Cannibal boom

1972–1985 · 12 films catalogued

The Italian jungle cycle. Eight years, a dozen films, and a court case.

A short Italian cycle in which a Western film crew, anthropologist or model goes into the Amazon, which is usually Colombia or the Philippines, and gets eaten.

Most of these films contain real animal killings, filmed for the camera. Cannibal Holocaust (1980) killed six animals on screen and Cannibal Ferox did the same. Assume unsimulated animal death in anything carrying this tag unless the blurb says otherwise, because it is the single thing most likely to affect whether you want to watch one.

Where it came from

Not horror. Mondo. The shock documentary format of Mondo Cane (1962) had already proved audiences would pay to watch real deaths abroad, narrated in tones of appalled fascination. Umberto Lenzi's Man from Deep River (1972) transplanted that apparatus into a fiction feature by remaking A Man Called Horse in Thailand. It did nothing for five years.

The boom

Ruggero Deodato restarted it with Jungle Holocaust (1977), then made Cannibal Holocaust, which is where the cycle's reputation comes from and where its argument gets complicated.

Cannibal Holocaust invented found-footage horror nineteen years before The Blair Witch Project, and it uses that structure to attack the mondo tradition it came out of. The documentary crew are the villains. They stage the atrocities they claim to be recording. Deodato was arrested on suspicion of having actually murdered his cast and had to produce them alive in court.

It also killed six animals to make that argument. Deodato said later that he regretted it, and Italian prosecutors pursued him over it. The footage is still in the film, and it is why Cannibal Holocaust has never been passed uncut in Britain.

Why it ended

British censorship put most of these titles on the video nasty list. Italian prosecutors took an interest. And the cycle only ever had one idea, which was exhausted by 1982.

Where to start

Cannibal Holocaust, knowing what is in it. It is the only one with an argument, and everything else in the cycle is the same material with the argument removed.