The Italian cannibal cycle, 1977 to 1985

The Italian cannibal film had a shorter life than most people assume. Draw the boundary generously and it runs 1972 to 1985. The part everyone is actually thinking of is about four years long.

It comes out of mondo, not horror

Mondo Cane (1962) proved a format: send a crew abroad, film customs and deaths, narrate it in tones of appalled fascination, sell it as documentary. A large and unmeasurable share of mondo footage was staged, and the audience half knew. The possibility that it was real was the product.

Umberto Lenzi's Man from Deep River (1972) is the hinge. Structurally it is A Man Called Horse, Westerner captured by tribe and assimilated, relocated to Thailand with the mondo apparatus bolted on: real rituals, real animal slaughter, documentary inserts. It did not start a boom. It sat there for five years.

The boom

Ruggero Deodato restarted it with Jungle Holocaust (1977), then made Cannibal Holocaust (1980).

The reputation is deserved in more than one direction at once.

The structure is decades early. A rescue party recovers film shot by a missing documentary crew, and a New York broadcaster has to decide whether to air it. That is found-footage horror nineteen years before The Blair Witch Project, and more rigorously built than most of what followed.

The target is its own genre. The documentary crew are the villains. They stage the atrocities they claim to be recording. For an exploitation film to argue that the mondo tradition manufactures the savagery it sells is an unusually sharp piece of self-awareness.

Six animals were killed on camera to make that argument. A coati, a turtle, a snake, a monkey, a tarantula and a pig. Deodato said later he regretted it, and that his son's reaction to the film changed his mind.

The legal aftermath is the part usually left out. Deodato was arrested in Italy on obscenity charges and, because the marketing had claimed the footage was real and the four lead actors had contracted to stay out of sight for a year, he was also suspected of having actually murdered them. He produced them alive in court. The animal charges stuck.

The imitators

Cannibal Ferox (1981) is Lenzi running the same material with the argument removed. The US subtitle was Make Them Die Slowly, which is an accurate description of what was being sold.

Eaten Alive! (1980) recycles footage from earlier films into a Jonestown pastiche, and by then the cycle is repeating itself.

Why it ended

British censorship put most of these titles on the DPP list. Italian prosecutors took an interest, which producers noticed. And the cycle only ever had one idea, which was used up by 1982.

What survives

Cannibal Holocaust is still studied, still cut in Britain over the animal footage, and still the only entry with anything in it beyond the premise. The rest of the cycle is the same shoot without the film around it.