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.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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