 Starring: Dominique Pinon, Pascal Benezech, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro
Year Of Release: 1991
Plot: In a post-apocalyptic world where food is in short supply, the residents of an apartment above a butcher shop need a new maintenance man after the previous one mysteriously disappears. A former clown takes the job and quickly falls in love with the butcher's daughter, which causes conflicts in her family, who only wants the young man to fatten him up so he can supply them with fresh meat. |
Even though few people have ever engaged in it, cannibalism holds a strange fascination over people, whether it’s tales of ancient cultures where cannibalism was sometimes engaged in, or films which look at the taboos people will break in desperate circumstances. It’s a subject that’s appeared in numerous movies in many ways over the years, but what are the 10 best cannibal movies?
10. Doctor X (1932)
Director: Michael Curtiz
Although Michael Curtiz went on to direct Casablanca, in the early 30s he was assigned to cheap and cheerful throwaway flicks such as the darkly comic Doctor X. Only a couple of years later, after Hollywood’s self-imposed crackdown on sex and violence in film, the film probably wouldn’t have been made, but it’s gone down in history as the first sound film to deal with cannibalism. It follows a reporter investigating a series of gruesome, cannibalistic murders, which witnesses describe as being committed to by a deformed ‘monster’. Ultimately though, in a rather Scooby Doo type ending, it turns out things aren’t as they appear.
9. Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Although there’s not much cannibalism in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ play, it’s worth including here simply because when the people-eating-people scene comes, it makes for one of the most hysterical moments in movie history. The film is about a mother (Katharine Hepburn) who wants her niece, Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor), lobotomised for defiling the memory of her son, Sebastian. Although the film has to skirt around what Sebastian was up to (he was a paedophile, but you weren’t allowed to say that in 1950s Hollywood movies), it leads up to Catherine’s OTT revelation, where it turns out the reason she’s so disturbed is because the boys Sebastian wanted sexual favours from ended up chasing, killing and then literally devouring him.
8. Cannibal: The Musical (AKA: Alfred Packer: The Musical) (1996)
Director: Trey Parker
How could we ignore a film called Cannibal: The Musical? It shouldn’t come as a big shock either that a movie with a title like that is a pre-South Park work by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, made when they were both still at university. The film is based on the true story of Colorado’s only convicted cannibal, Alfred Packer, who got lost along with several companions in the Rocky Mountains. Although the exact events that followed aren’t 100% known, it is clear Packer ended up eating at least some of the other members of the party, and he may well have killed them too. Unsurprisingly though, Cannibal: The Musical takes more than a few liberties with the tale, as well as adding in plenty of musical numbers.
7. Ravenous (1999)
Director: Antonia Bird
Another movie loosely based on aspects of the true story of Alfred Packer, as well as the infamous Donner Party (screenwriter Ted Griffin came across the stories while reading Dashiell Hammett’s The Third Man), but which takes things in an increasingly fantastical direction. It’s the 19th Century and a man walks into the remote Fort Spencer in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, claiming he was part of a party that got lost in the mountains and ended up indulging in cannibalism to survive. However it turns out things aren’t as they appear and it’s all to do with a conspiracy surrounding the Native American legend of the Wendigo, where cannibals get unusual powers, but also have an endless craving for human flesh which has to be satisfied.
6. Hannibal (2001)
Director: Ridley Scott
Although The Silence Of The Lambs is the best of the Hannibal Lecter movies, he doesn’t really eat anybody properly in that movie (he just talks about what he liked to do with census takers, and bites a few people), so it’s probably not the best one to include here. For proper Hannibal style cannibalism we had to wait for Ridley Scott’s sequel and the gory and somewhat absurd sequence where Lecter removes the top of Ray Liotta’s skull, fries bits of his brain and then feeds it to him. It’s impressively disgusting but also can’t help but come across as slightly silly. However in terms of cannibalism it’s an impressive entry into the subgenre.
5. Delicatessen (1991)
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro
While mainly remembered for its amazing visual style, Delicatessen is essentially a cannibal movie, about a butcher’s shop that isn’t averse to serving a bit of human meat, due to the fact that in its post-apocalyptic future, food is in short supply. It’s also one of the few genuinely funny movies about people eating other people. Jean-Pierre Jeunet is said to have got the idea for the film after living above a butcher’s shop himself, and realising that he’d often eaten food so bad he wouldn’t have been able to tell whether it was made from humans or not.
4. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (2007)
Director: Tim Burton
There seems to be a bit of a theme in cannibal films for serving up people meat in pies, which is probably because you can never guarantee what you’ll be eating once it’s diced up and enclosed in pastry. One of the most entertaining things about Sweeney Todd is how it turns cannibalism into a seemingly logical business arrangement. Todd kills people (partly because of his mission for revenge against the judge who deported him, then stole his wife and daughter) and the struggling Mrs. Lovett turns them into pies, which become the taste of the town. It’s a darkly humorous situation where the cannibalism seems the most reasonable aspect of what’s going on.
3. Titus (1999)
Director: Julie Taymor
Believe it or not, even Shakespeare engaged in a bit of cannibalism. Well, presumably not in real life, but he included it in one of his early plays. Well known as Shakespeare’s most violent and extreme play, Julie Taymor’s movie version doesn’t stint on the blood and sex (indeed it was originally going to get an NC-17 rating in the States until the director agreed to a few cuts). It also keeps in the OTT ending of this revenge-begetting-revenge saga, which involves Titus killing two young men so he can bake them in a pie and feed them to their mother (yes, that is why South Park had Cartman do something similar).
2. Alive (1993)
Director: Frank Marshall
Would you ever eat someone? I don’t mean just because you fancied chomping on some man meat (ooh, er, missus), but would you do it if the situation was desperate and it was the only way to survive? That’s the central question posed by Alive, based on the true story of a Uruguayan rugby team, whose plane crashes in the Andes, leaving them so far from civilisation that no one knows where they are. The survivors desperately try to survive, and once the meagre rations run out they must face the question of whether to stay alive they are prepared to eat the flesh of those killed in the crash, in the hope that someone will have enough energy to get off the mountain and alert people to where the rest of the survivors are.
1. Soylent Green (1973)
Director: Richard Fleischer
‘It's people!’ The whole of Soylent Green pretty much rests on its cannibalism revelation. In an overpopulated future, food is at a premium, so the starving populace is dependent on processed rations produced by the massive Soylent Corporation, including the vegetable based Soylent Red and Yellow. Their new product is Soylent Green, supposedly made of high-energy plankton, however when Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) starts investigating a murder, it leads him to some disturbing revelations about what Soylent Green is really made from.
TIM ISAAC
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