With The Walking Dead getting long in the rotting tooth, World War Z 2 indefinitely delayed, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter theoretically closing out its long-running franchise, and no more zombie blockbusters on the immediate horizon, it feels like zombies are slowly lurching out of the cultural zeitgeist. Like vampires before them, they’ve peaked and faded from the mainstream back into the horror canon, allowing another type of killer to have its moment in the spotlight. Recently, a new wave of stories — from the French art film Raw to Netflix’s satirical comedy The Santa Clarita Diet — have posited the humble cannibal as the heir apparent to the horror throne du jour, moving into more complex, disturbing territory than the zombie model allows.
Cannibals offer a richer core premise than the average walking corpse. Both subsist on human flesh, but zombification works like a disease, where cannibalistic tendencies creep in like an addiction. Writers and directors reframing cannibalism as an affliction of the mind rather than the body have turned it into a complex, often conflicted new archetype. Most of the new run of cannibal stories treat their subjects not as monsters, but as human beings wrestling with the all-consuming desire to do something revolting. They’re like zombies with a conscience.
Garance Marillier in Raw
Focus World
It wasn’t so long ago that cannibals were solely a fixture of exploitation cinema, their taste for homo-sapien steaks a marker of exoticism and unrefined savagery. Trash-cinema junkies still revere Ruggero Deodato’s elegantly titled Cannibal Holocaust as one of the most gruesome films of all time, though the allegations that some of the murders on-screen were bona fide have been outed as apocryphal. Low-rent studios continued to churn out similar cheapies through the 1980s, with colorful titles like Devil Hunter, White Slave, and Cannibal Ferox. More recently, Eli Roth paid homage to this grandly disreputable filmmaking heritage with his grungy throwback The Green Inferno, while the recent Bone Tomahawk fused horror to the Western, both films ascribing savage-tribesmen qualities to a group of people-eaters.
Zombies are diseased, but cannibals are addicts fighting an urge
But Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs was the pivotal moment for this line of the horror tradition. Any conversation about cannibalism must necessarily recognize the human element that Thomas Harris’ most famous creation brought to the material, showing that a man could be an urbane, composed sophisticate while gorging himself on still-warm human livers. (With the proper bean-and-wine pairing, of course.) On the severely underseen TV series Hannibal, Lecter’s penchant for impeccably prepared body parts is presented as a mark of a refined palate. When he invites some guests to unwittingly dine on a recent victim, they swoon over his cooking, suggesting that there’s an unironic upper-class appeal to eating people, if you can just divorce the act from the ghastly intentions usually associated with it.
Anthony Hopkins in The Silence Of The Lambs
Orion Pictures
Perhaps Lecter’s even classier return on TV was what sparked this spike in nuanced depictions of gourmet cannibals. Hannibal isn’t the only recent work that’s used cannibalism as a narrative jumping-off point for allegorical commentary, or craftier character studies instead of scares. The festival-fêted drama Raw has already earned a reputation as an uncommonly stomach-churning experience (the accounts of fainting and vomiting are already the stuff of legend), but critics wouldn’t be lining up with hosannas for mere gross-out stories. The account of a veterinary student’s dramatic metamorphosis from a soft-spoken brainiac into a voracious arm-biter is rich with parable potential. Her obsessive need to taste blood and the accompanying shock she feels at herself can stand in for the first terrifying brushes with sexual maturity, or personal reconciliation with an outré fetish. It also feels like a feminist cautionary tale in the same mode as Teeth. Raw takes cannibalism at face value, as another adolescent urge stubbornly refusing to adhere to reason.