Having an old friend for dinner: cannibalism goes to the movies

Having an old friend for dinner:

cannibalism goes to the movies

Desmond Bellamy

Student ID 21796403

Thesis submitted to fulfil the requirements of B. Media (Hons) Southern Cross University

October, 2014

Having an old friend for dinner: cannibalism goes to the movies

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Abstract

What (or whom) would you be willing to eat? This thesis examines human

cannibalism in the movies: is it gratuitous and included for shock value, or

does it cast light onto our most profound cultural and moral assumptions and

taboos?

Eating humans is shocking and abject because of our assumed, largely

unexamined, Cartesian and humanist beliefs that we are ontologically non-

animal. I examine, in a selection of English-language feature films, different

iterations of cannibalism: survivalism (necessitated by catastrophe or dystopian

social collapse), the primitive savage of colonial discourses, the inhuman

psychopath and the opportunist.

Cannibalism points to the need to limit voraciousness of appetite in a world

reaching environmental resource saturation. I argue that the abjection

experienced by viewers comes from abhorrence of the objectification of

humans, and that the cannibal film unconsciously aids in deconstructing the

human/animal binary, thus recognising the damage done to the environment,

our fellow creatures and each other through the use of the rhetoric of animality.


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Acknowledgements

I would particularly like to acknowledge my Supervisor, Dr Lisa Milner, who

brought both enthusiasm and solid academic common sense to the task of

putting boundaries around the parameters of this thesis. My passion for most of

the films considered, as well as my fascination with the cultural concepts upon

which they shed light, tended to lead to a certain prolixity, and Lisa’s firm but

encouraging support allowed me to channel this sometimes raging flood of

words and ideas.

Many other academics at Southern Cross University have also played a crucial

role in my work, particularly Grayson Cooke, Rob Garbutt, Jim Hearn,

Andrew Jones and Anne Schillmoller, all of whom have helped me

enormously in navigating the shoals of cultural and film studies.

Special thanks must go to the Librarians of the SCU libraries who have

tirelessly and relentlessly tracked down some very odd and often rather

obscure references for me, as well as walking me through the vagaries of

EndNote more than once.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, particularly Nella for her patience as I

disappeared into dark corners of the house to type or watch ‘slasher’ films, and

for the time she and my children generously took from their own busy lives to

review, edit and comment on my thesis.

Cover image from The silence of the lambs (Demme 1991)


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Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction ..................................................................... 6

Chapter 2: Concept review .............................................................. 14

2a. Cannibalism ............................................................................ 14

2b. Reification ............................................................................... 19

2c. Alterity ..................................................................................... 21

2d. Abjection ................................................................................. 25

2e. Film studies .............................................................................. 27

Chapter 3: Iterations of cannibalism .............................................. 31

3a. Survivalism .............................................................................. 31

Alive (Marshall 1993)........................................................................... 32

Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973) ............................................................ 35

3b. The savage ............................................................................... 39

Robinson Crusoe (Buñuel 1954) .......................................................... 40

The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover (Greenaway 1989) ............ 44

3c. The inhuman ........................................................................... 48

The Texas chain saw massacre (Hooper 1974).................................... 49

The silence of the lambs (Demme 1991) .............................................. 53

3d. The entrepreneur .................................................................... 59

Sweeney Todd: the demon barber of Fleet Street (King 1936) ............ 60

Sweeney Todd: the demon barber of Fleet Street (Burton 2007) ......... 61

Chapter 4: Results and discussion .................................................. 64

Chapter 5: Conclusion ...................................................................... 69

References .......................................................................................... 71

Filmography ...................................................................................... 79

Appendix: Films considered ............................................................ 81


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Chapter 1: Introduction

In 1985, Australian academic Val Plumwood was attacked and almost killed

by a saltwater crocodile in Kakadu National Park. In her paper Being prey

(1995), she described the loss of her narrative of self as she caught a glimpse

of an indifferent world in which, to her incredulity, she found herself “just

food” (1995, p. 7). The thought of humans, the masters and predators of nature,

being suddenly transformed into prey is, she thought, at the base of horror

movies and stories and reflects a "deep-seated dread of becoming food for

other forms of life" (1995, p. 6). How much greater is this dread, then, at the

prospect of becoming food to, being incorporated by, other humans?

This thesis asks the question: is the use of human cannibalism in films

gratuitous and included merely for shock value, or does it cast light onto our

most profound cultural and social assumptions and taboos? The title of the

thesis, “Having an old friend for dinner”, is taken from a double entendre in the

final scene of the film The silence of the lambs (Demme 1991) in which the

newly escaped “pure psychopath” cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, is planning to kill

and eat his former jailer. Cannibalism is a confronting issue and critical

responses to it vary, from humour, particularly double entendres, through to

horror and abjection. At one end of the spectrum of films that feature humans

eating humans are so-called ‘slasher’ pictures, often accused of being

exploitative and offering voyeuristic thrills to those inclined to vicarious

violence; at the other are films that use the concept of cannibalism to offer

insight into social and cultural issues such as colonialism, modes of

consumption and marginalisation of political or social ‘others’. Even at the

‘slasher’ end, however, it is clear that the continuing popularity of cannibalism

indicates that there are deeper social, cultural and psychological issues that

maintain that shock value, at a time when so many other taboos have lost their

power to affront.

Cannibalism was cited historically to support colonialist policies – the

“quintessential expression of savagery and evil” (Salisbury 2001) that justified

the civilising mission. The fear and fascination with cannibalism does not start


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with European colonialism of course: Konishi (2002, p. 72) traces it back to

Herodotus. Up until the eighteenth century, no Western historian seriously

doubted that it was common among the barbarians (Konishi 2002, p. 61).

However, in post-colonial societies, in which almost all the major films I

consider have been produced, the concept still has that power to shock:

cannibalism remains, on screen and elsewhere, “the epitome of monstrousness”

(Daniel 2003, p. 6). This thesis examines what maintains its power to outrage

and how the abject is expressed culturally – specifically through cinema.

I am using interdisciplinary methodologies of film and cultural studies to

review a selection of films that include scenes of cannibalism and to examine

the methods directors use to intensify or trivialise cannibalism: how it is used

for metaphoric or sometimes sensationalist purposes. A critical paradigm is

used, where dualisms and their power relations such as human/animal,

civilised/savage, sane/psychopathic are deconstructed and examined both

through the plots and production techniques of the selected films and the ways

in which they were received and interpreted. This critical paradigm seems

appropriate in that this thesis examines the way cannibal films challenge

existing social models of subjectivity, and postmodern theories facilitate the

ignoring or exploding of the boundaries between disciplines (Best & Kellner

1991, p. 256). I also briefly examine the increased interest in psychopathy as it

is reflected in the growing number of cannibal films over recent times. To

maintain a manageable scope, I will not consider documentaries about

cannibalism in times of war or siege, nor the plethora of films showing

cannibalism by the ‘undead’ such as zombies and vampires. Only English

language feature films are considered, and of the over one hundred such films

found (see Appendix), only eight will be analysed in any depth.

This thesis focuses on various ways in which humans become the subject of

their narrative by means of exclusion of all those considered non-human

(including, throughout history, many members of their own species).

Cannibalism draws its horror, I argue, from its transgression of this key binary

- humans eat non-humans, never other humans; the inside incorporates the

outside, never itself. Derrida (1981, p. 103) says that the binary opposition of


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inside to outside is the “matrix” of all oppositions and Kilgour (1990), who

wrote the definitive work on cannibalism as a metaphor of incorporation,

points out that the inside/outside division relies on a delicate balance in which

the absolute division between the two is dissolved as the dominant inside

incorporates the outside to resolve the tension (1990, p. 2). Deborah Bird Rose,

in her book on anthropogenic mass extinctions Wild dog dreaming (2011, p.

21), states that Western philosophy is dedicated to finding ways to avoid

noticing the death of animals, and that this may be central to human identity.

Cannibalism, then, brings attention to the death of humans as animals, the

deliberate disregard of which seems crucial to our very identities.

Cannibalism is the most extreme form of incorporation, which itself is a

concept basic to power relations. History is full of entities (tribes, nations,

classes, sometimes even individuals) incorporating rivals into themselves.

Economics busies itself with ways of encouraging consumers to incorporate

more products made by corporations which, meanwhile, jockey to incorporate

each other into ever larger entities. Culturally, incorporation is most often

associated with the universal activity of eating. The theologian William Ralph

Inge (1926) suggests that nature is “a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the

active and the passive” (1926, p. 56) so eating, and its resulting effects

(defecating, vomiting, flatulence, belching) are often uncomfortable reminders

of our lineage to nature, our ‘animality’.

My motivation for pursuing this subject is my desire to understand and then

problematise what Calarco (2013) calls the “metaphysical anthropocentrism”

(2013, p. 6) which defines humans as ontologically non-animal, puts humanity

at the peak of the food chain and leaves all other creatures (including those

humans stripped of their humanity) as potential prey. The deconstruction of

this human/animal duality, from Descartes through to the "biological

continuists" (Oliver 2009, p. 8) of the animal rights movements is a topic far

larger than can be adequately covered in this thesis, but certain theoretical

discourses that are used in creating this lacuna and the way these often related

discourses are developed in, and relevant to, the films being examined will be

considered, particularly alterity, reification and abjection.


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It is an empirical fact that we are made of meat, and the “rhetoric of

animality”, as Calarco (cited in Caffo 2013, p.3) calls it, has been used

extensively to disempower and marginalise not only other species but other

humans throughout history. To maintain our subjective narrative, and our

hierarchical position, we find ways to deny this animality, from the Bible's

"made in the image of God" to Heidegger's concept of "dasein" (cited in

Derrida 1974, p.266). Human dasein forms world, exists, eats, dies, whereas

animals are “poor in world” and live, feed and perish. Yet the depiction in

cannibal films of humans as meat, together with increasing scientific

realisation that many animals appear quite rich in world formation (Calarco

2013, p. 27), seem to promote a transgressive reinterpretation of this basic

dualism of Western philosophy.

The realisation of our animality through the experience of excreting, dying,

decaying and so on, our very materiality, gives rise to abjection, considered at

depth by Julia Kristeva in her Powers of horror: an essay on abjection (1982).

Abjection in a darkened cinema fills us with revulsion that makes us cover our

eyes, and at the same time with a morbid fascination, a transgressive joy,

Kristeva's “jouissance” (1982, p.9), which keeps us peeking through our

fingers. Abjection is thus central to all horror stories and particularly to the

films I consider here, but its ambivalence is considered in this paper mainly

through the conflicting receptions of the character of Hannibal Lecter in The

silence of the lambs (Demme 1991) and the debate over whether to eat the

dead crew and passengers in Alive (Marshall 1993).

As Carol Adams indicates (2003, pp. 12-13), consuming other beings is central

to our culture: it is what subjects do to objects. One of the major observations

from the films considered is that in each case of cannibalism, in varying ways,

the victims had to be objectified: changed from someone to something.

Reification is the process in which humans are turned into objects and objects

treated as human, whether applied collectively or individually. Coming from

Marxism, reification relates to many fields of social theory. Reification of

humans occurs in many forms including slavery, genocide, confinement and

abuse, but in this thesis I set out to examine how reification, this treatment of


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humans as ‘animals’ or meat, is culturally inculcated in the selected films and

the different iterations of cannibalism therein. Again, this concept is present in

every film considered, but is best seen in the two versions, made seventy years

apart, of Sweeney Todd by George King (1936) and Tim Burton (2007).

The third discourse that supports cannibalism in these films is alterity, a term

coined by Levinas (1999) which describes the way identity is formed in

contrast and often in opposition to another entity. While reification turns others

into objects, alterity divides groups into those who are normatively human, in

Butler's words, “grievable” (2006, p. 20), and those who are ‘other’ and can be

ignored, conquered or eaten. Within this category I pursue the debate about the

way humanity is produced negatively by its opposition to animality, through

what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine” (2004, p. 37). While I will

not be delving into the ethical distinctions that arise from this division, the fact

that eating one mammal, Homo sapiens, is the stuff of horror while eating

others is unremarkable is central to the question of taboos and normative social

behaviour that this thesis examines. The traditional colonial trope is the alterity

of the civilised versus the savage, presented, with some irony, in Luis Buñuel's

Robinson Crusoe (1954) in which the white man defends his island from the

"men-eaters", to whose lands he had been headed on a slaving expedition when

shipwrecked. Peter Greenaway's The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover

(1989) is a fascinating and subversive journey into assumed social hierarchies

and their expression in customs of what, how and whom we consume.

A related concept is Durkheim's theory of anomie (1951, p.254): the

breakdown of normative values and relations, usually resulting from economic

dislocation. Anomie plays an important role in several cannibal films,

particularly those in which social order has disintegrated. Anomie in cannibal

films is usually generated through natural or man-made disaster, but is also

very much a metaphor for the loss of identity and community caused by social

change and economic disadvantage. This can lead to the act of cannibalism on

an individual or socio/political level; examples of each are taken from The

Texas chain saw massacre (Hooper 1974), and Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973),

films in which civilisation has devolved to savagery.


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I have chosen to use the term ‘cannibalism’ in this paper rather than the “more

neutral, descriptive word anthropophagy” (Petrinovich 2000, p. 4). The main

reason is that ‘cannibalism’ is of course more widely recognised, while

‘anthropophagy’ is a somewhat obscure academic term often found in satirical

use, such as Arens’ Rethinking anthropophagy (1998, p. 39), which is a play

on the title of his critic Edmund Leach's Rethinking anthropology (1961).

Moreover, neither term is sufficient for the description of humans eating

humans. ‘Anthropophagy’ etymologically just means eating humans, which

could apply equally to Plumwood's crocodile as to Hannibal Lecter.

‘'Cannibalism’, on the other hand, draws its origins and becomes the “universal

signifier of anthropophagy” (Bartolovich 1998, p. 207) from Columbus’

credulous acceptance of the information given to him by the Arawak people

who described their “bold” neighbours the Caribs as dog-like men who ate the

peaceful Arawaks (Konishi 2002, p. 72). From a corruption of ‘Carib’ came

both the names ‘Caribbean’ and ‘cannibal’. Thus, although biologists will

often use ‘cannibal’ to describe the habits of intraspecific predation among

other species, the term derives from a colonial trope that referred specifically

to humans eating humans, and so will be used in this paper as a useful

abbreviation of "human intraspecific predation". The emotional baggage

carried by the word cannibalism is precisely what I am exploring, adding some

further justification for its use.

Cannibalism is a polysemic term, open to different interpretations even in the

same context, sometimes by the one reader. Repulsive yet fascinating, abject

yet regularly treated with humour, I have attempted to categorise it (with much

overlap) into several iterations, based on the impetus for the act. How do

humans make a choice to eat others of their own species, what conditions do

they insist on (such as the way the victim has met his or her death) and how do

they overcome the taboos associated with it? The films considered fall into an

interpretive cycle that is defined by the motivation and pleasure of both the

cannibal and the audience, as no act of cannibalism on film is produced

without an eye for its commercial reception. The cycle of categories begins

with simple survival: the need for humans to eat other humans where some

catastrophe has left no alternative. Alive (Marshall 1993), the story of the


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Uruguayan football team stranded on the Andes by a plane crash, is typical of

this stream.

The anthropological version of survivalism is the colonial image of the savage,

unaware of 'civilised' taboos, and drawing protein (and often psychic

nourishment) from defeated enemies or deceased friends. Robinson Crusoe

(Buñuel 1954) tells the story of a Western man confronted by such ‘benighted’

savages. Brought home, the savagery of consumerism culminates in

cannibalism in Greenaway’s The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover (1989).

