A Plague Upon Our Palates: Examining The Cannibal as Metaphor for the Ongoing Pandemic
The new horror kids on the block aren’t alright. They are traumatized, not just because of the killers trying to get them — no that’s still applicable — and plenty of them are back to the good old days of being the distributors of blood-soaked justice (see the rebooted Scream franchise) or righteous cool weapon-wielding dispatchers of retribution themselves (e.g., Terrifier 2).
…plus, the genre has heavily leaned on women and girls as the faces of horror cinema for a myriad of reasons (not always for sexist or misogynistic reasons but that tether is most certainly there and it should be acknowledged). Also, the needle has moved slightly for queer horror protagonists but not nearly enough in a genre as camp and boundary bulldozing as this and it’s a shame.
We may root for these kids as the heroes or at the very least anti-heroes but more and more of the young characters featured in horror these days are morally grey or slip gradually into antagonism (e.g., Talk to Me, Bones and All, Pearl).
The young folks are people-eaters (Raw), possessed by demons (Evil Dead Rise), and most have a tug-of-war between good and evil inside them…and what socio-political commentary can we unpack with the resurgence of the vampire in popular media (Castlevania, Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, Interview with a Vampire) while the werewolf has sadly languished (Cocaine Werewolf and Wolfland are coming out soon…hopefully) but vampire content is coming off the assembly line at a rapid clip.
Moreover, an especially special mention should be given to the ‘Frankenstein/Frankenstein’s monster’ renaissance with women and girls at the center who either are the creator or the creation and each film does wildly different interpretations of the concept and the politic it wishes to untangle across their myriad of films (birth/rebirth, Poor Things, Lisa Frankenstein, The Angry Black Girl and her Monster).
The real world regularly influences the horror we are seeing on screen or at the very least how its interpreted…from (literal or political) violence against women, the continued prevalence of mass shooters, the crush of capitalism, multiple genocides playing out across the globe, the ideological backlash against queer/trans everything, racist/homophobic/transphobic book bans, the dissolution of ‘third-places’, and lest we forget the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (and fingers-crossed but please God not H5N1)!!
The world for the kids right now is f#cked and it’s no wonder the lead characters in these films are angry, nihilistic, snarky, and depressed. I thought an interesting place to unpack this hunger for survival (against a multitude of forces that want to serve us undercooked unappetizing unrecognizable dishes) would be through the cannibal genre.
Firstly, I’ve never really written about these films at length even though I’ve mentioned some of them before. Second, ‘the cannibal’ has intriguing overlaps with the zombie, vampire, and werewolf genres I previously mentioned who are consumers of the blood, life force, etcetera of another human being. Third, what events were happening in reality that made the surreality of the boom in cinematic cannibals urgent and something that so many directors wanted to sink their teeth into?
I’ve got a lot of thoughts bubbling and brewing about why young people are being used as narrative seasoning in this allegorical smorgasbord of ravenous angst — who would choose or be forced to eat each other — rather than taking a chunk out of the real human monsters that have hoarded the most desirable cuts for themselves, bones and all.
Knives (and forks) out.
I’ve been a vegetarian for about 7 years now and it was a gradual process. First, it was pork, red meat, and then chicken…and then that was it. However, I do miss my pepperoni pizza and chicken wing combos. That used to be one of my favorite comfort meals…there are vegetarian or facsimile options for all of these foods but they don’t have the same…bite. Perhaps, it's the fat or the sinew, but there is most certainly a marked difference. The brain and the tongue knows.
I hadn’t even thought about what was going on in ‘meat-land’ until 2020 pandemic news brought it to the forefront of how capitalism affects and infects everything, especially our food. The United States in particular has an overabundance of food and livestock — that instead of giving meat, dairy, or eggs away or drastically reducing the price — many businesses destroyed these products instead.
