Tag: slaughter

Accused Nithari cannibal serial killers go free: “THE SLUMDOG CANNIBALS”

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News1 Comment

The 2006 Nithari serial murders case was alleged to have taken place in the house of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher in Noida near Nithari village, Uttar Pradesh, India between 2005 and 2006. Moninder Singh was convicted in two out of the five cases against him, while his servant Surinder Koli, accused of assisting him or possibly instigating the killings, was convicted in 10 out of the 16 cases against him.

Koli admitted to killing six children and a 20-year-old woman referred to as “Payal” after sexually assaulting them. He later confessed to eating their livers and other parts of their bodies. Both men were sentenced to death, Koli ten times, but eventually, in October 2023, after some 2,000 hearings, Allahabad High Court acquitted them both, citing lack of evidence.

Despite being from a family of Hindu vegetarians, Koli was from the Dalit, the Untouchable caste, who are considered subhuman by much of society, marginalised, excluded, with their human rights routinely violated. They survive by doing the jobs no one else wants. From 14, Koli worked as a butcher’s assistant, learning to slaughter and dismember large mammals, which seems to have been a useful skill later in his life. He apparently developed a taste for meat at this time.

In 2005, Koli became a servant to Pandher, where he witnessed some pretty lively parties involving Pandher’s friends and visiting sex workers. In March that year, a little girl went missing in Nithari, and a couple of weeks later it happened again. Between 2005-06, a child went missing in Nithari every six weeks on average.

Police told parents they had probably run away (although the youngest was three years old) and would return by themselves. Frustrated by police inaction, parents and local residents in December 2006 organised the excavation of the reeking drains behind Pandher’s house where they found bags of bones, which proved to the hands and legs of small children. Skulls were found on the other side of the house. Police arrested the two men, and found some of the children’s belongings in the house. Police put the number of child victims at more than 31. Locals rioted outside the house, claiming that the police were corrupt and had concealed evidence of crimes involving rich people; the father of one girl alleged that the police had threatened and harassed him.

They demanded that the local police force be replaced by the Federal Government agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation. In 2007, six police were suspended for incompetence and the CBI filed sixteen cases against the two men involving abduction, rape, murder, criminal conspiracy and trafficking.

The CBI investigated the case, which by now was surrounded by accusations that tried to explain the disappearances – an organ transplant racket, or a child pornography ring. Pandher’s laptop was found to contain images of naked children, but they turned out to be his grandchildren. The logistics of harvesting and selling organs of small children turned out to be almost certainly insurmountable. Extensive psychological evaluations found that Koli was obsessed with young girls aged 5-7, while Pandher had a thing for 18-19 year old sex workers (one victim was twenty, the rest were children). Koli admitted on tape to luring the little girls into the house, strangling them and having sex with them before killing them, then cutting up their corpses and eating body parts. The way he dismembered them was similar to what he would have learned as a butcher’s assistant when he was a teenager. Yet investigators found that he had behaved entirely normally with his own children back in his home village, where his wife and family lived.

On 12 February 2009, both the accused—Moninder Singh Pandher and his domestic servant Surinder Koli—were found guilty of the 8 February 2005 murder of Rimpa Haldar, 14, by a special sessions court in Ghaziabad. This verdict embarrassed the CBI, as they had earlier given a clean bill of health to Pandher in all their charge-sheets. Both were given the death sentence. Other victims were identified, including:

  • On 4 May 2010, Koli was found guilty of the 25 October 2006 murder of Arti Prasad, 7, and given a second death sentence eight days later.
  • On 27 September 2010, Koli was found guilty of the 10 April 2006 murder of Rachna Lal, 9, and given a third death sentence the following day.
  • On 22 December 2010, Koli was found guilty of the June 2006 murder of Deepali Sarkar, 12, and given a fourth death sentence.
  • On 24 December 2012, Koli was found guilty of the 4 June 2005 murder of Chhoti Kavita, 5, and given a fifth death sentence.

On 16 October 2023, 17 years after the crimes first came to light, Koli and Pandher were acquitted of all charges against them due to insufficient and largely circumstantial evidence, despite the recorded confessions of Koli. The parents were naturally shattered.

It seems likely that between the animalisation of lower caste humans and the sacralisation of certain species of cattle in India, some people are unable to discern any line between humans (except for their kin) and other large mammals.

“Moninder used to have call-girls coming home all the time. Seeing them, I wanted to have sex as well. Slowly, these feelings turned into my wanting to murder and eat them. A girl from Sector 30 called Dimple was passing in front of the house. I called her inside. I then strangled her with her chunni. When she was unconscious, I tried to have sex with her but failed. So I killed her. I wanted to eat her. So I took her body into the bathroom upstairs. I got a knife from the kitchen and cut her body into little pieces. I then cooked a piece of her arm and chest and ate it.”

Koli later denied any involvement in the murders, saying that the CBI made him “remember” names and details to frame him, as they were protecting rich men who were raping and killing girls and selling their organs (a high-tech form of cannibalism). Pandher is now free; Koli remains in jail. The victims’ families continue suffering, even as some of them were given houses and cash settlements. When money talks, nothing and no one is off the menu.

