Editorials
Before ‘Green Inferno,’ There Was ‘Cannibal Holocaust’
As we gear up for the release of Eli Roth’s highly anticipated Green Inferno I thought it would be fun to take a look at the film that served as Roth’s greatest inspiration. Of course I’m taking about Cannibal Holocaust, which may very well be the most controversial film of all time.
Before diving into Cannibal Holocaust, I think it’s important to look at the cinema landscape of 1980, which was a very good year for the movies. The Empire Strikes Back, The Blues Brothers and Airplane! all dominated the box office. While the horror films from the year didn’t bring in as much cash, they were still incredibly good and successful in their own right. If you were a genre fan in 1980 you were presented with such treats as The Fog, Maniac, The Shining and Friday the 13th.
Italian horror in particular seemed to really thrive in 1980. The best of the best in terms of Italian filmmakers graced the big screen. Dario Argento returned with Inferno, a film that received little love upon release but has since risen to cult status. Lucio Fulci took us all to the City of the Living Dead. Not one to be outdone by Fulci, Umberto Lenzi invited us to the City of the Walking Dead, more commonly known as Nightmare City. A young Lamberto Bava began to hone his craft with his solo directorial debut, Macabre.
Ruggero Deodato may very well have been the busiest man of 1980. He ended the year with The House on the Edge of the Park, a film in which Deodato considers too violent, even by his standards. However, it was Deodato’s first film of the year that really ruffled some feathers and quite frankly pissed people off.
When Cannibal Holocaust was released in February of 1980 it certainly wasn’t the first cannibal film in existence. It wasn’t even the first cannibal film from Deodato. By this time the cannibal genre as we know it had been rolling along for almost a decade. I’m not sure what it was about 1980, maybe there was something in the air, but nearly 10 new entries would hit the subgenre with Cannibal Holocaust leading the way.
Cannibal Holocaust is a splendid display of exploitation. It’s gory and extremely brutal. It contains some of the most disturbing, disgusting imagery you’ll ever see and is honestly hard to watch at times. The film goes far beyond it’s gruesome surface with a depth most films lack. Cannibal Holocaust serves as a social commentary on the modern world at the time, which just so happens to be pretty relevant these days. It really is a terrific movie, but the basic structure, the meat and potatoes, that’s all pretty standard cannibal fare.
A group of tourists head out to the middle of a rainforest where they encounter a tribe of cannibals.
Is this the plot to Cannibal Holocaust? Maybe it’s Lenzi’s Deep River Savages? Perhaps it’s the story to Roth’s Green Inferno? In a way it’s all three.
When you really break it down all cannibal films, including Cannibal Holocaust, can be summed up with a fairly generic plot synopsis like the one up above. This isn’t a bad thing or a knock on any cannibal movie. Within any genre, or in this case a subgenre, films are going to share characteristics and more often than not they are plot related. If Cannibal Holocaust wasn’t the first cannibal film, then why was it so special? Why didn’t any of the cannibal films from the eight years prior result in a public outcry? Why hasn’t any cannibal film since had the same impact?
There’s likely a number of answers to this question that you could easily build a case for. It could simply be that Cannibal Holocaust is the best of the genre. Maybe it’s the social commentary, but truthfully I think that’s present in most cannibal films, and horror films in general for that matter. Roth has already gone on record saying that Green Inferno takes a few social jabs. For me, the answer is easy. There’s one thing that rises Deodato’s masterpiece above the rest.
Presentation.
Cannibal Holocaust actually falls into two different horror subgenres – cannibal and found footage. It’s presented as a documentary. Passed off as if it’s real and some people thought it was! In fact, Deodato wanted people to believe it was real so much so that he had the actors sign agreements saying they would basically disappear for a year. They weren’t allowed to be in movies, television shows, commercials or any type of ad. This was to maintain the belief that they had been murdered on screen.
Just think about how crazy that is for a second. Cannibal Holocaust was released on February 7, 1980. That’s 13 years before Man Bites Dog and 19 years before The Blair Witch Project. This was some serious next level thinking from Deodato. He may not have realized it at the time, but the impact this approach had has been astronomical. Since 2010 alone, there have been nearly 80 new entries into the found footage subgenre. An argument could be made that next to Jaws, Cannibal Holocaust is the most important film of all time.
A week and a half after the film premiered in Milan, Italian authorities seized it and quickly arrested Deodato for making a snuff film. Giving that the deaths look pretty damn real and the actors had not been seen or heard since can you really blame the authorities? Deodato had to demonstrate some of the special effects for the court and locate the actors to appear on his behalf. He was able to avoid life in prison but was still in some hot water.
The animal murders in Cannibal Holocaust are 100% real. Because of this the film was banned due to animal cruelty. Deodato defended his actions at the time, spending three years in court fighting for his film. In 1984 the court finally ruled in his favor and the ban was lifted. Of course numerous other countries around the world would continue their ban on the film, but this was a major victory for Deodato nonetheless.
In a 2010 interview with Electric Sheep Magazine, Deodato further stood by his actions. He argued that people have no problem eating animals so what’s wrong with seeing them killed?
“They don’t make the connection between the food on the table that mummy has cooked from the supermarket, and the fact the animal has actually been killed,” Deodato told Electric Sheep. “When you go to a Third World country people kill animals. I saw pigs and rabbits being killed growing up on a country farm when I was young. My son has not seen this because times have changed, he hasn’t had the experiences I have, for him it all comes pre-packed.”
Agree with him or not, you must admit Deodato makes some excellent points. We live in a society ripe with hypocrisy. I could certainly do without seeing the murder of animals on film, but then I willingly eat meat so who am I to say they shouldn’t be there?
35 years after it’s initial release and Cannibal Holocaust is just as relevant and groundbreaking as ever. Aside from being highly controversial, Cannibal Holocaust is extremely influential and that influence stretches far beyond the cannibal subgenre. The previously mentioned Blair Witch Project owes just as much to Cannibal Holocaust as the Green Inferno does. Hell, it’s not even subject to just horror films these days. David Ayer released a crime drama that likely wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Cannibal Holocaust.
Deodato paved the way for these films. It’s time we stop looking at Cannibal Holocaust as merely an outrageous movie intending to shock and stir up controversy, and instead see it for it truly is as one of the most important pieces of cinema to ever exist.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
You must be logged in to post a comment.