked at the film “Eat the Rich”, in which the workers fought back against their effete bosses. Pure fantasy of course; in reality, 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?

The rich also hang out together with other rich people, and despise the poor. Everything decadent is considered better and more desirable.

The club in the title is an elite group of privileged and powerful men – women are not invited. For their pre-dinner entertainment, they sit and watch two performers have sex, during which they are beaten to death and subsequently served at the black-tie dinner.

Their chairman is the influential politician Borges (Pedro Domingues) who rails against the depravity of those who threaten the traditional morality of Brazil, whom he describes as “poors, delinquents, pederasts and filthy scum”. That makes is awkward when Borges is seen by Gilda as he is being buggered by a servant.

This puts Otavio and Gilda in peril – they have a secret that Borges will happily kill to conceal. But can they kill Borges first? In the funniest line of the movie, Otavio objects to Gilda’s murderous plan:

Because to the rich, killing and eating the servants is no more murder than beheading a chicken. So they plan to get the new caretaker, Jonas (Zé Maria) to do the dirty work, then they will go through their ritual: Jonas will have sex with Gilda, then at the climax, Otavio will kill him with an axe.

Of course, these things never go as smoothly as the conspirators wish.

It’s pretty slapstick cannibalism, which is a shame, because it’s a Brazilian film, and that should make it a bit more interesting – Brazil was the source of so many of the stories of cannibalism that early explorers brought back to shock the gentle folk of Europe and secure funds for journeys of colonialism and genocide. The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in his book Cannibal Metaphysics (2014), sought to ‘decolonise’ anthropology by challenging the increasingly familiar view that these stories were mere fictions of colonialism. Rather than deny the existence of cannibalism, which would simply reclassify the Amerindian peoples as ‘like us’, de Castro examines the details of Tupinamba cannibalism, which was ‘a very elaborate system for the capture, execution, and ceremonial consumption of their enemies’. This alternative view of Amerindian culture rejects the automatic assumption of the repugnance of cannibalism – instead, it owns the history or mythology. This could have been a far more interesting film if the cannibalism had been owned by all sides and interpreted as a unique identity, rather than just being a rather crude metaphor of class struggle.

The film got 57% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is not bad, but not good. The reviewer from Variety said

“A diverting, stylish, but ultimately rather trite satire whose social critique and grand guignol aspects never quite come to a full boil.”

By the way – check out the Cannibal Club in Los Angeles.

cannibal club LA.JPG

No, I haven’t been there. I understand they do not have a vegetarian option.

Also, it’s a fake website. Sorry.

The First and Last Hannibal movie: HANNIBAL RISING (Webber, 2007)

On September 22, 2019September 21, 2019 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films, Hannibal5 Comments

Well, it’s the first Hannibal movie, because it starts with him as a child, and it’s chronologically the last one released. Unless #BryanFuller makes a movie, instead of Season 4 of the TV show. Or Sir Anthony Hopkins comes back as an octogenarian Hannibal, with his wife (Clarice – Jodie Foster or Julianne Moore would both be fine) running the meat business. Martha De Laurentiis @neoprod – I have a script treatment ready!

This is the Hannibal film everyone loves to hate. We are treated to a sweet young Hannibal (Aaran Thomas) having to watch his beloved little sister Mischa being eaten by Nazi collaborators and deserters, and then discovering that he himself unwittingly joined the feast.

From this, we deduce, came his hunger for human flesh. Like the desperate young crash survivors carving meat from the corpses of their dead teammates in Alive, his subsequent actions may not be acceptable, but become at least partially understandable. Psychopathy founded in trauma.

Hannibal of course would have hated this – remember that he told Clarice in Silence of the Lambs

“You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviourism… Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil?”

Or as the 21st century Hannibal said:

when it comes to nature versus nurture I choose neither. We are built from a DNA blueprint and born into a world of scenario and circumstance we don’t control.

