Tag: Jack the Ripper

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

Jack The Ripper – “a different breed of killer” – “FROM HELL” (Hughes Brothers, 2001)

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Even those who are not True Crime aficionados know of Jack the Ripper, a mysterious serial killer who slaughtered women in the Whitechapel district of London in 1888, took body parts for trophies, and on one occasion wrote to the authorities boasting of having eaten a victim’s kidney. Well, half a kidney – the other half was enclosed in the letter, and was positively identified as human tissue. The letter was entitled “FROM HELL”.

In my thesis, I date modern, domestic cannibalism from 1888, when Jack the Ripper murdered five or more women in the summer and autumn of that year.

The From Hell letter was sent to the Chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in October with a box containing half a kidney.  The letter stated that the writer had taken the kidney from a woman, and half of it was enclosed as proof. “tother piece I fried and ate it very nise” (sic).

This letter, and the half-kidney, are featured in this week’s movie.

A huge literature has developed on the history and likely identity of Jack, but none of it is conclusive; the crime writer Patricia Cornwell argued that the Ripper was the famous artist Walter Sickert. Others have written credible accounts of other suspects, including Prince Edward Albert Victor, second in line to the British throne. The enduring mythology of Jack the Ripper, though, depends on the fact that he remains unknown, a figure hidden by his presumed uniformity with those of his milieu. Jack was the domestic cannibal – murderous, voracious, and indistinguishable from any other citizen, just another face in the street, as demonstrated by the fact that he was never apprehended, or even conclusively identified.

Jack rapidly became an international phenomenon. A Chicago doctor wrote in the Medical Standard that,

… the Whitechapel murderer is a cannibal pure and simple. The Whitechapel murders are clearly the work of a lunatic of the so-called “sexual pervert” type, fortunately rare in Anglo-Saxon lands but not infrequently met with in Russia, Germany, Bohemia and France. In these lunatics there is a return to the animal passions of the lowest cannibalistic savage races. Cannibalism is shown in a thirst for blood, and these animal passions come to the surface when the checks imposed by centuries of civilization are removed either by disease or by the defects inherited from degenerate parents.

So critical to the creation of the domestic monster was The Ripper that almost a century and a half later, books and films are still investigating and theorising on his acts and identity.

Jack went “viral” long before the internet was around to invent the term. Jack conventions are held around the world offering attendees the opportunity to view and buy merch and listen to “experts” tell them who Jack (maybe) was. Many books have offered definitive proof of Jack’s secret identity, only to have other experts contradict them. One writer actually bought at auction a shawl belonging to one of the victims, Catherine Eddowes, and had it forensically examined, finding, through links to the DNA of descendants, that it contained her blood, and the semen of a long-suspected Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski. Seems conclusive, doesn’t it, but other Jack-fans were sceptical; DNA can be contaminated. Richard Cobb, who organizes Jack the Ripper conventions, told the Guardian that the shawl had been “openly handled by loads of people and been touched, breathed on, spat upon.”

This film, From Hell, has a somewhat more circuitous lineage, being based on a graphic novel (formerly called comic book series) by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell which was published from 1989-1998 and then collected into book form. That novel is based on a 1976 non-fiction book by Stephen Knight with the rather unfortunate title of Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. Knight’s theory proposes a conspiracy by the Freemasons, in which high-ranking Freemason Sir William Gull, royal surgeon to Queen Victoria, is told to cover up the marriage of a shopgirl, Annie Crook to Prince Albert Victor, the heir to the throne, which had resulted in a baby who would be in line for the crown, particularly as the Prince was dying of syphilis. The murders themselves were not the crimes of passion common in impoverished London, particularly from the pimps that the women feared most, but involved the careful dissection of the bodies and removal of organs and often vulvas. The basis of many theories was that these were clearly the work of an educated man with medical or at least anatomical training.

“Martha Tabram was raped, tortured and killed. This is methodical. The butchery is irrational, yet meticulous and deliberate. Altogether a different breed of killer.”

The film had mixed reviews, getting a 57% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I found it an easy to watch, interesting tale told with some gusto, by a stellar cast: Sir William Gull, physician to His Maj and presumed serial killer, is played by the late lamented Ian Holm, who was playing a sweet, doddery, 111 year old Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring the same year he played Jack.

