Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Directed by Ruggero Deodato

Viewed on Shudder

Summary: A documentarian group disappears  while trying to film secretive cannibal tribes in the Amazon. Shortly after an expedition is sent after them and they learn terrible things.

Cannibal Holocaust is one of the most notorious horror films ever made and probably the most notorious found footage movie ever made. Banned in reportedly as many as fifty countries upon release, and still banned in some, Cannibal Holocaust has a truly nasty reputation as a movie full of disturbing imagery and barbaric sequences. That reputation is…mostly earned, as Cannibal Holocaust is a genuinely unsettling viewing experience. It also happens to be one of the earliest found footage movies. But that isn’t what attracted me to it. Honest. What attracted me is the legendary reputation that this movie enjoys as one of the most shocking films ever made. Does Cannibal Holocaust live up to this reputation?

In a word, yes. Cannibal Holocaust is an incredibly disturbing movie, that, even tempered by time, is still creepy and unsettling. This isn’t just because of the copious amounts of gore in the film, but because of the insanely bleak outlook that the movie takes on humanity. Bit of a warning before we begin that this is a really disturbing movie that contains gore, death, sexual violence and cruelty to animals so if you don’t want to hear about any of these things just, turn back now and I won’t think any less of you. Cannibal Holocaust is not for everyone and that is okay. But now we’re all here and ready to talk about one of the most infamous movies of all time so let us proceed.

 

The plot of the film is pretty simple, it’s about two expeditions into the Amazon rainforest. The first, a group of American documentarians who go to make a documentary about the native cannibal tribes living lives untouched by Western society. The second was launched a year later to investigate what happened to the members of the first expedition, who never returned. Things get off to a rocky start with the second expedition as their method of finding the home of the Yacumo tribe is to ambush a bunch of natives and take a hostage to lead them back, all while a local sloth looks on.

 

I can imagine that sloth must have been pretty scared during this.

 

Following the steps of the first group, the current one eventually manages to locate their remains. Being documentarians, the initial group recorded all their interactions with the locals, in the hopes of making a groundbreaking documentary about the elusive tribespeople of the Amazon. Everyone at the station thinks it would be a wonderful idea to use this footage in a combination documentary about the tribespeople and tribute to the documentarians who took the footage. But once they begin watching the footage they learn that this expedition was not as benign as they once believed.

 

This is a grim movie. Even beyond the storyline itself being very dark there is just this grimy nature to all the footage that comes from the cheap production and makes everything look even more off-putting. The gritty production values make everything look much more realistic than it should, especially considering that the gore effects aren’t always the best. Smartly, most of the sequences of gore are shot in ways to get around these issues, either from far away or by obscuring the sequence somehow. Everything also seems to be covered in mud just to drive the point home a bit more.

 

More than just the visuals though, the grim nature of the film plays out through just how casually horrible almost every person acts towards others. Murder, sexual violence, butchering animals while they’re still alive, the movie shows all of these things in great detail on numerous occasions and they are always upsetting. The animal mutilation in particular because that violence is real. Those animals died. That’s one of the big controversies of this movie, a lot of people object to it because of the harm done to animals, and I can see where they’re coming from. I don’t think animals should be killed for entertainment, but by the same token I eat meat and the animals killed for this film were eaten. Does it make me a hypocrite to object to seeing animals killed and eaten when I myself am involved in industries that commit far worse atrocities against animals on a daily basis? I would say yes, and that may be the point of the movie. (If you really don’t want to watch this footage though there do exist edits of the movie that remove those sequences.)

 

The greater point falls neatly in line with the idea of declaring someone’s actions immoral or savage while engaging in similar behavior, and you can see that from one of the scenes I mentioned earlier. When the second expedition gets their guide through murder and enslavement, while they talk about how dangerous and violent the Yacumo are it is hard to see this as anything but commentary on the different standards that groups are held to. Of course murder is fine if people I like or am involved with do it, but if people I don’t like do it then that is very bad. What is interesting though is that they never really go in the ‘noble savage’ direction, or talk about how wonderful the natives are and how only the Americans are bad. Most people are terrible and while it is completely in line to argue that what the ‘civilised’ people did was much worse, it doesn’t hit you over the head with that. Which is interesting because the last word I would use to describe this movie would be subtle.

 

Unfortunately, not everything works perfectly here, the characters are generally unmemorable and the cheapness of the production does sometimes make sequences look a bit underwhelming. Some of the gore does look hokey, especially the severed heads. There was a weird moment at the beginning of the movie that underscored production difficulties. A woman was being tortured by an Amazonian tribesman, and I could tell that this was a white woman made to look darker skinned by covering her in mud. I thought this was intentional, but it’s never brought up again. I did some research and found that the woman who was supposed to play that part didn’t show up, so they had to use someone from the production staff.

 

There’s a couple more moments like that where stock animal footage is occasionally cut too while characters allegedly shoot at off screen leopards. Other than some silly editing I don’t have a ton of problems here, there’s some good pacing and tons of haunting visuals. I would almost call the movie surreal in how it would take these long scenes of characters butchering animals and showing you every step of that way along with scenes of people getting ill at the sight of it. Then in the next shot those people would be happily eating the meat. There are a lot of clever satirical moments like that and I can’t just dismiss something like this, with all of its ultraviolence and disgusting content, as being excessive for the sake of being excessive.

 

Cannibal Holocaust is not for everyone, but the combination of gore and social satire is truly memorable, and the controversial nature of this film is sure to keep it relevant for years to come. I can’t say I really enjoyed this movie in a conventional sense, but it had this hypnotic hold on me that not many movies are capable of creating. I would recommend Cannibal Holocaust to people with strong stomachs and lovers of exploitation films. It is an intense movie though, and there is no shame in tapping, because once things start going bad they get much much worse.

 

 

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