There are two streams of thought on the subject of evil: one, from Rousseau to Arendt, is adamant that morality requires an explanation for evil, while an alternative stream from Voltaire to Jean Améry, insists that it be left unaccountable. Clarice Starling and Dino De Laurentiis would seem to favour the side of Rousseau, while Harris and Hannibal, and many critics of the film, seem more aligned with Voltaire. Harris apparently faced the awful choice of accepting large sums of money to divulge the origin story, or else see it betrayed by another writer.

The opening image of a film, they tell you in film studies, sets the mood and the theme. This one opens with a spider-web.

People are afraid of spiders, for reasons that I have never quite understood. Beware, this one seems to be saying, and we hear childish Hannibal in the background, telling Mischa to run and hide! But it’s just a game. Until the Nazis appear, with their Hiwis, or Lithuanian collaborators, led by the irredeemably despicable Grutas (Rhys Ifans), bandits who are all too willing to assist the SS, for their own profit.

Hannibal’s parents are killed, and the Hiwis take over the lodge, desperate for food, and finding none.

Except for the children.

We do not witness the cannibal acts then, but in nightmare flashbacks eight years later. Hannibal (Gaspard Ulliel) is now a teenager, still mute from PTSD, in an orphanage which uses the former Lecter Castle. He is accused of not honouring “the human pecking order”

Yes, he hates discourtesy. He won’t swallow bullying. Yet.

He escapes the orphanage, crosses Lithuania, Poland, East Germany (hops over the Wall, easy as anything) and arrives in his uncle’s home in Paris. Uncle is dead, and he moves in with his beautiful young Japanese aunt, Lady Murasaki (Gong Li, who is Chinese, but, ah well). Will there be romance as she helps him recover his voice?

She teaches him about the Samurai code, in front of the armour of her ancestors, strangely evocative of a later Hannibal.

She teaches him the art of fighting. And the treatment of enemies.

A butcher in the marketplace insults Murasaki, and Hannibal is enraged. The butcher (a Nazi collaborator) becomes Hannibal’s first kill, and then his first human meat, after the chef explains the delights of eating cheeks.

Hannibal presents Murasaki with the butcher’s head. When she objects that he did not need to do that for her, he replies

Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to Hannibal. Ah, so young, and already eating the rude. And already seeing cannibalism everywhere – looking at a fresco of Abraham on the mount, about to sacrifice his son, he asks

So much about older Hannibal is revealed – the police inspector (Dominic West from The Wire) gives him a lie detector test – but he responds to nothing.

Hannibal is also brilliant – the youngest student ever admitted into medical school. But he is still obsessed with Mischa and the men who took her from him. He can draw their faces from memory, but cannot remember their names. A dose of sodium thiopental, truth serum, with the Goldberg Variations (another Silence of the Lambs reference) playing in the background, gives him his mental break. Or maybe breaks something in him, depending on your propensity for behaviourism. He remembers that there was a bag of dog-tags left in the lodge, returns to the Soviet Union (no problem crossing the Iron Curtain for Hannibal apparently) and finds all the names. And Mischa’s teddy bear, and her bones. And one of the Hiwis, whom he dispatches, much as Will later dreams of dispatching Hannibal.

He licks the blood off his glove, with some gusto, and prepares the cheeks for a fresh-air feast.

Hannibal spends the rest of the movie tracking down the rest of the gang, who are now into respectable industries like human trafficking and drowning ortolans for lunch.

Along the way, there are interesting discussions of our topic – cannibalism. One of the gang tell Hannibal, as he is about to be killed:

Survival cannibalism. Common in the days of sail, and in various famines. But the Inspector knows what happened, back in the USSR.

Cannibalism happened on the Eastern Front, says the Inspector. This is not news to Hannibal. He is determined to find the gang leader, Grutas. The Inspector tells him (us) what a lovely guy Grutas is. He sawed off the head of the Rabbi at Kaunas.

