by Jeff Parsons

Created on: November 12, 2007   Last Updated: December 08, 2009

The spectre of cannibalism has haunted us throughout the ages - evidence of gouges from human teeth were discovered on prehistoric human bones; Crusader campaigns were stranded in the desert realms, where the enemy then became anyone hungrier than you; the Black Death ravaged populations around the world, killing up to 60% of its victims and leaving the rest to starve; up until the 20th century, magical elixirs were concocted from the powdered remains of Egyptian mummies (executed criminals were also an unadvertised substitute); and now, your neighbor, the kind, quiet and friendly one who always waved hello to you, is appearing on today's headline news for doing the unspeakable. These atrocities evoke shock, anger, fear, and strangely enough, morbid curiosity intense feelings that are perfect material for the cinematic medium.

The entertainment value of cannibalism was initially realized within some of the popular 1930s cinema newsreels, depicting intrepid explorers trekking through exotic jungles, discovering long lost primitive tribes, their savage past dramatically speculated. The first tentative step away from this careful subtlety and into certain mayhem was taken with Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936). The Depression era proved to be the wrong time for a dark, scary and bleak movie. The theme was deemed unusable and shelved for the longest time, except for the occasional minor movie subplot.

Then, in the 60s, many of society's taboos vanished and the cinema began to revel in satiating the consumer's baser demands. Mondo Cane (1962) started the Mondo film fad, using the familiar 1930s travelogue plot-line to exhibit graphic savagery, torture, rape and cruelty. From there, the classic cannibal was slowly changed into a truly horrific monstrosity, sometimes depicted to the extreme. The first Mondo style cannibal film was The Man from the Deep River (1972). The truly disturbing Cannibal Holocaust (1980) was notorious for killing the Mondo shock appeal, with the 1988 sequel effectively nailing the coffin lid shut on exploiting pointless grotesquerie.

Meanwhile, Night of the Living Dead (1968) created an interesting new subgenre: cannibalistic zombies, rising from the grave, usually initiated by some mysterious means like a comet, spacecraft, virus or chemical spill. The initial reviews were harsh, but the out-of-control, raw chaos excited fanatic moviegoers through three more films: Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985) and Land

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