Seemingly tailor-made for horror movies, cannibalism is just about the worst thing many of us can imagine. Although we see it often in zombie films, the very fact that it’s zombies doing the cannibalizing puts a distance between the events and the viewer, in that the perpetrator is no longer human.
But let’s take a look at some movies where cannibalism is a plot point without that extra distance of zombies. Movies where cannibalism is a conscious choice, or a means for survival, or a matter of preference, or something foisted upon a person, instead of a virus passed from bite to bite.
Ranging from horror to black comedy to documentary, these are fifteen films where cannibalism provides a little food for thought.
15Raw (2016)
Before French film director Julia Ducournau won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for thebody horror filmTitane, she made a bloody splash with her first feature length movie,Raw. Justine (Garance Marillier) has just started veterinary school, where the hazing process is no joke. Justine goes along with it but balks when, as a strict vegetarian, she is required to eat a rabbit kidney. Her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf), also a student at the school, forces her, and from that moment on, Justine begins to crave meat. She starts with a burger but progresses quickly to raw chicken, and then, in a hilariously gruesome comedy of errors, her sister’s finger. Family secrets are slowly revealed, and Justine is left with a quandary in this extreme coming-of-age film.
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14Ravenous (1999)
The genre-bending 1999 horror Westernstars Guy Pearce as John Boyd. Set during the Mexican-American War, Boyd has been hailed a hero for capturing a command post, but the opportunity only befell him because he survived a massacre by hiding under the corpses of his fellow soldiers. His cowardice gets him sent to a desolate fort along with other shamed soldiers, including a drunk, an addict, and a bit of a psychopath. A haggard man named Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle) stumbles into camp, with a horrific tale of a lost wagon train, snow, starvation, and eventual cannibalism.
The men at the fort form a search party to find the remains of the wagon train, including the murderous leader, one Colonel Ives. But the tables turn as Colqhoun is not who he says he is, and Boyd will again be faced with choices that will determine whether he is a hero or a coward.
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13Alive (1993)
The 1993 film is based on true events that occurred in theAndes mountains in 1972, when a plane carrying members of an Uruguayan rugby team crashed on their way to a match. The survivors are lucky to include several medical students, but many passengers cannot be saved. Those who survived the ordeal, which lasted 72 days, eventually resorted to cannibalizing their dead fellow passengers, after much debate, and many were conflicted about their actions.
Ethan Hawke played Nando Parrado, who worked on the film as an advisor. The movie also takes its cues from Piers Paul Read’s book detailing the incident. Although the movie doesn’t deal with the aftermath, the book delves into the social repercussions felt by the survivors once all the details of their survival emerge.
12Delicatessen (1991)
Jean-Pierre Jeunet(Amélie,The City of Lost Children,Alien Resurrection) and Marc Caro directed this post-apocalyptic black comedy gem about a decrepit French apartment building. The landlord, Ciapet, runs a butcher shop out of the first floor, and times have gotten so hard that he kills prospective tenants, whom he, in turn, sells on the cheap as meat to the current tenants of the building.
Long-time Jeunet collaborator Dominique Pinon plays a down-on-his-luck circus clown named Louison, the newest tenant, who is luckily so handy around the building that Ciapet decides not to serve him up. It turns out the other renters are in on the scheme, and they’re hungry, but lucky for Louison, there is an underground (literally and figuratively) group called the Troglodistes, vegetarian vigilantes recruited by Louison’s girlfriend/Ciapet’s daughter.
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11Bones and All (2022)
Bones and All
Luca Guadagnino once again directed his current muse, Timothée Chalamet, alongside Taylor Russell as Lee and Maren. They’re young, they’re beautiful, they’re in love, and they’re cannibals. Maren killed her babysitter as a young child, and her father has been trying to mitigate the damage from her baser impulses for years. Lee is more guarded about his past, but it emerges that both Lee and Maren seem to have inherited their tastes from their parents.
Both of them also struggle morally with their appetites, and Maren is stalked by fellow cannibal Sully (Mark Rylance), who proves to be the couple’s inevitable undoing. There aren’t many films that can portray themes of cannibalism alongside love and family, but this one does just that.
10In My Skin (2002)
Part of the New French Extremity Movement, this 2002 film was written and directed by its star, Marina de Van. She plays a successful woman named Esther who cuts her leg quite badly when she falls at a party, setting her on a grim journey of self-discovery. She is fascinated by the wound and, seemingly impervious to pain, begins to cut it further with whatever implements are close at hand. Her relationships with her boyfriend, co-workers, and friends begin to deteriorate as she graduates to more violent self-harm, eventually eating bits of skin that she’s cut off of herself. Even in terms of body horror, it’s an extreme film that asks complex questions about bodily autonomy and disassociation.
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9Trouble Every Day (2001)
French auteur Claire Denis trained her eye on cannibalism in this chilly, messy, yet oddly erotic film. Vincent Gallo is Dr. Shane Brown, and he and his wife June (Tricia Vessey) are honeymooning in Paris, although Shane has an ulterior motive: visiting a neuroscientist, Dr. Sémeneau (Alex Descas) and his wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle), who are proving difficult to track down. It turns out that the good doctor is locking his wife in their home when he leaves for work, and that the illness she has suffered from recently, causes her to seek men out, have sex with them, and bite them to death. Like many of Denis’ works, it’s an enigmatic movie with plenty of metaphors and stark visuals that will stick with the viewer long after the closing credits.
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8Suddenly Last Summer (1959)
You might be surprised to know that cannibalism popped up in this 1959 adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play. Elizabeth Taylor stars as the disturbed Catherine Holly, currently the resident of a New Orleans institution after a disastrous trip abroad with her cousin Sebastian. She is tended to by Dr. John Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) and her aunt Violet (Katharine Hepburn), who are trying to get her to tell them what transpired on the trip that was so shocking, events that ended with Sebastian’s mysterious death. Due to the potential sordid nature of the tale, Violet is prepared to have Catherine silenced by lobotomy, but Cukrowicz is able to coax the story out of her, which ends with a group of young Spanish men killing and eating cousin Sebastian.
7Soylent Green (1973)
The most famous quote fromSoylent Greenis a spoiler from the film’s end: Charlton Heston yelling, “Soylent Green is people!” The 1973 film is set in the dystopian ecocide of 2022 in a dangerously overpopulated New York City. The gap between the 1% and the rest of the world is a yawning chasm, and the poor are crammed into tenements, subsisting on foods called Soylent Red, Yellow, and the newest, Green. Heston plays police detective Robert Thorn, whose work on a murder case leads him to investigate the Soylent Corporation and something big that they are hiding. Thorn eventually finds out what the murdered man was covering up, and it turns out that, yep, everyone has been eating people, as the bodies of the poor have been turned into Soylent Green.
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6The Green Butchers (2003)
Nikolaj Lie Kaas takes on double roles in this Danish black comedy: he plays Bjarne, a stoner butcher, as well as Bjarne’s brain-damaged, vegetarian twin brother Eigil who was inadvertently responsible for the accident that killed their parents, and has been in a coma ever since. Along with his co-worker Svend (Mads Mikkelsen), Bjarne starts Svend and Co., a butcher shop that is not very popular until an electrician accidentally dies and Svend begins to sell his marinated flesh under the name of “chicky wickies”. Bjarne would rather not, but the item becomes wildly popular, and Sven begins to cause more ‘accidents’ to keep up with demand.
