Cannibal
The oldest taboo, treated as appetite: a family, a tribe, a frontier or a student who has discovered what they are hungry for.
Cannibal5 to start
- 1The Texas Chain Saw Massacre1974
- 2Bone Tomahawk2015
- 3Raw2016
- 4Cannibal Holocaust1980
- 5Ravenous1999
What defines it
- Era
- 1972 to today
- Mood
- disgust, taboo, hunger
Cannibal horror is the oldest taboo treated as appetite. The form's trick is never the eating, which it often keeps off screen; it is the ordinariness around the eating. A family dinner. A hazing ritual. A frontier fort with a stew on. The horror is that the people at the table have made their peace with it, and the film asks how long it would take you.
The rules are about hunger and community. People who eat people, as a family, a tribe, a frontier necessity or a private discovery. A frame that normalizes it: a dinner table, a tradition, a scientific expedition, a school. A victim who is usually an outsider, which the form has used to ask hard questions about who the real savages are, and sometimes to answer them badly. And disgust, which the form shares with body horror and splatter, used here with a moral floor under it.
The form has two roots. One is the backwoods film: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), with its slaughterhouse family and its dinner scene, and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), with its desert clan, both drawing on Ed Gein and both more suggestion than gore. The other is the Italian cannibal boom, from Man from Deep River (1972) through Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Cannibal Ferox (1981), films set in the Amazon that were exploitation first and, in Deodato's case, something more disturbing than that. The 1990s gave the form Ravenous (1999) and its Wendigo, and the 2000s and 2010s gave it range: Wrong Turn (2003) in the backwoods, We Are What We Are (2010 and 2013) at a family table, Bone Tomahawk (2015) on the frontier, Raw (2016) in a veterinary school, and Fresh (2022) on a dating app.
The signature techniques are about the table. The meal, filmed as a meal. The kitchen, with the wrong things hanging in it. The reveal of what the stew is, delivered to a guest who has already eaten. The family portrait, with everyone smiling. And the sound, since the form has always known that chewing is worse than blood.
- disgust
- taboo
- hunger
Disgust with a moral floor: cannibal horror scares by making the eating ordinary, a dinner, a habit, a family tradition, and by letting you see the table.
- Axis
- Scare Score
- And
- Loved it
How it scares
This is disgust with a moral floor. Cannibal horror aims at the reflex that body horror aims at, the part of you that pulls back from meat, and then adds a second thing: the knowledge that the people doing it are people, and that they have reasons. The dread here is social, the slow understanding of what the family is, and the jump scare, when it comes, is usually a door and a hammer. Bone Tomahawk's cave scene is the form at its most extreme, and it works because the film has spent ninety minutes making you like the man it happens to.
The form gets to anyone squeamish about meat, which is a lot of people after these films. It gets to viewers who scare at other people, and especially at families. It is less effective on people who find the taboo academic rather than visceral, and some do; for them the form is grim rather than frightening, and the crueler entries are simply unpleasant. Raw is the bridge for those viewers, because it treats the appetite as a feeling before it treats it as a horror.
How to rank it in Gasper
You answer which was scarier a handful of times, and the film finds its place among everything you have ranked. Loved it? Heart it.
- 1
Cannibal films make for weighty head-to-heads. You answer "How scary was it?" with Terrifying, Some scares or Barely flinched, and then "Which was scarier?" against films you gave the same answer. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre against a ghost story is a farmhouse in August against a hallway in the dark; Raw against a slasher is a feeling against a hunt. Answer for the one that changed how you looked at a kitchen, and the film settles into your rankings within a handful of comparisons.
- 2
Scores on this page run high for the backwoods branch and modest for the comic and tender branches, and the first answer is where you sort them. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is Terrifying for most people; Ravenous is Some scares for most and loved anyway. Your first answer sets the band and the comparisons settle the order inside it, so a black comedy about appetite is only weighed against other films that unsettled you a little, and its Scare Score, 0 to 10 with one decimal, reflects that honestly.
