Cannibalism in popular culture
Cannibalism, the act of eating human flesh, is a recurring theme in popular culture, especially within the horror genre, and has been featured in a range of media that includes film, television, literature, music and video games.
Examples of prominent artists who have worked with the topic of cannibalism include William Shakespeare, Voltaire, Bret Easton Ellis, and Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Considered one of history's most gruesome movies, Cannibal Holocaust was commonly believed to be a snuff film, and Deodato was brought to trial on suspicion of having killed his actors.
The film Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, 1971), by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, details the alleged cannibalistic practices of the indigenous Tupinamba warrior tribe against French and Portuguese colonizers in the 16th century.
In Tennessee Williams' play Suddenly Last Summer (which debuted 7 January 1958) and its subsequent adaptations, the fate of the deceased son of Mrs. Venable is revealed to have been death at the hands of natives who then ate his remains.
In Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), human culture is transformed as a result of the Martians' practice of eating their dead friends as an act of great respect.
Anne Rice's novel The Queen of the Damned (1988) references an ancient culture who practice necro-cannibalism because they consider the consumption of their loved ones' remains a more fitting funeral rite than burial or cremation.
[4] The Transmetropolitan comic book series (1997–2002), by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, includes cultural cannibalism in its setting, where many bizarre and outlandish lifestyles are now common.
Michael Crichton's techno-thriller novel State of Fear (2004) features scenes where the characters encounter cannibals on a remote Pacific island.
The government's attempts to curb population growth through strict laws and encouragement of homosexuality ultimately fail, leading to a period of chaos and lawlessness where people start to openly kidnap, kill, and consume others.
[7] By making cannibalism a feature of the future as well as the past, Mitchell "raises questions about the myths of progress and linear time that underlie Western thought.
The book has been read as criticizing the increasing disparities in wealth and status in Chinese society, where the "pleasure and desire for delicacies" of the wealthy matter more than the lives of the poor, until "the inferior in social rank becomes food" in the novel's satirical exaggeration.
The most commonly seen ones are the Raiders, clans of savage killers living in the wasteland who habitually eat their victims flesh, which can be gained as an item called Strange Meat.
Fallout 3 also has the community of Andale, a two-family clan emulating the faux-1950's culture of pre-war society, while simultaneously practising both inbreeding and cannibalism, similar to the notorious Sawney Bean legend.
One of their chairmen is intending to return the group to its roots by serving the members human flesh without their knowledge, with the player having the choice of either helping or stopping him.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, features a quest in which the dragonborn (player) discovers a clan of worshipers of the daedric prince, Namira, who consume the flesh of corpses found in the catacombs underneath Markarth.
It also inspired the American TV series Yellowjackets (2021–), in which a group of high school students (mostly members of a girls soccer team) who survive a plane crash in a remote area are driven to cannibalism.
[15] Similar stories that have provided inspiration for popular culture adaptations are the accounts of Alferd Packer and of the Donner Party (1846–47), both of which involved people who ate human flesh in order to survive snowbound entrapment in the mountains.
In Max Brooks' post-apocalyptic zombie horror novel World War Z (2006), American survivors head north into Canada to escape the undead, and are forced to cannibalize their dead in order to survive the harsh winters.
Some of the survivors in Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road (2006) and its 2009 film adaptation practice cannibalism, as persistent and ubiquitous atmospheric ash has eliminated virtually all other sources of food.
Furthermore, it is stated that in the show's history a group of humans living in space after a nuclear war has to resort to cannibalism due to an event known as "the blight."
Hartwin fulfills his dream of eating a willing victim found on the Internet, and is modelled on Meiwes, whose complaints that his personal rights were violated led to a ban on the film in Germany.
Rosa von Praunheim's Dein Herz in Meinem Hirn (Your Heart in My Brain) and Ulli Lommel's Diary of a Cannibal (2006) also depict the case.
[37]Morrison uses symbolic cannibalism to represent Pecola's "entrapment in a globalized capitalist system in which intensively plantation-farmed sugar and its teeth-rotting products are signs of Third World peoples' exploitation both as workers and consumers.