Both survival and savagery stories are usually presented as unfortunate,

morally deplorable, yet at least partially understandable. These two categories

merge into the genre of dystopian scenarios, which speculate that the collapse

of, or withdrawal from, civilisation will throw humans back into savagery and

the need to forage for any food available, including the protein of their own

species. Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973) is an example, made more affective in

that, while we do not commonly expect to be stranded in a wilderness or

abandoned among primitive tribes, we are regularly presented with visions of

social collapse through environmental or political disasters, a fear that is

magnified by distrust of those who govern us and could well turn on us.

Survivalists inhabit extreme landscapes and savages remote ones, while

dystopian scenarios are commonly set in the future. In familiar environments

in our own time, we are likely to find the ‘inhuman’: the cannibal at the heart

of civilisation and, most alarmingly, at the heart of each of us. When rules of

civilisation recede and leaves humans at each other's mercies, we find

inhumans like Leatherface in The Texas chain saw massacre (Hooper 1974), a

dystopia set in the present in a socially degenerate backwater into which any of

us could unintentionally stumble. Perhaps the most frightening inhuman,

though, is the cannibal at the heart of where we live. The quintessential figure

here is Hannibal Lecter in a series of films that began with The silence of the

lambs (Demme 1991): powerful, brilliant, immensely strong and psychopathic.

We fear he may be the charming man next door; we fear he may be our

shadow. The motivations of such psychopaths are complex and often involve

convoluted psychological explanations. Clutching at straws of plausibility, the


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monster is sometimes excused (and the story often devalued) by a back-story

of abuse and a subsequent thirst for revenge.

The final iteration that I explore is cannibalism for purely commercial motives.

Sociopathic in that they are held back by no pangs of conscience, the

entrepreneurs in such films seek to profit by their use of the flesh of their

neighbours. The example chosen here is the myth of Sweeney Todd, and I look

at two filmic versions, separated by some seventy years in their production, for

a clue to the shifting cultural expectations and reception of the concept of

entrepreneurial cannibalism. I also briefly consider a groundbreaking early

‘slasher’ film, Blood Feast (Lewis 1963), in which the enterprising murderer is

collecting female body parts to cater a feast in honour of an Egyptian goddess.

Thus we come a full circle: survival in extremis, cannibalism in benighted

savagery, psychopathy of those who reject social mores, and finally

cannibalism as trade. For what is cannibalism for profit but a form of financial

survivalism? This cycle of iterations traces the wheel of human history from

scarcity to early hunter and warrior culture through the ructions of social and

cultural coexistence to the contradictions of modern capitalist society

(Bartolovich, 1998) - the reconciliation of appetite with apparent limits to

growth. The common factor to each iteration is cannibalism’s ability to

problematise unexamined tropes of subjectivity and human singularity and

challenge the dualism that allows us to objectify ‘the other’ - be they human or

other species. In a culture of crisis, where environmental, social and economic

problems threaten to overwhelm us, we are presented with scenarios where our

foundational and hierarchical dualisms of human/animal, man/woman and

culture/nature, what Derrida named “carnophallogocentrism” (1974, p. 280),

no longer serve us.


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Chapter 2: Concept review

2a. Cannibalism

In this chapter, I examine some of the ways in which cannibalism is explained,

justified or rationalised within the films I consider. This literature review is

presented as a context review (Neuman 2006, pp. 111-2) of writings about

cannibalism in film and generally, and the key social and cultural concepts that

may help explain its cultural responses. It is not a comprehensive review of the

current research on my topic, since most texts about cannibalism are not

concerned specifically with film, but rather with philosophical issues in

historical or fictional texts. Instead, it is a “conceptual literature” review

(Walliman 2011, p. 34). Film is an important part of modern mythologising,

particularly since it is normally received in company as opposed to the solitary

reception of the book.

Most films involving cannibalism are of the horror genre, which is considered

the “mass-cultural heir” of Greek tragedy (Wolfe 2003, p. 116), a genre that

explored the disruption of social orders, particularly the role of revenge. I will

not be surveying Greek tragedy here, except to point out that many characters

such as Tantalus, Atreus, Procne and the cyclops Polyphemus all involved in

ate human flesh (Gill n.d.), whilst Uranos, king of the gods, actually ate his

children.

To understand the continuing cultural impact of the cannibalistic act, I have

sought out writings on cultural studies and social science concepts that relate to

the way identity is defined and challenged by the act of consumption. The most

important of these is Kristeva’s notion of abjection, together with issues of

alterity and reification, which address the ways individuals or groups are

divided into subject or object and thereby rejected, blamed or abjected. The

path from the dominant paradigm of anthropocentrism, singularity and the

often semi-divine status of humans, which dates back to the Bible and

Aristotle, through to Hannibal Lecter eating a census taker’s “liver with fava

beans and a nice Chianti” (Demme 1991) requires considerable and circuitous


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redefinitions of social norms. Murder of humans is still a sensationalist trope

within all forms of entertainment including news bulletins; cannibalism raises

it to another level. The films considered all present this pathway in different

varieties, some justified through anomie, revenge, greed or necessity, others as

psychopathy, but in every case a social being goes from subject to victim to

object, from citizen to corpse to carcass. To get there, the victims in these films

are first excluded from kinship through alterity, then stripped of humanity or

personality through reification before finally being slaughtered (or scavenged)

and incorporated. In every case, the act of cannibalism, if it is to be presented

as entertainment, must elicit the maximum abjection, to quicken the pulse of an

increasingly jaded audience. In order to gain the commercial value of being

shocking, it must rattle the cage of all we have assumed about being human,

and being ontologically non-animal.

Freud in Totem and Taboo (1998) speculates on the origins of the taboo of

cannibalism in Darwin’s “primal hordes” and the act of rebellion against the

incest taboo by killing and eating the father (1998, p. 122). Cannibalism

therefore seems inextricably bound up with incest guilt. Fear, of course, is also

an indispensable accompaniment to the meal: Minaz Jooma (2001, p. 73)

asserts that cannibalism “represents the complete loss of ontological being” –

when assimilated totally into an alien body.

The fascination with cannibalism dates to the earliest texts (Ullyatt 2012, p. 7),

well before the birth of Western colonialism or the motion picture. The origin

of the term in Columbus’ imperialist incursions and its subsequent use to

isolate the savages and stifle debate (much like the use of the word ‘terrorism’

today) makes the incorporation of human flesh a crucial part of the study of

colonialism. Much of the colonial certainty about the predilection for human

flesh among the peoples newly contacted on voyages of discovery were based

on circumstantial evidence of human bones, supported by poor or non-existent

language skills, an elitist European disdain for the local cuisine, and a

desperate desire to find cannibalism where perhaps none existed (Konishi

2002, p. 65).


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The seminal work on cannibalism in literature is Kilgour’s From communion

to cannibalism (1990), which sets out to “do for cannibalism what Freud did

for incest” (1990, p. ix), although she extends her scope to the wider concept

of “incorporation”. Kilgour gives a detailed exposition of cannibal literature

from Classical to modern times in literature as well as examining a few films,

and makes valuable observations on post-structuralist problematising of

absolute dualisms and the resulting break down of the inside/outside tension.

Kilgour (1990, p. 4) links Derrida’s statement that the inside/outside binary is

“the matrix of all possible opposition” (Derrida 1981, p. 103) with Freud’s

assertion (2008, p.219) that the inside/outside binary emerges from the oldest,

oral phase of development when the infant wishes to “take in” anything “good”

and exclude anything “bad”. Anything outside, alien to the ego, is bad, from

the infant’s viewpoint.

Kilgour reviews the concept of cannibalism as an extreme metaphor of

incorporation, extending the exclusion of the outside to its incorporation: the

taking of the other into self. She places this problematic binary in the context

of post-structural deconstructions of all absolute antitheses (Kilgour 1990, p.3)

and points out that the binaries that have come under critical examination such

as production/consumption, cooked/raw, spirit/flesh, and male/female are

never equal but always hierarchical with one side stronger or more favoured

than the other, and dependent for their coherence on the superior term’s

control. Incorporation into an idealised unity is the ultimate aim of such

control, as the stronger destroys and subsumes the weaker, but at the same time

this dissolves the binary by incorporating the inferior into the superior. The

perfect, immortal human would have no relationship whatsoever with any

outside entities according to Derrida (1981, p.101) but that defies the

structuralist position that meaning derives from difference (Kilgour 1990, p.3),

as well as the simple fact that such a perfect individual would starve, as eating

is quintessentially the incorporation of the other into self. Eating is also one of

the most basic of physical needs and the one most closely controlled by social

norms. The absolute hierarchical distinction between the inside (eater) and

outside (food) immediately breaks down on incorporation: the adage “you are


17

what you eat” confounds all such distinctions and challenges identity based on

exclusion (Kilgour 1990, p.7).

Kilgour updated and summarised her findings in The function of cannibalism

at the present time in the anthology Cannibalism and the colonial world

(1998), in which she argues that the rituals of cannibalism were originally a

form of sublimation of ferocious hungers, but, in modern society, its function

is to demystify culture and expose the darkness under the myths of civilisation

(1998, p. 259). This is a mirror image of the concept’s colonial past: “Where in

the past the figure of the cannibal has been used to construct differences that

uphold racism, it now appears in projects to deconstruct them” (1998, p. 242).

I am ‘incorporating’ Kilgour’s insight, but applying it to fields beyond racism

in that cannibalism sheds light not just on human conflict but also the

anthropocentric assumptions behind the exploitation and incorporation of non-

human animals. In the same anthology, Bartolovich (1998, p. 205) asserts that

cannibalism is a complex sign that can either signify resistance to cannibalism,

for example Eat the rich (Richardson 1987), or conflate cannibalism with

capitalist exploitation. In every case, the concept relies on the disgust of the

audience for its impact.

Kilgour expounds her theories of cannibalism through an analysis of

psychoanalytic and feminist critiques thereof. While these are both vast topics

in themselves, in this thesis I can only briefly consider the fact that women are

almost never the murderers in the films considered, seldom the eaters (except

in the cases of ‘innocent’ cannibalism) and rarely, except in the most extreme

‘slashers’, the victims. Moreover, when women are victims, they are not

butchered cleanly like men but must go through an ordeal, as if to ‘earn’

reification. In Texas chain saw massacre (Hooper 1974), the young men are

killed quickly with a sledgehammer (like cattle) or a chain saw. The women,

conversely, suffer penetration by meat-hooks, confinement in freezers and

beatings. Melanie Klein (1997, p. 30) speaks of the human infant’s fear of

being consumed, which arises out of its reaction during the oral phase against

the breast, the first source of nutrition but also the first symbol of externality.

The mother therefore represents the source of nutrition and also the


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unconscious source of fear, the fear of being eaten, the fear that so thrills

audiences of cannibal films. Lestringant (1997) notes that one of the main

narratives of ‘savage’ cannibalism, Robinson Crusoe, shows a man terrified of

being consumed - by the sea during the shipwreck, by wild animals when he

struggles ashore, and by cannibals when they disturb his solipsistic existence

(1997, p. 142).

Hannibal Lecter refuses to eat Clarice Starling - “he would consider that rude”

(Demme 1991). There is a complex dialectic here: while it is “rude” to eat

women, when it occurs it is usually after brutal, punitive abuse. Adams (2003)

concludes that women are “blamed” for death, mythologically brought to

humanity by Eve or Pandora (2003, p. 123). Cannibalised women cannot be

reified until they have been condemned and punished. While this topic

deserves a study of its own, I will look briefly at the role of women in each of

the films considered, except Robinson Crusoe, where the humans are entirely

male, simplifying at least that dialectic.

Crystal Bartolovich (1998) considers a number of films, particularly Peter

Greenaway’s The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover (1989), as examples of

allegories of late capitalism. This is a complex analysis, as cannibalism can

indicate resistance to capitalism or conflate the two concepts as metaphor.

Consumerism is brought into its sharpest focus through cannibalism, the

ultimate incorporation, in which we consume ourselves. Bartolovich (1998, pp.

214-5) points out that capitalism is not a form of cannibalism but rather

parasitism, and that the “absolute consumption” of the cannibal is quite

different to capitalist accumulation. Cannibalism can of course represent

consumption without limits, yet Bartolovich, like many writers on the subject,

approvingly quotes Montaigne’s sixteenth century essay Of cannibals which

urged cross-cultural understanding with his insistence that European acts of

“eating men alive” (through slavery, exploitation and torture) are far worse

than the demonisation of cannibals eating the (usually) dead (cited in

Bartolovich 1998, p. 214). Probyn observes that cannibalism can represent

restraint in that there are no theoretical limits: he could eat incessantly, but

chooses not to: “He is an omnivore with a sense of occasion” (2000, p. 81).


19

Furthermore, his audacity fascinates us precisely because everything we

normally consume has become “stultifyingly homogenous” (2000, p. 82).

Cannibalism illustrates a contradiction inherent in capitalism: the voracious

appetite which is at the heart of the expansive drive of domestic and colonialist

capitalism must finally be tempered by the limits to growth – workers must

subsist at home and colonies not be totally stripped and populations left to

starve. This dividing line between controlled and “voracious appetite”

(Bartolovich 1998, p. 224) is exemplified by the concept of cannibalism, which

in its early days was seen as a threat to production necessitating the governor

on his gunboat, but later became illustrative of the dangers of overconsumption

and the need to maintain civilised limits if accumulation is to continue (1998,

p. 225). This crisis of appetite versus limits is manifested in a preoccupation

with cannibalism - a “morbid symptom of capitalist appetite in crisis” (1998, p.

234). Modern consumerism and its threats to social cohesion and

environmental stability creates more appetite than it can satisfy: the cannibal is

a conceptual tool used to contemplate the “new and uncertain relation of men

to commodities” (1998, p. 236). It also brings into sharp focus the “violent

imposition of the buyer/seller paradigm” (Gilbert 2008, p. 562). The relation of

humans and commodities, and the confusion of the two, leads us to consider

the concept of reification.

2b. Reification

Sarah Palin famously (if not very originally) asked in her memoir Going rogue

(2009, p. 133) why, if God did not want us to eat animals, he had “made them

out of meat?”. My paper extends her question to humans, who are, of course,

also made out of meat, as is made abundantly clear in the films considered.

The gap between ‘person’ and ‘meat’, between a living personality or a slice of

protein, is conceptually vast, and can only be bridged through the process of

reification.

Reification is defined by Axel Honneth in Reification: a new look at an old

idea (2008) as “a type of human behaviour that violates moral or ethical

principles by not treating other subjects in accordance with their characteristics


20

as human beings, but instead as numb and lifeless objects – as “things” or

“commodities” (2008, p. 19). An important concept in Marxist theory, Lukács

reinforced Marx’s definition “that a relation between people has taken on the

character of a thing” (cited in Honneth 2008, p. 21). While this concept raises a

multitude of epistemological questions, in the context of this project it is

sufficient to note that the reification of human flesh, dead or alive, is a

precondition for many acts that would normally be considered abject or

inhuman. Humans can of course be reified and ‘cannibalised’ without actually

meeting another’s alimentary canal: Cooke (2007) highlights that body

snatching, which has been around for centuries, has been modernised into the

trade in human organs, whether from the living or dead, donated or

appropriated.