Johnny Depp plays Inspector Abberline, the cop searching for Jack, with his usual brooding sensual close-ups, while Heather Graham (Boogie Nights) is quite luminous as the sex worker Mary Kelly, who becomes his love interest as well as a target of Jack. Then there’s a delightful performance by Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid from the Harry Potter films) as Abberline’s sergeant, who quotes Shakespeare as he tries to revive Abberline from his opium den dreams, where he imbibes absinthe laced with laudanum and “sees” the murders as they happen.

Ian McNeice (Bert Large from Doc Martin) pops up as the coroner, and there are a host of other familiar faces. If you like a boisterous story and some great performances, you might enjoy this. But if you are serious Jack groupie, you will wince at the anachronism that puts the receipt of the kidney some time before the murder of Catherine Eddowes, from whom that kidney is likely to have been taken.

Like any fictional recreation of history, there is inevitably exaggeration and speculation. The film depicts an all-powerful Freemason movement infiltrating the police and medical establishment and threatening or killing anyone in their way. There is an evocative depiction of the life of late nineteenth century sex workers (called “whores” by the police, and often themselves, and “unfortunates” in official language). There is also some cursory mention of the classism and racism that English society exhibited in the age of Empire (and still does), seeking to blame the American natives in “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show” (perhaps a wink to the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs?), foreigners, Orientals, Jews, Socialists – anyone other than the rich and powerful. Several scenes feature the hatred of Jews that saw the police and the populace open to antisemitic provocation when looking for a scapegoat. The chasm between the respectable killer and the honest but disreputable poor is made by means of an (otherwise gratuitous) appearance by the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick who, like Jack, was a famous denizen of Whitechapel. He stands surrounded by respectable white men, wondering at his ugliness, but having no inkling of his humanity.

Foreigners, the disfigured, the “unfortunates” and Jews were outsiders in English society, and outsiders are denied the protection that other citizens expect, and so are easily accused, attacked, killed and sometimes even eaten. The “unfortunate” mother of the royal baby is kidnapped and given a frontal lobotomy, a new scientific technique which was instantly turned to the advantage of the elite.

In Victorian England, the poor were blamed for any and all of society’s ills, with the idea of suspecting a rich, educated man excluded from consideration. Of course, the Indigenous people in Queen Victoria’s empire were similarly objectified, enslaved or slaughtered, also using the benefits of modern technology such as the gunboat and machine-gun.

The movie opens with a quote, Jack, saying “One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century.”

I can see no other reference to such a quote in any source other than this movie, but it has a certain ring to it, it makes sense of this modern drama between the rich, who only ever want more, and the poor, who scrabble just to stay alive. At a time when the environment has been appropriated and cannibalised by the ruling class, has Jack’s comment in 1888 proved prophetic?

Jack the Ripper was less “a return to the animal passions of the lowest cannibalistic savage races” and more a manifestation of the voracious appetite and greed of modern capitalist industrial society, where the value of everything, including the life of humans and other animals, is counted only in monetary terms, and the marginalised and objectified are cast out and consumed.

Love and cannibalism: BONES AND ALL (Luca Guadagnino, 2022)

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The modern cannibal is usually hard to identify. Jeffrey Dahmer was the all-American boy next door. Armin Meiwes used to mow his neighbours’ lawns to be helpful. Issei Sagawa was so small and helpless that he seemed vulnerable rather than threatening. Albert Fish was a sweet old man, so charming that the Budd’s let him take their little girl to a party.

They were normal, everyday people, a bit weird, but not monsters.

At least, not in appearance. This is a recent phenomenon – the original cannibals were called anthropophagi (Greek for man-eaters) and were humanoid in shape, but were usually some sort of hybrid – a mix of humans and gods or other animals – strong, ferocious, and clearly not quite human. From the 15th century, the alleged cannibals found by Columbus and other explorers were different in culture and skin colouring, so were easily distinguished, defamed and exterminated. It is only recently, since Jack the Ripper in 1888, that the cannibal walked among us, undetected until the victims were found (or what was left of them).

Bones and All presents as a coming of age cannibal romance, taking a sharp turn back into cannibal history for its themes. Maren (Taylor Russell from Lost in Space) is finishing high school, a spectacular end of term in which she is invited to her friend’s sleepover and bites a girl’s finger off, instead of, you know, just admiring the nail polish, as she had been invited to do.

She then goes on the run with her father, who has been keeping her ahead of the law as she grew up (her first human meat was her babysitter when she was three) but now ditches her, with a few hundred dollars and a birth certificate.