He walked away from his war crime trial because a witness got acid poured down her throat. So really, whatever Hannibal does, well, it’s OK with us. But the Inspector has decided Hannibal is insane.

Murasaki tries to persuade him to give the gang up to the police. She can be quite persuasive.

But Hannibal cannot make that promise. He has already promised Mischa – revenge.

At his first encounter with the villain, Grutas, he has an interesting outlook on cannibalism too.

There you have it. Cannibalism is about love.

Then the big reveal. Lady Murasaki is a captured by Grutas, Hannibal comes to the rescue and has Grutas at his mercy. Mercy is not a word Hannibal uses much, and when Murasaki asks him to stop, he says

Grutas replies:

So did you. You ate her too. So why don’t you kill yourself? Pot Watcher fed her to you in a broth. You have to kill everyone who knows it, don’t you? You ate her, half conscious…

Hannibal snaps, and carves M for Mischa on Grutas’ chest.

Murasaki gives up, despite Hannibal’s protestations of love.

Instead of following her, Hannibal stops for a quick snack on Grutas’ cheeks.

Trivia time: Hannibal is not only a brilliant doctor, musician and cook, but he is also apparently ambidextrous. Check him out writing left-handed in this movie, whereas he is right-handed in all the others, and in the TV series.

The film got a measly 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. Most criticism centres on the fact that it is not particularly scary, but that rather misses the point, IMHO. The question the film asks is: how do people overcome the social conditioning of their childhoods to become what they are – killers, cannibals, rapists, politicians? It may be genetic, as Hannibal tells Clarice: “nothing happened. I happened”. Or maybe the childhood itself offers a clue to how, as Clarice asked “you got that way”. The film offers a view of the latter – a gentle, loving little boy with, clearly, a brilliant mind, but so traumatised that he can think of nothing but revenge. His target – rude people and bullies. No one minds seeing them get their comeuppance. But you take a bite out of their cheeks, and suddenly everyone is convinced you’re a monster.

But here’s why I like this film:

The book and the screenplay are both written by the brilliant Thomas Harris, who of course created Hannibal. This is the only film in the series for which Harris wrote the screenplay
The Director is Peter Webber (Girl with a Pearl Earring)
There are two Hannibals in this movie (a 100% increase on all the other movies)! One at age eight, and the other a young man
It only takes Hannibal’s story up to his arrival in North America, leaving a nice narrative gap between that and his eventual capture and captivity by Will Graham in Red Dragon, which was perfectly filled by Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (even if time shifted by a few decades)
It shows the humanity of Hannibal, his devotion to his sister, and his determination to hunt down her killers. If you don’t want your Hannibal to show humanity, then this can be a problem
It was a prequel. Every great character gets a prequel – Darth Vader, Indiana Jones, Vito Corleone, Mr Spock, Zorro, Batman – even Jesus has scored a few. Why not Hannibal?

“I know that babies taste best”: SNOWPIERCER (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)

On July 7, 2019March 6, 2023 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films3 Comments

Verschlimmbesserung: a word I found in the Urban Dictionary. It means an attempted improvement, which just makes things worse.

How can we make the frightening prospects of global catastrophe due to climate change even worse? Well, apparently the best way is to come up with a half-arsed way of fixing it. In Snowpiercer, a corporation has come up with a substance, CW-7, which is sprayed into the atmosphere to deflect the sun’s rays and cool the planet. It succeeds brilliantly:

The only humans left alive are on a train, the SNOWPIERCER, which dashes through the snow, circumnavigating the earth once a year. The grateful survivors form a happy band of brothers who work together to survive.

Just kidding!

There is, as in all human society, a strict hierarchy of power and privilege. It’s the year 2031. The rich, including the train’s inventor Wilford (Ed Harris) live in luxury at the front of the train, the “scum” live at the back in squalor, beaten and tormented by armed soldiers and fed a mysterious protein bar made of what?