The BBC released a documentary on the case called The Slumdog Cannibal in 2012. This was after the initial trials, but before the several appeals. The documentary, which concentrates on the background and motivations of Surinder Koli, can be watched (at the time of writing) on YouTube.

Internet Phantasies of Cannibalism

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal writing, On cannibals1 Comment

Trigger warning

This blog contains graphic scenes of sexual abuse, violence and cannibalism. These are all imaginary phantasies (in the Freudian sense of wish fulfilment rather than whimsical fiction or “fantasy”), drawn, written or simulated. None claim or even appear to be anything other than phantasies.

Note: these images were all taken from a standard browser search of the Internet in 2023. Most were captured from the short form blogging platform Tumblr, which hosts a wide range of different sites, including cannibalguy. None of these images below are from the “dark web” where there are supposed to be far more graphic scenes including, allegedly, genuine instances of rape, murder and cannibalism.

If you don’t like graphic images (he said to people reading a blog called thecannibalguy), please exit, and come back next week.

cannivore2

Tumblr has deleted this account since I downloaded these images in January 2023. The link below is to his or her new account at an aggregation site called Tumbex. Some of these images appear there, while others not shown here have been added. The images reflect a deep male fear of the female cannibal, an extreme form of what Barbara Creed calls Phallic Panic.

Severityschool

This site seems to explore the eating of the male; some images such as the one below consider the parallel with those considered ontologically animal and so morally inconsequential, and question why humans might not be the same.

Murray David

More cannibalism of the male, but this time on Facebook, which is usually considered a little more, shall we say, demure than Tumblr. The most interesting aspect of this image is that the male has been penetrated (an outrage usually reserved for the female) and that, although the site censors seem to have no quarrel with the steel rod entering his anus and exiting his mouth, the penis has been blurred for the sake of decorum. Torture and cannibalism are, it seems, less offensive than images of human genitals.

grandahl2

Cannibalism can fascinate not just objectively but subjectively. Many web users claim to crave their own consumption by a cannibal, and some of them like Bernd Juergen Brandes achieve their desires. For most, it is phantasy, often expressed in long rambling narratives.

Preparing my meat

I know it’s unusual, but I’ve wanted someone to eat my genitals for as long as I can remember.  If you think you might be interested in cooking and eating my cock and balls, please drop me a note.
You should prepare me however you think best.  I’m willing to help prepare and serve myself to you to eat if you desire.  One cooking method I’ve thought a lot about has me sitting on a low mound, my legs straddling a wood fire burned down to coals. My butt is impaled on a short steak pounded into the mound to keep me from moving and some insulation is placed on my inner thighs.
Before I’m placed over the coals to cook, the chef has tied my erect cock and balls off tightly.  He tamps a seasoned stuffing mix down my pee hole to season me from inside and forces a large clove of garlic in my glans to keep the stuffing in me.  He then takes a large syringe and injects some seasoned Cabernet into my ball sack.  He tells me my balls will braise in the wine and cook more slowly as my penis is roasting.
At first just a few coals are placed under my genitals at first to provide a little heat. Foil is tented over my genitals so they cook evenly from all sides. I’m grinning and trying not to cum with my cock tied off. I feel some pain from the heat, but my cock is getting numb from being tied off. At this point the chef occupies me with some conversation as I start to cook…
The chef and I continue to chat about dinner. He bastes my balls and cock head frequently so they don’t burn and periodically sifts more seasoning onto my genitals. My cock is continuously twitching. My cum seeps into the stuffing chef forced down my pee hole, but can’t escape to the end of my cock. My balls move in the wine that fills my sac, but can’t get away from the heat. Chef keeps adding a few more coals around my genitals. Then I realize: I’m starting to cook! and get the first whiffs of my roasting sausage – musky pork ! I’m so excited to finally be dinner. I hope I’m tasty.
After some time my cock is mostly numb and I’m cumming deep in my groin. My cock is a golden brown and my ball sac is getting crispy on the outside. Some stuffing has blossomed out the end of my penis around the garlic.  Some wine has leaked from the hole used to fill my sac and mixed with the seasoning I’m coated with. I’m ready to be served! The chef helps me up off of the dowel that impales my butt and I hobble to a sturdy outside table…
I sit on a large platter facing the chef and spread my legs as far as possible to present myself for his dinner.  He shakes some salt and ladles juniper berry sauce on my browned and steaming cock and I’m ready to be carved. With wide eyes I watch the chef spear my cock head and slice it off. He smiles just before popping it in his mouth and starting to chew. I’m trying desperately to cum, but can’t with the tight binding at the base of my genitals. Piece by piece he carves and eats my roasted penis, dipping each bite in the juniper berry sauce. Eventually, it’s a twitching red circle even with my balls.
He eyes the second course greedily, and smiles again as he slices open my crispy ball sac. My roasted testicles pop out with the remaining wine sauce. The cords are cut and my oysters sliced. (he gives me a piece to taste, interesting flavor with a hint of cum.)
With my testicles devoured, he trims off the crispy bits of my sac and wipes the plate with them. They crunch in his mouth. The root of my penis is now exposed and dripping juice on the plate. He comes at it with you carving knife and starts to cut. I feel him slicing through my living meat. I grit my teethe and push into the knife, willing him to carve out my root for the final bites of his meal.
He pops it in his mouth and walks off chewing as I collapse on the table.

