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A few nights ago, I was in the mood to rewatch Spookyrice's summary video on Cannibal Holocaust when I stumbled across a channel that uploaded the whole movie to YouTube! Completely uncut! Uncensored! I was shocked!
Of course I had to watch it. It was only an hour and a half in run time, plus it was infamous for a variety of reasons besides just being scary, which I will discuss in this entry today!
Cannibal Holocaust is a 1980 Italian horror movie about anthropologist Harold Monroe leading a rescue team into the Amazon rainforest to rescue a crew of filmmakers (Alan, Faye, Mark and Jack) that have gone missing while filming a documentary on a few indigenous tribes, who are known for practicing cannibalism and other morally questionable rituals.
This film is unique for it's fake documentary/found footage style of storytelling, which would be popularised by later movies such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity series. The first half of the movie shows the rescue team's efforts to track down the missing crew and recover their footage, and the second half showcases said footage of what really happened during the crew's visit. Cool approach that's executed pretty well.
I love the ost of the movie, especially the main theme! It sounds like something that would be played at a wedding on the beach. It's fun to play it to someone who ends up liking it, but doesn't really know where it comes from. It's kinda like an inside joke among horror fans, which is super funny. It was apparently played in an episode of Euphoria too!
Most of the practical effects depicting human gore and violence are pretty impressive. Scenes of cannibalism and mutilation looked very real. Of course I can't talk about this without bringing up the infamous impaled woman scene, which led to rumours going around that some of the human deaths were real.
However, I'm unfortunately approaching the points that make it difficult to recommend this movie to many people, despite it being overall a pretty good film!
Gore depicting animal deaths is a different story. I say this because real animals were killed during this movie's production. Some scenes include a pig being shot point blank by a shotgun, a squirrel monkey being decapitated by a machete and an Arrau turtle being decapitated and dismembered, showing it's entails spilling out. I found the hardest scenes to watch were anything involving an animal being killed, because at least I knew the human violence and rape were acted out.
It's for such reasons that I roll my eyes whenever someone tries to act tough online, complaining about how "fake" they think everything looks and how they can't believe anyone believed it was real.
I think context is also important here, considering this was 1980, and the concept of a movie being this graphic and realistic was probably still mostly unheard of to wider mainstream media. A similar scenario happened with the music videos for the Nine Inch Nails' Broken EP, which were so graphic that they never got released officially due to how realistic a lot of the gore was for the time (around 1996 or so).
Relating to the story's "villains", I wouldn't say there's necessarily a definitive "bad guy". I think the overall message is pretty nuanced. It isn't afraid to dive in to the messiness of human brutality and exploitation in journalism, and how people, no matter how "civilised" they are or not, are not immune to performing cruel acts for the sake of survival, peer pressure or even sick satisfaction.
Yes, the filmmakers were violent and cruel, choosing to kill animals, abuse the natives, burn their homes and have sex in front of them on top of the ashes. They definitely had their fate coming, but this black and white thinking completely ignores the brutality of the tribes.
During the trek through the jungle, the prisoner held captive by the rescue team conducts a ritual in which he rapes and kills a woman with a stone as punishment for infidelity, or else he'll be killed by his tribe. Several women in hiding are killed and raped during a war between two tribes. A pregnant woman and her baby are killed to prevent the spread of syphilis by forcing her to give birth, burying the infected baby in mud, and then beating her to death.
And of course, they're cannibals.
On the other hand, it's definitely weird to make a movie with themes of human suffering and exploitation of suffering in journalism, only to turn around and not only kill real animals in such a manner, but also depict natives as being "violent savages".
The last part especially gets weird when you learn that the tribes depicted in the movie were played by real indigenous people who were actually pretty chill in real life. In this article, they were said to be already wearing more modern clothing like t-shirts and jeans and working in offices, but they didn't necessarily know they were being portrayed as "bad guys".
Anyways, that was Cannibal Holocaust! A movie that, despite some of its questionable production choices, was overall a pretty solid film that I really enjoyed! One of my favourite splatterpunk/extreme horror movies for sure, but DEFINITELY not for everyone.
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