Google at your own risk but there were millions of pig, cow, and chicken cullings because there were just too many in the feedlots and hatcheries (and keep your eye on the international African swine fever outbreak that’s happening now). Oh, and if you were hyper-vigilant about it like I was — because I was extremely worried about animal-to-human spillover — there was a major swine flu and bird flu outbreak that was affecting the wild and domestic global market by the millions (then and now since 2019).
In tandem, CEOs and corporations seized upon this moment to price gouge with exorbitant pricing. Meanwhile, giving all of us less. More air in the potato chip bags all around, eh? As many of you are experiencing, everything is unaffordable now…but meat prices, that was one of the first that everyone took notice of. I know the issue is even messier for farmers who are really in a tug-of-war with industry, the globalization of the food market, and how one reconciles their head and their heart in all of this.
Itchy. Tasty.
So…let’s talk about cannibalism! First things first, we have to address anti-fatness and thinness as default in the horror genre and broader socio-political culture when it comes to the visuals of who gets to consume, who gets to revel in the eating, and who gets to look sexy while doing it. Shout out to Lea Anderson’s series Be(ware) The Swallowing at Fangoria.
We have the trope of the gluttonous fat person ingrained in our minds (like the award-winning play turned Oscar darling The Whale from 2022 which I’ve been warned against seeing) but frequently when horror is involved when consuming the life force of another we have the svelte vampire, the skin and bones zombie, hyper-muscular werewolf, and so on and so on. Chomp, slurp, repeat. Every now and again, we’ll have a fat variation but there’s a particular grotesqueness to how they’re depicted and regularly with no interiority or desirability beyond their monstrosity.
…and who am I to speak as a ‘thin’ gym-bodied person who didn’t get the Black lottery genetics of the thighs, hips, booty combo? Me, my mom, and my sister…all average. Since I was a wee one though, I’ve always been obsessed with strong bodies in whatever package they come in. Powerlifters, strongmen, sumo wrestlers, shot putters, hammer throwers…you’ve got to have mass to do these athletic feats of strength and YOU HAVE TO EAT!
And because I’ve detoured a bit, anti-fatness and anti-Blackness loom large, metaphorically speaking, over everything desirable. There are degrees of acceptance to body types, where race and class determine everything. And because knowledge is power, here’s some required reading — Da’Shaun L Harrison’s: Belly of the Beast. A must-read if you haven’t already.
Historically, cannibalism of the body or the blood existed in times of war, famine, or ritualistic purposes. The grim instances that personally stand out are in modernity where some European countries clamored for the bodies or bones of Egyptian mummies or the Jim Crow lynching era in the United States where the bodies were eviscerated for the most desirable parts. Cannibalizing ‘the other’ lies betwixt the literal definition and metaphor but always revolves back to power. Morality is our greatest deterrent against eating other human beings so when one engages in the practice, what have they now become? Is the specter of our true omnivorousness too much to bear?
Directors Julia Ducournau and Luca Guadagnino explored this dichotomy but injected the humanizing elements of longing for connection into the mix to not completely make the characters seemingly irredeemable monsters, especially when the cause of much of their angst came from their parents and the elders around them. Cannibals in their teens, 20s, and 30s worry about where their next meal is coming from like anyone else; to include, even greater ostracization from society than your typical youthful angst.
This anxiety comes from a very real place where life is informing media and vice versa; so many hallmarks of youth or being young are eroding. Young people, despite living in a more modern, technologically advanced period exist in a far more precarious time…where we are sicker-poorer-hungrier meanwhile being exploited, incarcerated, or houseless. Gun violence, climate change, and escalating fascist governments are our existential crises. Lest we forget the ongoing pandemic where young people have experienced innumerable losses…
In the narratives of Raw and Bones and All, the tension of intimate relationships between siblings and lovers escalates the danger and precariousness of being a cannibal. It's an intriguing profound choice for both films to house the source of the main character's cannibalistic roots in the mother; too frequently, motherhood is seen as genteel or domestic when in truth it is frequently injected with violence…even birth itself is not a bloodless affair. *Note: all of the main cannibalistic characters in the films explored throughout this piece are predominantly white, with Bones and All being the exception (and race acting as subtext rather than main-text. I thought this was a missed opportunity to explore what this type of world looks and tastes like for a Black person and if there was a deeper trigger for their devouring).
