In Defense Of: Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

1980’s Cannibal Holocaust remains one of the most controversial (and despised) horror movies ever made.

Playing devil’s advocate for Cannibal Holocaust, one of the most notorious horror films ever made

Cannibal Holocaust is a rare horror film that has never stopped being controversial. It was controversial when it was first released in 1980 and it’s just as controversial today — if not more so. 

It’s the ultimate polarizing genre movie. People who hate the film don’t just loathe it, they consider it genuinely criminal. It’s a film that’s almost universally condemned, even by people who actually like it as a motion picture. Even people who have never seen it (and never will see it) are quick to damn it as “that animal cruelty movie.” Even the people who made it later went on to say they regretted the whole unsavory ordeal — as far as indefensible horror movies go, Cannibal Holocaust is about as indefensible as they come.

Maybe I’m just a fan of playing devil’s advocate, but I personally believe films are like people: everybody deserves an opportunity to defend themselves in the court of public opinion, even if the guilt of the suspect is hardly in question. And since director Ruggero Deodato has been dead for a couple of years now, I guess I’ll have to appoint myself post facto celluloid defender here.

Let’s start with the obvious. Yes, Cannibal Holocaust has a LOT of animal slaughter in it. A giant tortoise gets killed … for real. Two monkeys get decapitated … for real. A pig gets shot … for real. A feral critter that’s a distant relative of the North American raccoon gets gutted … for real. Several snakes in the film get diced up … for real. The evidence speaks for itself. 

By just about any contemporary legal standard in the United States, pretty much all of those aforementioned instances of slaughter would constitute cruelty to animals, and probably an aggravated felony version of it. But the recording of those animal killings (and by extent, the right to distribute the movie wholesale) are Constitutionally protected forms of free expression. That was decided in a fairly obscure 2010 Supreme Court case called United States vs. Stevens, which dealt with the commercial production of “crushing” videos — i.e., pornographic films involving small animals being stomped to death. So if we’re going with a strict freedom of speech angle here, there’s nothing patently unlawful about the existence of Cannibal Holocaust. It may be disturbing, it may be disgusting, it may be wantonly cruel and it may be sociopathic … but the movie itself isn’t illegal.

Of course, just because something isn’t illegal doesn’t mean it isn’t also immoral. Just about anybody can watch Cannibal Holocaust and say it’s crude and vicious and inhumane and they wouldn’t be wrong. But at the same time, if you’re going to argue against the movie’s horrific displays of animal cruelty, you might want to take a step back and think about your own personal habits. Unless you’re a hardcore vegan and ardent animal abolitionist, it’s kinda hypocritical to rail against Cannibal Holocaust for “cruelty” when you eat Burger King, Taco Bell and Chick-fil-A five or six times a week. The local McDonald’s is responsible for a thousand times as much animal slaughter as Deodato, and that’s every single hour of every single day. 

Now, the rebuttal there is probably something along the lines of “well, that’s different, because those animals are slaughtered for food and Deodato was slaughtering animals for entertainment.” Well, I’ve heard — and “heard” isn’t a synonym for “confirmed” in this specific instance — that most of the animals slaughtered in front of the camera for Cannibal Holocaust were later eaten by the Colombian “cast” of the picture. If that’s the case (and again, I can’t state beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is true), then it’s really nothing different from John Q. Public eating a sack of chicken nuggets for lunch. Indeed, the only notable difference is the guy eating chicken nuggets has the benefit of not seeing the horrific death that led to his caloric intake. 

I think a lot of people who condemn Cannibal Holocaust are obviously first world types who have no idea what agrarian life is actually like. Deodato grew up in the ash heap of World War II and animal slaughter was part and parcel of every day life — if it wasn’t he and his family would’ve starved to death. I think a lot of the outward disdain of Cannibal Holocaust is actually an unconscious form of classism and xenophobia directed towards third world people and subsistence farmers they forget exist within the borders of their own country. They can’t possibly imagine a world where you can’t hop on a $9,000 bicycle and get whatever you need for sustenance at the neighborhood Trader Joe’s built atop the bulldozed remnants of low-income housing units. 

I grew up in the Deep South and one of my earliest memories is watching my great grandma cleave the head off a chicken in the kitchen. That’s what people do to not starve when the closest paved road is five miles away and the nearest grocery store requires a 20-minute drive. These people exist, they’ve always existed and they STILL exist today. I doubt there’s anything in Cannibal Holocaust that would shock them — after all, they actually KNOW what it takes to get that bacon and sausage on a breakfast plate.

It still amazes me that Cannibal Holocaust catches so much hate for depicting animal cruelty when so many other (and far more famous) movies do the exact same thing. The entire Western genre was pretty much built upon dead horses — there’s just as much intentional violence perpetrated against animals in Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (incidentally, released the same year as Cannibal Holocaust), but when was the last time you heard ANYBODY bemoan and lament Heaven’s Gate as “that one horse murder movie?” A water buffalo gets massacred for real in Apocalypse Now and nobody calls Francis Ford Coppola a degenerate criminal. For crying out loud, there’s an actual chicken beheading in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory … and instead of being castigated as an animal snuff film, it’s universally hailed as an all-time family classic. Even within the horror community there’s some obvious species-ism going on. Everybody laments Cannibal Holocaust, but you never hear anybody condemning The Beyond or Phenomena when those movies depict the onscreen killing of hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of insects. So maybe it’s not an issue of animal cruelty, per se, as much as it is an issue of the right and wrong kinds of animal cruelty. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m expecting your three-page essay on the ethical difference between killing a cockroach on camera versus killing a monkey on camera by noon tomorrow. 

Ultimately, the perennial outrage over the scenes of animal torture and slaughter in Cannibal Holocaust may prove Deodato’s point perfectly. You hear so much outrage and ire over the animal deaths in Cannibal Holocaust, but you NEVER hear anybody bring up another point about the film — namely, the fact that it contains scenes of real life humans actually being killed.

Oh, it’s 100 percent true. There’s a scene in the film where we literally see an Asian child get shot at point blank range and the actual executions of African prisoners. But there’s virtually zero online outrage and moral indignation over those clips being included in the film. 

Which begs a most interesting question. If a viewer is more upset over seeing a turtle get killed on camera than bearing witness to the actual severed body parts of civilians murdered in third world countries, what does that say about the viewer and their personal biases and prejudices?