sashaotaku

Much hand-drawn art involves violence against women, usually helpless but sometimes compliant and occasionally even enthusiastic. This image suggests that penetration by penis and skewer or spear are analogous, and the figure in the middle appears to be a woman with a camera who is at least voluntarily documenting the intercourse and likely murders, possibly to prepare herself for the same fate from the man who is sexually fondling both her and the prospective killer.

Coffingag

The artist who posted this is unapologetically into ‘dolcett’, a subset of vorarephilia, usually abbreviated to ‘vore’. Vore of women (gynophagia) can be ‘soft vore’ where the victim is eaten while still alive and whole or ‘hard vore’ where killing and dismemberment is depicted with attendant gore, while male diners usually express appreciation for the meat. Dolcett is hard vore gynophagia that depicts females being killed and cooked, often on a spit, and often with their enthusiastic agreement.

The artist of this piece stated that the art was “commissioned” and would be the first of a series that would be drawn when time allowed during their semester. I wonder if the semester covers the writings of Julia Kristeva, who speaks of the “fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal”. This image is clearly based on the roast chicken which appears on millions of dining tables nightly, but is clearly a woman – it shows breasts and a round but stitched stomach, implying an equivalence between being pregnant and being ‘stuffed’. The pregnant woman is the ultimate disrupter of the patriarchal symbolic order, a symbol of fertile, fecund nature.

sexual-freak-show

This is a hard vore site, but also promotes other paraphilias such as scopophilia, voyeurism, bondage, incest, torture and bestiality, interspersed with innocuous images of entirely healthy young women, conceivably placed to allow readers to exercise their own imagination. The concept of a person seeming to enjoy being roasted alive is pure phantasy; there have been no reports to my knowledge of anyone ‘enjoying’ this, even Joan of Arc. This image appears to have been removed, but replaced with many more graphic scenes.

Flostress

This site is no longer available, or at least cannot be opened safely, indicating that it may have been appropriated by a fraud site. It demonstrates the equivalence of women and animals that Carol J. Adams has studied comprehensively. The face and breasts are clearly human, the ears and tail clearly porcine.

Hills-finest

This site involves many purported recipes for “girl meat” and line drawings imagining various abuses. The one below seems to have been removed but while there it expressed (with appallingly ignorant spelling) a profound misogyny.

Fluidcravings

Originally uploaded to Tumblr but since deleted, in fact the whole account has been removed.

A succinct summary of the problem with cannibalism and carnivorism in general. The eater is motivated by a voracious appetite and objectifies the victim as simply food. The victim is terrified, experiencing an agonising death immersed in stomach acid. The end result is satisfaction for the cannibal while the victim is reduced to ordure. “I’m not food” is what the trillions of animals slaughtered every year for human consumption would say if they could make themselves understood by the consumers, and sums up the struggle against carnivorous virility.

Madalot

https://www.tumblr.com/madalot/138271941363/vore-sequence-with-juicy-and-some-willing-anon-i

Clearly Creed’s archaic mother, the basis of so many man-eating monsters, who reflect an unconscious fear that the mother’s body, from which we all emerged, has the power to re-absorb the child. In this drawing, we see one who is seemingly willing to re-enter her body, assuming a foetal position in her stomach.

ForbiddenFeast

This is a site dedicated to gynophagia and dolcett images, and is only fully accessible by paid subscription, but there is still plenty of free content for those who happen upon it. The explanatory page states that it features

“exclusive artworks depicting food in a “unmentionable” nature (sic). If I seem vague, I’m sorry. You should check out the terms “dolcett” and “gynophagia” to get what we mean. If you are here by mistake and do not know the context of what this site is about already, you should leave now.”

I’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of words wondering why an image such as the above is so abject and repugnant, while the same scene is unremarkable in any butcher shop, just because it involves a different species of mammal.

Reddit

r/cannibalism_ Lounge
byu/drunkcannibal incannibalism_

Reddit is a social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website where readers can join and participate in discussions on particular topics in dedicated areas called “subreddits”. This subreddit is simply entitled “cannibalism_lounge”. It offers a rather more sophisticated version of the defunct Internet fetish forum “The Cannibal Café” where Armin Meiwes contacted prospective victims in the year 2000.

@iampigmeat

This account has been removed from Tumblr but content is still available in Tumbex. Objectifies the human body into “choice cuts”, a process common to butcher shops, but usually showing the bovine rather than human form.

