What’s With All The Cannibal Content Lately?

Cannibals in horror films have gone hand in hand for years: whether in classics like The Silence of the Lambs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or in more recent flicks and remakes like The Hills Have Eyes and Bone Tomahawk, they truly are the stuff of nightmares, and Hollywood knows it. While cannibalism isn’t the most popular of horror sub-genres (it’s just never going to have the widespread appeal of psychological horror, gothic horror, or cabin-in-the-woods tales), there has been a curious surge of cannibal content over the last few years. Whether on the big screen, streaming platforms, or network television, the rise in stories involving humans devouring other humans is unavoidable. (Hell, we even celebrated Valentine’s Day with cannibal cards this year!)

In 2013, NBC premiered Hannibal, a new horror/drama series based on the characters made famous by The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon. The series, starring Hugh Dancy as extreme empathizer Will Graham and Mads Mikkelsen as famed psychiatrist/lover of cannibalistic cuisine Hannibal Lecter, was met with widespread critical acclaim, and featured a series of gorgeously shot cooking montages that were enough to make your skin crawl. This iteration of Lecter somehow managed to be even more refined than Anthony Hopkins‘; watching him in the kitchen was like being immersed in your favorite cooking show (except the menu consisted of human flesh and organs). The cannibal’s culinary prowess made the concept fresh and watchable, and even at the show’s goriest moments, the sleek cinematography and brilliant storytelling combined with the horror to create something completely unprecedented on television (and avoid comparisons to its beloved predecessor in the process). It’s still one of the most painful cancellations in recent memory, but the fact that a show featuring this much blood, guts, and consumption of human flesh even lasted three seasons on NBC (or anywhere, frankly) speaks to the changing horror climate.

Since Hannibal‘s tragic departure from network television, there has yet to be another cannibal-centered crime series – but Netflix recently picked up the torch and turned this gruesome concept into a darkly funny one with Santa Clarita Diet. The show depicts a woman (Drew Barrymore) who dies and continues to live her life “undead” – but this new existence comes with a cost, and that is a newfound hunger for human flesh. While there is a supernatural element here (she’s essentially a zombie) that puts this show among the slew of zombie content out there (The Walking Dead, iZombie, etc), the graphic nature of her eating habits and manner in which the storyline is handled makes it a lot more akin to cannibalism than zombie-ism.

In addition to their television takeover, cannibals have also taken to the silver screen in a slew of different settings as of late. Problematic-yet-popular Eli Roth gore-fest The Green Inferno drew crowds in 2015 and featured college students being consumed alive by a cannibal tribe in the Peruvian jungle. Last year, Nicholas Winding Refn‘s latest flick The Neon Demon, a psychological horror film that took the metaphor about Los Angeles “eating you alive” to an entirely new place. The film started out to be something of a cautionary tale centered on a young model (Elle Fanning) who takes L.A. by storm, but the jealousy of her peers comes to a head when they eventually decide to tag-team her to kill her, eat her, and bathe in her blood – all in an effort to absorb her perfection (because “beauty isn’t everything – it’s the only thing“). While many critics found the film gratuitous and the ending certainly took an ugly twist, the use of cannibalism to make old tropes and myths literal made the movie unforgettable.

This summer, The Bad Batch, Ana Lily Amirpour‘s followup to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, will hit theaters. The film stars Keanu Reeves and Jason Momoa in a cannibal dystopia, and the trailer alone is enough to induce some mild nausea in viewers. Perhaps the most talked about cannibal content of the year thus far, however, is French film Raw, a flick so graphic that it caused grown men to faint at the Toronto International Film Festival in January. Raw depicts a young vegetarian who gets a hankering for human flesh after she’s forced to eat raw meat – and director Julia Ducournau does not shy away from even the most gruesome of images (the trailer is not for the faint of heart). From television and streaming platforms to festivals and big-budget blockbusters, cannibalism has taken the world by storm.

There are many factors that could play into the recent spike of cannibal content – we’ve become more and more desensitized to violence, which is no secret, so it doesn’t bother us too much to watch Michael Pitt eat his own nose. There’s also the fact that everything in Hollywood is cyclical, and maybe we’ve taken a nod from the Italian cannibal films of the 1970s and ’80s and this wave is our current obsession. The most likely reason, however, is that a lot of the folks creating this content understand that horrifying things like cannibalism can be used as a tool in sophisticated storytelling. Just like Joss Whedon employed monsters and supernatural occurrences to tell a bigger, more emotional story on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the filmmakers and writers here have used cannibalism as a metaphor for a plethora of topics. Whether used as a cover for the sexual awakening in Raw or to embody vanity in The Neon Demon, as disturbing as these films and television shows can be, they’re using a traditional horror taboo to paint a bigger picture… and we’re eating it up.