It then becomes a road movie, as she travels through the American Mid-West trying to find her mother, attracting suspicion not because of her eating habits but just because she looks too young to be on the road. She comes across another cannibal (they are called “eaters”) in the shape of a weird old man named Sully (Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies) before meeting up with Lee, played by the love interest of seemingly everyone nowadays, Timothée Chalamet. Chalamet appeared in the third instalment of Guadagnino’s “Desire Trilogy”, Call Me by Your Name), in which he was the love interest of Oliver, played by Armie Hammer, who has recently been generating his own cannibalism headlines.

As a road movie it’s Thelma and Louise mixed with Romeo and Juliet, if they had been cannibals. In other words outsiders, star-crossed lovers, and lots of flesh being torn off dead (and sometimes living) bodies. Road movies rely on meeting new and weird people, and learning about the protagonists (and ourselves) from their stories.

Sully is a lonely old man who teaches Maren about being an eater, and how an eater has a super-power – like a vampire, they have a nose that can smell other eaters at great distances, and can also smell dying people, which allows him to feast on them fairly inculpably, although Maren rather wonders if they should be calling 911 rather than letting them gasp their last breaths. So they are anthropophagi, they smell different, have a strong sense of smell, and so are not quite human. We subsequently discover that the cannibal gene is passed on – Lee’s dad and Maren’s mother were also eaters. They are a breed apart, hybrid humans, who can mate with non-eaters.

They are also presented as ‘savages’ – related to the colonised peoples who were declared cannibal by the imperial powers. Maren is biracial, and Sully (although played by a classical British Shakespearean actor) seems to be presented as a Native American, with a long ponytail and a feather in his hat. The marginalised and disenfranchised are regularly presented as dangerous, thieves, murders, cannibals, regardless of any evidence.

An interesting character from colonial times is the wendigo, a figure from Algonquin mythology who eats his fellow humans and draws on their strength to grow huge and powerful, which only makes him hungrier and deadlier. Sully tells Maren that her fate is to need more and more flesh as she gets older.

Just like the wendigo, who is an indigenous version of the anthropophagus, and one that was used by the victims to characterise the European invaders and their voracious appetite for land and gold. The phrase “bones and all” reminds us of the colonial greed that denied the humanity of those invaded and insisted on taking everything, leaving nothing and nowhere to go but a few reservations or missions in remote, unprofitable areas. Eating bones and all is also a perfect way of getting rid of the evidence.

The title Bones and All is taken from the book of the same name by Camille DeAngelis, but the phrase was not used in the book – it just meant that Maren and the other eaters would automatically eat the whole person, bones and all. Except for her first, the babysitter, because she was too small to swallow bones – she left a pile of them, a pool of blood, and the hammer from an eardrum. In a movie, though, it can be harder for the viewer to maintain a willing suspension of disbelief, so eating the victim bones and all becomes a rite of passage – the next level of being an eater. Maren and Lee don’t know how to eat a person bones and all, so they are not yet postgrad eaters. Maren puts it succinctly – “that’s impossible.” But what about eating the flesh? Armin Meiwes took ten months to eat 20 kilograms (44 lb) of Brandes, but we are asked to accept that Maren and Lee can eat a whole body in a night.

But then, everything is ambiguous in this story, which has been widely described as a metaphor for otherness and queerness. The story is set in 1981, as Ronald Reagan is entering the White House. Being different, queer, compassionate, seeking social justice were all considered laughable or dangerous. Greed was good, and so eating a victim bones and all might have seemed laudable. Drug addiction was escalating, and some have seen the cannibalism in this film as a metaphor for this as well – Maren and Lee can’t go too long without their feed, and will do whatever they need to in order to get it.

Some of the ambiguities are more subtle: Maren looks young, which bothers various people she deals with, although she is 18 and technically an adult in most places. Lee falls in love with her, but is also capable of appearing to be cruising for gay sex.

He chooses a carnival worker who has been mean to a child, leads him into the bushes and masturbates him, slitting the man’s throat as he orgasms. It was not until twenty years later that gay sex was legalised in the US, and this man’s secret desire for same sex petite mort becomes his real mort. They then discover that the man had a wife and family, and are stricken with guilt, because apparently eating some people is OK, but not family people.

Then we have the eaters – Maren is naïve and caring, horrified by her need to feed. Lee is a puny dude who kills seemingly effortlessly, but like Hannibal Lecter, Lee prefers to eat rude people – when we first meet him, he challenges a rude person in a supermarket and leads him to a deserted shed where he kills and eats him. Sully is an senior eater, so has to eat regularly, but says he tries not to kill people – sniffs out those who are dying, but later he gets violent when Maren rejects his advances.

