Tag: methamphetamine

Cannibalism as contagion: ANTLERS (Scott Cooper, 2021)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films1 Comment

If you read this blog, and I hope you do, you might remember a movie we reviewed recently called Wendigo. It was about the mythical creature from Algonquin legends, the spirit who takes over humans and turns them into voracious cannibals whose feeding frenzy makes them grow larger and, consequently, hungrier. The Wendigo is usually represented by the stag or at least the antlers of a stag; thus the title of this week’s film, Antlers, which fronts another Wendigo, although this time a rather less complex creature.

Directed and co-written by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass) the film is produced by Guillermo del Toro, who has already won three Academy Awards for his imaginative grotesqueries. Del Toro’s films exhibit his fascination with fairy tales and mythology and the monstrous, in which he finds poetic beauty. The cast is outstanding, led by Keri Russell (Grimm Love, The Americans) as Julia, a teacher in rural Oregon who wants to help a young boy in her class named Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas) who, she suspects, is suffering parental abuse. She thinks this because he is drawing gruesome pictures of creatures with huge antlers, and collecting roadkill.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s dad used to take him out on road trips to find roadkill to dissect, but there was nothing wrong with him, was there? Well, OK, but anyway, he wasn’t being abused, and nor is Lucas (except by the usual school bully).

Lucas’ dad was using an abandoned mine to cook methamphetamine, disturbing the quiet of the place, releasing who knows what has been hiding in there? Yep, but it’s not a balrog (also usually shown with horns), it’s a wendigo. And it has infected both the dad and the little brother. Dad is now very loud, very violent creature with a lack of hair (bit like Gollum, but more excitable) who need to be fed raw meat every day. No smart cracks about Oregonians, please. But Julia is an outsider herself – she fled to California as a young woman to escape her abusive father, and is wracked with guilt about leaving her brother Paul (Jesse Plemons – Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad) behind. He is now sheriff of the town, where he does exciting things like evict poor people from their humble homes. She thinks he resents her, and we think so too – why wouldn’t he? He tells her he spent his entire life praying she’d come back. But now, whenever he comes near her, she flinches as she flashes back to her father abusing her as a child.

Paul goes into the woods to retrieve half a human body that someone has reported, and takes it to the coroner, who tells him the mutilation shows teeth marks – and they are human teeth. Almost halfway into the movie, and we finally have some cannibalism going on! Paul finds the other half of the dude (the dad’s former business partner) in the mine where they were cooking the meth. Also some mysterious antlers!

From there on, people start getting eaten – the stern school principal, the school bully who has been picking on Lucas (monsters can also be instruments of justice). It doesn’t work well for dad either; after he is finished enjoying the school principal, the real monster, now in the shape of a skeletal beast looking similar to the creature fought in the Alien films (but with antlers), sacrifices his body (the reference to the crucifixion is clear), then bursts out of his mouth, leaving him a charred, flayed wreck.

Lucas is carried off to the hospital, where he is diagnosed as dehydrated, malnourished, and deeply psychotic. Well, no wonder!

Warren, the previous Sheriff, is a local Native American, and explains to them that Lucas’ drawings, as well as the antler found in the mine, depicts the Wendigo,

“…a diabolical wickedness that devours mankind… known to be eternally starving but feasting makes them hungrier, and weaker. Those who are unfortunate enough to encounter one can only kill it when it’s in its weakened state. And only by extinguishing its beating heart, forcing it to search for another host. But it makes sense you see – our ancestral spirits never died. They were here long before we were here, and they’ll be here long after we’re gone. But now they’re angry.”

They find the missing school bully, who has been “eaten in half”, but Paul tells Julia he still cannot believe in a mythical nature spirit. He requires a conversion experience – maybe his deputy getting pin-cushioned and eaten, and then him getting comprehensively monstered? That leaves it up to Julia to take on the Wendigo. Being a teacher, she remembers the bit about it being weakened when eating, and the bit about extinguishing its beating heart. Using some impressive combat techniques that she probably learnt in The Americans, Julia rather easily beats the big beast, but then has a new problem – the Wendigo spirit is now in Aiden, Lucas’ little brother. Does Julia have the heart to kill and tear the beating heart out of an eight-year-old boy who looks like he just needs a meal and a bath? And do it while she is being watched by his big brother, Lucas?

