The big news about Grindhouse Releasing’s domestic two-disc version of the DVD and subsequent theatrical re-release had just been announced, and I figured it would be a perfect time to delve into the history and themes of the cannibal flick equivalent of being run over by a train. Needless to say the professor, as well as the rest of the class, began showing concern for my mental health when I showed scenes from the movie in class while presenting my topic. Surprisingly little has been written about Cannibal Holocaust, at least that I could find, and I’m sure that while a good many of you have already read all the material you could find on it, I hope you find the following to be at least interesting, if not particularly informative. For those of you to whom Cannibal Holocaust remains that unseen Holy Grail of Gore (and with the internet and eBay and now the domestic release, what the hell are you waiting for?), but who eagerly devour any little snippets about it you come across, this may either serve to enhance your curiosity or give you pause for thought as to whether or not you really want to see monkeys decapitated, a fetus torn from a pregnant woman, men gelded, gutted and decapitated, and just generally the most unpleasant and nihilistic stuff ever filmed outside a Republican National Convention. Here, then, is a revised version of the final paper. Grab a beret and a cup of mochaccino, this could get pretentious.

“Cannibal Holocaust leads you to expect the worst and then shows it” (Landis and Clifford, pg. 212). This quote from Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford’s book “Sleazoid Express” sums up nicely a movie that has turned countless theaters full of gore veterans ill, and resulted in the arrest of director Ruggero Deodato.

There is, however, more to Cannibal Holocaust than mere shock tactics. It’s a thoughtful and interesting, if unpleasant, addition to a genre usually swamped in nothing but mindless violence (and don‘t think for a second that I‘m nay-saying mindless violence). Although Deodato claims to have made a movie about cannibals and nothing else, the more intellectually inclined genre fans have taken the film and made it their own (kinda like those goddamn hippies who think Joyce‘s “Finnegan‘s Wake” actually makes sense if you read it upside down and backwards six times in a row after eating enough hallucinogenic mushrooms to kill a rhino). While the ones not in denial (and possibly in need of psychiatric care) will admit they like the movie for what it is on the surface -- a down and dirty exploitation flick -- it’s hard to ignore the feeling that the film has an intelligent side. Not only does Holocaust lead the viewer to expect the worst of its characters, it also leads the viewer to expect the worst of his fellow man’s desire for sensationalism, and to what lengths he will go to feed that desire. Like, for example, sitting through a movie as reprehensible as Cannibal Holocaust. It’s a nifty little paradox, innit?

The film starts with Professor Harold Monroe leading a small expedition into the jungle to rescue a film crew who disappeared two months previous. The film crew had gone into the South American jungle to shoot the follow-up to their award winning documentary The Last Road to Hell. The new documentary was to be an examination of two warring cannibal tribes, the Yanomomo, or “Tree People” and the Shamatari, or “Swamp People,” deep in the jungle. These two tribes (and a third, the Yacuma) are all real South American native tribes. Their rituals and actions as portrayed in the film are (more or less) real, and they do (or at least did) indeed engage in cannibalism.

American feminist critics would have a field day ripping Deodato apart for simple misogyny, but a quick look beyond the surface violence shows something else. The scene described in the following paragraph is an accusation of society’s primitive desire for male control. The native woman showed independence and had to be made an example of to prevent other women from doing the same and robbing the men of their authority.

On the way to the Yanomomo encampment, Monroe’s party is witness to a form of ritual punishment for adultery. A male tribesman (it is unclear which tribe they are from) ties a woman, presumably his mate, to a post on a muddy shore. He penetrates her several times with an almost cartoonishly large stone phallus, stuffs her vagina full of mud and nails, and finally bashes her head in with the phallus. Chako stops Monroe from rescuing the girl, warning him that this ritual is a sacred act, and if the man had not killed the adulterous woman, his tribe would have killed him.

Monroe the modern humanitarian wants to intervene, but Chako, who lives close to the jungle and is more in touch with his primitive side, warns him against it. Eventually he gives in and simply tries to observe the ritual slaying with the objective eye of a scientist. It’s not necessarily right, but sometimes there is nothing that can be done. Man’s brutal desire to dominate everything around him will likely never be fully exorcised.

When Monroe and his two guides, Miguel and Chako, arrive at the Yanomomo village, they discover the film crew has been killed and eaten in a ritual of revenge and cleansing, meant to drive the evil spirits of the white men out of the jungle. The Yanomomo are cautious about letting Monroe and his crew into their village, but after Monroe and Miguel strip naked as a sign of trust and give the village chief gifts of a switchblade knife and a tape recorder with one of the Yanomomo’s ritual songs on it, they are allowed to enter the camp as guests for a feast and to take the film cans of the previous crew back to New York City to be developed.