Jake (Michael Stuhlbarg) is an eater who has graduated to eating bones and all, but he is accompanied by a friend named Brad (David Gordon Green), a cop (!), who is not a natural eater, but just likes doing it. Maren accepts that she and Lee have to eat people, but is revolted by Jake’s wish to do the same. We’re back to the old debate of nature versus nurture. Are people born queer? Or with addictive personalities? Or psychopathic? Or cannibalistic?

The Director, Luca Guadagnino, has made a number of changes from the book, which are examined elsewhere. The most obvious one, though, is that Maren is brought up and then eventually abandoned by her mother in the book, but her father in the film. This changes the dynamic considerably, because we now have two eaters in the family, both female. The eater parent in both versions is locked up in an asylum, having eaten their own hands, but in the movie it’s her mother, (a short but superb appearance by Chloë Sevigny). We arrive at last at the modern horror archetype, the “monstrous-feminine”, the figure that confronts the male viewer with his fears of being castrated (Freud’s favourite explanation), as well as “the monstrous womb” – a terrifying image of a “black hole which threatens to reabsorb what it once birthed” (Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 27). The female cannibal is quintessentially monstrous-feminine, terrifying men with the antithesis of popular female stereotypes of giving life and nurturing. In the book, Maren only eats boys or men (after the initial babysitter) – she is drawn to eat those who seek to be close to her. In both versions of the story, the ambiguity is clear to us and the female cannibals – they have a compulsion to eat, but don’t want to hurt others.

Maren’s solution is to try to act normal, fall in love, get a job, get “clean” of the eating. Her mother’s was to lock herself away, and even then she chewed off her own hands.

To me, the most fascinating ambiguity in this film and in our societies generally is the question “who can you eat?” Eating some animals is considered just “normal” – Lee is chewing on bacon (pig flesh) served to him in a very respectable café, and has been working in an abattoir. When they need money, he and Maren rob the abattoir at night, later sitting on the overhead walkway watching the cows who are to be killed for legal, non-controversial eating, when Maren observes

“every one of them has a mom and a dad, sisters, brothers, cousins, kids. Friends even.”

The real question, Derrida says, is not what to eat but how to eat well. Perhaps, as Chalamet has said, it is impossible to live ethically – every act of consumption or energy usage wrecks the environment a little bit more. For some carnivores, this is seen as a ‘bones and all’ issue, they call it “nose to tail” – killing is OK, but wasting any part of the animal is the real crime. But as Maren says, cows also feel terror, pain, bereavement when their babies are taken from them. The author of the book, Camille DeAngelis, went vegan before writing it, indicating that the problem of who to eat, the rude or dying, the human or the cow, weighed on her, and the scene filmed in the slaughterhouse indicates that Guadagnino may have felt the same. Cat Woods’ review in Salon reminds us that Brad, the off duty policeman, chooses to be a cannibal:

“Why would he hunt, slaughter, and feast upon human flesh if he doesn’t need to?
And, if we the audience can be repulsed by that – and his evident choice to slaughter and eat flesh when there is abundant satiety that doesn’t cause violence, pain and loss – then perhaps we need to venture a little deeper into our own psyches and ask: Why would we feast upon flesh if we don’t need to?”

This is a seriously good film, with a great cast and, in the midst of all this carnage, we are treated to magnificent scenery beautifully captured by cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan. I have not revealed the ending, and hope I have not revealed too many other plot points. I recommend you go see it.

“It’s primitive as can be”: GILLIGAN’S ISLAND (1964-67)

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A tweet making waves the other day from film director James Gunn reminded me of the many hours I wasted spent as a child watching the seemingly endless travails of the seven castaways on the TV series Gilligan’s Island. Being shipwrecked on a desert island with Mary Ann and Ginger did not seem such an ordeal to my pubescent mind, except every now and the group would be threatened by the arrival of – yep – CANNIBALS!

English professor Priscilla Walton observes that her first encounter with cannibals was also on her television, watching the enormously popular show. The series ran from 1964-67 over some 98 episodes plus occasional reunion movies.

Gilligan’s Island (GI) was a clever reboot of the first English language novel, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (even mentioning that story in the closing song).

“No phone, no lights, no motor car, not a single luxury. Like Robinson Crusoe, they’re primitive as can be.”