Content removed by the website

Sites like Facebook and Tumblr spend a lot of time and money deleting gratuitously offensive posts. Most effort seems to be spent in tracking down and removing porn, which I would think might be less offensive to many than the scenes of bloody mayhem in the vore posts. The ones like those shown in this blog, which last long enough to be captured, are probably relatively mild content. Anything stronger (or focused on genitals) usually gets the boot, often accompanied by a triumphant statement such as the one below, which seems to say “we caught you”.

They are pretty successful capturing consensual sex, but rape, torture and cannibalism? Not so much.

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

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films3 Comments

Since at least the time of Sweeney Todd, the barber who killed his customers and turned them into pies in the early 19th 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?

Humans as livestock: THE FARM (Hans Stjernswärd, 2018)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films11 Comments

What does it mean to be “treated like an animal”? We humans are, after all, animals, one species of the family Hominid, or great apes. So why should we not be treated like animals, or, if we are averse to abuse, why then do we treat non-human animals “like animals”? The ultimate act of treating humans “like animals” is the killing and eating or the human body, which of course is made of meat, and various other edible parts.

One of the classics of cannibal studies is the film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, made on a tight budget by Tobe Hooper in 1974, and remade and turned into multiple sequels since then. In these films, cannibals capture and slaughter tourists for their flesh. The Farm attempts to push the slaughter metaphor a whole lot further.

The cannibal who dwells among us has been a popular trope since Sweeney Todd the Barber starting cutting the throats of his customers over 200 years ago, carting their bodies to the pie shop of Mrs Lovett, who turned them into very popular pies. There have been multiple versions of this story, the latest being a musical with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. Variations on this theme included Motel Hell and the Danish comedy Green Butcher, starring Mads Mikkelsen (21st century Hannibal Lecter) as you have never seen him before.

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It’s Mads, Captain, but not as we know it.

Early cannibal stories concentrated on ‘savages’ who ate us just because that’s what the imperialists told us that was what primitive peoples did. Sweeney and his ilk looked a lot like us, but happened to be less discriminating when it came to sourcing their meat. Slasher cannibals were a hybrid – a fusion of the foreign savage and the domestic entrepreneur – they were modern, civilised people who had sunk back into voracious savagery. Texas Chain Saw was a progenitor of the slasher films in which a bunch of urban trendies come up against a whole family of degenerate cannibals – people who have dropped (or been thrown) out of civil society and reverted to savagery and cannibalism. Stories about semi-human, savage cannibals waylaying travellers date back to at least Sawney Bean and his incestuous cannibal family in 16th century Scotland, or even further back to Homer’s Cyclops or the various monsters reported by Herodotus.

What slasher and savage cannibal movies had in common was that the cannibals were more of the hunter-gatherer type, setting traps or chasing potential prey, as our ancestors did for a couple of hundred thousand years before the agricultural revolution started, some ten thousand years ago. At that time, we started selectively breeding animals, confining them, controlling their lifecycles, harvesting their bodily secretions, and slaughtering them for meat at our convenience. This movie, The Farm, takes that social evolution into the world of cannibals. What if our backroad cannibals didn’t just chase down tourists, but farmed humans for their meat and their milk?

It’s an intriguing premise, which starts with the traditional horror preamble, a young couple, Nora (Nora Yessayan, who also did the casting) and Alec (Alec Gaylord) stopping for the night somewhere they should know better than to stop, much like Brad and Janet in Rocky Horror Show.

These films have a formula – the sassy, city folk, some of them in an unmarried relationship (and being judged and often punished for it).

The diner with food of an indeterminable origin, the gas station with the weird attendant.

The house or motel with some nasty surprises (e.g. bloodstained sheets), and (yes) the monster under the bed.

But The Farm goes off in another direction after that. The young couple are captured and put in cages.

They are gagged, and so they are voiceless, the way we consider farm animals to be, and treated ruthlessly by the farmers, who are mostly wearing animal masks.

Nora is tied with her legs apart and artificially inseminated, as happens to millions of cows every year.

Alec is confined, knocked on the head and taken off to where human meat is harvested. Somehow, he survives that and comes looking for Nora.

The farm is a catering company, cooking and selling the meat for festive events.

The captured human men are killed whenever fresh meat is needed, the women are fitted to suction machines and their milk is collected.

When they can no longer become pregnant, they are added to the butchery.

I guess we are (most of us) aware that cows, like all mammals, have to give birth before they produce milk. On this farm, as on dairy farms world-wide, the babies are waste products of milk production and are killed soon after they are born. That indifferent killing of the innocent is the most disturbing scene of the film.

Look, it’s BUSINESS. Just as billions of male chicks are minced alive at hatcheries because they can’t lay eggs, so dairy calves are killed if they can’t produce milk, and human babies dashed against the concrete floor in the milking sheds of The Farm. Of course, businesses of all sorts have production and quality problems, and have to deal with unhappy customers.

Nora and Alec escape and seek refuge in a church. How much sympathy would an escaped cow or sheep or pig get in a church? It does give us an understanding of the ideology of the Farm though, with it’s mural based on Matthew 19:14:

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

Farmed animals are often compared to children in that they are vulnerable, selectively bred to be dependent and of course are mostly slaughtered when still infant or barely adult. The Dean of St Paul’s, William Ralph Inge, wrote in “The Idea of Progress”,

“We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.”