Spoiler alert: you bet she does!

But as we watch the happy ending, Lucas now living with Julia and Paul, we see Paul begin to cough and spit out black foam – the first symptom of becoming a Wendigo (or this version of it.) As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen told us in his “Seven Theses” on monster culture, the monster never really dies or goes away; it just comes back in different clothes, or different skin. No matter how many times Ripley killed the Alien, it kept coming back, sometimes in the shape of its progeny (a reversal of the Beowulf story, where killing the monster arouses his mother’s wrath).

There are several versions of the Wendigo story. In Supernatural, the Wendigo only ate people every 23 years, an extreme version of the paleo diet. In Fear Itself, the Wendigo takes over anyone who is weak and hungry and fills them with rage, while in Lone Ranger, it appeared an outlaw in the Old West, who could only be killed with a silver bullet for some reason. The common thread is insatiable and voracious appetite, a hunger that destroys without thought for sustainability. In Bones and All, that hunger begins young and gets stronger as they grow older. Perhaps the classic of Wendigo literature is the film Ravenous, in which becoming a Wendigo gives not just superhuman strength but close to invulnerability, or at least the ability to heal any wounds by eating more people. And, of course, a voracious hunger.

The film starts with a warning. This is read in Ojibwe, one of the Indigenous languages of the Algonquin people, whose lands stretch from present-day Ontario in eastern Canada all the way into Montana. This is the language in which the mythology of the Wendigo was developed. The English translation scrolls up the screen:

The film is brilliantly acted, beautifully filmed and directed, but could have made more of a point of the environmental message with which it started, rather than just hurtling into the special effects and gore. The Wendigo is well presented, if a little sparse (we hardly see those antlers), but the connection between the greed of humans and the monstrous revenge of nature is left hanging. There have been five great extinction events found in fossil records. The SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION is happening as we speak. Extinctions have occurred at over 1,000 times the background extinction rate since 1900, and the rate is increasing, a result of human activity (or ecocide), driven by population growth and overconsumption of the earth’s natural resources. In late 2021, WWF Germany suggested that over a million species could go extinct within a decade in the “largest mass extinction event since the end of the dinosaur age.”

Humanity has waged war on nature since we came down from the proverbial trees, but particularly since the agricultural revolution some 12,000 years ago, when we decided nature could be dominated rather than placated. Fossil fuel combustion, the selective breeding of billions of other animals for food or clothing, the capture of wild animals for entertainment – these are all manifestations of the war on nature, motivated by a Wendigo-like hunger which can never be satiated. It’s a war that we cannot win, without destroying ourselves in the process – nature never goes away, but, like the Wendigo, comes back in another (angrier) skin – floods, droughts, climate change, etc. We have, as the Ojibwe warning says, pillaged the land and awakened a Malevolent Spirit. Like any organism evolving by natural selection, we can adapt or die. Our only advantage over other species is that we could, if we had the sense, decide which to choose.

Ohio man sentenced to 26 years to life for killing Menlo Park woman in order to stay young through cannibalism

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal NewsLeave a comment

Francis Wolke, 30, was found guilty on March 2, 2023 of first-degree murder for killing 62-year-old Kathleen Anderson in her Menlo Park bedroom in December of 2018, and sentenced on April 5 to a term of 26 years to life in prison.

San Mateo County prosecutors stated that a friend of Anderson found her body while the killer was still inside the house. The friend called the Menlo Park Police Department and detained Wolke at knifepoint until police arrived.

When the trial opened on Tuesday, February 14, Wolke’s attorney, Connie O’Brien, had declared, in a rather unusual opening statement, that her client was driven to murder by a desire to engage in cannibalism. She stated that Volke believed that, if he committed cannibalism, he would “stay young forever” and join the “1%” of people who eat human protein to become rich.