Unlike Defoe’s story, Gilligan (Bob Denver) was not a lone survivor of a shipwreck but the hapless “first mate” on a little cruise boat, The Minnow. Gilligan, his skipper (Alan Hale) and five tourists left a tropical port for a three-hour tour, and instead were marooned on an uncharted island, apparently interminably. Various commentators with too much time on their hands have suggested that the seven castaways represent the seven deadly sins (e.g. Ginger was lust and Mary Ann envy). I’m not going near that one, fascinating as it is, because this is a cannibal blog after all. And cannibalism is neither illegal, nor one of the seven deadly sins. It just misses out on all the gongs.

Robinson Crusoe worried ceaselessly about his lack of company, eventually adopting Friday, a local ‘savage’ whom he rescued from a tribe of cannibals. He also spent a lot of the book and some of the movies worried about what to eat, and nervous that Friday might eat him. Like those of us marooned on this planet rather than an island, major preoccupations are always fear and appetite. Appetite is all about food and sex. Fear is about being killed and perhaps eaten.

The obsessions of Gilligan and the other all-white islanders were the same. Of course, it was the sixties, so no sex could be shown except for the movie star, Ginger (Tina Louise) who used her flirty charms to inflame and coax the men into various (non-sexual) activities. But – what did the castaways eat? Well, it was an island, so presumably the would eat sea animals, as well as various plants (including some that grew from a box of radioactive seeds in one episode). There seemed to be a lot of coconut pies.

Then of course, like Crusoe, there were the natives who, like most depictions of indigenous peoples until fairly recently, were assumed to be primitive savages and so, ipso facto, cannibals. No evidence was presented, and no one was ever eaten. From the earliest days of the movie, and well before, indigenous peoples who were being dispossessed by European explorers were declared cannibals, with no evidence needed other than their lack of “civilisation.” Think of movies like Cannibal Holocaust and the various Italian movies of that period, or old classics like Windbag the Sailor, Be My King, or the early racist cartoons like Jungle Jitters.

Sheer Eurocentric racism of course, as I suppose was the choice of the Irish name “Gilligan” for the show’s clown, a boy/man who is usually responsible for thwarting their rescue through his clueless blunderings. The “natives” were invariably people of colour wearing grass skirts with bone piercings in ears, noses, etc and horns on their heads. This probably is the image that springs to mind even now when a cannibal scholar mentions cannibalism in polite company – primitive savages who threaten our safety and bodies if we fall into their clutches. Of course, as Walton points out, the island was the traditional home of the “natives” – it was Gilligan and the castaways who were the intruders, introducing baffling technology and probably a few new pandemics to the locals. There’s a comprehensive study of GI Natives on a Gilligan fandom page. Yes Virginia, there is a GI fandom site.

But the cannibal has moved on. From the outsider who was only sighted by explorers or conquistadors, the cannibal has firmly come home and, since the time of Jack the Ripper who boasted of eating the kidney of one of his victims, the vast majority of reports of cannibalism involve people in urban cities and communities eating their neighbours. Generally, they are dismissed as psychotic personalities who know not what they do. That discourse has become ever less convincing, with cannibals like Fritz Haarmann or Armin Meiwes or even Jeffrey Dahmer all seeming to know exactly what they were doing. The ultimate example of the civilised, enlightened, urbane cannibal is of course Hannibal Lecter, who simply sees eating inferior or rude humans as no worse than eating pigs or fish. Unlike the other examples, Hannibal is fictional, but perfectly represents the cultural trend toward the modern, domestic cannibal.

So, who would the cannibals have been in a re-booted Gilligan’s Island? There are clues. While the men seem largely asexual (Gilligan and the Skipper could perhaps be considered bunk-mates, while the Professor is married to science and Thurston Howell III to Lovey and therefore to asexual domesticity), the women are given standard feminine stereotypes of the virgin (Mary Ann), the whore (Ginger) and the symbolic mother (Lovey). Barbara Creed‘s “The Monstrous-Feminine” emphasises the importance of gender in the construction of female monsters, and so it is not totally surprising that when people turn their fantasies beyond the wholesome storyline of the series, it is the gentle, subservient Mary Ann (Dawn Wells) who becomes the knife-wielding cannibal.

The 2002 comic strip Cool Jerk (above) depicted Mary Ann, or maybe a look-alike, as a cannibal named Mary Annibal. The Silence of the Lambs had swept the Oscars in 1992, and the sequel, Hannibal, had come out in a blaze of publicity in 2001.

Cannibalism on a desert island (or in an inaccessible place like the Andes) is a long tradition, and a rich source of humour. Above is the cover of the Horror Society’s Summer 2015 issue. Can you spot the Cannibal Holocaust reference?