Carol Adams in The pornography of meat (2003) calls this strategy of turning

someone into something by the clearer if clumsy term “thingification” (2003,

pp. 22-23). This process requires an “absent referent” which keeps the

commodity, for example ‘meat’, separate from the butchered cow (or abused

woman, in her example). Physical oppression works with the use of metaphor

and euphemism to distance the subject from the object by equating him or her

with something that has already been objectified (Adams 2010, p 69). This

metaphorical usage is problematic as it accepts the absence of the referent: to

refer to a victim as ‘a piece of meat’ objectifies the animal, just as referring to

a person as a ‘pig’ is intended to objectify (dehumanise) that person. Val

Plumwood (1993, pp. 41-68) discusses these dualisms in depth. Reification

requires not just a redefinition of the proposed victim, of whatever species, but

an active acquiescence in forgetting that the victim ever was anything more

than meat. Horkheimer and Adorno (2002, p.191) state that “the perennial

dominion over nature... derives its strength from such blindness.... All

reification is forgetting”.

Crucial to an understanding of the cannibal film is an unpacking of what

Lefebvre (2005, p. 60) describes as a “rotten heart” at the centre of civilisation:

the place where “anomie and reification have come to replace psychosis”. The

example I will use to illustrate reification in this thesis is the legend of


21

Sweeney Todd, the barber who killed his customers and deposits them through

a trapdoor for his neighbour, Mrs Lovett, to turn into meat pies for her bakery

shop. This is a complete picture of reification: the customer becomes a corpse

and then a commodity. I will look at two versions of this story filmed seventy

years apart: the George King (1936) tale of a man who is motivated by greed

and lust, and Tim Burton’s remake of the Sondheim musical (2007) in which

Todd is a tortured victim of injustice seeking revenge.

A cursory glance at these would indicate that reification must be more

adequately explained (if not justified) in modern times, whereas pure evil was

sufficient motivation in the earlier part of last century. Contrary to this view,

however, the most successful Hannibal Lecter films The silence of the lambs

(Demme 1991) and Hannibal (Scott 2001) offered little explication of Lecter’s

murderous activities, whereas the prequel Hannibal rising (Webber, 2008) was

widely disparaged, partly for trying to offer an explanation for Lecter’s

psychopathy. Reification is also evident in all the cannibal films in various

ways, and will be a crucial concept in an examination of the debate over eating

the deceased crew and passengers on board the wreck of the Uruguayan plane

in Alive (Marshall 1993). The Texas chain saw massacre (Hooper 1974) offers

a glimpse of a clearly psychopathic family of cannibals, but locates them as

former abattoir workers who have simply replaced their lost employment -

reifying animals into barbecue products - by doing the same to passing tourists.

The cannibal must convert the grievable to the edible: to meat. Only the mythic

savage or the psychopath sees clearly who he is eating. To reify ‘the other’

requires a previous step: the estrangement of another being. This is achieved

through alterity.

2c. Alterity

Alterity, the creation of ‘otherness’ and the definition of the subject in

opposition to that ‘other’ object (Parkinson & Drislane n.d.), is a prerequisite

of any adversarial relationship. Originally coined by Levinas in Alterity and

transcendence (1999), it phenomenologically defines the way in which identity

is formed in contrast to another entity. Derrida states that all binary oppositions


22

(such as good/bad, true false, inside/outside) rely on each term being external

to the other (1981, p. 103). In terms of my thesis, I find very apposite Butler’s

(2011) denial of claims that human subjects are simply created: “The

construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more or

less human, the inhuman and the humanly unthinkable” (2011, p. xvii). Butler

also speaks to the ontological status of humans or the “normatively human” in

her study of the precarious or “grievable” life (2006, p. 20).

Much of my thinking on this subject comes from consideration of the question

of the human/animal divide. Calarco’s Zoographies (2013) is subtitled “the

question of the animal from Heidegger to Derrida” and examines how

Continental philosophy has largely drawn back from challenging

anthropocentrism. Calarco and Atterton (2004) have edited a selection of the

major philosophical writings on the human/animal divide with commentaries.

This concept seems to me crucial in understanding both the rationalisations of

the cannibal, who can dehumanise and objectify others so as to see his fellow

as meat, and the audience, who see their own revulsion as a proof of the

inhumanity of the transgressor. Human versus animal is one of the key

dualities in most human cultures. Heidegger spoke of an “abyss” which divides

the human from the animal (cited in Calarco 2013, p. 37). Derrida mocks the

concatenation of millions of absolutely diverse species into one term: “the

animal, what a word!!” (2004, p. 118). He substitutes the word “animot” to

remind us of the incongruity of gathering all animals into one dualistic

opponent to humanity. There is no “animal in the general singular”: this is a

term that men have given themselves “in order to identify themselves” (2004,

p. 125). We typically consider animals as potential food, while humans are

exempt. Yet, just as we normally distinguish between animals that can be eaten

and those that should not (for example companion animals in many cultures),

there are also distinctions that allow objectification of certain humans under

certain conditions; these humans are sometimes described as ‘dehumanised’

and can even, in certain circumstances, then be eaten.

Many companion animals are, in Butler’s terms, grievable, and the disgust

occasioned at the idea of eating them is considered by some just as extreme as


23

cannibalism, raising interesting questions about the ontology of animality. The

term “animality” is used by Bataille (2004) to equate with immediacy or

immanence: this “immanence” creates a continuity that makes differences

between the eater and the eaten indiscernible. Humanity is defined by the

denial of our animality, from which we are now totally closed off. On the other

hand, Freud speaks of the absence in children of the “sharp dividing line”

between human and animal and their propensity to ascribe animals full

equality (1998, p. 109). This human/animal alterity, and the ethical debate

which haunts the subject but can only be glanced at here, is well summarised

in Calarco’s Zoographies (2013) and Dombrowski’s Babies and beasts (1997).

In the cinema, the concept of alterity was as clear as black and white when I

was a child. In Westerns, the white and black hats were a uniform of good

versus evil; in stories of colonialism the same dualism often referenced skin

colour. One key basis of colonialist ideology was the belief that the white man

was better, more civilised, able (indeed obliged) to help the benighted savages,

and above all, different. Kilgour (1998, p. 239) remarks that eating, the most

basic human need and the most complex cultural symbol, is constantly used to

define differences: personally, nationally and even sexually. Cannibalism is

seen as perverse eating, she adds, and so justifies attack on the offender, and

destruction or at least assimilation. In this sense, the gunboats and the

missionaries shared the same goal, if different tools. Alterity sheds light on the

way others have been historically, and are still, dismissed as inferior to the

dominant subjects. Cannibalism defies this alterity, which gives sense and

boundaries to our ethical norms by defining exclusions; it fills us with the

dread of eating what Guest calls “others like ourselves” (2001, p. 3).

All iterations of cannibalism in the films I examine rely on the ‘othering’ of the

victim by the cannibal, and, in turn, of the cannibal by ‘civilised’ society. Just

as the survivors of the plane crash on the Andes in Alive (Marshall 1993) had

to see the corpses no longer as their friends but now as “just meat”, so they

must also decide whom to eat among a new and abject set of ‘us and them’

choices. Nando, the instigator of the debate about cannibalism, is the last to


24

eat: he wants to be assured the flesh he is offered did not come from the body

of his sister.

Agamben (2004) analyses the ways humans separate themselves,

ontologically, scientifically and politically, from non-human animals. He

describes this process of dehumanisation as an “anthropological machine”, in

which “man” (human) is produced through the opposition man/animal, a

constant state of exception in which the inside is determined by the exclusion

of the outside and vice versa (2004, p. 37). He further describes this

anthropological machine, the workings of which are apparent if not always

visible in each of the films to be considered, as changing in modern times. The

earlier model worked to exclude the outside by humanising the animal: the

man-ape, the wild-man, the slave, the barbarian - these were all produced to

show the limits of humanity. Beyond these subhumans was the realm of the

civilised, the human, the (male) man. In modern times, the machine has

worked in the opposite way - the human has been animalised or separated

within the human body - “the Jew... or the neomort or the overcomatose...”

(2004, p. 37). Instead of producing animals who are close to human, and

therefore determine the boundaries of humanness, the machine now degrades

humans into inhumans. In Homo Sacer (1998), Agamben examines the way

humans can be excluded from social life, brutalised and redefined as inhuman.

Probyn (2000, p. 88) extends Agamben’s argument to the cannibal: he cannot

be included in the polis, yet it is his exclusion that defines humanity.

To question the gap between animals and humans is to invite ridicule (Calarco

2013, p. 30), yet this seems to be exactly what the portrayal of humans as

mortal flesh, edible commodities, does. This challenge to human/animal

dualism seems to me crucial in understanding the affectiveness of cannibal

films. Ridicule and humour are a common response to cannibalism, but more

often the act is shown as horror: the death of the victim far less so than the

subsequent incorporation, which powerfully reminds us of our materiality and

is therefore disturbing and abject.


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2d. Abjection

Abjection is the most appropriate term for the horror mixed with fascination

that seems evident in the reception of successful movies about cannibalism.

Many genres show graphic scenes of violent death, escalating as CGI

technology improves, but cannibalism offers a deeper fascination: we can

suffer, we can die, but we can also be food, mere meat, and totally disappear as

we are incorporated.

The key text in my consideration of abjection is Julia Kristeva’s Powers of

horror (1982). Calarco (2013, p. 15) considers that this work is, in many ways,

an updating of Sigmund Freud’s Totem and taboo (1998), looking into the

primal beliefs that form the foundations for many social agreements, but are

rarely examined for justification or rationality. In Kristeva, Freud’s theory of

the “uncanny” becomes “abject” (Calarco 2013, p. 10). Central to the study of

cannibalism are the figures of abjection – loathing, disgust, rejection, caused

by the breakdown of the distinction between subject and object. Kristeva’s

work on abjection has caused much controversy since its release in French in

1980; considered less arcane than her earlier works, it nonetheless remains a

dense and somewhat abstract read, but the concept it covers is crucial for a

consideration of horror and disgust. Abjection refers to the horror (represented

by spasms or vomit) that is caused by the confusion of identities and the

collapse of meaning (1982, p. 2). Food loathing is “the most elementary and

most archaic form of abjection” (1982, p. 2) even though somewhat subjective:

one example is Kristeva’s tendency to “gag” on seeing or touching the skin on

the surface of milk (1982, pp. 2-3). The primary example of abjection, though,

is the corpse, which is “the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life”

(1982, p. 4). Abjection comes not from the corpse or a lack of cleanliness but

from the representations of those things: the disturbance of identity, the fact

that they do not “respect borders, positions, rules” (1982, p. 4). The taboos of

each culture (and she points to wide variations) exist to shield social order

from “animalism”, seen even in primitive societies as representing sex and

murder (1982, pp. 12-13).


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Rachel Herz makes a similar point about abjection in her book That’s

disgusting (2012): that codes of eating “maintain a barrier between our

civilised humanity and the wildness of beasts” (2012, p. 14). Like Kristeva’s

emphasis on “death infecting life”, Herz sees meat as raising fears of our own

“livingness” (2012, p. 17); this motivates the packaging of food with as little

resemblance as possible to the animal from which it came.

Paradoxically, Kristeva finds that, although we do not desire abjection, it

nevertheless holds a fascination and even joy – what she calls, following Lacan

(Evans 1996, p. 93), “jouissance” (Kristeva 1982, p. 9). This simultaneous

“vortex of summons and repulsion” (1982, p. 1) is what we see in the faces of

the audience at a horror film: terror, disgust, repulsion, fascination: abjection.

The innumerable and profitable sequels to horror franchises are further

evidence of this fascination for what is repellent . In Freudian terms, Kristeva

sums up the confrontation between the objectification of the other that is so

basic to our identities with the stab of conscience that makes the behaviour

allowed by such objectification so foreign: “To each ego its object, to each

superego its abject” (1982, p. 2).

This repetitive attraction may be painful and violent, but offers a poetic

catharsis (1982, p. 29) that needs further deliberation in considering the

continuing fascination with cannibalism. Creed (2004, pp. 39-40) identifies at

least three ways in which the horror genre illustrates abjection: its use of abject

images (blood, sweat, corpses and so on), its crossing of borders in which the

monstrous challenges the symbolic order, and the use of the “abject maternal

figure”. The abject can be used to determine and reinforce the barriers of

humanity and civilised behaviour (Creed 2004, p. 36). Creed gives as an

example the crowds that flocked to the cinemas to see Silence of the lambs

(Demme 1991) and Hannibal (Scott 2001); the encounter and subsequent

rejection of the abject offers the viewer a renewed “sense of self and

civilisation” (2004, p.36). While this is undoubtedly correct, I am suggesting

that there is a dialectic at work in which experiencing the abject does not only

reinforce normative subjectivity but also undermines the routinely

unquestioned reification of society’s outsiders.


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The source of abjection is the subject of many conflicting discourses. Freud

(1998) speculated that a primal act of cannibalism established much of

humanity’s morality, religion and social organisation. This (perhaps) came

about when an all-powerful father was overcome by a “primal horde” of young

males he had expelled from the tribe, who then killed and ate him as a way of

incorporating his power (1998, pp. 121-2). The guilt over this act of patricide

gave rise to bans on both murder (particularly of totem father substitutes) and

sex with the women of the tribe: incest (1998, p. 123).

Although beyond my scope, a fascinating feature of cannibal movies is the

difference between the treatment of male and female (or more accurately

masculine and feminine) characters, both in the roles of cannibals and victims.

Kristeva diagnoses the abjection of women by concluding that all pollution

falls into two categories: excremental and menstrual: excrement and other

forms of corruption, including the corpse, stand for dangers from without;

menstruation represents the dangers from within (1982, p. 71). She details as

aspects of “fear of women” the fear of “menstrual defilement”, fear of

procreation (1982, p. 77) and the “prohibition of the maternal body” (1982, p.

14) resulting in respect for “my brother” and thus the rejection of cannibalism

(1982, p. 79). Abjection can at once protect the subject and make vulnerable

the ‘other’.

2e. Film studies

Gilles Deleuze in his magnum opus on cinema wrote that “A theory of cinema

is not 'about' cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and

which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other

practices” (1989, p. 280). Following this emphasis on concepts rather than

techniques, I refer to several works to examine the filmic processes used to

convey cultural assumptions apparent in the selected films including the

sometimes covert social or ethical arguments.

Studies specifically relating to cannibalism in cinema are uncommon, although

film is mentioned, often as an afterthought, in many academic works on the

practice. Jennifer Brown’s Cannibalism in literature and film (2012) argues


28

that cannibalism reflects social fears prevalent at the time of the creation of

each work, and so is represented both culturally and spatially. She examines

the use of the trope of cannibalism as a mirror of each of several historical

periods: the inscrutable and threatening savage of colonial times, the regional

cannibal of domestic areas that have fallen outside the norms of civilised

society (particularly the ‘hillbillies’ of the American post-industrial

wastelands), and the city cannibals who are the heart of darkness within our

closest social milieux: from Jack the Ripper and Sweeney Todd in early

industrial London to Hannibal Lecter and the authentic cannibal Jeffrey

Dahmer (Jacobson 2002) in contemporary America. To Brown, the cannibal

starts as a threatening foreigner and moves to the centre, ultimately being

shown to be indistinguishable from us. This is an interesting schema, and has

some valuable analyses of some of the films I will be looking at, although it

tends to take the abjection of cannibalism as assumed.

Patrick Fuery’s “New developments in film theory” (2000) looks at the

influence of discourses of postmodernism and poststructuralism in film studies.

He argues that cinema is far more than the experience of sitting in a seat

watching a movie: the emotional responses, the conversation afterwards, the

reviews and blogs, the semiotic analyses are all part of that experience (2000,

p. 46). The Oxford Dictionary of film studies (Kuhn & Westwel, 2012) is a

comprehensive reference to all aspects of film studies and criticism, as well as

offering very useful links to other texts. The Kindle edition is easy to search

and difficult to cite (no page numbers).