There is revolution brewing though, led by Curtis (Chris Evans, in a far meatier role than Captain America ever offered him).

There’s a lot to like in this movie – the plot is interesting, the action plentiful, the cast are stellar (including also John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, Song Kang Ho, and Tilda Swinton, as well as Paul Lazar, who played a nerdy scientist in Silence of the Lambs) and the photography, particularly of the frozen world and the train, is superb.

Bong Joon-ho is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. Metacritic has ranked him one of the 25 best film directors of the 21st century, and he recently became the first Korean director to win the top prize at Cannes – the Palme d’Or, for his 2019 film Parasite, which also explores class and social divisions. Parasite went on to win four Oscars at the 92nd Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film.

The film between Snowpiercer and Parasite was Okja, an animated piece that was also nominated for a Palme d’Or but was voted down, perhaps because it was released on Netflix. Okja crossed the anthropocentric line of privilege, featuring cruelty to a giant pig specially bred for human consumption (like so many animals today) and the horrors she faces in the slaughterhouse.

Snowpiercer also explores some fascinating ethical issues to do with leadership, biopolitics, class privilege, revolution, violence, the Holocaust, our reliance on technology and yes, finally, cannibalism.

Wilford explains to Curtis: “You’ve seen what people do without leadership.”

Look, this is a pretty recent movie and got a woeful cinematic release, so you may still be planning to see it. Therefore, I won’t disclose the ending. But you need to know the cannibalism angle, because you are, after all, reading this blog on cannibal films and TV shows.

There are hints in the first half of the film, discussions about the number of arms people have, and then more food references as they march their prisoner Mason (Tilda Swinton), who previously lectured them on their place at the bottom of society, through the front cars. First they go through a greenhouse, then an aquarium, and we hear Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a tribute (one hopes) to Silence of the Lambs. At the front of the aquarium, ecological balance is maintained by eating the fish twice a year as sushi. They sit down for this elite meal, but make their captive eat the protein bars that are the only food given to the “scum”.

Curtis and his dwindling band of fighters go through a butchery, then a school, where the children are taught that tail-enders

And that we, the pre-trainers,

There are dentists, tailors, hairdressers, a fancy dining-car, an aquatic centre, a disco, a drug lounge – all the things that make up decadent, modern society.

We are socially and culturally determined in large part by what we eat. The food is always better in first or business class. The higher classes eat beautifully prepared, gourmet tidbits. The lower classes, the starving and the deranged eat what they are given, or what they can hunt.

Just before the showdown, Curtis reveals what it was like when they first boarded the train: “A thousand people in an iron box. No food, no water.”

“There was a woman. She was hiding with her baby. And some men with knives came. They killed her and they took her baby.”

Then an old man took the knife and cut off his own arm, offering them that as food, to save the baby. Then others started doing the same. Sacrificing to the cannibals to save the next generation. Then the rich started sending through protein bars. And we thought they were going to be the cannibals!

Things Curtis hates about himself:

Well, there’s a lot more to the story, and a lot more to like, but you can find out by watching the movie. It’s worth it.

Here’s the trailer:

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“An act of dominance: HANNIBAL Season 2 Episode 6 “Futamono” (Fuller, 2014)

On June 2, 2019May 18, 2019 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibals on TV, Hannibal2 Comments

Why do cannibals eat people? This episode looks at that question, and demonstrates that they do it for the same reason that anyone eats anything. Appetite and power. Hunger and dominance. They want to, and they can. Isn’t that why people eat other animals?

Hannibal had a near death experience in the previous episode and, as this one starts, he is playing harpsichord. As he explains to Alana Bloom, who is also a psychiatrist and into this stuff:

He is growing. Becoming, as he hopes Will is growing and becoming – becoming a killer and cannibal like him.

