Cannibal movies: the good, the bad and the indigestible

With revered Italian director Luca Guadagnino turning his lens on cannibalism in the Venice Festival-bound ‘Bones and All’, Geoffrey Macnab peels back the layers on the decades-long cinematic treatment of one of society’s last taboos

Anthony Hopkins in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (Shutterstock)

People eat each other on screen for many different reasons. If you look across the broad range of dramas and documentaries touching on cannibalism, you will find serial killers, aeroplane crashes, shipwreck victims, and ancient tribes who sup on human flesh as a matter of ritual.

Cannibalism is seemingly everywhere at the moment. It’s in mainstream TV series like Yellowjackets and in art house films like Julia Ducournau’s 2016 debut feature Raw and Claire Denis’ recently re-released Trouble Every Day. It’s there in Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic horror Texas Chainsaw Massacre and in Eli Roth’s gory, Peru-set The Green Inferno. Certain prominent cannibals, most notably the Chianti-sipping Hannibal Lecter, have become pop culture heroes.

“They [cannibal stories] are a really enduring trope. We live in a society that is hyper-violent, where virtually any form of violence can be justified in some way, shape or form but cannibalism is one of the last taboos,” US writer Kea Wilson says. The author of the canny and surprisingly funny 2016 novel We Eat Our Own (set during the making of a 1970s cannibal movie) has a lot to say about our enduring fascination with this most morbid of subjects. “We don’t normally see folk getting eaten,” Wilson tells The Independent. “It [cannibalism] taps into some really primal impulses and fears about what constitutes our humanity.”