Cannibal Holocaust is a 1980 Italian cannibal horror film directed by Ruggero Deodato and written by Gianfranco Clerici. It stars Robert Kerman as Harold Monroe, an anthropologist who leads a rescue team into the Amazon rainforest to locate a crew of filmmakers that have gone missing while filming a documentary on local cannibal tribes.
Produced as part of the contemporary cannibal trend of Italian exploitation cinema, Cannibal Holocaust was inspired by Italian media coverage of the Red Brigades' terrorism. Deodato believed the news reports to be staged, an idea that became an integral aspect of the film's story. Additional story elements were also influenced by the Mondo documentaries of Gualtiero Jacopetti, particularly the presentation of the documentary crew's lost footage, which constitutes approximately half of the film. The treatment of this footage, which is noted for its visual realism, innovated the found footage style of filmmaking that was later popularized in American cinema by The Blair Witch Project. Cannibal Holocaust was filmed primarily on location in the Amazon rainforest of Colombia with a cast of mostly inexperienced American and Italian actors interacting with actual indigenous peoples.
Cannibal Holocaust achieved notoriety as its graphic violence aroused a great deal of controversy. After its premiere in Italy, it was ordered to be seized by a local magistrate. Deodato, screenwriter Gianfranco Clerici, and producers Francesco Palaggi, Alda Pia, and Franco Di Nunzio were convicted of obscenity. The film was released from seizure in 1982. It was banned in the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and several other countries because of its graphic content, including sexual assault and genuine violence toward animals. Although some nations have since revoked the ban, it is still upheld in several countries. Critical reception of the film is mixed, although it has received a cult following. The film's plot and violence have been noted as commentary on journalistic ethics, the exploitation of South American countries, and the difference between Western and non-Western cultures, yet these interpretations have also been met with criticism, with any perceived subtext deemed hypocritical or insincere because of the film's presentation.
Plot In 1979, an American film crew — director Alan Yates, script supervisor Faye Daniels, cameramen Jack Anders and Mark Tomaso, and native guide Felipe — disappear into the Amazon rainforest while filming The Green Inferno, a documentary about indigenous cannibal tribes.
Harold Monroe, an anthropologist at NYU, agrees to lead a rescue mission for the missing filmmakers. Before his arrival, military personnel stationed in the rainforest conduct a raid on the local Yacumo tribe and take a young man hostage to negotiate with the natives. Monroe flies in via floatplane and meets his guides, Chaco and Miguel.
While trekking through the jungle, they find Felipe's skeleton and Chaco force-feeds the hostage cocaine to keep him pliable. They secretly watch a native man murder a woman as punishment for adultery; Chaco forbids Monroe to intervene. The team follows the man to a group of Yacumo and promises to release their hostage in exchange for being taken to the Yacumo village. Once there, the group is greeted with hostility and learns that the filmmakers caused great unrest among the people.
The next day, Monroe and his guides head deeper into the rainforest to locate two warring endocannibal tribes, the Ya̧nomamö and the Shamatari. They follow a group of Shamatari warriors to a riverbank, where Monroe's team saves a smaller group of Ya̧nomamö from death. The Ya̧nomamö invite the team back to their village in gratitude but remain suspicious of the foreigners. Monroe bathes naked in a river to gain their trust, where a group of Ya̧nomamö women joins him. The woman leads Monroe from the river to a shrine, where he discovers the filmmakers' skeletal remains and their film reels. He later plays music from a tape recorder for the Ya̧nomamö in the village, hoping they will trade it for the film reels; the natives are intrigued and agree.
Monroe returns to NYC, where Pan American Broadcasting System executives invite him to host a documentary broadcast based on the recovered film. Monroe insists on viewing the raw footage before agreeing. One of the executives introduces him to Alan's work by showing an excerpt from his previous documentary, The Last Road to Hell, after which she informs Monroe that Alan staged dramatic scenes to make his films more exciting.
Monroe begins to view the recovered footage, which follows the group's journey through the rainforest. After walking for days, Felipe is bitten by a venomous snake. They amputate his leg with a machete to save him, but he dies and is left behind. Upon locating the Yacumo in a clearing, Jack shoots one in the leg so they can easily follow him to the village. Once they arrive, the crew proceeds to intimidate the tribe and kill a child's pet pig before herding the natives into a hut, which they burn down to stage a massacre for their film. Monroe expresses apprehension about the staged footage and the treatment of the natives, but his concerns are ignored.
After viewing the remaining footage, Monroe is disgusted by the station's decision to air the documentary and shows the executives the unedited footage he alone has seen to convince them otherwise. The final two reels begin with the filmmakers gang-raping a Ya̧nomamö girl against Faye's protests, silently watched from afar by a Ya̧nomamö man. They later encounter the same girl impaled on a wooden pole by a riverbank, where they claim that the natives killed her for her loss of virginity before marriage.