More recently, James Gunn, the director of Guardians of the Galaxy, Suicide Squad and many others (and a known provocateur with a wicked sense of humour) suggested that he and Charlie Kaufman had wanted to restart “Gilligan Kimishima” as a cannibal movie. He tweeted an image of his entry in a Twitter trend that asked people to “pitch a movie with two pictures, no captions.” He juxtaposed the GI tribe with Theodor de Bry’s 16th century engravings of the Tupinambá in Brazil, a series of engravings he based on the sensational accounts of Hans Staden and Jean de Léry, both of whom gave graphic descriptions of cannibalism (hey, it sells books).

Gunn went on to explain that this was a true story. He and Charlie Kaufman had pitched a movie version of Gilligan’s Island to Warner Bros. in which the starving castaways would kill and eat each other. Unfortunately, the creator of GI, Sherwood Schwartz (and later his estate) refused to let it go ahead.

Such a shame. Of course, most of the original GI actors are now dead (Dawn Wells sadly died from COVID-19 just before New Year), but with modern artificial intelligence and deepfake technology, who says we couldn’t have a cannibal feast on an avatar Gilligan’s Island? It would at least be white meat.

Six dead(ish) serial killers: THE BUTCHERS (Steven Judd, 2014)

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If you could somehow bring a dead serial killer back to life, let me ask you this:

  1. What question would you ask him?
  2. Why the hell would you bring him back to life??

This movie was called The Butchers in some markets and Death Factory in others, but didn’t exactly set the world alight in either case. The “plot” (sic and sick) concerns a bunch of misfits reciting a spell that returns to life some of the more notorious recent serial killers, who are featured in a bizarre museum called The Death Factory: Albert Fish, John Wayne Gacy, Jack the Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, and the Zodiac Killer. Wait – that doesn’t make sense? Well, enjoy the ride.

 Before the ride, though, a flashback – Simon (Damien Puckler – Grimm) is having a nightmare about when he was a little boy and killed his father with a golf club. First we get to sit through the father killing a neighbour and Simon’s mother, in grisly detail. Yeah, Simon has serious issues. So did I after watching a woman have her teeth knocked out.

He’s on a bus with his brother (who reads Dante’s Inferno, as you do) and a bunch of misfits representing various stereotypes of America, heading for the Grand Canyon, but the bus breaks down and so they hoof it the Death Factory.

Meanwhile, a lawyer from Africa comes to visit the Factory, gets a guided tour of the killers (for the sake of the audience rather than him I rather think) and sees the vials of blood collected from them (how the hell did they get blood from Jack the Ripper?) and then kills the owner.

He has a big antique book, which we just know is going to be full of magic spells. The Goth couple from the bus find it and recite the spell of resurrection (you know, just for fun), and all hell breaks loose. No, really, it’s all a Satanic plot. Say the words, and the drops of blood form columns of fire and the dead butchers are resurrected.

But keep your disbelief suspended – it gets worse. When they get killed, they return to dust and smoke and enter the one who killed them. Confused? So were the writers I fear.

Of course, no slasher film is complete without the impending victims arriving from a broken-down vehicle at a sinister and run-down gas station / diner.

But the interest in this script is not so much in the bus passengers but the six born again killers who stalk them. From the point of view of a cannibalism blog, we only really care about four of them (the cannibals) and there are some real plot problems here. For a start, Albert Fish was ostensibly a harmless old man, unless you were a young child (he used to kidnap children, flog them, murder them and eat them), but he was clearly not up to a fist fight, unless you were under eight years old. Here is the movie Fish, and the real one. Not a bad likeness, but a scary monster?

Jack the Ripper was never identified (nor was Zodiac come to that) so this one wears an old person mask and talks with an English accent. But we have a revelation when Jack takes off the mask! Yes, Jack the Ripper turns out to be a lesbian, who finds out what little girls are made of (with the help of a cut-throat razor). Well, glad they sorted out that mystery anyway. Any clues on who killed JFK while you’re there?

Ed Gein was technically not even a serial killer since he only killed a couple of people, preferring to source his body parts from gravesites, and he was also pretty decrepit, an unlikely partner for hand-to-hand combat. Not even trying for a likeness here – just a scary Fred Flinstone.

That leaves Jeffrey Dahmer who was certainly a serial killer, but his M.O. was to drug his victims then drill holes in their heads when they were unconscious, hoping thereby to keep them around as zombie boyfriends. So, Dahmer was a lover, not a fighter.

Dahmer does, however, have the best line in the movie; after biting one dude:

“33% of Caucasians are A positive… I prefer A negative.”