Cine-Ethics (Choi & Frey 2014) is a collection of various approaches to ethical

questions raised in cinema. Particularly interesting is King’s analysis of

Deleuze’s volumes on cinema and its claim that modern cinema “allows us to

see differently in order to think differently” (cited in Choi & Frey 2014, p. 61).

Another collection of articles provocatively titled Film theory goes to the

movies (Collins, Radner & Collins 1993) contends that while film studies has

led the way with poststructuralist critical approaches, it has largely ignored

popular cinema in favour of classics and alternative cinema (1993, p. 1). There

is an informative chapter by Staiger on The silence of the lambs (1993).


29

Tinkcom and Villarejo’s collection Keyframes: popular cinema and cultural

studies (2001) links the production of films with their reception. There are

several papers in this book that relate directly to cannibalism, including an

analysis of the Hannibal Lecter series (Mizejewski 2001). The introduction

summarises cultural studies approaches to film, including theorists from the

Frankfurt School, Althusser, Gramsci and Mulvey (Tinkcom & Villarejo

2001). The “complicated and contradictory social relations” that develop out of

mainstream cinema cannot be dismissed simply because of its corporate base

(Tinkcom & Villarejo 2001, p. 3). Cultural production is integral to the modern

“knowledge economy” (Offord, Cooke & Garbutt 2012, p. 188) and even

Hollywood can send transgressive messages, intentionally or otherwise.

Kracauer, a Frankfurt School theorist, sheds light in his Theory of film (2004)

on the mundane, often invisible functions that film can reveal to us. Mulvey’s

paper Visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1975) discusses the male gaze

and the woman as bearer, rather than maker, of meaning, particularly relevant

to the question of women as occasional victims of cannibals, but rarely as

perpetrators.

Also pertinent to the films considered is Kord and Krimmer’s discussion of

“destabilised masculinity” (2011, p. 2) which helps explain both the non-

dominant masculinity of many of the characters in cannibal films as well as the

apparent upsurge in the number of such films in the late twentieth and early

twenty-first century. Clover (1993) makes some fascinating points about the

gender roles in ‘slasher’ films: that the victim must be expressed as feminine

and the monster as masculine, but usually in “gender distress” (1993, p. 27)

and that audience identity can be simultaneous: that “gender is less a wall than

a permeable membrane” (1993, p. 46). This “gender displacement” allows the

‘slasher’ audience (which, she accepts, is overwhelmingly young males) to

explore taboo subjects like incest and parenticide safely and vicariously (1993,

p. 51).

The culture in which a film is made and then received plays an obvious part in

both its success and its social repercussions. Nesbet (2003) relates Sergei

Eisenstein’s surprise at the mixed reactions of different audiences to his film


30

Strike (1925) in which he used a montage of an abattoir as a metaphor for the

suppression of striking workers. He managed to shock the audience at the

metropolitan premiere, but when the venue moved to working class areas, he

found the audience unmoved: “the impression arose above all not of death and

blood, but of beef and cutlets” (2003, p. 48). This supports the Poststructuralist

argument that what is signified constantly changes as signifiers interact in an

infinite variety of intertextualities (Best & Kellner 1991, p. 21). Cinema is but

one form of text of course, but is particularly significant in tracing and

analysing social trends due to its immediacy, created by what Mulvey calls the

“emphasis of the look” (1975, p. 17): the fact that, unlike literature and stage

plays, the director of a film is able to direct our point of view.


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Chapter 3: Iterations of cannibalism

3a. Survivalism

Understanding, or at least tolerance for cannibalism, is at its most obvious in

the films that portray survivalism. What Lestringant called “cannibalism by

constraint” (cited in Konishi 2002, p. 3.11) was a favourite explanation in the

late eighteenth century, and the implication of extending that explanation into

Western social milieux suggests that necessity can cause reversion to savagery.

Set in the past and usually based on a true story, or in a dystopian future, these

films portray an anomie, a breakdown of the normative social order, which

explains, if not excuses, what happens. In these films, humans are reduced to

starvation and face a stark choice between their personal moral objections to

cannibalism and preservation of their lives. Petrinovich claims that, in such

situations, cultural constraints are “peeled away” (2000, p. 6) and only human

nature is left, as red in tooth and claw as Tennyson could have envisaged.

Probyn (2000, p. 80) argues that most people (those who can afford the cinema

at least) have little or no experience of what actual starvation and are titillated

by the question of what they would do if faced with the choice of human flesh

or inanition. Even those who feel they would be unable to make this decision

usually respect the will to survive.

Heston encounters his best friend becoming dinner: Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973)


32

The general approach seems to be tragedy rather than drama - in Alive

(Marshall 1993), few viewers would approach the film with no knowledge of

the story they are to see: the tag line was “They survived the impossible...by

doing the unthinkable”. The expectation of the crash and the dilemma to be

faced makes these stories more about pity than disgust. They are also the

stories that seem to strike a more realistic and therefore profoundly disturbing

note to many viewers: while most of us will not meet a psychopathic killer or a

savage, we are constantly assailed in the daily news by warnings about social

and environmental collapse. The dystopian trope seems to be getting stronger

than ever: the New York Times recently wrote that the appetite for cataclysm

texts is growing stronger (Alter 2014). In the Appendix, I list the English

language films considered for this study: over 50% have been made this

century.

I have chosen, to illustrate survivalism, a reality based film, Alive (Marshall

1993), set in the recent past as docu-drama, and a dystopian anomie: Soylent

Green (Fleischer 1973), set on an overcrowded Earth in what at the time

seemed the distant future, the year 2022.

Alive (Marshall 1993)

Alive is the semi-fictional retelling of

an actual event: the crash of a

Uruguayan Air Force plane chartered

by a football team in the Andes in

1972. The subject of cannibalism is

not hidden: in case viewers missed

the synopsis, reviews or word-of-

mouth titillation, the film starts with

Carlitos, a survivor of the crash

(played by a chain-smoking John

Malkovich), reflecting on his ordeal

some twenty years earlier, and

sharing the moral conclusions he


33

drew from it. So many people, he complains, have told him they would have

rather died than done that which he coyly does not name, but “until you’re in a

situation like that, you have no idea how you’ll behave”. Wreathed in smoke,

he explores the metaphysical lesson which we will hopefully glean from the

tale of anomie, that the God he learnt about at school was not the God he met

on the mountain: “the God that’s hidden by what surrounds us in this

civilisation”. He caught a glimpse, it appears, of that savage and indifferent

world of eat or be eaten, the inhuman universe that shocked Plumwood as she

whirled in the crocodile’s death-roll.

The metaphorical nature of this tale is established at the beginning of the

narrative. Two women play female stereotypical roles, one enthusing about,

the other terrified of the mountains over and into which the plane bounces.

They are the mother and sister of Nando (Ethan Hawke), who is to become the

lead character when he finally awakens from his coma. The sister, Susana,

thinks the mountains are beautiful, the mother replies that they look like “big

teeth”. So the metaphor of incorporation is established, and so the plane and

the mountain meet, in a feat of special effects impressive for 1993.

Nevertheless, we are 44 minutes into the film before the subject of cannibalism

arises: Nando plans to walk over the mountains for help, but cannot do it on a

piece of chocolate and a sip of wine (their only perceived food stores). “Then

I’ll cut some meat off the pilots. After all they got us into this mess” he says.

The others think he is joking and go on reciting their rosaries, but by day nine,

when his sister dies and they hear on the radio that the search has been called

off, Nando calls them together and announces “We’re going to save ourselves”.

His meaning is clear: they will have to eat the dead.

A crucial debate follows between those who “won’t do it” because it’s

“disgusting” and those arguing in favour. These arguments boil down to the

common themes of cannibal films. Abjection: we do things that are disgusting,

for example “if I had a wound that was rotting and needed washing out,

wouldn’t you do it, even though it was disgusting?” Reification: “if the soul

leaves the body when we die, then the body is just a carcass... What’s there in

the snow is just meat, Antonio. Food.” Then of course the theme of this


34

iteration of films: survival. Our families (and perhaps God too) would rather

see us alive than morally pure. As they prepare to cut the first pieces of human

flesh, one of them comments: “It’s like communion. From their deaths, we’ll

live.” Kilgour (1990, p. 149) asserts that they thereby convert “the survival of

the fittest in its crudest form into a kind of communion”, reinforcing

Montaigne’s argument that the boundary between cannibal and Christian is

fragile. As Adams (2010, p. 72) points out, when we become matter without

spirit, we are liable for both exploitation and metaphor. Nando, the instigator,

hangs back from feeding until he is reassured they are not eating his sister’s

body. Does this support a hypothesis that the female body is more abject even

than an anonymous corpse? The abjection of the mother is an important part of

Kristeva’s argument, but here it seems more likely that reification is simply

impossible in some instances, particularly where close kinship interferes with

the process of alterity. Nando does not enlighten us; he just moans “she was so

beautiful” (Marshall 1993).

Creed (2004, p. 34) takes issue with claims that monsters must be male,

pointing to several different guises for the female including vampires, witches

and many more. However, it is unusual, even in survival films, to see women

cannibals. Although the survival arguments have been fought and won, the last

woman alive in the plane, Liliana, is still holding out, but decides that she

wants another baby, will need nourishment, and accordingly agrees that

tomorrow she will eat. That night an avalanche engulfs the wreckage and she is

one of the victims, saved from abjection by death.

The crucial scenes in Alive are crowd scenes - survivors packed together in the

wrecked interior of the plane, sharing their hopes and despairs, discussing

ethics and strategies. These are mobile point-of-view shots: we, the audience,

are sitting among them, considering the same life and death questions, asking

ourselves what we would do in their position. By contrast, the scenes outside

in the dirty snow or struggling across the mountains to safety are remote: we

are just observers, our distance confirmed by non-diegetic and often syrupy

music. Little attempt is made to show the physical affects of seventy days

without (non-human) food: the men look ready for their next football match


35

when rescue finally arrives. Newsweek complained that the film left out the

sociological manoeuvring among the survivors that was featured in the book

upon which it was based, and which would help explain the apparent ease with

which Nando and the “warrior” class win over the others to their unlikely plan

(Ansen 1993). Ebert (1993) admits that he does not know what it would be like

to huddle in a wrecked plane for ten weeks eating human flesh, but complains

“I cannot imagine, and frankly this film doesn't much help me”. It seems a

minor quibble: the film was clearly a vehicle for Ethan Hawke, Vincent Spano

and other Hollywood “young guns”: Newsweek stated that Hawke has “a face

for which close-ups were invented” (Ansen 1993), suggesting that not

everyone in the audience may have been there to struggle with ethical

dilemmas.

Part of the attraction of the movies, particularly thrillers or horror movies, is

the safety of recognising that we are anchored in a cinema watching actors on a

set, and that realisation is never far away in watching Alive. Comfortable,

warm and well-fed, we can watch our proxy desperadoes wrestle with

fascinating questions of reification and abjection while munching thoughtfully

on a choc-top. We may conclude that they would have been better to die in the

crash, or that they made the heroic choice, but either way the genius of this

iteration of the cannibal film is that we have watched the reification, the

dehumanising of the human, while allowing ethical ambiguity.

Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973)

Soylent Green presents quite a different

picture of survival cannibalism. Starting

with idealised images of leisured

gentlefolk posing before Victorian and

Edwardian cameras, the opening montage

rapidly records the deterioration of

humanity through mass production of

commodities (starting with Model T

Fords) through to alienated office


36

workers, packed freeways and trains, mountains of garbage and clouds of

pollution. The montage is followed by an intertitle explaining that the year is

2022 (fifty years after the film was made) and that New York City now has a

population of forty million. People are crammed everywhere - sleeping on the

stairs of apartment blocks and in the abandoned cars that fill the broken roads.

The protagonist, Frank Thorn (Charlton Heston), is a New York cop,

sweltering in his tiny apartment. He watches an advertisement for the Soylent

corporation promoting new “Soylent Green”, a miracle food said to contain

ocean plankton. His room-mate Sol (Edward G Robinson) tells us of the days

of his youth when food was real: the Greenhouse Effect has made everything

“burn up”. The only food now is manufactured - Soylent biscuits and

margarine. The rich, however, can buy fresh food from highly fortified shops;

even meat is available “under the counter”.

The alterity here is class based - the rich can eat real food from the rural areas,

which are guarded like fortresses to protect them for the privileged. The poor

must queue for water and whatever artificial fare the giant corporations

manufacture. Meat itself is described as “something special” by both the

shopkeeper and Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), the woman buying it for her rich

lover, Simonson (Joseph Cotten). Not only the huddled masses and the meat

are reified however: Shirl is called “furniture” in that she comes with the

apartment (Thorn asks “personal or building?”) and is only prized for her

beauty and utility. This is classic reification or commodity fetishism: she is a

commodity, while the food she buys is personalised and admired. Shirl and the

other “furniture” women are given one day off a month and can be beaten

indiscriminately by the owners and building manager. On the street, crowd

control consists of “scoops”: bulldozers which shovel rioters up and dump

them into disposal trucks.

Thorn investigates the murder of Simonson, who has been slaughtered by a

corporation assassin with a blow to the cranium, as cattle are. Sol discovers

from an oceanographic survey taken from the dead man’s apartment that the

oceans are incapable of supplying the plankton supposedly used to make

Soylent Green - it is in fact being made from the only protein still in good


37

supply: dead humans. Sol is shattered and decides to seek euthanasia, called

“going home”, at a luxurious establishment where people are, for once, treated

with respect, as human, and euthanised to scenes of bucolic beauty and their

choice of music. Thorn arrives in time to witness Sol’s death, and Sol begs him

to expose the conspiracy. Thorn sneaks into the sanitation plant, a vast factory

where people are turned into protein under high security. The bodies are

dumped into a giant vat, and a conveyor belt at the other end bears Soylent

Green wafers. Shocked at this reification of human corpses, Thorn proceeds

with no qualms to kill several factory workers who are trying to stop him: the

sanctity of human life is not the issue, it is cannibalism of the dead that bothers

him. After the required chase, he utters the famous words: “Soylent Green is

people!” The final scene shows Thorn carried out on a stretcher, bloodied

fingers in the air as he demands that “Everyone must be told”. But does anyone

care? The credits roll over the same scene and music (Beethoven’s Pastoral

Symphony) that Sol enjoyed when going “home”, the implication being that

Thorn dies, while the people struggling to exist continue to demand their

Soylent Green.

Soylent Green is a mixed iteration of cannibalism: the people who don’t hear

Thorn’s message are “innocent cannibals” (Lindenbaum 2004, p. 479) who

continue to believe the plankton story, while those who do hear have little

option but to ignore the message: like the stranded footballers in Alive, the

poor can either eat dead people or starve. The abjection of processed corpses is

probably of minor concern to the masses: barely eking out an existence,

sleeping on stairwells or in abandoned cars, murdered at the rate of hundreds

per day, herded like cattle and shifted with bulldozers when they complain.

The reification of the dead, so abject to Thorn who has discovered the good life

in Simonson’s apartment, is mild compared to the reification of the starving

masses. Abjection is a luxury only the ruling class can afford. Alterity in this

dystopia is for the living: a tiny minority of powerful men live in heavily

guarded apartment blocks enjoying fresh food and “furniture” women, while

the rest live in squalor. At death, though, all are equal: the same sanitation

truck picks up (and pays for) Simonson’s corpse as anyone else’s. Rich and

poor alike become crackers.