Anderson had never met Wolke, 30, before the murder. “There was no known relationship or contact between defendant and victim, nor a known motive for the crime,” prosecutors said. Wolke lived in Cincinnati, Ohio and had arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area just days before the murder. He was also wanted in Santa Clara County for prowling and drug possession. According to the Palo Alto Daily Post, Anderson worked as the City of Atherton’s arborist for two decades.

In 2020, Wolke had pleaded not guilty due to insanity. The trial jury deliberated for three days before finding him guilty, and then reconvened to consider the insanity issue, which could have seen Wolke sentenced to state hospitals, instead of state prison. The jury handed down its ruling on March 8 2023 in San Mateo County Court in Redwood City, finding that Wolke was sane at the time of the murder.

Defence lawyers had argued the insanity defence based on Volke’s belief that he had to commit cannibalism in order to join “the 1%” and stay young forever. They testified that Wolke said he wanted to join an elite group of wealthy people whom he believed killed humans and ate their flesh to become “protein harvesters” and that he, too, would enjoy wealth and eternal youth after consuming human stem cells.

Deputy District Attorney Tricia Povah argued the case for Wolke’s intent to murder. Povah laid out in graphic details the injuries that Wolke inflicted during multiple attempts to take the life of Anderson, including attempted strangulation.

Wolke was accused of stabbing Anderson in the eye with a pencil, hitting her brain. The allegation that Wolke used a deadly and dangerous weapon in this act was also accepted by the jury.

Wolke also attempted to behead Anderson, which his defence lawyers alleged was due  to his intention to engage in cannibalism. Wolke reportedly told investigators he:

“wasn’t very good at (it) because (he’d) never done it before.”

Wolke, according to court testimony, had a history of heavy methamphetamine use, but did not test positive for any drugs at the time of the murder. According to defence attorney Connie O’Brien, he was experiencing psychosis in the form of auditory hallucinations while on the bus ride from his family’s home in Cincinnati to the Bay Area, with voices telling him that he had to commit sins to join the 1%.

Despite Wolke’s hallucinations, the prosecution argued that Wolke had an understanding of the morals surrounding murder and that he was aware of his actions as he committed the killing. Dr George Wilkinson, a forensic psychiatrist and expert witness for the prosecution, testified that Wolke understood his actions.

“He was well aware of what he was doing, in fact, it would have been necessary to fulfil the delusions.”

Povah argued that he showed awareness of his situation. When police officers went to enter the house to investigate, Wolke told them where to find Anderson, saying:

“The body’s in the basement. I have a mental problem. I very seriously killed that woman.”

Lots of interesting Cannibal Studies issues are raised by this case. Cannibals are almost routinely labelled as psychotic, on the anthropocentric assumption that human flesh is sacred and inviolable. But to be found insane, as Wolke discovered, a murderer has to prove that he (or she) did not know what he was doing, or that it was wrong. Hannibal Lecter, in the books, movies and TV series, was not executed for his crimes because the jury found him insane. He strongly denied this.

An intention to achieve social status through the ingestion of human flesh seems to show a clear understanding of (some rather dubious) causality. That is, he knew what he was doing, even though he was doing something that would seem to most people irrational.

Or is it? The mythology of the Wendigo tells of cannibals who gain strength, size and often healing powers or long life through eating the flesh of other humans, but also develop an insatiable appetite for ever more of the stuff. What appetites distinguish and define the so-called “1%”, that tiny group of uber-rich who absorb around a quarter of the nation’s income and own 40% of the wealth? Psychiatrists will happily tell you that those who achieve huge fortunes or high office are often psychopaths, immune to fear of failure, or empathy for those they exploit. The accumulation of capital, whether by imperialists or corporate raiders, is metaphorically a form of cannibalism, feeding on the flesh of others in a zero-sum game, that is supposed to gain them enormous wealth and eternal life (or a botox version of it).

A part of Wolke’s mind must have worked out that he was not made of such stern stuff, and told him that, to get there, he would need to cultivate his inner cannibal.