Another great line is when Simon and the bible thumping lady find a series of pentagrams and vials of serial killer blood (curiouser and curiouser). She has some expertise here, which turns out to be as useless as it sounds:

“I wrote a paper on the psychological dysfunction of fanatical religious behaviour. At Emory.”

But most of the dialog consists of people saying to other people “stay here, I’ll go check it out.” You just know that’s not going to end well. Several times (yawn).

This is a pretty awful movie, garnering a handsome 12% on Rotten Tomatoes. If you like gore, that is well done and you might enjoy it, if you can get past all the metaphysical nonsense of pentagrams and life force transfers. If, however, you are a student of cannibalism, you will be mystified by their portrayals of these murderers. Have these people never heard of Wikipedia?

More importantly, how did they decide on these six as the world’s worst serial killers, and why were four of them (67%) best known for their cannibalistic behaviour? Our fear of death is notorious – watch a group of people flee from a loud noise like a flock of pigeons. The primal part of our brain, like that of the pigeon, takes over when survival seems to be at issue. Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that our terror of death is the basic motivation of human behaviour.

But the enormous interest in cannibalism indicates that there is something even more terrifying than dying: being eaten. Dramatic headlines announce the victim of the latest shark or crocodile attack, while meanwhile hundreds die unremarked, in more mundane incidents taking place all around them. We build mausoleums or place immense marble slabs over our graves to keep out marauders, we pour chemicals into the veins of our corpses to preserve them from worms and bacteria. The worst terror, though, is incorporation into the body of another human. Theologians write learned pieces on God’s options for restoring the body on the day of judgement; if we have been absorbed into another body, to whom would the restored flesh belong? Ed Gein is included in the canon of cannibals not for the numbers he killed but because he used the body parts to make furniture and lampshades.

Cannibalism feeds our darkest fears – that we are not made in the image of God (however that is interpreted) but that we are edible animals, no different to the millions of other animals we slaughter every day: for their flesh like Dahmer and Fish, for their skins and bones like Gein, or just to see what’s inside, like Jack.

Family feeding frenzy: FRIGHTMARE (Pete Walker, 1974)

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The British Daily Telegraph called this movie a “moral obscenity”, or perhaps that was their mission statement. The trailer (above) is a hoot, offering the warning

Of course, these ‘small segments’ which are the only ones they dare show are the most gruesome parts of the movie. If you’re coming for the gore, just watch the trailer. But Frightmare has a lot more to offer than just slasher-fare. It is a British film, which is pretty refreshing in itself, as the British tend not to make a lot of cannibal films, sadly. Among the best are Revenge of Frankenstein, and Death Line. The Brits like to analyse their cannibals, find behaviourist explanations of their eating preferences. This film is in that tradition, but with some nice variations.

The film was variously titled Frightmare, Cover Up and Once Upon a Frightmare. Released in 1974, it was directed by Pete Walker, who spent the 1970s battling the censors with a string of gory movies, which didn’t set the box offices alight, but eventually became cult classics, particularly this little cannibal thriller.

 The story starts with a shy young man (Andrew Sachs, best known as Manuel from Fawlty Towers!) asking to be allowed into a trailer-home, from whence we know he will not be departing.

He’s not from Barcelona…

Then we see a very cranky judge sentencing Edmund and Dorothy Yates to a mental institution; he had hoped to send them to the gallows, but unfortunately there was this medical report…

Seventeen years later, Dorothy (Sheila Keith from Ballet Shoes) and Edmund (Rupert Davies from The Spy Who Came in from The Cold) have been deemed officially cured, and live in an isolated farmhouse. Dorothy ate at least six people in 1957, while her husband was convicted as well, having faked insanity in order to remain with his wife, although in reality he had not been involved in her murders. But that’s all in the past, says Dorothy, who now is just a harmless old pensioner. Dorothy has taken up hobbies, including needlepoint, and the use of power tools.

In the current day (well, 1974) Dorothy is back to her old tricks. She lures lonely and friendless young people to her home, promising tea and tarot card reading, at which she is deadly accurate, as the session always finishes with the same tarot card.

