Cannibalism on screen: From performative shock of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Hannibal Lecter's way of life

“Good food is like music you can taste, color you can smell.” Ratatouille gets us. In this series ‘Food for Film,’ we pick food films/shows that make our mouths water and our souls richer.

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In a review from 1974 by Roger Ebert, the distinguished critic summarises The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as “without any apparent purpose, unless the creation of disgust and fright is a purpose. And yet in its own way, the movie is some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it’s well-made, well-acted, and all too effective."

Written and directed by Tobe Hooper, the film was panned, almost ridiculed in its time, for being gory for the sake of being so. It also introduced to willing mainstream audiences a rare cultural miasma – cannibalism. Almost 50 years on from the film that is now considered cult in the genre of horror, the perverse act of a human feeding on another human has transcended from being just an inimical mark of depravity.

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In Julia Ducournau’s French drama Raw (2016), cannibalism is used symbolically as a gateway to conformity. The film delivers visceral scenes and tension with its foot on the throat all the time. The film was termed, ironically, by a lot of critics, as a ‘coming-of-age’ drama. While that reputation is not entirely refutable, Raw uses cannibalism as a potent comment on body image and our innate desperation to fit into wider cultural definitions – sexy, successful etc.

In Nicolas Winding Refn’s gaudy thriller The Neon Demon (2016),  a supermodel is so consumed by the desire to stay relevant, she gorges down the liveried insides of her peers. Cannibalism here appears as the rope that depraved careerists latch onto in moments of self-doubt. Both are modern illustrations, that use the act of eating another human as a ruse to colour mortal preoccupations that may actually be more sinister because they hide in plain sight.

This modern rewriting of cannibalism has taken an age to evolve, from the performative shock of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film that was followed up by a slew of B-grade attempts at serial provocation.

The credit for this transformation must go to Thomas Harris’ landmark creation, Hannibal Lecter, a human flesh connoisseur possessing the urban etiquette of an artist.

In The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Lecter, played with implausible haunting grace by Anthony Hopkins, only admits to eating his victims. In the second film,  Red Dragon (2002, actually first of Harris’ books), Lecter hosts a high-brow dinner where he feeds his guests the best cooked parts of his latest kill. Hopkins’ role was pivotal to how cannibalism has evolved in cinema from being the repulsive plug of bombshell revelations to the quiet ascertainment of a learned culture. Lecter does not just bite down on his victims with depraved anxiety and hunger, but consumes them with all the elegance of an antique gramophone.  

Of course, cannibalism has existed in alternative formats with zombies and vampires filling up on muscle weight or bloody cocktails of terrified humans. But in both cases, the trope is merely the instrument used to paint a fantastical world. In Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), drinking human blood is a poetic exercise in seizing, between two vampires almost tragically in love with the world they are also destined to kill, slowly. But zombies and vampires, though humans in a certain sense, eat other humans only as an instinctive flex to survive. Cannibalism, done out of the purity of some inaccessible principle or simply for the elegance of foraging beyond the boring normal, is a rather frighteningly bold and intimate perspective.  

In the under-watched tv series Hannibal, Mads Mikkelsen carries out murders and culinary acts of demonic, tongue-swirling beauty. It is perhaps the most exotic human flesh has ever looked in cinema. In the wild and stunning Assamese film _Aamis_ (2019), a lovelorn man offers his own tissue as literal fodder for unrequited desire. Human flesh here becomes a literal expression of love. Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet satirises the inexplicability of steely marriages as a whacky zombie couple survive both suspicion and intrusion to maintain whatever ‘normal’ is defined as in modern-day America. What does conventional ordinariness even look like?

John Steinbeck’s popular Depression-era set novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) culminated with the discomforting image of a pregnant woman feeding a grown man directly from her breasts, to keep him alive. To think that we have today come to a point where convention is attempting to find different ways to lyricise the consumption of humans by humans tells you something about both reality and fantasy. In a world rife with galling, almost patronising inequity, it is telling that white cinema continues to fantasise about cannibalism from a view of salacious lifestyle, and not economic impediment.

How cannibalism is poeticised by your cinema is perhaps a good indicator of just how far cultural faultlines can be extended through agency that can only be acquired by wealth and entitlement. In a way, the very framing of cannibalism can be viewed as a self-revealing act of privilege. Nonetheless, it is and will remain fascinating to witness what that next limb of human sentience travelling down the throat of a fellow human foretells, both about the story, its message, and the people trying to tell it.  

Read more from the series here.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.