Nora and Alec, at the start of the film, stopped at a café near the Farm, where they were watched as they uncaringly ate beef and bacon burgers. They were, without their knowledge, judged guilty of eating flesh, of cannibalism of their fellow mammals, and the “animals” are now harvesting their bodies in return.

Eric from scariesthings.com summarised:

“this is a tough watch for most audiences and is even a little rough for hardened horror fans”

The reviewers either loved or hated The Farm. Very few thought it was just OK; it was either slammed as stupid and badly made or lauded as a brilliant expose of modern animal agriculture, told in a looking-glass world where we are the animals. I tend to the second view, but I hope you will get the chance to decide for yourself. The film seems to be on Amazon Prime.

I won’t tell you the ending, but the poster kinda gives it away…

Cannibalism with Danish: “The Green Butchers” (Jensen, 2003)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films8 Comments

Green_Butchers_Danish

Anders Thomas Jensen directed this Danish black comedy, which is only really listed early in this blog because it stars – yep, that really is him – Mads Mikkelsen, better known to readers of this blog, I daresay, as Hannibal Lecter in the television series Hannibal (2013-15).

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Svend (Mads Mikkelsen) and Bjarne (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) work in a butcher shop, but are browbeaten by their mean boss, “Sausage” Holger (Ole Thestrup), who says Bjarne’s pate tastes like jockstrap, and even disparages Svend’s marinade (believe it or not, this becomes an important plot point). Holger opens the film with a great summary of animal agriculture:

“I’ve always been fascinated by sausages. It’s almost mythological to kill an animal and then mock it by sticking it in its own intestine. Can you imagine anything worse than being stuck up your own ass?”

They can’t stand this rude dude, so they start their own butcher shop (slagtermester). Bjarne has problems: he smokes twenty joints a day and kills animals so he can collect their skeletons. But it turns out he is the saner of the two partners.

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Their grand opening attracts a total of zero customers. Next morning, Svend does not have a good day: he breaks up with his fiancé and then discovers that he has inadvertently locked the electrician in the meat freezer all night. What to do with a frozen electrician? Holger appears, demanding fillets for the Rotary dinner, and Svend panics.

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Next day, the guests from the Rotary dinner are queueing up outside the shop – they all loved the fillets. Business is booming and, as Svend says, we had to get rid of him, one way or another. The electrician becomes “Svend’s chicky-wickies”. Then the real estate agent turns up, wanting a tour of the premises. So it goes.

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It’s an accidental Sweeney Todd. They meant no harm, and are just being rewarded for bumbling incompetence. And isn’t that the way the world really operates? The Peter Principle!

Then the local pastor reveals that he didn’t like the Rotary dinner. It reminded him of his wife. The wife he had to eat after a plane crash on their honeymoon. Yes, it’s not just Danish Hannibal, it’s also Alive!

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Mads Mikkelsen is very good in the role of the nervous, sweating, irritable Svend, although it’s hard to reconcile this farcical character, and his extraordinary haircut, with the cool, sophisticated and brilliant Dr Hannibal Lecter, let alone Le Chifre in Casino Royale or even Kaecilius in Dr Strange.

Hannibal - Season 1

By the end of the film, we are asked questions of perception: what is appetite? What is “meat”? Is the secret in the sauce? Is that a wig?

The promoters had no idea what to do with this film. Check out some of the posters – hard to tell that they are for the same thing!

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It’s a quirky comedy, pleasant enough and inoffensive, unless you are offended by either butchers or cannibalism. If you are equally offended by both, then perhaps it has done its job well.

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Ensemble cannibalism: “Eat the Rich” (Richardson, 1987)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films5 Comments

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is reported to have told the Paris Commune during the French Revolution that:

“When the people have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”

It caught on, some 200 years later, and became the title of a number of songs from such revolutionary outfits as Aerosmith, Motörhead and State of Mind.

Rousseau could have added “and when the people have nothing to watch, they will watch cannibalism comedies”. Lucky he didn’t though, because not many people watched this particular lemon.

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Eat the Rich is a black comedy featuring the cast members of the popular television series The Comic Strip Presents…. (Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson, Jennifer Saunders and Alexei Sayle), plus a whole lot of big name cameos. Among the cameos are two really great bass guitarists: Paul McCartney and Bill Wyman!

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Enough trivia – time to get to the serious business of comedy. The film is set in a restaurant named ‘Bastards’ where Alex (Al Pellay), is a waiter, trying to put up with the contempt and disgust of the upper-class clientele, who order dishes like “sliced baby koala, poached in its mother’s milk”. Alex is fired for being rude and turns to a life of crime and revolution. The denouement comes when Alex and his friends return to Bastards and start killing and cooking the customers, renaming the establishment “Eat the Rich”.

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This is the police
This is the police. Lay down your knives and forks!