38

The reviewer John Puccio (2011) called Soylent Green “a movie based on an

ending. And if you can't figure out that ending ten minutes into the movie, you

aren't paying attention”. It is one of the most revealed spoilers of any film, with

those who have never seen the film knowing the quote, thanks largely to a

satirical version on Saturday night live (Schager 2003). Despite this, I find the

film still compelling; its vision of a near future dystopia caused by global

warming, more relevant now than ever, offers a glimpse into the mirror: if

what we fear comes to pass, would we eat the green crackers or instead choose

to go “home”?


39

3b. The savage

In comedy, cartoons and many other areas of popular culture, cannibalism is

associated primarily with images of savages dancing around a cauldron in

which white men sit stoically awaiting their fate. This image of the savage as

inevitably a cannibal dates back to earliest records of “barbarian” outrages and

was an unquestioned belief in most colonial literature. Bhabha (1996, p. 88),

one of the key of post-colonial scholars, states that the discourse of the colonial

subject requires forms of racial and sexual difference to be articulated. The

resulting stereotypes construe the colonised as racially degenerate, thus

justifying invasion and imposition of civilisation (1996, p. 92).

The anthropologist Obeyesekere (2001) questions the usefulness of the

ethnographic category of ‘cannibalism’ itself. “The term cannibalism should

properly be reserved for the fantasy, found the world over, that the alien, the

demon, the ‘other’ is going to eat us” (2001, p. 69). Kilgour (1990, p. 147)

remarks that the invention of the word ‘cannibal’ during the invasion of the

New World coincided with the emergence of the individual and became useful

Lupino Lane in Be my king (Lane 1928)


40

in the definition of individuality: the ‘alien’ who was the opponent of the

individual, and threatened to consume him. This, she says, is the basis of the

colonial discourse which allowed the construct “New World savage” to act as

justification for subsuming the inferior peoples whose lands the colonists

coveted.

In “Rethinking anthropophagy,” the anthropologist William Arens (1998, p.

46) argues that cannibalism did not ever exist as defining cultural practice.

While this controversy is well outside the scope of this thesis, his comment

that it is usually taken as evidence of a lack of culture in that the perpetrators

cannot “distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable foodstuffs” raises the

question of what is meant by “acceptable” and how culturally relative is this

definition? Longhurst (2008, p. 128) points out that eating always involves

“choices about identity”.

My enquiry into the ‘savage’ focuses on the classic tale of Robinson Crusoe, a

seminal work in colonial discourse, yet reinterpreted in different eras.

Robinson Crusoe (Buñuel 1954)

Although directors have revisited colonial era

stories of cannibalism with gusto, in the

relatively new technology of the screen, they

have generally done so with modern

perspectives. Cannibals in most films, therefore,

are not the inhuman savages of Daniel Defoe,

Edgar Rice Burroughs or Edgar Wallace. The

‘savages’ in even the earliest films are often

presented with humour, for example Lupino

Lane’s Be my king (1928), Crosby and Hope in

Road to Zanzibar (Schertzinger 1941) or The

wrong box (Forbes 1966) in which amorous

cousins Michael and Julia are reassured that she

is not a blood relation: she was adopted after her

missionary parents were “eaten by his bible


41

class”. In more serious depictions, the ‘savage’ is either a noble one, or at least

is offered some humanity, and often his characterisation (we rarely see female

savages) is given an ironic edge to criticise modern, “civilised” society. Yet, as

Creed (1998, p. 87) indicates, a positive image can be as degrading as a

negative one.

The example used here for the cannibal as colonised savage is Luis Buñuel’s

Robinson Crusoe (1954). Crusoe is, according to James Joyce (1964), “the true

prototype of the British colonist... the manly independence, the unconscious

cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy,

the calculating taciturnity”. Buñuel (1954) opens his film of the eighteenth-

century novel with a shot of Defoe’s book sitting on an ancient map, a nod to

the importance to film makers of classic literature. Crusoe tells us he was on a

voyage to buy “negro slaves” when his father’s warnings of disaster came true;

we next see him struggling ashore amid the debris of his lost ship. The island,

or at least a severely constrained and isolated space, was considered a

prerequisite for cannibalism in the eighteenth century (Konishi 2002, p. 73).

All his shipmates, or at least the human ones, have been consumed by the sea.

Barefoot and hungry, he cracks an egg he finds in a nest, but his European

sensibilities do not allow him to eat the baby bird inside. Unlike the savages he

is yet to meet, he has little hope of surviving in the wild, but is saved by

finding and plundering the wreck of his ship, salvaging building supplies, guns

and flint to make fire (more important, he realises, than the gold in the drawer

below). His whole focus is to secure himself against the wild world: beasts and

savages. Although this is a long way from his early surrealist movies, this is

still classic Buñuel, particularly the fever dream, reminiscent of his later films

The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie and Belle de jour (cited in Lybarger

2004) in which his giggling father pours water on a pig, while the delirious

Crusoe begs for a mouthful.

On the island, European civilised life is represented by Crusoe and his

weaponry, and Rex, a dog who has also swum ashore. He finds in a ship’s

chest “a cure for both body and soul”: tobacco and the Bible. Buñuel seems to

have felt Crusoe’s pain - he had been exiled from his native Spain for 14 years


42

when he made the film, and was living in Mexico, having lost his job in

MOMA after being denounced as a Communist (Lybarger 2004). His longing

for home while surrounded by “the other” is obvious in his character’s

affection for the dog, while he is quite prepared to shoot birds and stamp on

rats and spiders. He domesticates native goats and parrots, but is devastated by

the death of Rex, feeling “now truly alone”. Sinking into eccentricity, he talks

to two insects, “my little friends” and feeds them an ant.

This propensity to instant alterity even between species of insects soon comes

to a head as Crusoe has to decide which humans deserve to be saved, and

which sacrificed. The difference is their status: as cannibals or victims. His

reunification with humans after 18 years comes as we follow his footsteps

along the beach, only to be confronted with another distinctly human footprint.

His abjection is immediate. “Men-eaters! From that very land I had once

thought to sail to. Revolted, horrified, all that night I watched the cannibals at

their ghastly entertainment”. Their guilt is assumed, but only confirmed after

they leave and he comes across their fire-pit which is surrounded by human

heads and bones: Hulme observes (1998, p. 2) that the “primal scene”, the

proof of cannibalism, is usually not the act, but the aftermath. Crusoe plots a

technology-based massacre, including another dream sequence, this time of

planting a bomb under their fire-pit, but realises “I had no heaven-sent right to

be judge and executioner on these people, who had done me no injury. I would

leave them to God’s justice”.

This resolve is short-lived; seeing Friday escape from the cannibals, he steps in

to kill the pursuers and rescue the boy. Friday bows to him in a homo-erotic

scene in which Crusoe puts his foot on the boy’s head. He explains that the boy

will be called Friday, while Crusoe’s name is “Master” and that they are

“friends”. The boy spits out Crusoe’s carefully harvested and baked bread,

indicating that he would rather dig up the pursuers whom they buried earlier.

Crusoe sits up all night in fear of this new “friend”: “if the cannibals fail to

come at me before morning, he might”. He won’t let Friday handle weapons;

he shoots birds out the sky to frighten him and puts a strong door on his cave

so he can sleep securely. He is reassured to watch Friday eat the flesh of


43

animals, “knowing that the only source of that other meat he so relished would

be myself”.

He comes to appreciate once more having a servant. The balance of alterities,

man to animal, civilised man to cannibal, master to servant, has been restored,

yet his fear of the primitive cannibal increases. When Friday sneaks into his

room hoping to try his pipe, Crusoe decides to put leg-irons on him,

remembering how he had intended those instruments to be used on the savages

he planned to carry off to slavery. But Friday is misjudged: “Friday love

Master always.” He seizes Crusoe’s gun, but it’s a suicide plan - “kill Friday -

no send Friday away.” In a moment that crystallises the dreams of empire,

Friday has become the good savage, brought to civilisation by the white man.

Cheyfitz (1997, p. 3) describes this scenario as the savage “articulating the

deepest desires of US foreign policy towards the Third World in the Twentieth

Century.” The primitive cannibal has submitted to our will, but lovingly, in

gratitude rather than through force. In the next scene, Friday is armed and

helping hunt wild pigs, with Crusoe’s admission that Friday was “as loyal a

friend as any man could want.”

But if Friday is to take on Crusoe’s civilisation, he must also accept his

morality. Friday finds Crusoe’s gold coins and thinks them a gift from God.

“From the devil”, Crusoe mumbles, but Friday goes off to make a necklace

with these baubles, which in this closed circle are of value only to the savage.

He celebrates in a woman’s dress, wielding a sword, to Crusoe’s horror. While

they shave each other and share a pipe, Crusoe tries to explain the devil and his

works - he also has evolved, or converted, from conquistador to missionary.

Yet he is baffled by Friday’s broken epistemic posing of the problem of evil -

why doesn’t God just kill the devil? Why is God mad when we sin, if he lets

the devil tempt us? Friday, the innocent, the savage, baffles Crusoe, the

colonialist, expressing Buñuel’s overt anticlericalism (Bordwell 2004, p. 778).

They are set upon by the cannibals and Crusoe is saved by Friday’s gun, just as

Crusoe’s gun saved Friday years before. The civilised savage fights the

cannibal savages for the life of the Englishman. His gunpowder exhausted,

Friday kills the third cannibal in hand-to-hand combat, but the beach is


44

swarming with others. Their preparations for a last stand are interrupted by

gunfire; to their amazement the beach is now full of white men who are

slaughtering the fleeing cannibals. Like Friday’s foes, these white men have

prisoners tied up - their ship’s captain and bosun, against whom they have

mutinied. “White men eat prisoners too?” asks Friday with a distinct smirk.

Friday and Crusoe free the prisoners, who agree to take Crusoe and “my man”

to England if he helps them recover the ship, which of course they do in due

course, tempting the ‘civilised’ mutineers, like the devil, with Friday’s gold

necklace.

Dressed like an Englishman again, Crusoe makes a melancholy farewell to his

kingdom. He has defeated the evil of the savages and the mutineers, whom he

leaves to rule his kingdom. Friday avers that he is not afraid to go back to

civilisation “if master is not”. He is already dressed as a servant. The cannibal

can become tame, but clearly he can never become “your own kind.”

The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover (Greenaway 1989)

Kilgour quotes Montaigne’s sixteenth

century argument that savagery is not all on

the side of the cannibal:

There is more barbarisme [sic] in

eating men alive, than to feed upon

them being dead; to mangle by

tortures torment a body full of lively

sense... than to roast him after he is

dead” (cited in Kilgour 1998, p. 243).

Peter Greenaway’s The cook, the thief, his

wife and her lover (1989) is the perfect

representation of the savage cannibal within our own civilisation, even though

the actual act of cannibalism does not occur until the closing minutes of the

film. The film however is replete with images of physical and metaphoric

incorporation and abjection: eating, corpses, excrement, violence and

humiliation. This is such a perfect representation of abjection that the


45

Reelviews reviewer (Berardinelli 2014) was “at a loss” to find anything

disgusting that had been left out. It is as if Greenaway had ticked off all of

Kristeva’s examples of abjection, except the skin that forms on milk.

The film is almost entirely set inside the upmarket restaurant Le Hollandais

which has been bought by gangster Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) who

torments and humiliates the patrons, staff, his men and his wife Georgina

(Helen Mirren). Bartolovich describes this process as “making everyone

around him miserable in ways that depend upon the alimentary canal” (1998,

p. 204). Sinnerbrink (1992) observes that the restaurant metaphorically

presents a reversed alimentary canal: the back door with its dog-shit is the

anus, the stomach is the kitchen where the food is processed and finally the

dining room is the mouth, the site of cultured discrimination, but also of abuse.

While Spica eats and belches and spouts abuse and absurd bon mots, Georgina

escapes, in brief interludes, to have a sexual and then a loving relationship with

the very refined bookshop owner Michael (Alan Howard), with the connivance

of the cook, Richard Borst (Richard Bohringer). The world of the restaurant is

surreal, with each room coloured differently and the costumes of the

protagonists changing to match as they move between them. Tables in the

kitchen and the dining room are groaning under the bodies of dead birds and

mammals. Spica shows little distinction between his three pet subjects: food,

excrement and sex. The pleasures of sex and eating and the abjection of

excretion are important messages from Greenaway’s film: Spica sums up “the

naughty bits and the dirty bits are so close together, that it just goes to show

how eating and sex are related”. He forces an enemy to eat dog-shit, his men

gorge on the fine dining and vomit on the table, and his wife reveals that sex

for him involves only violence and degradation. Spica’s favoured method of

torture is force feeding: he feeds excrement in the opening scene to a man who

owes him money, he feeds buttons to the kitchen boy, and when he discovers

the love affair, he and his men kill Michael by making him eat one of his

books. Georgina persuades Borst to cook the body; in a ceremonial scene, she

reverses his force-feeding tactic and at gunpoint forces him to make good his

earlier threat to eat the lover, suggesting he starts with Michael’s cock: “it’s a


46

delicacy, and you know where it’s been”. As she kills Spica with another

phallic symbol, his own gun, she hisses at him (while looking at us, the

viewers) the single, final word of the film: “cannibal!”

The film’s alterity focuses on the criminal crew against polite society. It was

made toward the end of the long period known as Thatcherism, in which

Britain was hugely polarised between followers of “libertarianism” and their

opponents who felt that money and power were crushing all vestiges of civil

society. The film has widely been interpreted as a protest about the politics of

that time, with the thief as Thatcher and her greedy plutocrats and the lover as

the ineffectual left opposition, the cook as the civil service and the wife as the

people, being alternately wooed and abused. Roger Ebert saw a more universal

message about an entrepreneurial class that is raping the earth and its

environment while the “timid majority” finds distraction in romance and

escapism (1999). The New York Times (James 1990) felt that Greenaway was

asking the question: what happens when “the most crass and sadistic people”

gain power? Greenaway himself said that his use of cannibalism was a

metaphor of consumer society: “once we’ve stuffed the whole world into our

mouths, ultimately we’ll end up eating ourselves” (cited in Bartolovich 1998,

p. 205).

Bartolovich, however, sees Greenaway’s message as elitist: consumption is

only an issue when the “wrong” people are doing it (1998, pp. 209-10). Spica

and his crew debase the high culture of Le Hollandais with their ignorance,

crudity and violence. Georgina (whom Spica insists on calling “Georgie” as if

trying to alter her gender), Michael and Borst are refined, aesthetic and

vulnerable, like the high culture which the thieves abase with their debauchery.

Greenaway seems to be accusing the “low culture” thieves, and his audience,

of the same “voracious hunger” that colonialism cited to calumniate the natives

they wanted to subdue. White and Stallybrass in their study of transgression

point out that the bourgeois subject is constantly defined by the exclusion of

“the low” which is always considered disgusting, but “disgust always bears the

imprint of desire” (1986, p. 191). This suggests perhaps a more nuanced view

of both the “disgusting” thief and the effete lover: that appetite must be


47

constantly fuelled and yet controlled. Bartolovich calls this need of capitalism

to consume totally and yet to hold back if accumulation is to be possible one of

its “principal contradictions” (1998, p. 225).

Greenaway is exploring these “limits to appetite” in his scenes of sex, food and

excrement; the contemporary cannibal is “deployed to work out a new and

uncertain relation of men to commodities” (Bartolovich, 1998, p. 236). The

cook is a film about abjection, but also desire. Cannibalism reduces the human

to a roast dinner, but at the same time questions the limits we increasingly need

to put on our meals.


48

3c. The inhuman

Inhumans are of our species yet apart: something has gone wrong. Yet they

reflect a powerful fear that the fault is not accidental but part of a social

dysfunction that threatens all normative civilised practices. We do not need

psychoanalytic explanations of the behaviour of these monsters, yet we

identify a shadow, be it ourselves or that of someone we recognise. When the

Hillbilly or the urban sociopath captures, kills and eats us, we whisper

explanations about economic distress, abusive parents, traumatic stress. We do

not just fear the inhumans; we fear becoming them.

