Category:Cannibal film



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 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. 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.

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.

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
 * Cannibal Tribe
 * 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.