The film was a very thinly veiled satire on Thatcher’s England, but never really seemed likely to be a call to arms. Timeout London said:

“the back-alley production values and total lack of comic invention on display in this Thatcher-baiting misstep meant that any hopes of a Pythonesque run at the movies were knocked way back on their heels.”

It was a commercial flop, taking in only $200,000 in the US. This may have set cannibal humour back decades but, fortunately, we have just learnt that John Cleese is writing a cannibalism film! According to recent press releases, Cleese has revealed that:

“My greatest professional accomplishment will be a movie I’m writing now, a light comedy about cannibalism. It’s called Yummy.”

Hold The Sunset. Phil (John Cleese). Copyright: BBC.
Of course, that could be Cleese being too silly, too silly.

But it shows a certain zeitgeist – cannibal films are the flavour of this era of our culture. I wonder if it relates to our fears about the increasingly apparent hazards of a society and economic system based on ever more voracious appetite?

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If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

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Entrepreneurial cannibalism: “Eating Raoul” (Bartel, 1982)

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Eating RaoulEating Raoul has become a cult classic since its release in 1982. It was directed by Paul Bartel, who also plays the role of Paul Bland, a use of nominative irony, since he and his wife Mary (played by the wonderful Mary Woronov who starred in Warhol and Corman films) are a bland and horribly normal couple. They live in a block of apartments and eke out an existence working at unsatisfying jobs, while dreaming of somehow opening their own restaurant.

The film starts with a shot of the iconic Hollywood sign and a voice-over, of the type that was popular in film newsreels, describing the contrasts in that town between rich and poor, and tells us that “sex hunger is reflected in every aspect of daily life”.

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“The barrier between food and sex has totally dissolved.”

This contrast then goes to the microcosm of the life of Paul and Mary. They are prudes; they sleep in separate beds and disapprove of sex, except for “a little hugging and kissing”. But there are almost constant “swinger” parties in an adjoining apartment: as if to exacerbate their financial woes, rich and decadent swingers share their lift and their corridors. When one of the swingers tries to rape Mary, Paul kills him with the cast iron frypan, finds $600 in the guy’s wallet, and thus begins a career of hilarious and profitable murders of “rich perverts”, whom they lure with ads offering kinky sex.

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But that doesn’t make it a cannibal film, suitable for this blog. That comes later, when their locksmith, Raoul, enters the scene, ready to make money from the bodies and the victims’ cars.

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But when Raoul himself has to be disposed of, and there is nothing to serve the real estate agent who is going to secure the purchase of their dream restaurant… Well, as Hannibal said in Silence of the Lambs:

“Haven’t you had company coming and no time to shop? You have to make do with what’s in the fridge, Clarice.”

Cannibalism is all about power and appetite, and so Eating Raoul is a perfect allegory for Western (and particularly Hollywood) society. Everyone is either exploiting or fucking everyone else, and why should Paul and Mary Bland be any different? Cannibalism – it’s the ultimate American Dream.

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The sex shop scene on Youtube:

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Highway cannibalism: “The Road”, (Hillcoat, 2009)

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Cormac McCarthy wrote his chilling book The Road in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize for it. I remember reading it at the time, and it was a very disturbing experience. Diving into the book was like one of those dreams where you walk out of the sunshine into a cold, dark and ominous environment. It left me both sorry and relieved to finish it. The sense of loss and wasted opportunity left a deep impression for weeks after reading it, maybe forever. The film captured some of this deep sense of menace and loss, but to a much lesser extent. Roger Ebert and many other reviewers praised the film, at the same time pointing out that it was not as powerful as the book. The Guardian reviewer summed the film up as intensifying the poignancy while deflecting the horror, and some of the more graphic examples of cannibalism are skipped in the film, particularly the finding of an infant’s corpse, all prepared for consumption by his desperate parents. But perhaps it’s an unfair comparison: experiencing a book through one’s own imagination is never really comparable to seeing the interpretation of the actors and director.

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So: what’s it about? Well, it’s post-apocalyptic. A great catastrophe has wiped out most life on earth, including most of the forests that we rely on for the very air that we breathe. The earth is dying; the voice-over tells us “No animals have survived, and all the crops are long gone”. We are never told what happened: there is a flash and there are two characters: man and boy. They are given no names beyond those.

“Cannibalism is the great fear”

The earth is stripped of life, the survivors of their names and their humanity. Armed gangs roam the highways, killing and eating anyone they can find. When the man shoots a member of a cannibal gang who encounters them on the road, he is left with only one bullet in his gun. It will be for the boy, if it should ever come to the point where the only choice is to kill him or let him be eaten. When they come across a big house, they find a number of people locked in the basement – kept for future meals. When the cannibals arrive, they hide in the bathroom, and the man gets the gun ready at the boy’s head.

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There is a lovely scene where they find a survivalist shelter and spend a few days eating as much as they want, and even bathing – feeling clean is an almost forgotten luxury. But there is a pervasive sense of dread, of a world spiralling down into total extinction. Viggo Mortensen from Lord of the Rings plays the nameless man, cold, dirty and desperate, Strider who will never become Aragorn. The mother is played by Charlize Theron in a lamentably brief appearance, and Robert Duvall makes an appearance as a nearly blind old fellow somehow surviving in a time with no hope. The man teaches the boy a stripped down deontological ethic – there are “good guys” and “bad guys”, and the good guys are “carrying the fire”. They also don’t eat people. It is a final grasp at a humanism which failed humanity and failed the planet.

