Cannibal Tribe



From the mid 1970s until around the mid 1980s, a slew of chiefly Italian films were made that are known as "cannibal films" and are considered to form one of the most extreme subgenres of horror. The premise for every film involves civilized, predominantly white protagonists venturing into remote South American/Asian jungles and encountering tribes of dark-skinned human-eaters. The tropes for these films are quite consistent, possibly because most of the films essentially ripped off one of three cannibal films that enjoyed financial success. These tropes include:


 * The triumph of the white man (possibly the only brand of horror films where guys actually have a fighting chance, provided, of course, that they are white). This triumph can come in the form of successfully escaping the jungle or establishing a positive relationship with the savages, using gizmos and measured hand gestures.
 * Once contact has been established between the outsiders the natives, always because the outsiders have been captured through an act of stupidity, the outsiders are forced to witness an assortment of rituals conducted by the natives, all of which involve blood and something or someone being cut open. The lucky victim is generally not of any specific type; human victims whether male or female, civilized or savage, have all gone under the spear in these films. These sequences will often also include the protagonist/s suffering humiliating subjugation by the natives.
 * The civilized characters can be distinguished from one another, on a purely visual level. The savages are a collective mentality and rarely is one elevated to any position of significance in the film (the most notable exception would be Me Me Lai's character in Last Cannibal World).
 * Artistic Licence: When tribes who clearly never practice cannibalism are portrayed as doing so.
 * Civilized non-white characters die first and never lightly.
 * Cannibals sympathetic to the protagonists live long enough to get them out of danger before falling prey to their vengeful fellows.
 * Acceptable Targets
 * The Amazon
 * Beat Still My Heart
 * B-Movie
 * Captured by Cannibals
 * Chased by Angry Natives
 * Civilized women are typically sleazy, whiney bimbos who often serve as Ms. Fanservice (cannibal films do not stray far from standard horror). If they do have an attitude, it can be solved with a good slap.
 * Enemy to All Living Things
 * Exploitation Film
 * Extreme Melee Revenge
 * Fantastic Racism
 * Fate Worse Than Death
 * Genocide Backfire
 * Gorn: Implicit in the genre
 * Groin Attack
 * Horror Films
 * Human Sacrifice
 * Kill'Em All
 * Made of Plasticine
 * National Geographic Nudity
 * No Such Thing as Bad Publicity
 * Revenge
 * Rape and Revenge
 * Roaring Rampage of Revenge
 * The Hunter Becomes the Hunted
 * Tribal Carry
 * Values Dissonance
 * Virgin Sacrifice
 * Wacky Wayside Tribe
 * Western Terrorists
 * Interracial relations between a native and one of the protagonists. Typically the native is female, but either way the sex is rarely consensual.
 * Characters played by Ivan Rassimov and Me Me Lai. They appeared in three films in the genre, more than any other actor. Me Me Lai's characters were native women with, um, breast implants.
 * Sadly, almost every cannibal film made in this period features animal cruelty either from wildlife footage or in scenes created for the film. This aspect of the films both cements their infamy as a subgenre and their notoriety as going further down the path of moral decadence than most other horror films.
 * The most well-known and successful of these films was Cannibal Holocaust in 1980. It is also infamous for scenes of gratuitous animal death, among other things.

Film director Antonio Climati was considered to have put an end to the genre in 1988 with the film Natura Contro, which is also known as an unofficial sequel to Cannibal Holocaust.

Compare Cannibal Clan, which is more or less the inverse of this trope, where the cannibals are typically white-trash types suffering from an advanced case of backwoods degeneracy.

Film

 * The Man From Deep River (1972) was the first Italian cannibal film and introduced the notions of white people being trapped in cannibal territory, exotic rituals, white-native sex and Me Me Lai and Ivan Rassimov.
 * Last Cannibal World (1977). four plane passengers are stranded in a jungle, the brown-skinned members of the group die quickly, the main character is stripped, fondled and urinated on and watches the natives kill first one of their own using bull ants and then a crocodile. He escapes using Me Me Lai, who helps him survive before being eaten by the pursuing tribe.
 * Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977)
 * Prisoner of the Cannibal God (also known as Slave of the Cannibal God and The Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978)
 * Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals (1978)
 * Primitives (1979)
 * Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Upon the film's release, the director and producer Ruggero Deodato was arrested on the charge that they had had several of the actors murdered for the camera. Their names were cleared when they arranged for the "dead" actors to appear together on television. It has been suggested that The Blair Witch Project and The Last Broadcast appropriated their Mockumentary style from Cannibal Holocaust.
 * Eaten Alive! (1980)
 * White Cannibal Queen (1980)
 * Devil Hunter (1980)
 * Cannibal Ferox (1981). Natives capture two men who previously exploited them, along with three college students who have fallen in with them. The natives humiliate and kill all but one of them in slow, ritualistic fashion -- hence the official and alternative movie title: Make Them Die Slowly.
 * Cannibal Terror (1981)
 * Amazonia: The Catherine Miles Story (1985)
 * Cannibal Ferox 2: Massacre in Dinosaur Valley
 * The Green Inferno (1988).
 * Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (1989) is a satire of those kinds of film that is better than it sounds. It had to be billed as Piranha Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death in the UK to avoid association with the genre.
 * In 2003, director Bruno Mattei directed and created two straight-to-video Cannibal Tribe films, Cannibal Ferox 3: Land of Death and 'Cannibal Holocaust 2: The Beginning (AKA Mondo Cannibale), the official sequel to the original Cannibal Holocaust movie. Both films are a mix of Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Holocaust, Predator'', plus every other cannibal film imaginable from the 70s and 80s, thrown into not one but two giant blenders. Once that's done, you've got yourself two demonic and tainted cannibal films forged from the blackest/darkest pits of Hell.

Literature

 * There's a Cannibal Tribe in Terry Pratchett's non-Disworld novel Nation, but aside from being terrifying raiders who take human prisoners for slaves (and dinner, of course), they're really quite reasonable... and not nearly as terrifying as First Mate Cox.
 * Elements of this turn up in the South Seas Treasure Game from the 1981 novel Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes.

Live-Action TV

 * A regular threat in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.

Video Games

 * Monkey Island features a former Cannibal Tribe that has since turned towards vegetarianism.

Real Life

 * Mayincatec: Anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of the 1977 book Cannibals and Kings, has suggested that the flesh of the victims was a part of an aristocratic diet as a reward, since the Aztec diet was lacking in proteins. According to Harris, the Aztec economy would not support feeding them as slaves and the columns of prisoners were "marching meat".