Shortly afterward, they are vengefully attacked by the Ya̧nomamö tribe. A spear hits Jack, and Alan shoots him to prevent his escape. The natives begin undressing Jack's lifeless body and then cutting off his penis with a large machete before mutilating his corpse. An exhausted Alan admits they got lost while trying to escape and are now surrounded by the natives, whom he attempts to scare off with a flare gun. Faye is captured by the Ya̧nomamö. Alan insists they rescue her, but Mark continues filming as she is stripped, gang-raped, beaten to death, and beheaded. The Ya̧nomamö then locate and kill the last two team members as the camera falls to the ground. Disturbed, the executives order all the footage to be burned. Monroe leaves the station, pondering "who the real cannibals are".
Cast
Production Development
Production on Cannibal Holocaust began in 1979, when director Ruggero Deodato was contacted by West German film distributors to make a film similar to his previous work, Last Cannibal World. He accepted the project and immediately set out to find a producer, choosing his friend Francesco Palaggi. The two first flew to Colombia to scout filming locations. Leticia was chosen as the principal filming location after Deodato met a Colombian documentary filmmaker at the airport in Bogotá, who suggested the town as a location ideal for filming. Other locations had been considered, specifically those where Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn! had been shot, but Deodato rejected these locations because of a lack of suitable rainforest.
Deodato conceived the film's premise while talking to his son about news coverage of the Red Brigades' terrorism. Deodato thought the media focused on portraying violence with little regard for journalistic integrity and believed journalists staged certain news angles to obtain more sensational footage. The Italian media was symbolized by the behavior in the film team in Cannibal Holocaust, the depiction of whom was also influenced by the works of Gualtiero Jacopetti, a documentary filmmaker of whom Deodato was a fan. Jacopetti and his partner, Franco Prosperi, are credited with popularizing Mondo films, a genre of documentary, with their first release, Mondo cane. Mondo films focused on sensational and graphic content from around the world, including local customs, violence, sexuality, and death. Deodato included similar content in Cannibal Holocaust, such as graphic violence and animal death, and the documentary that is produced in Cannibal Holocaust resembles a Mondo film. The scene of Monroe bathing naked in a river and the scene of a forced abortion rite have also been noted as being similar to scenes in Antonio Climati's Mondo film Savana violenta.
The Italian screenwriter Gianfranco Clerici wrote the script under the working title I figli della luna (The Sons of the Moon). He had collaborated with Deodato in his previous films Ultimo mondo cannibale and The House on the Edge of the Park, the latter of which was filmed before Cannibal Holocaust but released afterward. The screenplay included multiple scenes that did not make the film's final cut, including one in which a group of Ya̧nomamö cuts off the leg of a Shamatari warrior and feeds it to piranhas in a river. This scene was to take place directly after Monroe's team rescues a smaller group of Ya̧nomamö from the Shamatari. Attempts were made to film this scene, but the underwater camera did not operate properly, and the piranha were difficult to control. As a result, Deodato abandoned his efforts, and still photographs taken during the scene's setup are its only known depiction. The originally scripted version of The Last Road to Hell, which was written to depict soldiers advancing upon an enemy position, also went unused, as Deodato instead decided to use stock footage of political executions for the segment in order to draw further parallels to the films of Jacopetti. The character names Mark Williams and Shanda Tommaso in Clerici's screenplay were also changed to Mark Tomaso and Faye Daniels, respectively, in the film.Clerici, Gianfranco. Cannibal Holocaust. Screenplay."The Last Road to Hell: Alternate Version" (supplementary material on DVD release of Cannibal Holocaust). DVD. Grindhouse Releasing, 2005.
Casting
Deodato decided to film Cannibal Holocaust in English to appeal to a wider audience and lend the film credibility. There is one scene in Spanish, about seven minutes in, for which the subtitles vary in different versions of the film. However, the film had to establish a European nationality so that it could be more easily distributed among European countries. Under Italian law, for the film to be recognized as Italian, at least two actors who spoke Italian as a native language had to star in the film. Luca Giorgio Barbareschi and Francesca Ciardi, two inexperienced students from the Actors Studio in NYC, were cast as Mark Tomaso and Faye Daniels, respectively, in part because they were native Italian speakers who also spoke English. Deodato also hired an American from the Actors Studio, Perry Pirkkanen, to play Jack Anders.
A friend of Pirkkanen was initially cast to play Alan Yates, but he dropped out of the film shortly before the production team left for the Amazon. He instead appears in the film as an ex-colleague of Yates. Casting director Bill Williams subsequently contacted Carl Gabriel Yorke to play the role. Yorke, a stage actor who had studied under Uta Hagen, was chosen in part because he was the right size for the costumes and boots, which had already been purchased. Because Cannibal Holocaust was a non-union production, Yorke originally wanted to be credited under the stage name Christopher Savage, although he ultimately decided it to be unnecessary because of the film's obscurity and remote filming location.