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The film’s conclusion – in which the film-makers are captured, raped, beaten, murdered and then eaten – indicates, quite blatantly, that the exploited will eventually turn upon those that wish to exploit their poverty. Yet while the film can be read as this cruel
critique on the media’s desire for sensational footage in both the daily news and in film, Cannibal Holocaust itself is as much a perpetrator of these activities as those it attempts to critique: amongst the many controversies surrounding the film, the most brutal is the actual on-screen killing of live animals. Various animals are killed during the film, including one explicit and protracted death of a turtle. These scenes are truly and undeniably horrific. When asked to defend these actions Deodato commented that the animals were going to be killed and eaten anyway. Whilst these deaths are inexcusable, their inclusion in the film has the perverse effect of conditioning the audience further into believing that the human mutilations are actually real: writing about the film in Eaten Alive! Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies, Lloyd Kaufman states: The audience has already seen actual death on screen, and have been subtly brainwashed into assuming they’re now seeing a woman [impaled on a] stake. The brain has been conditioned to accept that which it’s now seeing is real. This mixture of real and staged violence, combined with the handheld camerawork and the rough, unedited quality of the [film] is certainly enough to convince someone what they are watching is real.
The post-Cannibal Holocaust
mockumentary Cannibal Holocaust remains a ground-
breaking piece of genre cinema. As such, Deodato’s film has subsequently influenced the films of the mockumentary mode, defining for them the visual and textual strategies by which to convince the audience that what they are watching is indeed real as well as defining narrative events: subsequent horror mockumentaries would use similar visual strategies to Deodato (hand-held camera, real locations, natural light, raw and grainy footage) and position their protagonists in compromising situations. And as each narrative draws to an end, these protagonists would all end the film dead. The next horror mockumentary was The
Last Broadcast (Stefan Avalos, 1998) which was then followed by The Blair Witch Project. Following the example set by Deodato, both films claim they are made up of real ‘found’ footage and uses opening title cards (as does Cannibal Holocaust) to set up the context of realism. Whilst Broadcast functions almost like a documentary (for it is made up of interviews and discussions as much as it is of raw footage), Blair Witch unfolds almost in real time as the three student protagonists find themselves lost in the Burkittsville woodland and are increasingly assaulted by supernatural elements. Their footage is crude and raw, full of jerky and shaky images, some shot at night with only a single light to illuminate the horrors that seemingly surround them. Their footage also deliberately breaks
the rules of cinema by having its characters gaze directly into the camera and verbally address it: the most famous of these sequences is when Heather, ostensibly the director of the documentary, confesses to the camera her fear of the situation she and her friends have found themselves in. She apologises to their families and declares her love for her own. Heather’s terror is all the more palpable not only because she looks directly at the audience (and so effectively confesses to them as much as the camera) but because, at that point in the film, her situation seems so believable: Heather’s terror is the audience’s terror. Although Blair Witch was a significant
success, very few mockumentaries followed. This is possibly because the central conceit of the mode – a truth which in fact is a lie – had already become too worn and obvious for an audience that was demanding increasingly sophisticated viewing. Even so, a number of mockumentaries followed: The Last Horror Movie (Julian Richards, 2003), Snuff Movie (Bernard Rose, 2005), The Zombie Diaries (Kevin Gates & Michael Bartlett, 2006), Rec, Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, 2007) and, more recently, Quarantine and Cloverfield. Whilst none of these films have gone to the
extremes that Cannibal Holocaust went to, they retain a connection with it not just through the mimicking of the documentary visual style but also with the subtextual readings: the majority of these films can be read as being preoccupied with contemporary anxieties which use the mockumentary mode to bring a
english and media centre | December 2009 | MediaMagazine 51
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