Any conversation about the topic of cannibalism soon raises the spectre of

Hannibal Lecter, and specifically his first appearance in The silence of the

lambs (Demme 1991). Surprisingly, the film is not specifically about Lecter,

nor are there any obvious cannibalistic acts performed (although some are

discussed). The plot centres on the young FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie

Foster) who is ordered to help hunt a serial killer named by the press Buffalo

Bill. Bill, while not actually eating his victims, is skinning them to make a

“woman suit”. In this complete body mask, Bill is a descendant of one of the

great psychopathic figures of ‘slasher’ films, Leatherface from The Texas

Sally is offered her old friends for dinner: The Texas chain saw massacre (Hooper 1974)


49

chain saw massacre (Hooper 1974). Leatherface’s psychopathy is never

explained: his mask of human skin, kitchen apron, broken teeth and

inarticulateness indicates both mental and dental issues.

Films featuring inhuman cannibals routinely offer psychiatric observations to

explain their actions. Creed highlights that psychoanalysis and cinema were

both born at the end of the 19th century in the cradle of modernity (1998, p.

77). It is convenient to dismiss cannibals as insane, particularly those who do

not have the excuse of starvation or primitivism, as how else are we to explain

their apparent willingness (even delight) in doing what we assume would

disgust us? Herz (2012, p. 74) says that psychopaths have one characteristic in

common in psychological testing: an inability to recognise disgust. This lack

on their part may be a symptom of mental illness, yet the films considered

show other motivations that may be harder to reconcile with normative social

behaviour.

The Texas chain saw massacre (Hooper 1974)

The Texas chain saw massacre was named by

Total Film as number one of the fifty greatest

horror movies of all time (Graham, 2005). It

spawned a number of sequels and prequels,

but none as groundbreaking as the original.

Magistrale (2005, p. 157) calls it “the

archetypal horror film”, and Time said that it

set “a new standard for slasher films” (Zoglin

1999). The concept of a vulnerable woman

being terrorised by a monster was hardly

new, and some critics suggested that the

director, Tobe Hooper, may even have seen

the Australian ‘slasher’ film Night of fear

(Bourke 1972), so similar were the

psychopaths. Night of fear was banned as too violent, and the blogger Hal

Astell (2012) wondered if Hooper had decided to make Texas chain saw

bloodless, to avoid censorship. If so, his plan was in vain: Texas chain saw was


50

banned in many countries, and was not available for showing in Australia for

almost ten years after production (Refused-classification.com n.d.). Night of

fear moved from the knife or razor favoured in ‘slasher’ films to an axe; Texas

chain saw escalated the weaponry even further with a large and very noisy

chain saw. The chain saw is wielded by a particularly striking villain named

Leatherface, so called due to his predilection for wearing a mask made of

human skin.

Filmed in documentary style, on release it made a half-hearted attempt to

appear to be a true story, whereas in fact it was based on the exploits of Ed

Gein, a serial killer, but not a known cannibal, who was also the inspiration of

Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). It was filmed on a tight budget against

expectations it might never be cleared for exhibition. The respected critic

Roger Ebert summed it up (1974) as “a grisly little item...I can’t imagine why

anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it’s well-made, well-

acted, and all too effective.” Such exploitative movies are profitable if made at

the right price point, and Ebert grudgingly allows that the techniques and

special effects are far better than the genre demands. He particularly liked the

rapid montages of the survivor Sally screaming, with extreme close-ups of her

bulging eyeballs, expressing all the foam flecked terror of any animal who

realises she is about to be slaughtered.

Class alterity is established in the portrait of the family of ‘others’ who

terrorise, slaughter and eat passers-by. They are ‘white trash’, but made trash

by the process of industrialisation of agriculture: the abattoir in which the

whole family worked has automated or closed, leaving them to use their

expertise on a different species. Wood (1979) analysed the family as

representing the proletariat, in a critique of capitalism’s use and abandoning of

workers (1979, p. 29). The protagonists are a group of young hipsters who are

driving their Kombi through Texas to check on the grave of the grandfather of

Sally and Franklin, following reports (shown in graphic footage during the

credits) of graves being desecrated and robbed. The pseudo-documentary style

introduction tells us that “an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a

nightmare”, one that seems to be a thinly veiled exposition of the nightmare


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faced by the Woodstock generation as they moved from the summer of love

into the fall of Vietnam, drugs, the Manson murders and Nixon’s Silent

Majority. Hooper spoke of his inspiration coming from the “beginning of the

end of the subculture” (cited in Baumgarten 2000). Magistrale (2005) goes

further and says that Hooper opened the way for horror to become a “vehicle

for articulating twentieth-century pessimism” (2005, p. 153). It is revealing

that both Fleischer (1973) and Hooper (1974) crafted their stories of social

decline in the period between Nixon’s landslide re-election and his resignation.

Besides the disabled Franklin, the other four beautiful people are entirely two-

dimensional, laughing at the quaint locals, reading horoscopes and heading off

into unimagined horrors when looking for a non-existent swimming hole.

Franklin does most of the talking, more so even than Sally, his sister, the only

survivor, whose role is mostly to scream and run and scream more. Franklin

reminisces about their grandfather (whose grave they are checking) and the

abattoir where he used to sell his cattle. His speech is accompanied by images

of cows waiting to be slaughtered or drooling, near death, as he describes the

killing process - a sledgehammer: “it usually wouldn’t kill them on the first

lick”. The cows queue for death as the young people drive past, on the way to

their own identical slaughter. They pick up a hitchhiker who tells them his

brother and grandfather work at the slaughterhouse. “My family’s always been

in meat,” he tells them, an esoteric reference to their own imminent fate, which

only the viewers appreciate.

The family turn out to be not only intellectually disabled but mentally very

troubled indeed: the wild-eyed hitchhiker is the brother of Leatherface who

occasionally puts down the chain saw and dons an apron to take a feminine

role in the house of slaughter. Leatherface is actually humanised under his

mask: grunting, sweating and showing us his deformed teeth he is “as human

as movie killers have dared to get” (Shreve 2014). Another relative, the gas-

station owner, appears normal and presents a disturbing picture of the

schizophrenic nature of modern society: his station has no gas, he sells

barbecued meat of a suspect origin, and he constantly offers Sally comfort as

he recaptures her, gags her and beats her, all the time assuring her everything


52

will be all right. I couldn’t help thinking of the protestations of farmers who

insist that they care deeply about their animals, as they pack them onto trucks

for the gruelling journey to a terrifying death. At the climactic dinner table

scene, he announces “I just can’t take no pleasure in killing”, unlike the rest of

his family, including the comically ancient grandpa who can no longer hold a

sledgehammer, thus facilitating Sally’s escape.

The film’s final thirty minutes consist of Sally being chased, mostly with a

chain saw, with occasional respites where she is captured and tormented before

again leaping from windows. Hitchcock famously said that the chase is the

“final expression” of the medium of film (cited in Kracauer 2004, p. 304) and

‘slasher’ movies thrive on them, but is apparent that the chase is also the

ultimate demonstration of alterity: to be pursued, tormented and threatened

with slaughter is the mark of the ‘other’.

Texas makes clear the reification of both human and non-human in its graphic

scenes of slaughter, and reveals almost non-stop abjection from the time the

first city-slicker wanders from the oddly ominous family home over to the

apparent normalcy of the slaughter house next door. In abjection is jouissance:

we somehow keep watching as Sally screams endlessly, we don’t turn off as

Grandpa sucks the blood from her finger or drops his hammer repeatedly

(Shreve 2014).

Yet the film’s alterity is everywhere confused: instead of the normative divide

of country providing meat to the city, here the city kids are providing meat to

the rural rejects. As the kids are slaughtered, we hear the sounds of pigs

grunting, see a captive chicken awaiting her fate, in a room filled with the

bones and skins of several species, particularly H. sapiens. The cannibals’

method of slaughter, the sledgehammer, the meat hook, the freezer, is the same

as the way cattle and pigs are treated at an abattoir. They signify the extreme

view of male castration anxiety, illustrating Mulvey’s diagnosis (1975, p. 13)

that the male can either devalue and punish the woman or fetishise her: in a

house with no women (except their mummified grandma), they dress

Leatherface up in aprons, laugh at Sally’s attempt to win a reprieve by offering

sex, and torture and torment the two young women with meat-hooks and chain


53

saws. The chain saw itself, an obviously phallic symbol, is perfect for

penetrating and “meatifying” (Clover 1993, p. 125) the body, making its

humanity unrecognisable.

Is the film a disguised polemic against farming and slaughtering animals? The

reviewer Wickman (2013) called it “forehead-slappingly obvious” in his

review “The Ultimate Pro-Vegetarian Film Is the Last Movie You’d Expect”.

So much so that PETA listed it in its “top 10 movies that make you go

meatless” (PETA 2008). Hooper said in an interview that he gave up meat

while making the film: “the heart of the film was about meat; it’s about the

chain of life and killing sentient beings” (cited in Waddell 2010). He also

claimed that Guillermo Del Toro, no shrinking violet himself in abject film-

making, gave up meat after seeing it.

Nothing is as it should be in this film, nor was it in Nixon’s and Hooper’s

America, circa 1974. It is filmed in bright Texan sunshine rather than horror’s

normal Gothic gloom (Brown 2012, p. 121), the psychopathic Leatherface is

cooking in an apron when Sally is carried in, the “best killer” cannot even hold

a hammer, Sally’s terror at the dinner table is accompanied with the noises of

non-diegetic pigs, the normal filmic heroes (young white males) are butchered

without any defence offered, and what were they all eating when they stopped

the Kombi at the gas station and bought barbecue? Who among us, Hooper

seems to ask, is not a cannibal?

The silence of the lambs (Demme 1991)

The silence of the lambs is, almost without

exception, the film that people first mention

when I talk about this thesis. This is a little

surprising as, although the male lead,

Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), is a

psychopathic cannibal, for most of the film

he is incarcerated, and even post-escape he is

not seen actually eating anyone (although he

certainly discusses the idea with some gusto).


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In the sequel, Hannibal (Scott 2001), he is indeed shown serving human flesh -

the brain of his nemesis - to its owner. In a later prequel, Hannibal rising

(Webber 2008), an attempt is made to trace Lecter’s psychopathy to childhood

trauma: the cannibalism of his sister during the war, much to the displeasure of

many of his fans: the Metro Weekly review complained “gone is the nuance,

the mystery, the fright factor” (Shulman 2007). Another review called the

prequel unnecessary: “Lecter is fascinating because he's an enigma; his deadly

allure more appealing because his past is a mystery” (Dujsik 2007).

The silence of the lambs has become something of a cinematic classic, while

the sequels and prequels have largely faded from memory. Butler (2001) in the

Chicago Tribune credits Silence with legitimising cannibalism in the movies,

with its star cast and haul of all five major Academy Awards - best picture,

best actor, best actress, best director and best adapted screenplay. Before this,

Butler claims, cannibalism was limited to exploitation films. No doubt

directors from Luis Buñuel to Peter Greenaway might demur.

The film is a psychological thriller with Hannibal Lecter, an evil genius,

trading insights into the most private neuroses of trainee FBI agent Clarice

Starling in exchange for his profiling of the serial killer, Buffalo Bill, whose

very name totemically animalises him (Wolfe 2003, p. 101). Bill is killing and

skinning women to make a woman suit. He is pure monster, closer to the

gender-challenged Leatherface than the urbane, sophisticated, civilised

psychiatrist Lecter, who remains a mystery. Lecter’s jailer, Dr Chilton, comes

closest to attempting a diagnosis, saying “Oh, he’s a monster. A pure

psychopath. So rare to capture one alive”. Starling, asked by a young

policeman if Lecter is a vampire, simply replies “they don’t have a name for

what he is”. Kilgour’s explanation is flippant but perhaps insightful: he is

“overdetermined by rhyming logic” (1998, p. 248) - anyone named Hannibal

must end up a cannibal. That is good enough for the viewers - the man is pure

evil, but deliciously, he is not a monster in the sense of Leatherface or even

Sweeney Todd: we appreciate his style and wit, we even like him in contrast to

the other psychopaths we meet: Buffalo Bill, and Multiple Miggs, who

ejaculates on Starling on her way out of the asylum, a dastardly act that the


55

chivalrous Lecter abhors, and because of which he chooses to assist her. As the

reviewers above said, any explanation, any excuses, detract from Lecter’s

mystique; Kilgour calls him an extreme Hobbesian, devoted to his will and to

his own appetite, a perfect symbol of Freud’s oral phase brought to its logical

extreme (1998, p. 248). The psychological or legal weaponry of modern

society is useless against such primitive, raw power; Staring is sent to

interview him like the lamb of the title being led to slaughter. Buffalo Bill has

captured his latest victim, Catherine, daughter of a powerful US Senator, and

there are only days or hours before he kills and skins her.

The opening of the film finds Starling running in the woods, small and alone

like Red Riding Hood, yet we soon find that she is on an FBI obstacle course

in Quantico, running past the motto “hurt, agony, pain - love it”. Starling is not

one of the screaming victims that we find in Texas chain saw massacre: she is

not strictly what Carol Clover calls “the Final Girl” (1993, p. 35), the one who

experiences the abject terror and survives: that is Bill’s victim, Catherine, who

saves herself by taking Bill’s dog hostage. Starling is a victim, though: of

chauvinism from her colleagues, mental probing from Lecter and stalking in

the dark by Bill, but she is smart, well trained, strong and sassy, standing up to

her boss when he uses the chauvinist card: she is the perfect example of the

suffering woman becoming the avenging hero (Clover 1993, p. 17). Jancovich

(2001, p. 153) is not even convinced this is a horror film: it is too well made

and professional - his students considered it a “quality drama”, particularly

after it swept the Oscars. Clover admits it into the ‘slasher’ canon, but as a

“slasher movie for yuppies” (1993, p. 232). ‘Slasher’ films like Texas chain

saw massacre routinely pit the redneck monster against the civilised hero. The

silence of the lambs turns the normative alterity of the ‘slasher’ order on its

head: Lecter is the city sophisticate; Starling the West Virginia redneck - he

skewers her with the observation “you’re not more than one generation from

poor, white trash, are you Agent Starling?”, yet when she is splashed with his

neighbour’s semen he tells her that “discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me”.

Lecter is a pastiche of classical monsters: Dracula’s taste for blood,

Frankenstein scientific brilliance, Dr Jekyll’s hidden personality (Brown 2012,

p. 204); he represents “the shadow side of society’s fantasy of itself” (Ullyatt


56

2012, p. 18). His power to terrify is precisely his amiable, civilised charm: we

would rather be scared of cannibals who wear leather masks and grunt.

The ‘slasher’ pedigree, for Clover, is granted through the existence of the

female victim-hero, Starling, who has to overcome not just the mind games of

Lecter the monster, but also the political ineptitude of the men around her in

order to blow away the psycho-sexual killer Buffalo Bill (who is not a

cannibal, at least not in gustatory terms). Bill’s ancestry goes back to Norman

Bates in Psycho (Hitchcock 1960) and Leatherface: he is adult in body but

child in spirit, asexual and obsessed with absent femininity. Convinced he is

transgender (a diagnosis denied by the authorities) he imagines himself

aroused by his female persona that he is building from the hides of murdered

women. Creed’s summary of contemporary psychoanalytic film theory exactly

diagnoses Bill as abject feminine and “grotesque monster” (1998, p. 88) – he

symbolically castrates himself by applying lipstick (in extreme close-up) and

dancing in a wig, with his genitals pulled back between his legs so that he

appears to be female. Bill is a depraved cannibal in the sense that he

incorporates human parts into his persona, but it is Lecter, the deprived

cannibal in the asylum, who is the protagonist. Nonetheless, Lecter is of no

interest to the FBI or to us without his insights into Bill, as Mulvey remarks

(1975, p. 6); phallocentrism needs the image of the castrated woman to make

sense of its own world and its power relations.