Well, Will is already a cannibal – as he says to Jack Crawford:

Look, people as a rule don’t like cannibals much. Will tells Jack that he (Will) has “contempt for the Ripper, contempt for what he does”. What does he do? Jack asks. In a piece of dialogue straight out of the interview between Clarice and Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs, Will tells us:

If Will was Hannibal, he’d quote Marcus Aurelius. But this is close enough. Jack points out that the killer harvests organs. That’s what he does, sure, but why? Why does he need to do it?

Will is quick to point out that Hannibal is not like Hobbs, who honoured the animals (human and other) that he killed and ate. He uses the word “sounder” (a collective noun for hogs) deliberately.

Well, Hannibal is certainly thinking gastronomically. He is cutting up and skewering the pieces of a heart – human, probably. Alana is helping him, analysing him, working on a definition of humanity as they prepare the heart:

…and the things that make us human. Good and bad, love and ache.

Hannibal has not recovered from the murder attempt on himself.

And when Hannibal goes shopping, it’s not random. He has a method. A list of rude people, and a wonderful, hand-written recipe card base.

The latest victim has been grafted onto a tree in a carpark, his organs replaced with poisonous flowers. All except for his lungs.

Jack realises why: This is a judgement.

Jack wants to tell Hannibal about the latest case, but he won’t listen.

How is he going to do that?

Well, Will told Jack that if people were being killed, then Hannibal was planning a dinner party. Is this all still too subtle for Jack?

But now, Will is not alone. Abel Gideon knows about Hannibal, and so does Chilton, who records all their conversations. Jack asks Chilton if he knows what he is accusing Hannibal of? Oh yes.

Chilton is a believer, now that his life is at stake. He analyses Hannibal as psychopath:

Jack, he fits the profile. He is attracted to medical and psychological fields because they offer power over man. Cannibalism –

Hannibal eats people because he wants to, and because he can. He shows his dominance, and he dispenses justice. The dude grafted into a tree had, Jack observes, “paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” It had been an important nesting habitat for endangered songbirds.

Hannibal is picking victims for his dinner party. The recipes and victims are chosen and prepared carefully, to a Strauss “love song waltz”.

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Hannibal’s party is splendid, with liveried footmen serving the dishes he planned during the sequences above. Chilton and Jack watch the well-heeled, well-fed guests tuck in to the fare.

Jack rudely takes a plate of delicacies home with him. Or back to the lab.

But Hannibal is one step ahead – the food was made of animals other than humans – goose, pig, cow.

But Hannibal has new dinner plans. He drugs Alana, who becomes his alibi as he goes to the asylum and kidnaps Abel Gideon, the man who attempted to steal his identity by claiming to be the Chesapeake Ripper.

Gideon, now crippled by the asylum guards, will be both guest of honour and main course: Hannibal has amputated his “useless” leg and prepared it as Roti de cuisse: clay-roasted thigh with canoe-cut marrowbone.

Gideon is a little unsure of the etiquette of the guest / meat.

Then, there are more tributes to the earlier books/movies:

Silence of the Lambs

And Hannibal Rising

And Silence again – the girl in the pit.

Hannibal has finished his composition. This was his design.

Merely the ink from which flows my poem: HANNIBAL Season 2 Episode 3 “Hassun” (Fuller, 2014)

On April 21, 2019April 18, 2019 By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibals on TV, Hannibal2 Comments

Will is awaiting trial, and the FBI has offered a plea deal – but if he fights the case and loses, he’ll face the death penalty. The electric chair. We see him in that chair, smoke rising from his corpse, as the clock ticks – backwards. Like Vertov’s bull in Kino-Eye, he comes back to life. Then we see the executioner – it is Will himself, looking serious, and quite spiffy, in a suit.

He’s clearly anxious about the trial.

He buttons himself into a suit; so does Hannibal. They dress to the dalla sua pace aria from Don Giovanni. It is a song of anxiety – Donna Anna has asked her fiancé, Don Ottavio, to kill Don Giovanni in revenge. But all Ottavio can do is worry about her state of mind. Hannibal is feeling a bit guilty too perhaps, or is this his design? Anyway, he is creating a protégé from young Will, and doesn’t want electric chairs getting in his way.