When Monroe has the film developed, he is horrified at what it reveals. The film crew of Jack Anders, Mark Tomaso, Faye Daniels, and led by Alan Yates, committed terrible atrocities against the Yanomomo to incite them to war so they would have plenty of shocking footage to air back home. The footage shows their penchant for callous violence even before they reach the tribe, with Jack their guide and Felipe hacking up a huge river turtle for fun. An unfortunate ingredient in just about any Italian cannibal flick is the real mutilation of animals. A good number of otherwise iron-stomached gore fans refuse to watch these movies for just that reason, and while I can look past it, I could live without it. I’m not one to whine on about how bad it is to kill animals, because I love me some meat, and all the animals were purportedly given to the natives to eat, but I can‘t imagine who any of these directors thought was going to be amused by it..

It becomes increasingly clear that Alan Yates and company have no regard for life, human or otherwise, if it stands between them and notoriety. When Felipe is bitten on the toe by a snake, they inexpertly mutilate his foot to extricate the poison. When the impromptu surgery is unsuccessful, they hack his entire leg off with a machete. The wound isn’t cauterized in time, and Felipe dies on camera, so they bury his body in the leaves and move on. The crew seems to jump the gun on amputating Felipe’s leg, and the excitement with which they do it implies that they’re doing it just for more sensationalist footage.

Upon reaching the Yanomomo village after following a tribesman they shot in the leg to slow him down, the crew find the natives to be peaceful and rather boring. Instead of making due with what they’re given, the film crew attempt to rile up the natives, burning down the village, intruding on several sacred ceremonies, and gang-raping a young Yanomomo girl, condemning her to death by tribal law. When they later find the corpse of the girl impaled on a huge stake, Jack has to remind Alan to stop smiling because it’s supposed to be horrible and shocking and the camera is still rolling.

They certainly succeed at inciting a tribal war, except the war is waged against them – a centuries-old ritualistic exophagic cannibal war of bloody revenge designed to degrade and destroy the bodies and dissipate the souls of the enemy.

Exophagic rituals are or were practiced by many tribes throughout the world for a variety of reasons.

In this case, the Yanomomo are trying to wash clean the stain the outsiders have brought to their jungle.

In a typical show of ratings-hungry television executive insensitivity and general bastardliness, the heads of BDC-TV, who Alan and company were working for, insist on showing the documentary uncut in prime-time. Or at least, they want to until Monroe shows them the final reel of footage depicting the film crew’s mistreatment of the Yanomomo tribe and subsequent graphic slaughter. When the lights go up, one of the studio heads orders the film to be burned. A brief text card before the credits informs us that the projectionist in the screening room stole the film and sold it for a quarter of a million dollars.

Cannibal Holocaust was part of the Italian cannibal film cycle starting with Umberto Lenzi’s Deep River Savages in 1972. Cannibal Holocaust came in the twilight of the cannibal film cycle, which ended proper with Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox in 1981. Cannibal Holocaust was directed by Ruggero Deodato in 1979 and banned upon release in many countries, including England and Deodato’s native Italy. One critic said of the director, “of Ruggero Deodato one can only say, as the English said of Mussolini in 1940, ’if you see this man, cross over the street’” (Gere, pg. 63). Other, more open-minded critics have a different view. Filmographer Harvey Fenton states, “for the alter viewer who is prepared to be mentally challenged and emotionally assaulted, his [Deodato’s] best films can prove to be both cathartic and inspirational” (pg. 9).

Deodato’s shaky camera work, intentionally scratched and flawed film, and chaotic style of filming of these final sequences of mutilation and horror, along with the simple but effective and believable gore effects by Aldo Gasparri, lend the film an unsettling realism which is the source of much of the controversy. It is also why Deodato was eventually charged with killing his actors to make a snuff film (a rumor propagated by Photo, a French magazine) after the film was banned and Deodato was arrested under an old Italian law forbidding cruelty to animals regarding the animal slaughter in the film. Of course, it didn’t help that Deodato instructed his actors to effectively disappear for a time after the movie was made, working on no other projects and using assumed names to create the illusion that they had indeed disappeared. Truly, “Deodato should be applauded. Cannibal Holocaust really does prove that you can fool some of the people all of the time” (Kerekes and Slater, pg. 49).