The silence of the lambs trades in extreme close-ups: Starling usually pensive,

Bill leering and imagining a valid sexuality. Lecter, however, is directly

threatening. While Starling gazes into the distance and Bill at his reflection,

Lecter stares, unblinking, in extreme close up, ever closer, straight into the

audience’s eyes. It is us that he is addressing, analysing, threatening. Under the

threat is a keen humour, often rare in the genre. Besides Lecter’s pun about

“having an old friend for dinner”, he also reflects on Starling’s offer that, in

return for helping catch Bill, he will be allowed to use a beach (under SWAT

surveillance of course) where there are terns. Terns - the word suggests to him

that he and Starling should have “turns” at sharing information. Starling’s turn

will not relate to the case, but to her life, her childhood traumas. Despite her


57

boss’ instruction to tell him nothing personal - “you don't want Hannibal

Lecter inside your head” - she describes her worst memory: the death of her

father, a town marshal gunned down while on duty, and her subsequent life on

an relative’s ranch, where she found the truth of animal agriculture, being

awoken one night by the screaming of the spring lambs as they were

slaughtered. She tried to free the lambs, took one and ran, but was caught and

sent to an orphanage. Since then, Starling has been struggling with what

Melson (2005) calls the “calculus of killing” - the contradictory message given

to children that harming animals is wrong, but eating them is fine (2005, p.

185). Lecter’s speculative diagnosis is that she believes that if she saves

Catherine, the lambs will stop screaming in her dreams. She has made the

lambs subjects, while Bill makes his victims objects. As Starling tears up under

the intense and massively magnified gaze of Hannibal Lecter, she gives a

glimpse into the abyss of Adams’ absent referents (2010, p. 68), the same

process that objectifies animals and women who are the victims of violence.

Starling’s lambs are not the only part of modern civilisation scrutinised and

turned inside out by The silence of the lambs. The social order is very

commonly defined in film by showing not examples of it but characters or

events that transgress it. The strength of Lecter’s character is his ability not just

to offend the social mores but to be an extreme example of his social milieu

(Fuery 2000, p. 111): like modern America, he is educated, rational, even

enlightened, yet, like modern society, there is an undercurrent of extreme

violence and abjection. Similarly, Starling transgresses social boundaries with

her challenge to masculine power structures and her role as the rescuing hero

rather than the hero-victim. Wolfe (2003) refers to discourses of gender, class

and species as ideologies: they relate to each other and to the relations of

power in independent ways (that is, are not analogous). His opinion is that the

most important discourse in this film is that of species (2003, p. 99). While

cross-gender alterities are examined through the minor character of Bill and to

some extent Starling, and class issues in the clash of the civilised Lecter with

the often inept and backward authority figures, at the heart of the film

(reflected in its title) is the struggle of Starling to come to terms with the

reification of the innocents - the lambs of her childhood or the women Bill is


58

skinning. Starling struggles with what Derrida called “non-criminal putting to

death” (1974, p. 278), her uncle slaughtering the spring lambs or the callous

serial murders with whom she deals. Reification is seen throughout: Bill

speaks to Catherine in the third person: “it rubs the lotion on its skin; it does

this whenever it’s told”; Lecter speaks of his victims by function: “A census

taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice

chianti”. Wolfe delimits what he calls a grid of “species significations” (2003,

p. 101). These range from the pole of “animalised animals” who are sacrificed

without question for human benefit to “humanised animals” (basically pets)

who become de facto kin, to “animalised humans” who can be brutalised,

through finally to the other pole of “humanised humans, sovereign and

untroubled” (2003, p. 101). Despite the fact that the two extreme poles are

“ideological fictions”, humanism relies on the continuing viability of this grid,

as evidenced by the “profound awe” in which is held any figure who seems

able to personify both poles in impossible purity. That figure in this film is

Hannibal Lecter (2003, p. 102). The critic Royal Brown (2007) goes so far as

to say that Hopkin’s brilliance in the role makes Lecter “the cannibal we all

want to be” (2007, p. 374). Lecter does not resist humanist symbology, he

takes it to its logical extreme: he orders rare lamb chops, (a reference to

Starling’s trauma), in his cell before he slaughters his jailers and escapes, as if

to say that he does not eat animals instead of humans: he eats animals and

therefore humans too (Wolfe 2003, p. 123). He is consumerism taken to its

logical conclusion.

Lecter transgresses all humanist suppositions about the fate of murderers.

Wolfe points out that our modernist expectations are not overridden but

satisfied by the killing of Bill; this leaves room for a postmodernist

ambivalence towards Lecter and we can leave the cinema well satisfied with

his escape (2003, p. 119). We leave Hannibal strolling through a small

Caribbean resort in pursuit of the “old friend” he is planning to “have for

dinner”, an intertextual nod to the very word “cannibal” and its origins in

Columbus’ corruption of the name “Carib”. Kilgour summarises that the film

demonstrates the continuing power of primal appetites: “man-eating is a reality

- it is civilisation that is the myth” (1998, p. 259).


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3d. The entrepreneur

Lindenbaum (2004, pp. 477-480) reviews several typologies of cannibalism:

she suggests that they are so diverse that we should talk not of cannibalism but

“cannibalisms”. The categories include endocannibalism (eating a member of

one’s own group) and its opposite exocannibalism (usually defeated

opponents), medical, autocannibalism (eating parts of oneself, such as hair,

nail-clippings and placentas) and “innocent” cannibalism in which the act is

undertaken unawares. The last is common in stories of opportunistic

cannibalism - the persons buying Sweeney Todd’s meat pies or the Soylent

Green wafers is unaware of their provenance.

Eating others for profit has been treated satirically in films such as Eat the rich

(Richardson 1987) and Consuming passions (Foster 1988). Cannibalism is an

ideal metaphor for corporate greed or capitalist rapacity generally, and films of

entrepreneurial cannibalism usually have a clear subtext.

Innocent cannibals having old friends for dinner: Sweeney Todd (Burton 2007)


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Sweeney Todd: the demon barber of Fleet Street (King 1936)

The first film (chronologically) in the range

of cannibal stories I have chosen is George

King’s 1936 version of Sweeney Todd. Todd

is a modern myth, but is a descendant of the

shadow archetype (Vogler 2007, p. 65),

those who destroy themselves in trying to

destroy others, including Homer’s Cyclops,

whose behaviour, Lacan would say, is

governed by “unregulated libidinism” (cited

in Buchan 2001, p. 28). This Todd is

certainly so governed. The title role is played

by the appositely named Tod Slaughter, who

presents Todd as pure evil: socially

respectable, yet greedy for money and

lusting after the young heroine, Johanna. The

plot is straightforward: Todd has a barber shop near the docks where he lures

passers-by in for a shave, kills them and steals their valuables. His partner in

crime, Mrs Lovett, has a pie shop and profitably disposes of the bodies.

Johanna is the daughter of a local merchant and Todd offers to go into

partnership with him, planning to ruin him and blackmail him into approving

marriage with his daughter. When the girl’s true love, Mark, returns with

riches from the colonies, he is robbed by Todd but saved from death by Mrs

Lovett, who is jealous of Todd’s attention to Johanna. In an interesting

instance of early (pre-‘slasher’) gender displacement (Clover 1993, p. 51),

Johanna decides to save Mark by dressing as a boy, but is captured by Todd

and, setting the gender roles back to basics, has to be rescued from the

resulting fire (which consumes Todd) by Mark.

Neither Todd nor Lovett are ever seen eating human flesh - all cannibalism is

performed by the unwitting customers, alluded to when Mark’s comic relief

friend and shipmate, Pearley, munches through a pie while speculating on what

Todd does with the bodies. The word ‘cannibal’ is never uttered, and the only

abjection is seen when the narrator, a modern day barber in Todd’s old shop


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recounting the story to a customer, reveals there is a pie shop next door, and

watches in amazement as the man flees. This is textbook abjection: the smell

of meat from some non-human mammal cooking next door has made the

customer in contemporary London realise his own mortality.

This version is also replete in alterity and reification. The class nature of

nineteenth century England is illustrated by young Tobias who is brought to

Todd as an apprentice: Todd gets one guinea for each boy he takes from the

parish. The Beadle warns Todd that this is the last boy he is getting:

presumably he has killed and Mrs Lovett has cooked the previous seven. The

boy prepares the victims by applying shaving cream, and is then sent off for a

walk with a penny pie from next door, making the innocent lad the chief

innocent cannibal. In fact, all the cannibalism is innocent and is carried out by

the lower classes, represented by Pearley and Tobias, an apparent metaphor for

the exploitation with which the working class was struggling in the 1930s

when the film was made. Todd’s unconscionable slaughter of men (never

women, except almost the disguised Johanna) for profit is pure reification: he

treats his fellow humans as commodities. No explanation is given, nor needed:

Todd’s maniacal laughter is necessary and sufficient to make clear that he is a

psychopath; in this, he is a mythic figure like Hannibal Lecter: the stuff of

nightmares.

Sweeney Todd: the demon barber of

Fleet Street (Burton 2007)

In stark contrast, Tim Burton’s Sweeney

Todd, made seventy years later, seeks

explanations, rationalisations and even

some justifications for the roles of the

main characters. This version is a star

vehicle and a musical, an unlikely format

for a ‘slasher’ film. In this account, Todd

is an honest man wronged by a corrupt

power establishment: Judge Turpin (Alan


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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, Todd the entrepreneur is remade as

the wronged anti-hero and the forces of the law and government demonstrate

the unregulated libidinism that characterised Todd in the earlier film. 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 more of an artist: where his 1936 namesake

simply opened a trapdoor and let the victims suffer broken necks or skulls,

trotting down the stairs after them giggling and muttering “I’ll polish you off”,

Depp’s Todd is almost balletic in his use of the razor to slice each throat, and

the viewer is treated each time to streams of arterial blood. There is no polite

avoidance of the cannibal question in this later version: 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

kill, 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!” Like the

earlier film, though, Todd and Lovett never seem to eat their abject products;

the pies being hugely financially successful, presumably, like the ruling class


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in Soylent Green, they can afford other fare. In fact, Lovett is presented as the

psychopath in this version. She suggests the scheme despite her abjection at

her rival’s use of local cats, and, 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. Yet 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, once again disguised as a boy, and does

kill 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, to slit Todd’s throat and

thereby restore the social balance.

Todd kills and dies because there are no legal recourses for injustice in

Burton’s universe. Although 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. There is no room for sympathy or

identification with Slaughter’s 1936 Todd though: the man is evil personified

with his mad cackle and heavy hints of his intentions (”I’ll polish you off”) and

for teasing us with abjection, he dies a fiery death, a fate reserved for Mrs

Lovett seventy years later.


64

Chapter 4: Results and discussion

Buñuel asked that a film “discover something for me” (cited in Kracauer 2004,

p. 306) and Kracauer hypothesised that there are three types of functions to be

discovered. The first is phenomena normally unseen due to their size, or due to

their transience or our cultural “blind spots” (2004, pp. 306-11). Examples

might be the emphasis Hooper (1974) puts on Sally’s terrified eyes, which

normally would be beneath notice, or Demme’s (1991) decision to linger on

Lecter’s “rare lamb chops” as he kills his jailers, an ironic tribute to Starling’s

screaming lambs. The second function is the revelation of events in film that

would normally overwhelm consciousness such as natural disasters, war,

violence and debauchery. These are all playgrounds of cannibal films, and

while each film (particularly the ‘slasher’) has been accused of exploiting and

sensationalising such events, in defence of cinema Kracauer points to the fact

that film makes us contemplate events that would, in reality, be overwhelming:

“drowned in inner agitation” (2004, pp. 311-2). How much more clearly can

we consider the case for cannibalism while seated comfortably in a cinema for

two hours and six minutes, than if we had ourselves stumbled from the

wreckage of a Uruguayan plane in Alive (Marshall 1993)? The third is the

Crusoe and Friday discuss the dinner menu Robinson Crusoe (Buñuel 1954)


65

ability to render reality as it appears to those in extreme states of agitation, joy,

or other states (2004, pp. 312-3). Directors regularly use the mise-en-scène to

explore and enhance the events and emotions of the film: the use of colour in

The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover (Greenaway 1989) is an extreme

example, taking us from the darkness of the street to the stark kitchen to the

lavish interiors of the restaurant and the sterility of the bathrooms.

Film helps us discover things normally unseen, and cannibal films, I believe,

help us discover the alterity and reification that haunt our social, cultural and

interspecial relations. Poststructuralist theory is powerful and effective in

breaking down metaphysical formulations of the subject/object duality (Best &

Kellner 1991, p. 200). In this paper, I have tried to turn some of these

techniques towards examining how the cannibal film genre breaks down

oppositional dualism of human and non-human (or inhuman) through

challenging the transcendent position of humans that is assumed in modern

philosophical and cultural discourses. Bataille’s argument that our self-

definition is derived from rejection of our animality (2004, p. 34) illuminates

the way that deconstructing a human body with a chain saw deconstructs our

most sacred dualism. Derrida considers that the incorporation of the animal

corpse is both symbolic and real, whereas it is merely symbolic when the

corpse is human (1974, p. 278). In other words “the human is always eaten as

other than human” (Guyer 1997). One cannot be a full subject of modern

society without eating meat (Calarco 2013, p. 132) and the conception of the

human subject is usually conflated with “a self-present, speaking, virile eater

of flesh” (Calarco 2004, p. 190), what Derrida calls “carnophallogocentrism”

(Derrida 1974, p. 280). Calarco (2004, p. 193) asserts that Derrida

“complicates” the difference between real and symbolic sacrifice; I argue that

cannibal movies do the same, albeit in a cruder and more popular fashion.

Kilgour in her foreword to Guest’s book Eating their words (2001) states that

cannibalism is “one of the most important topics in criticism today, one which

pierces to the very heart of current discussions of difference and identity”

(2001, p. vii). Probyn says that cannibalism and incest operate as “society’s

psychic ground zero” (2000, p. 94). In cannibal films, humans become objects,


66

or else are seen objectifying other humans. Gilbert (2008, p. 564) proposes that

cultural studies needs to extend the environmental debate, the “green

discourse”, into questions of the fundamental importance of consumerism and

commodification: cannibalism crystallises this debate by confuting the

oppositional dualism of consumer and consumed.

Alive (Marshall 1993) asks us to consider the justification for treating friends,

even family, as just meat - their souls have left; their sacrifice should not be

wasted. Other films show various kinds of humans that do not fit into our

social norms - for example Lecter versus Bill in The silence of the lambs - the

civilised and urbane Lecter is a postmodern, attractive, mythic figure,

compared to the trashy and effeminate Bill whom we repudiate for his

genderless animality. Both objectify in different ways - Lecter attacks authority

figures like nurses, jailers and census takers, while Bill wants women only for

their skin - he seeks to commodify them. Both are outside the law, but only

Bill is outside our sympathetic range. Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973) talks of

people as overstocks, products, recyclable, particularly when dead. Robinson

Crusoe (Buñuel 1954) assumes the savages are inhuman - they are men-eaters

who may be sold as slaves, but cannot be trusted not to eat him in the night:

even the ‘civilised’ Friday. The thief in The cook, the thief, his wife and her

lover is savage, uncivilised; he pollutes civilised society with his money and

scatology and brutality. The butchers in Texas chain saw massacre are

subhuman - they cannot speak properly, are uneducated, unwashed, hideous,

vicious and have no moral code. They kill men like cattle, quickly and

suddenly, yet women are tormented and tortured first as if to punish them,

make them worthy of objectification. Sweeney Todd wants money (King

1936) or revenge (Burton 2007); he is not a cannibal by design, but Mrs

Lovett’s plan for his victims fits his needs. He objectifies those who are easy

pickings yet does not kill women unless they interfere with his plans.