- 3
The score and the heart split hard on this page, and in a predictable direction: the more extreme the film, the more likely you are to score it high and leave the "Loved this?" heart alone. Cannibal Holocaust is almost never hearted and often scored high, which is a fair summary of the film. If a cannibal film got to you harder than you would like the feed to know, Stealth mode keeps the rank private and still counts it toward the Taste tab, where Cannibal as a Top subgenre is rare and tells your friends something.
- 4
In Discover, the Cannibal shelf sits beside Survival and Torture, and the Subgenre filter narrows any search to it. The Community Scare, the average of everyone who ranked a film, is a useful warning label here: a high average on a film you have not seen means the crowd found it frightening rather than merely gruesome, and the gap between your score and the average on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre says a lot about how you respond to suggestion.
Where to go next
Survival is the nearest neighbor, the backwoods film when the locals are not hungry, and The Hills Have Eyes belongs to both. Torture shares the farmhouse and the basement. Body horror shares Raw, where the appetite is a change in the body. Serial killers share Ed Gein, by way of Leatherface and Buffalo Bill, and Hannibal Lecter is the form's most famous diner. Found footage was invented on this page, by Cannibal Holocaust, and splatter and gore is where the Italian boom's effects belong.
For deeper cuts, try We Are What We Are (2013), Jim Mickle's remake of a Mexican film about a family in the Catskills keeping a tradition after the mother dies, quiet and rain-soaked and very sad. The Hills Have Eyes (1977) is Wes Craven's grimy blueprint for the backwoods film, a family's car broken down in the Nevada desert near a clan that has been waiting. And Fresh (2022) is a dating film for its first half hour, and then the title card arrives.
Questions about cannibal
- Because it is the one horror that needs no supernatural and no weapon, only a decision. The form uses it to ask what a person is: meat, in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; a hunger, in Raw; a resource, in Ravenous. The eating is rarely the scariest scene. The table is.
- No, and almost everyone is surprised. There is very little blood on screen; the title, the sound and the dinner scene do the work. Tobe Hooper was aiming for a PG rating and did not get one, but the film's reputation for gore is built on what people think they saw.
- Yes, and it is also a coming-of-age film and a comedy about sisters. The horror is in the appetite and the few scenes that show it, and the film is far more about shame and family than about eating. It is the gentlest film on this page by a distance, which says something about the page.
- Ravenous, which is a black comedy with a very good score, or Raw, which is a sad, funny film with a few hard scenes. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the step up. Bone Tomahawk has one scene you cannot unsee, and Cannibal Holocaust is for almost nobody.
Why is cannibalism the last taboo?
Because it is the one horror that needs no supernatural and no weapon, only a decision. The form uses it to ask what a person is: meat, in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; a hunger, in Raw; a resource, in Ravenous. The eating is rarely the scariest scene. The table is.
Subgenres like this one
- SubgenreBody HorrorThe body itself is the monster: it changes, splits, merges or rots, and the mind inside has to watch.
- SubgenreSurvivalOrdinary people, cut off from help, against the land, the elements, the locals or the thing in the fog, with no rules and no rescue.
- SubgenreTortureA room, a captive, a person with a plan, and a camera that does not cut away when every other form would.
Keep reading
- FeatureHead-to-head rankingAnswer which film was scarier a few times and Gasper places it in your rankings. You never type a number.
- FeatureScare scoreA measure out of 10 of how scary a film was for you, read from your own ranked list and shown in skulls.
- GlossarySplatterSplatter is horror in which graphic, often deliberately excessive gore is the main attraction rather than a side effect of the story.
- GlossaryDreadDread is the sustained, building fear that something terrible is coming, the slow counterpart to the jump scare in horror.
- GlossaryJump scareA jump scare is a sudden image or sound, usually after a quiet stretch, designed to make the audience physically flinch.
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