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its false sense of realism – hand-held camera work, raw and uncut footage, poor sound and image quality, unscripted dialogue. When combined with a horror narrative the resulting film effectively deceives the audience into believing what they are viewing is actually real, regardless of how far-fetched the actual events may be. In essence then, what these films rely on is the illusion of authenticity and realism, a quality which when combined with the traditional tropes of the horror film – monsters, zombies, serial killers and the supernatural – makes for a very frightening experience indeed.


Origins For many the first horror mockumentary was


the incredibly successful low budget The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez, 1999). But whilst this film may have signified the possibilities of this mode for a contemporary audience, it was definitely not the first. The first was, in fact, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust: released in 1980, the film has become an acknowledged classic of the horror genre due to its originality, horrific content and subtextual content, as well as the many controversies surrounding the actual film itself. The narrative is concerned with a group of four documentary film-makers who go missing in the Amazon rainforest. When a search party goes looking for them they find their skeletal remains and their cans of exposed film. When played back, this footage shows the deceased crew staging violent events for the camera, raping a young tribeswoman, killing live animals and, as the


50 MediaMagazine | December 2009 | english and media centre


footage draws to an end, a series of violent and barbaric assaults that include more sexual assault, disembowelment and beheadings. From this brief outline of events it is clear that


Cannibal Holocaust is an immensely graphic film. And whilst the described events are all staged – that is to say they are based on a script and that the injuries, rapes, mutilations and human deaths are all acted out in conjunction with special effects and are therefore fake – the sheer ferocity of the imagery combined with its claim to be a documentary makes the film a truly horrifying, gruelling and disturbing piece of contemporary cinema. The reason for this sense of ferocity is Deodato’s deft and skilful directorial decision to film the fictional events as if they were actually real. To do this he applies all of the


visual tropes of documentary film-making to his shoot. The fictional events are recorded on location via a shaky hand-held camera on raw, grainy and, at times, poorly exposed film. The sound is crude and often pops and the lighting is natural, all qualities which signify everything taking place within the film as real. The effect of this strategy not only makes the audience believe what they are seeing is real but also brings to the fictional narrative an immense sense of emotional intensity and intimacy, qualities which not only draw the audience into the lives of the characters but also further into believing the realism of the footage. The narrative description also reveals the


film’s subtextual potential: according to sources on the production of the film, the idea came to Deodato when he reflected on news coverage of certain violent events. He felt that what he had been watching had little integrity in terms of reporting events truthfully and instead relied upon showing the horrific acts perpetrated. In this kernel of a response, Deodato began to establish the narrative for Holocaust by exaggerating the mode of reporting to the extent that the reporters themselves perpetrate the violent acts themselves in order to get the ‘story’ they believe will sell. As a consequence, the film explicitly suggests that the savagery of modern man is far more violent and brutal than that of the alleged cannibalistic tribal ‘savages’. It also suggests that the media is increasingly concerned with depicting the poverty and misfortune of other people to such an extent that it can be considered to be exploitational.


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