Hannibal puts on cuff-links, while Will has hand-cuffs. Easy to confuse the two words.

The Prosecution argues that Will killed and ate Abigail as her father had planned to do. Her father killed girls and ate them, so then did Will. The crime, although it’s a murder trial, is clearly cannibalism.

Jack is called as a witness and dumps on the FBI case, taking the blame for pushing Will too hard, and pleading the Hannah Arendt defence: Will had objected to the name “museum of evil minds” because

Will’s Defence lawyer opens an envelope and another ear falls out.

Hannibal’s diagnosis: there may be another killer. He has sent this ear to help you prove you are not guilty. He is an admirer. Will is incredulous – an admirer?

Hannibal speculates that the killer wants to be seen. Why?

In court, it’s not getting better though. Freddie tells how Abigail believed that, like her father

Chilton gives damning evidence, and uses Clarice’s line about Hannibal from Silence of the Lambs:

Hannibal takes Will a folder of crime scene photos from the latest murder – the court bailiff who was killed: found burned, mounted on stag’s head, Glasgow smile and ear lopped off. The team are calling it “Will Graham’s greatest hits”. Will does his pendulum thing (obviously feeling much better) and sees himself kill the dude, but without it being, you know, personal:

But Will sees that this is a different killer:

“Cassie’s lungs were removed while she was still breathing. Georgia was burned alive. What I found of Abigail was cut off while her heart was beating.”

Hannibal admits he knew that, but wants Will to use this as a defence, even though it’s a lie.

Hannibal gets on the stand, and takes the oath, but Will sees through him.

Hannibal lies for Will, saying it’s the same killer. It’s love, or as the prosecutor says, “his personal beliefs and biases are driving his conclusions.”

The judge tosses out the defence. Hannibal is pissed. Not in control.

Bad idea, judge. He is found holding the scales of justice. His brain on one side of the scales, his heart on the other.

But there will be a mistrial. Will has a reprieve. For now.

The Cannibal Guy

Tag: Human meat

“From the perspective of the virus, the human being is irrelevant” – ANTIVIRAL (Brandon Cronenberg, 2012)

“From the perspective of the virus, the human being is irrelevant. What matters is the system that allows it to function. Skin cells, nerve cells, the right home for the right disease.”

Cannibal news: ALBERTO SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ BUTCHERED HIS MOTHER BEFORE SHARING HER BODY PARTS WITH HIS DOG

Nice to know how much progress we’ve made in the last 800,000 years.

Meat is meat! THE BUTCHERS (Paulmichel Mielche, 1973)

“…to keep your family alive”, CADAVER (Herdal, 2020)

“What would you do to keep your family alive?”

Cannibals and Cops: “EATER” (Fear Itself S1E5, 2008)

A complete listing of my Hannibal blogs can be accessed here.

THE CANNIBAL CLUB – O Clube dos Canibais (Guto Parente, 2018)

The First and Last Hannibal movie: HANNIBAL RISING (Webber, 2007)

“I know that babies taste best”: SNOWPIERCER (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)

Things Curtis hates about himself:

IF YOU LIKE MY BLOG, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO RECOMMEND IT (WITH DISCRETION) TO FRIENDS ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS, YOU CAN USE THE TAG, OR EMAIL ME ON CANNIBALSTUDIES@GMAIL.COM.

“An act of dominance: HANNIBAL Season 2 Episode 6 “Futamono” (Fuller, 2014)

Merely the ink from which flows my poem: HANNIBAL Season 2 Episode 3 “Hassun” (Fuller, 2014)

IF YOU LIKE MY BLOG, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO RECOMMEND IT (WITH DISCRETION) TO FRIENDS ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS, YOU CAN USE THE TAG, OR EMAIL ME ON CANNIBALSTUDIES@GMAIL.COM.