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The impact of The Road comes from its feasibility. We know that we will probably not meet a psychopathic psychiatrist or even hairdresser, we don’t go to fly-over towns where the local abattoir workers have gone feral, we certainly don’t charter Uruguayan military planes to fly us across the Andes. But the threat of some sort of apocalypse confronts us from the front pages of the papers every day, in stories of natural disasters, nuclear wars, pandemics and environmental collapses. Human history is replete with examples of disasters followed by social collapse and cannibalism. The Road takes this scenario into our own time. We see the J-curves of human population matched by the same graph of species extinctions and carbon emissions, and we are forced to think – if the worse happens, what, or whom, will we eat?

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The future is cannibal: “The Time Machine” (Pal, 1960)

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HG Wells wrote his ground-breaking novella The Time Machine in 1895, and George Pal’s movie of it, made in 1960, kept to that timeline, with of course a detour some 800,000 years into the future. The film was fairly sensational at the time of its release and won an Oscar for best special effects for the time-lapse images, particularly the disintegrating corpse (we’ll get to it). It took some liberties with several aspects of the story for the purpose of fitting a lot of science and a lot of fiction into under 100 minutes of film, but was generally true to the social commentary of the book, particularly the division of humanity into the effete intellectuals and the menacing workers. To this, the Director, George Pal, added a sixties flavour that was quite prescient for a work made in the first year of that decade, particularly a strong antiwar theme, including a horror of nuclear conflagration and resulting environmental devastation, which occupied a large part of the public imagination in the Cold War years.

Why is the Time Traveller interested in time travel?

“I don’t much care for the time I was born into. It seems people aren’t dying fast enough these days. They call upon science to invent new, more efficient weapons to depopulate the earth.”

Freud said that the two most profound taboos are incest and cannibalism, and he traced their origins, as linked events, to Darwin’s primal hordes and the murder and consumption of the father who was monopolising the women. Anyway, fast forward (very fast) to the year 802701 and incest seems to have had a revival (insofar as everyone looks the same) while cannibalism, somehow, is still frowned upon. Or rather it has gone underground.

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The Time Traveller meets the humans of the future, the Eloi, who look like a bunch of beautiful but listless hippies, even though hippies did not exist for a few years after the film was made. A separate race of humans known as Morlocks live underground, shunning the daylight and any kind of fire. In their deep caverns, they have dark, satanic mills and chop up the Eloi, who are clothed and fed by the industrious Morlocks and then “harvested” at maturity. This is why there are no old Eloi, although there don’t seem to be any babies either, which makes the sustainability of the cannibal diet a little tricky.

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But wait, are the Morlocks cannibals? To be a cannibal, you really need to eat the flesh of someone of your own species, and it seems unlikely that the Eloi and Morlocks are even related, having evolved into different niches centuries earlier. The Time Traveller, known only as George, is shown some “rings” (a form of data disks which require no energy except for a quick twirl with finger and thumb) which reveal that a 326 year war destroyed the environment, causing the human race to retreat underground. Some remained in the infernal depths as white-eyed demons, preying on the innocent, while those who got the subterranean homesick blues eventually returned to the surface when it cooled down. There they continued to be fed and clothed by the Morlocks, but when the factory whistle goes, they march glassy-eyed into the factory – as raw materials.

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The Morlocks are dressed in baggy skin and flabby paunches and have bulging eyes and long, shaggy white hair. In fact, they look more like decrepit twenty-first century boomer hippies than the Eloi ever did. They are also no match for George who has his fists and his matches. There is also a love interest – Weena, (Yvette Mimieux), an Eloi girl whom George saves from drowning, since the Eloi can’t really see the problem if she does. He accuses her of being a child, then hopes to take her home with him on the Time Machine, a nice precursor to Lolita, which was filmed two years later. In 1895, in contrast, George has only male friends, and his off-sider is the Scotsman David Filby, played by Alan Young, who went on to be the side-kick of a horse in Mister Ed for many years.

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All right, there are some very silly things in this movie, and leading the list is the fact that the Eloi all speak perfect twentieth century English. Considering we can barely understand Chaucerian English from 600 years ago, it seems a bit odd to be able to converse with the locals straight off the boat, as it were, some 801,000 years into the future. In the book, the TT has to learn the Eloi language, but there’s no time for such nonsense in a 90 minute movie, unless it’s a European art-house film. Then there is the time machine stopping in 1966, just in time for nuclear war to break out, giving the film only six years before proving itself wrong.

There is a Robinson Crusoe feel to this film – although the planet seems quite heavily populated by young pretty hippies and old decrepit cannibal hippies, George is the only civilised patriarchal figure there, shouting at the Eloi and setting fire to the Morlocks as he sees fit. His first encounter with the Morlocks involves seeing – yep, a footprint. Lots of footprints, showing where the Morlocks have absconded with the time machine. We know the year; we don’t know whether it’s  Friday though.