Many of Cannibal Holocaust’s shocks are subliminal and have a more unsettling and longer lasting effect than simply dousing the actors with gallons of stage blood. For example, when Faye is decapitated after being ravaged by a group of Yanomomo warriors, there are several flashes of her head being held aloft which are only a few frames long. The film is blurry, jumpy and scratched, but in the end these effects all come together to make the scene seem more real, and much more disturbing than a close up shot on what would probably look like a clearly fake head being separated from a mannequin’s shoulders. It’s that “special kind of alchemy that happens when unintended effects become aesthetically transcendent” (Landis and Clifford, pg. 5).

Cannibal Holocaust suffers from the same problem as Day of the Woman a.k.a. I Spit On Your Grave - the problem that most viewers refuse or are unable to look past the gritty, nihilistic torture scenes to pick out the message buried under all the corpses. It also has never been marketed as an intelligent film, but rather only as a shock film, again like Day of the Woman, which had its title changed to I Spit On Your Grave by distributors trying to draw in the exploitation audience. This problem is complicated for Holocaust because its message is multi-layered and at times difficult to grasp, unlike Day of the Woman’s very clear pro-feminist anti-rape message.

Another difficulty most critics have in seeing Cannibal Holocaust as a “film of restoration and redistribution rather than a film of chaos and destruction” (Brottman, pg. 148) is that it is in fact two films, with the most current (and positive) events taking place at the beginning, and ending with the horrors acted out and acted upon the first group of explorers. “Yates’ story is one of chaos, anarchy, violence, and the apocalyptic collapse of moral boundaries; Monroe’s is one of wary restoration and resolution” (Brottman, pg. 140). Holocaust actually ends with Monroe making reparations for the vile actions of Yates and his team, thus remaining upbeat and positive about man’s capability to treat his fellow man with kindness and understanding.

The main structure of the film, and the reason there’s a Cannibal Holocaust, is based around the system of give-and-take, its collapse by Alan and his team, and subsequent reestablishment by Monroe‘s expedition. The footage shot by Yates’ crew and recovered by Monroe reveals the film team to have, upon not being “given” enough in terms of performance by the Yanomomo, taken what they wanted with violent force and collapsing the fundamental structure of exchange with the tribe. When Monroe’s narrative reaches the jungle, he and his guides begin to restore this system by showing themselves naked to the tribe as a sign of trust, and to present them with gifts of a knife and a tape recorder. The Yanomomo, in a gesture of almost superhuman understanding, not only decide to trust these white outsiders (who to them could well be another crew of rapists and pillagers), but they bring them into their village and allow them to be privy to their most private and sacred of rituals.

Cannibal Holocaust was a strong influence in the narrative style of The Blair Witch Project, a movie with half the style and not even a quarter of the class of its benefactor. However, aside from being influential to a new generation of genre filmmakers, Holocaust turned out to be something of a filmic Nostradamus regarding the shape of exploitive “reality” entertainment to come.

The following excerpt from Charlie Brooker’s November 2004 article for the London newspaper “The Guardian” nicely sums up the similarities between Cannibal Holocaust and the current spate of “reality” television, the newest and possibly most exploitative form of low-class sensationalist entertainment to date:

Thus, while the movie may leave something to be desired in technical terms, acting talent, narrative probability and so forth, “…to condemn Cannibal Holocaust for its moral and ethical implications seems to be somehow rather beside the point” (Brottman, pg. 147). You can be sure that the wholesome, upright, God-fearing, all-American families who would decry Cannibal Holocaust are setting their TIVO’s to record “Survivor” or “Wife Swap” or some other substanceless piece of pop culture tripe. I know what you’re thinking. “But Ragnarok,” you say, “Cannibal Holocaust is violent and horrible and full of rape and mutilation and hacking up animals.” “Yes,” I reply, “but at least it’s honest about it. Reality TV just waters it down so they can sell your mom dish soap and mini vans during the commercial breaks. If they could be nastier, they would, and I guarantee you no one produces throwaway TV shows for their love of the craft (which is practically nonexistent, as these tepid shows are created for next to nothing). At least Deodato lugged his camera crew into the jungle for a month to have some fun and be creative.”