Intriguingly, both films place the onus or the burden of being cannibalized upon the fathers contrasting the real world where women are the ones frequently devoured. Moreover, the emphasis upon young women as vessels for modern cannibalism cannot be extracted from its visuals as very werewolf-lite or dipping their toes into lycanthropy without the icky visuals of transformation sequences or questionable anatomy. Uppercase or lowercase queer these movies may be but leaning all the way into the allegory is the next frontier I think.
Now, let’s talk about a film that’s the opposite with a cannibal premise but is very by the numbers. FRESH, a Hulu exclusive that was released in 2022 employs the lover-deceiver-killer trope wherein the main character seems to make a connection with a handsome doctor who is only manipulating her for the butcher block.
Trapped in a basement where no one can hear you scream.
Check.
A secret club that wants a piece of you.
Check.
She tries to get away, but fails.
Check.
A non-reveal where the wife is in on it.
Check.
Hostel-type scene where she loses some flesh.
Check.
Black best friend akin to Get Out (2017) who tries to find you.
Check.
Etcetera etcetera.
It was an okay popcorn flick if you have a spare two hours but nothing groundbreaking. It dipped its toes into some soft cannibalism, some blood, and cutaways to fleshy bits for seasoning, but definitely don’t prioritize it as a main course.
A film that somehow slipped past my radar in 2016 (more than likely due to its marketing and strangely minimal word-of-mouth) was Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon which came out in June of the same year as Julia D’s Raw. The film diverges from the aforementioned film and Bones and All by exploring the fleeting nature of youth via the modeling industry. However, with the casts in all of the films explored…they are ironically or perhaps intentionally all modelesque — thin — 99.9% white. A snapshot of youth preserved in amber that so happens to be flawed by pesky cannibalistic tendencies.
Replacement/becoming old or a ‘has been’ in model culture and youth culture more broadly in our age of social media, clicks for the best body, and engagement for the fad ideal is the crux of the film’s exploration of how beauty, youth, and being ‘the it girl’ is fleeting. What’s the old saying: if you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em. The Neon Demon is a rollercoaster that somehow pulls necrophilia along for the ride (spoiler alert!) and not just in the horrific way that models are oftentimes posed, but then again why would the bodies of the dead or the dying be off-limits to the capitalist, er the cannibalist.
I feel like these movies are unraveling the thread, the existential dread, that many of us are spiraling as the walking dead. Perhaps in the next leg of this genre’s lifecycle, they’ll wade through the innards of climate change and dwindling resources or get to the heart of the matter with the burgeoning crisis of long-COVID.
*Strange that it’s been radio silence regarding any zombie or pandemic-adjacent horror movies, except for 28 Years Later (2025)…huh, maybe that’s when we’ll finally be able to reckon with it. You’d think directors would be chomping at the bit to tackle the layered terror of this moment, but either the scripts aren’t being written or they’re being shelved entirely for lighter and more palatable horror fare. It’s creepy and downright unsettling that there’s minimal engagement with the thing that’s been haunting all of us for the past six years and counting…and has been lock-step with triggering other dangerous diseases but hey, eat out to help out. (This was a disaster for the UK by the way).
The kids are not alright; in fact, they’re starving for life prospects that sadly no longer exist. We’ve got empty cups, bare cupboards, and the dollar menu has ceased to exist. (Un)happy meals for everyone. Rife with possibility, the modern cannibal story most certainly has teeth but let’s make sure it’s something we can really sink our teeth into. Upon lifting the cloche, I have been left wanting…
Food for thought: coupons (not diamonds) are a famished girl’s best friend.
