by Spencer Perry
When you first get into horror movies (really get into them) you devour everything you can find. You read books and lists about what are the best, the scariest, the goriest, the ones you have to see. We now live in an age where most films are available at the click of a mouse or a quick trip to the video store (if you still have one) but this wasn’t always possible even just a few years ago. One of the movies, affectionately refereed to as a ‘Video nasty’, is Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust and until a proper DVD release a few years ago it could only really be found in bootleg form at conventions.
We could spend a long time talking about the merits of Cannibal Holocaust as the grandfather of the “found footage” movement, but today I’ll just speak about its grotesque nature. There aren’t a lot of “cannibal movies” that have survived this long due to quality, but what you get in Cannibal Holocaust is some of the most gruesome and disturbing content you see in a horror film.
This film has violence really unlike any other movie. What makes the violence much more believable and disgusting is that some of it is real. All the animals killed in this film are actually being killed on the screen as you watch. While the same can’t be said about the humans in the film when you have that kind of real life mutilation a part of your brain can’t help but wonder. The deaths of the characters in Cannibal Holocaust, while excruciating, aren’t the worst part, that would be when the cannibals cook them. Entrails, muscles, and skin roasting on an open fire while the hypnotic score plays and the savages swallow pieces of people, it’s one of the most appalling and one of my favorite scenes in horror movie history.
Cannibal Holocaust is an acquired taste. It’s a hard movie to watch, even for seasoned horror veterans. It has very graphic violence and rape, it’s not for the feint of heart. But for those of us that can stomach the animal nature of the movie you’ll be in for a real treat.