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Anyway, George gets down and dirty into the underground, beats up some Morlocks, and sets the place on fire. He also fires up the Eloi who reclaim their power and beat up a few Morlocks too. Their totally vegan diet apparently has not left them, as George rudely claimed, “living vegetables”. His judgement of the Morlocks though is more severe: they had:

“… degenerated into the lowest form of human life: cannibalism!”

He gets his machine back and flees into the future, after killing a Morlock, who decomposes in time lapse mode, a scene that was quite the talk of the audience at the time.

But really, George. They have a system that works. His plan appears to be to return to 802701, impose regime change, and “free” the Eloi from the mouths of the Morlocks to build a new world. But of course the Eloi have no idea how to grow their food or make their clothes. With George as absolute monarch, they may learn. Or might they splinter into cliques, as humans always do, and soon go back to eating and wearing each other?

Filby, back in 1900, realises that George wouldn’t go off to build a civilisation without a plan. He figures out that he has gone back to the future and has taken just three books with him. Which books? No one knows.

Which books, Filby asks with a twinkle, would you have taken?

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Maybe Janice Poon’s cookbook?

 

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Revenge is (sweet) meat: “Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (Burton, 2007)

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Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, made in 2007, seeks explanations, rationalisations and even justifications for the depicted crimes of murder, cannibalism and various pure food offences. This version of the 19th century pot-boiler is a star vehicle and also a musical, a most unlikely format for a ‘slasher’ film. It is an adaptation of the Sondheim stage musical, in which Todd is an honest man wronged by a corrupt power establishment: Judge Turpin (the late, great Alan Rickman) has falsely convicted him and transported him to the colonies so that he, the judge, can abduct Todd’s wife, Lucy. Todd meets Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) who tells him Lucy was raped by Turpin and committed suicide, leaving their daughter a ward of the wicked judge, who now lusts for the young girl. In the twenty-first century, Sweeney Todd is not the entrepreneur that he was in earlier versions of the story, but the wronged anti-hero, and the forces of the law and government demonstrate the unregulated libidinism that previously characterised Todd. His plans to trap the judge thwarted, Todd wreaks revenge on all males (females being fortunate not to need barbers) with his cutthroat razors.

The abjection is constant, starting with the opening credits where we see streams of blood, mincemeat, pies going into ovens and more blood flowing into the sewer. The 2007 Todd is an artist: Depp’s portrayal is almost balletic in his use of the razor to slice each throat, and the viewer is treated each time to fountains of arterial blood. There is no polite avoidance of the cannibal question in this film: Todd and Lovett share a song where they speculate on the gastronomic features of different professions (she recommends priests). Todd puts this discussion in a social context:

“The history of the world, my love, is those below serving those up above! How gratifying for once to know, that those above will serve those down below!”

Despite this class-based comment, they agree to forgo the alterity that their working class roots would demand: “We’ll not discriminate great from small… we’ll serve anyone… and to anyone”. The reification of any adult male that comes into the shop arises not from Todd but from Lovett: he wishes only to waste everyone, to revenge himself on a society that has betrayed and (he believes) killed all those he held dear. She argues that this would be wasteful: “With the price of meat what it is, when you get it, if you get it; good, you got it!”

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Todd and Lovett never seem to eat their abject products; the pies being hugely financially successful they can, like the ruling class in Soylent Green, afford better fare. In fact, Lovett is presented as the psychopath in this version. She suggests the pie-making scheme despite her abjection at her rival’s use of local cats, and then, despite the young apprentice Toby’s clear devotion to her, locks him in the cellar with the corpses when he discovers the truth, and goes to fetch the murderous Todd. She is coldly rational like Hannibal Lecter, does no killing herself, and is in fact a perfect reflection of free trade capitalism, adding value to the raw materials that come her way. Todd is persuaded: the crunching sounds outside are “man devouring man my dear, and who are we to deny it in here?”

Todd almost kills his own daughter, who is disguised as a boy, finally kills the wicked Judge Turpin,  unknowingly kills his wife who is alive but insane, then throws Lovett into her own furnace when he discovers that she could have told him the truth. He once again kills for revenge, while Lovett dies not for her evil schemes but because she hoped to win his love. It is up to Toby, the innocent cannibal (he just loved Mrs Lovett’s pies), to slit Todd’s throat and thereby restore the social balance.

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Todd kills and dies because there are no legal recourses for injustice in Burton’s universe. Although he is a ruthless killer, the audience of the 2007 Todd is clearly invited to identify and sympathise with the anti-hero, much as we did the previous decade with Hannibal Lecter. Todd is a killer, but ordinary folks like us who jostle to get a table and eat one of Mrs Lovett’s delicious and very affordable pies are the real cannibals.

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Sweeney Todd received three Oscar nominations at the 80th Academy Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role for Depp, Best Achievement in Costume Design, and Best Achievement in Art Direction, which it won.

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