Whether it’s John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson talking about hamburgers in Pulp Fiction (1994) or Anthony Hopkins scaring the heck out of Jodie Foster as he goes on about fava beans and chianti in Silence of the Lambs (1991), food brings out a primal passion that sometimes goes to an extreme. And while the number of films that touch on gluttony (La Grande Bouffe, The Meaning of Life, Seven, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) are many, they pale in comparison to the gluttony of films that tackle cannibalism. 

I find the subject of cannibalism in cinema daunting precisely because it is so ubiquitous. Interestingly, I’m guessing that cannibals outnumber chefs in cinema by a factor of ten-to-one. Back in 1925, during The Gold Rush, Chaplin’s Tramp got stuck in a mountain cabin with another hungry companion and they danced around the table with forks and knives poised to dig into a human main course. Seventy years later Trey Parker & Matt Stone covered similar ground with their ode to Colorado’s most famous man-eater, Alferd Packer, in Cannibal: The Musical. Both of these films already have their fans, so  when it comes to snowbound desperadoes let me now give a shout-out to an overlooked and note-worthy gem called Ravenous.

Ravenous (1999) was directed by Antonia Bird, a British director who made a small arthouse splash with Priest (1994) and who has done a lot of TV work. Using the Mexican-American War of 1847 as background, a soldier is transferred to a remote outpost in the Sierra Nevada region. Guy Pierce plays a disgraced veteran who meets a man (Robert Carlyle) who claims to be the sole survivor of an encampment torn apart by cannibalism.  The film is definitely a bit of an oddity with shifting tones (gory horror, psychological drama, black comedy) and I’ll make no bones about it; it bombed and was reviled by many (Stephen Thompson referred to it as “Cringe-inducing in every sense of the word”).

So it is much to my surprise that I find that I loved it for the same reasons that Roger Ebert gave it a favorable review: atmosphere and music. Ebert writes that Bird “makes the weather feel genuinely cold, damp and miserable. So much snow in the movies looks too pretty or too face, but her locations (in Slovakia) are chilly and ominous.” Ebert also “admired the visceral music, by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn, which calls attention to itself (common) but deserves to (rare).” Personally, I liked the soundtrack so much that I bought the CD and find myself playing it often. Here’s a track to give you a taste:

Manifest Destiny

Back to cannibalism… and where to begin? I bet you could tweak the Six Degrees of Bacon Separation game to Six Degrees of Human Bacon Separation and find it just as easy. For example, Guy Pearce starred in Ravenous, but also had a small role in John Hillcoat’s The Road – the recent and terrifying post-apocalyptic view of what things might be like in a bleak world where food is hard to come by and hungry survivors resort to hunting their fellow bi-peds.

Or how about Michael Nyman? He’s collaborated frequently with Peter Greenaway (his score for A Zed & Two Noughts is another personal favorite of mine), and also scored Greenaway’s The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover, which created a big stir when it showed us this main course:

As you can see, Six Degrees of Human Bacon Separation could go on ad-infinitum, possibly even if you cut the number of degrees by half. Heck, you could even cut out the entire subgenre of cannibal exploitation films and all things zombie-related and still do just fine. You’ll find cannibals lurking in just about all areas: Musicals (various Sweeney Todd versions), horror (too many to name), science fiction (requisite mention here of Soylent Green), thrillers (Alive), comedies (A Boy and his Dog, Eating Raoul, Parents), porn (you’d be surprised at how many), political commentary (The People Under the Stairs), even romantic comedies (although, admittedly, its lean pickings here). For that last category, I want to give a special nod to Delicatessen, which remains my favorite film by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. There’s a title credit listing the film as “Presented by Terry Gilliam,” but Gilliam had little to do with the film other than being an obvious and huge influence on the sensibility of the two French co-directors, and he was happy to help them out on their debut by giving the film his imprimatur.

Delicatessen puts us in another post-apocalyptic scenario, but this time in a marvelously drippy and dilapidated building filled with oddball tenants who rely on their a landlord who throws ‘em a bone every now and then. Dominique Pinon plays a former circus clown who lands a gig as the latest in a string of unsuspecting superintendents being sized up for the display case of the downstairs butcher shop. Sure, it sounds depressing, but when you add a love interest and some brilliant art design the whole endeavor ends up being perfectly delightful. Here’s a celebrated scene from Delicatessen that always cheers me up:

Did I say cinematic representations of cannibals outnumber chefs ten-to-one? Scratch that, it’s probably more like 100-to-one. I’m not sure why that is, but we Morlocks are cannibals who breed Eloi for food so I can’t help but be a bit curious. All this talk of cannibalism might not be something that Focus on the Family finds fit for consumption, unless (of course) it’s to receive the Eucharist and drink the blood of Christ.