As if to answer the question of my thesis as to whether the use of cannibalism

is purely gratuitous, Butler (2001) wrote of Blood feast (Lewis 1963):

As a rule, cannibalism movies aren't about analysing this bizarre phenomenon but are simply into dishing out gruesome thrills. Certainly that's all director Herschell Gordon Lewis had in mind


67

in 1963 when he unleashed his incredibly cheap, obnoxiously gross Blood feast.

Simon Abrams (2013), on Roger Ebert’s site, said that the film was both

“terrible” and “historically important”. The allmovie website (2014) agreed

that Blood feast “exists solely to ogle grotesque acts of carnage”. However, it

admitted (perhaps ironically) that the film was “one of the important releases

in film history, ushering in a new acceptance of explicit violence” and added

that “Lewis tapped into this subconscious craving to view the private insides of

humanity”.

Blood feast’s feeble plot and production did not detract from the film’s

commercial success: made for $24,500, the film netted a profit of perhaps $30

million (Abrams 2013). It is an excellent example of how even the most

appallingly presented work can tap, probably unintentionally, a deeper

meaning and deconstruct the human/animal divide, for the psychopathic killer

in the film is actually a caterer, collecting body parts, as caterers do, for a

celebratory feast which is intended to become a ceremonial occasion. He is

doing, in other words, what butchers and clergy have done for centuries, but

using the meat of humans rather than other animals. His shopping list makes

him a direct progenitor of Buffalo Bill.

The ethologist Konrad Lorenz (1966, p. 241) argued against the popular

opinion that humans are carnivores, saying that this “confuses the concepts of

the carnivore and the cannibal, which are, to a very large extent, mutually

exclusive”. True carnivores are born with deadly weapons: teeth, claws and

venom, and evolve inhibitions against using these weapons on their own kind;

man, being basically a harmless omnivore, has developed no such inhibitions.

Aggression against those we objectify, therefore, is abject precisely because

there are no controls over how far it may develop. No other species can plan

genocide, and Kilgour (foreword to Guest 2001, p. viii) points to the

importance of being able to distinguish civilisation from barbarism in a post-

holocaust society. The cannibal, she says, is the site where self and other meet,

where the body becomes symbolic, while being reified to mere matter. Our

horror of cannibalism arises from our realisation that the act is both inhumane


68

but deeply human (Konishi 2002, p. 74). As Daniel says, the cannibal as the

epitome of monstrousness defines humanity (2003, p.6).

Wood states that horror films dramatise “all that our civilisation represses or

oppresses” (1979, p. 28). Alterity and reification oppress both the human other

and the non-human animal, while societal myths repress the real horror that

instead appears in film as abjection. Derrida contends that the treatment of

animals for human benefit has been turned “upside down” in the last two

hundred years, with industrialisation and regimentation resulting in an

unprecedented level of violence (2004, p. 119), while “men do all they can to

dissimulate this cruelty or hide it from themselves” (2004, p. 120).

I am suggesting in this thesis that the exposure of this violence through the

abjection of cannibalism in the cinema and its confuting of human/animal

dualism helps to expose this dissimulation and cause the audience at least to

consider the otherwise assumed reification and alterity that

carnophallogocentrism (Derrida 1974, p. 280) imposes on those objectified,

both those of human shape and the other species so violated. The debate will

rage for long about whether simulated violence increases or diminishes

aggression; the verdict on the reception of cannibalism in the ‘slasher’ film is

at least as nuanced, and probably the answer is not clear-cut on either side. Do

the type of viewers who choose to see films like Texas chain saw massacre or

Blood feast ever emerge convinced by the film’s abject content to turn

vegetarian? Unlikely, but next time they enter a butcher shop, they may at least

feel a thrill of recognition, a questioning of alterity, when they see bleeding

hunks of meat offered for their reified consumption, and perhaps even some

stirring of abjection. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use the term “becoming

animal” to describe the process of transcending metaphysical humanism and

anthropocentrism (1987, pp. 240-1). Calarco claims that this contesting of

anthropocentrism reveals a fascination for something outside, something that

could lie at the heart of us, in an “inhuman space” (2013, p. 43). This inhuman

space might be found in a butcher’s window, or in a cannibal movie.


69

Chapter 5: Conclusion

When Val Plumwood, caught in the jaws of a saltwater crocodile, thought in

disbelief “This can’t be happening to me, I’m a human being. I am more than

just food!” (1995, p. 7) she was reflecting a fear of being eaten that runs

through most horror films. The fear is profoundly intensified when the predator

is not a force of nature but an intelligent agent, to whom we, the all-important

subjects of our lives, are mere prey, edible objects. The pinnacle of this fear is

the thought that this intelligent predator, the one who has objectified us as we

objectify other species, is one of us - a human, be he (and he is almost always a

male) a savage, a survivor, a psychopath or an entrepreneur.

This fear is essential to the director of any film that hopes to shock or titillate,

but it is not enough to measure the abjection without seeking its philosophical

roots. Derrida called inside/outside the most basic dualist opposition (1981, p.

103); from a less abstract position, Deborah Bird Rose points to the opposition

of culture to nature, which she interprets as human versus every other living

thing, as the “hyperseparated” (Plumwood 1993) dualism that allows us to

Spica (Michael Gambon) has his wife’s best friend for dinner: The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover (Greenaway 1989)


70

think of ourselves as singular, unique and supreme (Rose 2011, p. 21). The

abjection of the corpse, or any other form of bodily destruction, challenges this

ontological split. Seeing others killing those like us makes us vulnerable;

seeing others eat those like us makes us just meat, just another animal, better at

some things like semiotics and Rubik’s cubes, worse at others like swimming

or running or flying. Is this a desirable outcome? That is a matter for others to

decide, in much longer theses written in areas barely glanced at here. I would

just point out that the human/animal and culture/nature dualisms, left

undeconstructed, are the source of all the suffering humanity has inflicted on

other species and most of the atrocities performed against those of our fellow

Homo sapiens who are stripped of their subjectivity, objectified, often on quite

indiscriminate and contingent grounds. Pointing out that we are considerable

as ‘just meat’ scares and disgusts us, just as the directors hope, but in the final

analysis also commences a process of deconstruction of human supremacism

and anthropocentrism that can lead to a more open, compassionate approach to

human and interspecies political interaction. Next time we pick up a fork and

knife, perhaps we will wonder if we really might be “having an old friend for

dinner”.

Hannibal Lecter’s extra dinner. The silence of the lambs (Demme 1991)


71

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Filmography Links to trailers are listed, to give a ‘taste’ of the films.

Bourke, T 1972, Night of fear, Umbrella Entertainment, Northcote Vic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrydr60oop0

Buñuel, L 1954, Robinson Crusoe, United Artists Corp, Mexico and US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f195WWXMt-A

Burton, T 2007, Sweeney Todd: the demon barber of Fleet Street, DreamWorks Pictures, California, USA. http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3786473753/

Demme, J 1991, The silence of the lambs, Columbia TriStar Home Video, USA. www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi1140457753

Eisenstein, S 1925, Strike, Triad Productions, Southgate, MI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWiDciPuSW4

Fleischer, R 1973, Soylent Green, MGM [Distributed by Warner Home Video], USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpN312hYgU

Forbes, B 1966, The wrong box, Columbia Pictures Salamander Film Productions, Culver City, Calif. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsLmhwZu6LQ

Foster, G 1988, Consuming passions, Metro Goldwyn Mayer : Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_EOP6woNPs

Greenaway, P 1989, The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover, Miramax Films, UK. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXLRdeYFHss

Hitchcock, A 1960, Psycho, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Universal City, CA. http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi607099161/

Hooper, T 1974, The Texas chain saw massacre, Vortex [Distributed by Filmways VTC], USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs3981DoINw

Jacobson, D 2002, Dahmer, Dream Entertainment, United States. http://www.metacritic.com/movie/dahmer/trailers/1083480

King, G 1936, Sweeney Todd : the demon barber of Fleet Street, Odeon Entertainment, U.K. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMkKWAm8mCI

Lane, L 1928, Be my king, Alpha Video, USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSuSv3qyL1Y

Lewis, HG 1963, Blood feast, Something Weird Video, Seattle, WA. http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi196804889

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrydr60oop0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f195WWXMt-A

http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3786473753/

http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi1140457753

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWiDciPuSW4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpN312hYgU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsLmhwZu6LQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_EOP6woNPs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXLRdeYFHss


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs3981DoINw

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/dahmer/trailers/1083480

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMkKWAm8mCI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSuSv3qyL1Y

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi196804889


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Marshall, F 1993, Alive, Paramount Pictures, USA. https://vimeo.com/44072081

Richardson, P 1987, Eat the rich, Image Entertainment, Chatsworth, CA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIo3NMpH-84

Schertzinger, V 1941, Road to Zanzibar, Universal Studios Paramount Pictures, Universal City, CA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BhR8X-B5Jo

Scott, R 2001, Hannibal, MGM, California. http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi1300339481/

Webber, P 2008, Hannibal rising, Movie One, Sydney, N.S.W. http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi600638233/

https://vimeo.com/44072081

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIo3NMpH-84

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BhR8X-B5Jo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BhR8X-B5Jo




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Appendix: Films considered English language feature films concerning cannibalism (to at least some extent).

Over half (61 of 114) were or are to be made in the 21st century.

The films chosen for inclusion in the thesis are highlighted.

Film Year Director

Be my king 1928 Lupino Lane

Sweeney Todd 1928 Walter West

She 1935 Lansing C. Holden, Irving Pichel

Sweeney Todd 1936 George King

Road to Zanzibar 1941 Victor Schertzinger

Robinson Crusoe 1954 Luis Bunuel Moby Dick 1956 John Huston

Suddenly last summer 1959 Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The time machine 1960 George Pal

Blood feast 1963 Herschell Gordon Lewis

The naked prey 1966 Cornel Wilde

The wrong box 1966 Bryan Forbes

Spider baby or The maddest story ever told 1968 Jack Hill

Beneath the planet of the apes 1970 Ted Post

Carry on up the jungle 1970 Gerald Thomas

Night of fear 1972 Terry Bourke

Cannibal girls 1973 Ivan Reisman

Soylent Green 1973 Richard Fleischer The Texas chain saw massacre 1974 Tobe Hooper A boy and his dog 1975 LQ Jones

The rocky horror picture show 1975 Jim Sharman

The hills have eyes 1977 Wes Craven

The mountain of the cannibal god 1978 Sergio Martino

The time machine 1978 Henning Schellerup

Motel hell 1980 Kevin Connor

Conan the barbarian 1982 John Milius

Eating Raoul 1982 Paul Bartel

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0922386/?ref_=tt_ov_dr








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Sweeney Todd: the demon barber of Fleet St 1982 Terry Hughes

C.H.U.D. 1984 Douglas Cheek

Manhunter 1986 Michael Mann

The Texas chain saw massacre 2 1986 Tobe Hooper

Blood diner 1987 Jackie Kong

Eat the rich 1987 Peter Richardson

Consuming passions 1988 Giles Foster

Flesh eating mothers 1988 James Aviles Martin

Cannibal women in the avocado jungle of death 1989 JF Lawson

Parents 1989 Bob Balaban

Society 1989 Brian Yuzna

The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover 1989 Peter Greenaway Leatherface: Texas chain saw massacre III 1990 Jeff Burr

Fried green tomatoes 1991 Jon Avnet

The silence of the lambs 1991 Jonathan Demme Alive 1993 Frank Marshall Cannibal: the musical 1993 Trey Parker

Heart of darkness 1993 Nicholas Roeg

Texas chain saw massacre: the next generation 1994 Kim Henkel

Judge Dredd 1995 Danny Cannon

The tale of Sweeney Todd 1997 John Schlesinger

Robinson Crusoe 1997 Rod Hardy and George Miller

Ravenous 1999 Antonia Bird

The 13th warrior 1999 John McTiernan

Titus 1999 Julie Taymor

American psycho 2000 Mary Harron

Keep the river on your right 2000 Lawrie Shapiro, David Shapiro

Hannibal 2001 Ridley Scott

Wendigo 2001 Larry Fessenden

Dahmer 2002 David Jacobson

Red dragon 2002 Brett Ratner

The time machine 2002 Simon Wells

























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Evil breed: the legend of Samhain 2003 Christian Viel

The Texas chain saw massacre 2003 Marcus Nispel

Wrong turn 2003 Rob Schmidt

Bad meat 2004 Scott Dikkers

Serenity 2005 Joss Whedon

Sin city [The hard goodbye] 2005 Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez

Grimm love (original title "Rohtenburg") 2006 Martin Weisz

Hillside cannibals: The legend of Sawney Bean 2006 Leigh Scott

The hills have eyes 2006 Alexandre Aja

Sweeney Todd 2006 David Moore

The Texas chain saw massacre: the beginning 2006 Jonathan Liebesman

Diary of a cannibal 2007 Ulli Lommel

Hannibal rising 2007 Peter Webber

Hostel II 2007 Eli Roth

Nobel son 2007 Randall Miller

Sweeney Todd: the demon barber of Fleet Street, 2007 Tim Burton Tooth and nail 2007 Mark Young

Batman: Gotham knight 2008 Yasuhiro Aoki

Dying breed 2008 Jody Dwyer

Gnaw 2008 Gregory Mandry

The last confession of Alexander Pearce 2008 Michael James Rowland

After dusk they come [The forgotten ones] 2009 Jorge Ihle

Blood snow [Necrosis] 2009 Jason Robert Stephens

Doghouse 2009 Jake West

Grace 2009 Paul Solet

Hunger 2009 Steven Hentges

The Donner party 2009 Terrence J. Martin

The Road 2009 John Hillcoat

Van Diemen's Land 2009 Jonathan auf der Heide

Cyrus: mind of a serial killer 2010 Mark Vadik

Never let me go 2010 Mark Romanek








http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jody_Dwyer&action=edit&redlink=1







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The book of Eli 2010 Albert and Allen Hughes

Bad meat 2011 Louis Jarmen

Snowtown murders 2011 Justin Kurzel

The day 2011 Douglas Aarniokoski

The guest room [Serving up Richard] 2011 Henry Olek

100 bloody acres 2012 Cameron Cairnes, Colin Cairnes

Antiviral 2012 Brandon Cronenberg

Cloud atlas 2012 Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski

Eddie: The sleepwalking cannibal 2012 Boris Rodriguez

Elfie Hopkins 2012 Ryan Andrews

Fresh meat 2012 Danny Mulheron

Life of Pi 2012 Ang Lee

Sawney flesh of man [Lord of darkness] 2012 Ricky Wood

The colony 2013 Jeff Renfroe

Eat 2013 Jimmy Webber

The green inferno 2013 Eli Roth

The lone ranger 2013 Gore Verbinski

Snowpiercer 2013 Joon-ho Bong

Texas chain saw 3D 2013 John Luessenhop

This is the end 2013 Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen

We are what we are 2013 Jim Mickle

Breeding farm 2013 Cody Knotts









Having an old friend for dinner: cannibalism goes to the movies

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