Meanwhile, the audiences who pretend to be shocked by the primitive atrocities shown in Cannibal Holocaust and other cannibal films, and even more so the mondo films which will be covered a bit later, don’t seem to see the irony in that they have no problem with the degradation, defilement, injury, and sometimes even death of their fellow man to feed their hunger for sensationalist entertainment in Prime Time. They tune in every week to see people figuratively stab each other in the back with no remorse on shows like “The Apprentice”, much like Felipe is stabbed and sacrificed for the good of the ratings, or watch contestants guzzle a blender full of pureed rat on “Fear Factor”, ala Monroe and Chako joining in the cannibal feast with the Yanomomo. If you tune in to NASCAR, are you watching because you actually care about who wins, or do you just wants to see a blazing car wreck? That’s what I thought.

The final word about the projectionist stealing the death footage filmed by Alan’s crew and selling it for a huge profit turned out to be disturbingly prophetic as well. Now any amateur shock junkie with a camcorder can be given access to disaster sites by claiming to be a freelance “newshound.” Scenes of suicides, car wrecks, and murders are sold by the private sector to the highest bidding network, and people are forced to see their loved ones’ privacy and dignity stripped away as their corpses are paraded across every TV screen in the country.

It has gotten even worse in recent years, with the popularity of amateur video reality TV shows like “I Witness Video” and a new breed of “shockumentary” (starting in 1979 with Faces of Death), containing nothing but scenes of death. These scenes are comprised of both actual newsreel footage and the trusty standby of staged murders, suicides, and fatal accidents dressed up to look like the real thing.

In an interview with Gian Luca Castoldi, Deodato gives a hint of an even more frightening and disgusting form of extreme entertainment indulged in by the upper class - the hunting of other human beings:

Clearly Deodato found this practice abhorrent, as would any rational person. His role in jailing someone who profited from the real suffering of fellow humans pretty clearly deflates the credibility of those who argue that he is a nihilistic maker of snuff films.

Cannibal Holocaust is also an indictment of journalistic integrity, specifically regarding the mondo genre which started proper in 1962 with Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s Mondo Cane (although legendary showman Kroger Babb created the precursor to the mondo film, Karamoja, in 1954). Cannibal Holocaust undeniably takes inspiration from these mondo flicks regarding the style of cinematography and editing, and even sporting an opening title card claiming the movie is a true story. It is also an interesting, albeit somewhat extreme, look at how some of the segments for mondo films were staged and shot.

As Harvey Fenton states:

Mondo films were documentaries intended to shock “civilized” western audiences by showing them the strange and barbarous practices of foreign peoples, usually Asian or African. They consisted mainly of bizarre and sometimes painful-looking religious practices like fakirs shoving huge needles through their faces, as well as National Geographic-style footage of animals eating each other. There were also plenty of scenes of people killing animals, including natives killing them for food, with camera crews capturing the whole spectacular butchery on film. Westerner’s flabbergasted reactions to scenes such as these are amusing to watch. It would seem that since they didn’t kill the animals themselves, they are exempt from responsibility for the death of their ribeye or New York strip.

Questions are raised by the discerning viewer as to how the camera manages to constantly be in the right place at the right time to capture these scenes of slaughter, or if perhaps the whole thing was a setup with the crew staging or paying tribesmen to perform actual animal mutilation for them. The animal killing in Cannibal Holocaust -- Jack and Mark butchering a huge river turtle with a machete and Alan tormenting and finally shooting a small pig in the Yanomomo village -- offer an unpleasant look at how these scenes may have been intentionally set up by jaded filmmakers like Jacopetti and Prosperi.

Cannibal Holocaust also uses actual newsreel footage of executions for the Last Road to Hell segment, making it one step closer to its mondo brethren, and consequently one step closer to the snuff film it has so widely been accused of being. Interestingly enough, the film treats the execution footage as fake. “Just to give you an idea how Alan and the others worked, everything you just saw was put on…there was no enemy army approaching,” says one of the BDC-TV executives eager to show the Green Inferno footage on national television. “Alan paid those soldiers to do a bit of acting for him.”

Probably the most famous, and most tasteless, of all the staged mondo sequences is Jacopetti and Prosperi’s 1970 offering, Farewell Uncle Tom. Nearly the entire film is a put-on. Saddled with an X rating for being “far more sexually explicit and perverted than conventional pornography” (Landis and Clifford, pg. 166), Farewell Uncle Tom purports to be an inquest into slavery, but rarely are the atrocities shown anything but staged shock sequences, the most memorable of which are the reenactment of slave ship conditions and the “breeding barn,” where slave women are mated with muscle-bound studs to produce a new, stronger generation of slaves.