Then there’s the kids – Jackie (Deborah Fairfax), Edmund’s daughter from a previous marriage, who seems relatively normal, and Debbie (Kim Butcher), Dorothy’s actual daughter, conceived shortly before Dorothy was committed to the asylum; Debbie has never met her parents. Debbie is only fifteen but rides with a violent bikie gang and has apparently inherited her mother’s appetite for human flesh. She initiates a fight in which her boyfriend and his gang beat to death a barman, who had refused to serve her because she was under-age. The bikie gang flees when witnesses arrive, but Debbie stays, and carries off the body. Jackie meanwhile is delivering packages every week to her step-mother. They bleed, and they turn out to be the brains of some unfortunate sentient animal. She buys them at the butcher (oh the horror!), pretending she has been hunting humans, as a good step-daughter would, but Mum is not fooled – she wants human brains. Probably likes the way they come pre-scrambled.

Edmund tells his daughter that Dorothy has started up her old gustatory habits, and shows her a corpse in the back of his boss’ Rolls Royce to prove the point. If you have a chauffeur, you might want to dash outside now and check the boot (trunk) of your Roller. We’ll wait for you.

Jackie’s boyfriend is, conveniently, a psychiatrist, who searches out Dorothy’s case history. As a girl, the chief boffin says, she had a pet rabbit who, during the Great Depression, her family decided to kill for food. Traumatised by the consumption of her beloved family member (of the furry variety) she “twisted the horror of the situation into something pleasurable.” She started catching small animals and eating their brains, then started on larger ones, of the sapiens variety.

“It was the only case of cannibanthropy on record in this country. Pathological cannibalism. There were a couple of cases in the United States, almost unheard of anywhere else.”

Now we’re just getting silly, in a way that would embarrass Manuel and Basil. For a start, there is no such word, and if there were, it would just mean someone who cannibalises humans, which is somewhat redundant. Pathological cannibalism didn’t exist in 1974? In the country that birthed Jack the Ripper less than one hundred years earlier? Only fifteen years earlier, Tom Burns had killed, molested and eaten (more or less in that order) two little girls in the town of Barrow in Lancashire. But it’s an interesting observation that in less than fifty years ‘pathological cannibalism’ has gone from almost unknown to a regular headline for the yellow press.

Jackie confronts Debbie about her wild, wild ways, then tells the cops where to find the (partially chewed) body of the barman. Debbie and her boyfriend head to the country home to, you know, meet mum and dad. Find out a bit about the old folks.

It’s a touching reconciliation of mum and daughter, even when mum takes a pitchfork to the boyfriend.

Look, it might have been horrifying and gruesome in 1974, but maybe we’ve all become hardened by watching cannibal movies or the TV evening news. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a measly 55% but, to be fair, it is highly watchable and, being a British production, the character actors are superb, particularly Rupert Davies and Sheila Keith.

The daughters are also more than just the gorgeous young teens that seem to swarm in slasher films. There is conflict between the older Jackie who feels responsible for everyone, and the younger Debbie, who lives for kicks (and a bit of flesh). Jackie represents the delusional nature of modern social customs, which see humans as defined by being other-than-animal, and so she is happy to buy the brains of cows or sheep (socially acceptable) in order to fool her step-mother (socially awkward), but horrified to find the older woman preferring the real thing (socially unacceptable). I’m sure most cannibals (and zombies) would think she is delusional: a brain is a brain.

The fascinating part of the movie for me is the main antagonist, Dorothy, the (unfortunately rare) female cannibal. Cannibalism remains an extreme form of carnivorous virility, and women have not yet won equality in number of perps or number of victims, and they probably even earn less flesh than men. I liked that Debbie, who had never met her cannibalistic mother, was already eating bartenders, disproving the expert psychiatrists who had blundered in releasing Dorothy, and before that misinterpreted her cannibalism as an unfortunate response to the eating of her pet rabbit. Debbie adds nature into the mix, offering support for a kind of genetic cannibalism, almost a wendigo syndrome, something that runs in families, like the Finnish family in Bloody Hell, or the Parker family in the Catskills. Frightmare was released a year before The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which of course became the quintessential family-cannibal movie.

Anyway, Dorothy is a superb villain, a mixture of Arsenic and Old Lace and Leonarda Cianciulli, who murdered three women to make soap and teacakes in wartime Italy. Sheila Keith portrays at one moment a frail old woman, broken by years in an asylum, and the next a cackling serial killer with an electric drill and a flaming poker, both of which she plunges into various victims. Her husband has the role of the weak, supportive spouse, he is Mrs Lovett to Dorothy’s Sweeney Todd. Simon Flynn on the Peter Cushing tribute website called her “the most memorable woman the horror genre has ever seen.” Amen to that.

You can get the movie at Amazon or you might find it on Youtube – currently the full movie is showing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJj_ir8vi2I