"Cannibal Holocaust"

35 years ago, Ruggero Deodato became the first professional filmmaker to be officially taken to court on suspicion of creating a snuff film. In a makeshift behind-the-scenes presentation more surreal than anything he had caught on camera, Deodato did not content himself with producing the main cast before the magistrates in order to confirm that they were still very much alive; he went as far as revealing how he achieved the trick of making a woman seem impaled on a spike, something that no creator in modern history had been compelled to do by court order until then.

The film in question, one that continues to divide critics and audiences even as its cultural and aesthetic impact on horror cinema remains undisputed, is Cannibal Holocaust. What was originally conceived as just another in a series of schlocky cannibal movies churned out by the booming Italian exploitation film industry became an overnight cinematic legend in a very literal sense, the kind of film many people simply could not believe had actually been made. Banned in many countries – including, until 2001, the UK, where it proudly headed the infamous “video nasties” decried by Mary Whitehouse and her moral crusaders – and cited as a major influence by filmmakers as respected as Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone and Nicolas Winding Refn, Cannibal Holocaust didn’t just push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable violence within the horror genre; for many viewers and critics, it blew up previously well-established conventions on where the border between art and exploitation stood, and scattered their remains across the entire blood-soaked landscape. For its defenders, this was additional proof – alongside Wes Craven’s 1972 landmark rape-and-revenge story The Last House On The Left¹ – that grimy, low-budget exploitation horror’s contribution to cinema as an art form could go far beyond practical gore effects. Cannibal Holocaust, they insisted, was more than just a cheap exploitation of westerners’ neocolonial fantasies of cannibalistic tribes for shock value – it was a bold, unflinching critique of audiences’ insatiable lust for screen violence, as well as a meditation on humanity’s innately brutal nature regardless of one’s “civilized” or “savage” surroundings and upbringing.

It would be easy to dismiss such praise as fanciful intellectual gymnastics performed by people afraid that their consumption of trash might harm their respectability, but the truth is that Cannibal Holocaust, in spite of Deodato’s later claims that he never sought to make anything else but a cannibal movie, seems genuinely sincere in its efforts to question its own audience’s presumed bloodlust and at times comes dangerously close to making insightful points, which makes its overall hypocrisy more of a frustrating disappointment than something worthy of righteous indignation.

One of Cannibal Holocaust’s strongest points is its structure: Metatextual from its opening scenes, which use television as the medium through which the missing documentary film crew and anthropologist Harold Monroe’s efforts to discover their fate are introduced to the viewer, it alternates from self-reflexive diegetic storytelling (initially in the form of TV interviews) to what seems like a straightforward journey to the “green inferno” where the crew’s remains and footage are found, then back to self-reflexivity as we make the same journey again, this time from the recorded perspective of those who undertook it, discovering new and progressively more inhuman acts with each new screening.

This structure keeps the viewer’s attention by regularly making them re-assess previous information based on new contextual elements. This is widely considered to be the first instance of the “found footage” gimmick in the horror genre, and if it is not the best overall film of its kind, its narrative usage of this device is certainly one of the most ingenious: as we identify with Professor Monroe, rather than the footage’s odious protagonists, the feeling of progressive discovery is greater than if their actions and fates had been revealed through conventional flashbacks, and the consequent detachment brings an additional eeriness to Riz Ortolani’s gorgeous accompanying score (unnecessarily hand-waved in the film as stock music inserted by the editors).

Here, however, end the compliments, as the “found footage” gimmick and resulting detachment are here used as a license to display exceptionally pornographic violence perpetrated by both the cannibals and the documentary crew. The idea is that because we are viewing both recorded and “live” events from the point of view of a moral, enlightened character who repeatedly vocalizes the intended “who’s the real savage?” theme, we are able to see them as the senseless evil that they are. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Inserting the hero’s sickened reaction shots in-between images of a woman being brutally raped with a stone and a nail-ridden mudball is not enough to elevate such a scene above crude exploitation. The fact that most of the worst crimes are recorded by an in-universe camera whose complicity is evident throughout does not make their depiction inherently critical.

For there to be criticism or self-criticism, the camera and its filmed subjects – be they the characters or the events – need to work together, not necessarily in a conscious alliance, but rather as complementary players in the same game. In this case, the many recorded instances of rape – native-on-native, native-on-crewmember and crewmember-on-native – are barren of any narrative contextualization that would justify their depiction, aside from being the easiest, laziest imaginable shorthand for common human depravity. They are entirely gratuitous and carry no political or moral resonance. Unlike the harrowing scene in which the crew threatens an entire tribe at gunpoint to assemble inside a hut they then proceed to burn down – a crime they plan to edit in order to make it look like the work of an enemy tribe – there is no thought, internal logic or greater point to these rape scenes other than the shocking nature of the act itself; in the case of the sole female crewmember’s later gang-rape by cannibals following her comrades’ own gang-rape of one of the tribe’s women, the act is framed as karmic eye-for-an-eye retribution, making its visual recording a tacit affirmation of approval rather than a revelation of any sort.

And then of course, there’s the real, unsimulated killing of animals, carried out by both the natives (whose non-human meal of choice appears to be freshly-picked monkey brains) and the film crew. In one of the film’s most nauseating sequences, the camera follows them in a single take as they capture, behead and disembowel a turtle for later consumption. Because we know this is a real turtle being slaughtered and the camera lovingly lingers on its carcass, severed head and guts, any intended commentary – be it a critique of media glorification of real-life violence or an asinine parallel between animal slaughter and cannibalism – falls flat on its face. Its barbaric and completely unnecessary nature is made all the more blatant by the fact that it was entirely Deodato’s idea; it’s not as if he was accompanying hunters and filming their activities or had accidentally stumbled across these animals being killed. He forced his actors to kill animals live on camera for a film that purports to ask what savagery really is and didn’t see the contradiction until decades later when he expressed regret for these scenes. By emulating his characters’ bloodlust without a hint of self-awareness, Deodato forfeits any claim to a moral high ground.

Compare this lack of thoughtfulness to dark Belgian mockumentary Man Bites Dog² – in which a film crew follows a sociopathic hitman around on his day-to-day jobs, making themselves complicit in his increasingly violent crimes to the point of later participating in a gang-rape. Unlike Cannibal Holocaust, Man Bites Dog uses black comedy to bring attention to the sordid feelings and fantasies that viewers sublimate when watching such material; the physical and sexual violence, which escalates in a distinct yet carefully-paced manner, are never indulged in for their own sake.

And yet, although inarguably superior, Man Bites Dog might not have been conceived without Cannibal Holocaust’s cultural influence. Rémy Belvaux, Benoît Poelvoorde and André Bonzel never cited it as an influence, yet their thematic and narrative similarities cannot be ignored. As shockingly misogynistic and indefensibly hypocritical as Cannibal Holocaust may be, its existence has enriched cinema for the better. Such is the kind of moral paradox art lovers must live with.

¹Itself inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film The Virgin Spring, which likely served as an additional bridge between “highbrow” art and entertainment generally considered just one step above industrial pornography.

²Known to Francophone audiences as C’Est Arrivé Près De Chez Vous – It Happened Near Your Home in French.