Cannibal Holocaust implicates not only its fellow media industry shock mongers, but the viewer as well, seeming to say, “This is horrible, isn’t it? Look at all the disgusting things happening on the screen! Then why are you still watching!?” Professor Monroe’s disgust at and refusal to have anything to do with the recovered footage sees Monroe acting as the civilized side of every viewer’s consciousness, repulsed at what his/our fellow humans are capable of doing to each other in the name of greed, fame and fortune.

It is this repulsion that brings so many to track down Cannibal Holocaust. The film has never had a stateside video release until 2005, so gorehounds and horror fans have had to go to some lengths to track down a bootleg or have an imported version sent from overseas. To many genre fans, it becomes a game - a quest to find newer and more horrible movies to call up that sickening gut-punch feeling as we become more and more desensitized to cinematic violence. Perhaps not the healthiest of addictions, but it beats actually committing acts of violence for kicks.

Monroe’s final question, “I wonder who the cannibals really are?” drives the point (rather heavy-handedly) home. While the supposedly civilized westerners look down on jungle tribes like the Yacumas, Shamataris, and Yanomomos as primitive savages, their respect for life and nature, as well as their ability to renew and move on as illustrated by their acceptance of Monroe’s expedition despite the horrors visited upon them by Alan and his team, is exemplary.

Ruggero Deodato and Umberto Lenzi seemed to have a running contest throughout the cannibal film era to see which one could out-gross the other. While many would argue that Deodato won the gross-out game, Lenzi got the last laugh. The final hurrah of the Italian cannibal cycle, and the most notable aside from Cannibal Holocaust, is Umberto Lenzi’s “positively demented” (Fenton, pg. 64) Cannibal Ferox. Ferox attempted to revisit the question of who the cannibals really are. This time, a group of anthropologists have gone into the jungle to prove that cannibalism doesn’t exist. They run afoul of a group of violent drug pushers, and eventually both groups wind up on the menu after the criminals push one of the native tribes too far with their abuse. Once again the natives are only forced to be savages by the intrusion of the truly savage white men.

In the end, all traces of savagery and cannibalism are hushed up. Gloria, the single surviving member of the group of anthropologists, returns to New York City to deliver her doctoral thesis and declaims the existence of cannibalism, “obviously in a state of heightened denial” (Brottman, pg. 156).

Cannibal Ferox never comes across as the intelligent, albeit punishing film its predecessor was. It is clearly more a pure exploitation picture, and is also “arguably the more morally reprehensible of the two due to its unapologetically gleeful, misanthropic attitude” (Fenton, pg. 64). Cannibal Holocaust, at least, tries to make you feel bad for watching such horrible acts of violence. Cannibal Ferox fully intends for you to enjoy them.

Few other exploitation/horror films pack the visceral punch or the intellectual ammunition of Cannibal Holocaust. 27 years after its initial theatrical release, it is still widely regarded as the king. Many have tried to dethrone it, and all have failed. The reason it still holds that throne is the feeling it leaves its viewers with - not just another gritty adrenaline kick, but a more wary and cynical view of the entertainment world and people’s ability and complete willingness to do horrible things to one another for personal gain.

The Moral of the Story: I think I’ve pretty well covered the moral of the story, so today I’ll use this space for an amusing anecdote instead. Last summer, my girlfriend and a couple of buddies and I drove up to Minneapolis to see Cannibal Holocaust at the Landmark Uptown. I assumed the Minneapolis midnight movie crowd would be fairly jaded (maybe not as much as I am, but that takes some doing), and most of the audience would have seen the movie by now. My assumption was strengthened when B-Fest-style jokes were hurled at the screen when the title card came up and through the first few minutes of the movie. Once Miguel stuck the muskrat with his knife, a few ripples of uneasy laughter played through the room, as though the audience were a bunch of newbies and just getting a taste of what lay ahead, and then joking resumed for a bit. When the Yates footage finally started to roll, the theater was Dead. Fucking. Silent. Till the end of the movie. Looking around at the other 150-or-so movie goers around me as we left, it seemed that we were in the minority, knowing what we were getting into going in. The rest of the crowd looked like they’d just spent the last 90 minutes being punched in the genitals by a pneumatic battering ram. It was a beautiful sight.

Sources

Brooker, Charlie. “The Guardian”. London, November 27, 2004.

Brottman, Mikita. “Meat Is Murder! An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture”
New York, NY: Creation Books, 1998.

Fenton, Harvey. “Cannibal Holocaust: The Savage Cinema of Ruggero Deodato”
England, U.K.: FAB Press, 1999.

Gere, F. “Cahiers du Cinema” July/August1981.

Kerekes, David and Slater, David. “An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff”

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