Video Nasty #7: Cannibal Holocaust

Synopsis: Four young documentary filmmakers venture into 'The Green Inferno', an area of the Amazon inhabited by cannibal tribes. When they fail to return, an NYU anthropologist leads a rescue mission to find the missing group, or at least what's left of them. The professor returns to New York with reels of film that hold the horrifying and troubling truth of the filmmakers' disappearance.

In 2010 i'm attempting to watch and review all of the films on the DPP Video Nasty list. Click here for an explanation.

I really loved aspects of Cannibal Holocaust. It was far gorier and shocking then any of other nasties i've watched so far, and it was put together with aplomb. Although this wasn't the first film to use fake documentary footage, it's incredibly realistic and undoubtedly bought the technique to a mainstream audience influencing, if not directly, The Last Broadcast, The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. Much like The Blair Witch Project, it was deliberately implied during promotion of the film that the four documentary filmmakers were not actors and that the recovered footage shown in the film was real. Unlike The Blair Witch Project, this claim is slightly preposterous as half of the film is shot in a traditional cinematic way.

The gore in Cannibal Holocaust is at times incessant, but still manages to maintain its realism and shock factor. One infamous scene shows a woman impaled on a tall wooden stake, the spike protruding through her mouth. The effect was so realistic the filmmakers had to explain how it was achieved in court to avoid a murder charge. The marketing trick of blurring the line between fantasy and reality obviously worked on the Italian authorities.


Cannibal Holocaust is a damning criticism of the media's tendency to focus on horrific images when covering war and violent conflict. At the time various news agencies had been accused of faking such images to improve ratings. More broadly, the film questions who is more uncivilised, the cannibals with their unusual and primal rituals, or the civilised filmmakers who exploit them for ratings and cheap shocks?

Although often lacking in subtlety, Cannibal Holocaust's script makes its point well, especially during the last half of the movie when the viewer is shown the recovered reels of films. These scenes are narrated by the disapproving Professor, ensuring that even a ten year old can understand the underlying point of the film. The documentary makers not only exploit the tribes by filming their day to day rituals in a lurid manner, but they also interfere, terrorise, murder and rape the tribe's people to elicit responses for them to film. When the documentary makers discover the woman impaled on a spike the cameraman has to tell one of the men on film to stop smiling; he can't help showing his glee at finding something so horrific to capture on celluloid.

The original cut of the film lingers on a depressing amount of animal cruelty, presumably because it's a cheap way to make the viewer question what is real and what is fake. After all, these crazy uncivilised tribes will cut anything up for some wacky ritual or a quick bite, the film's just showing what happens in the real world, right?

And this alludes to my problem with Cannibal Holocaust. How can one point the finger at media for exploitation when the filmmakers themselves think it's acceptable to film an extended sequence of giant turtle being caught, decapitated and gutted, just for a cheap thrill? How can they justify cutting a live monkeys face off (twice, to get all the shots required) in the name of art or to make a political point? The filmmakers are either completely naive or, worse, making a film they know is exploitative and immoral, using the political message as a get-out clause, something to excuse the barbaric and stupid, stupid, stupid animal cruelty. It's heartening to read interviews with the directors and actors expressing remorse for using animal cruelty, but this doesn't excuse it.

Cannibal Holocaust is in parts a fun film, but it can't escape its own hypocrisy. It's a shame that the animal cruelty happened, because without it the film would be a sure fire classic.