The native performers weren't paid. They were berated and treated like shit. The other actors were barely paid and also treated horribly, and everyone was subjected to acts of violence no one should have been experienced. The way the tribes were portrayed is inaccurate and inhumane, racist caricatures. The director's attempt at a meaningful critique of Western culture, media, and capitalism is lost in the execution of the film.

Other films in this genre tried to derive the horror from sympathy with the victims. In this, the filmmakers wanted to make a film that derives horror from sympathy with the cannibals. It's an idea that is both trite and profound at once, too obvious to work and too accurate not…

100

Cannibal Holocaust was a formative experience for me in the same way that a lot of movies were for 14-year-old me. I'd scavenge lists like "top 50 most DISTURBING films EVER made" and "the WORST of the VIDEO NASTIES", as I thought that a lot of what made cinema 'adult' was gore, sex, and, gasp, explicit content. In hindsight, some of those films I've left behind as adolescent exercises in brutality. Often, movies like A Serbian Film and The Human Centipede have the hallmarks of exploitation classics, but they're all nasty surface - just pushing the envelope further so viewers don't notice how shallow it all is.

But in returning to Cannibal Holocaust, a film that once terrified an…

What an appropriately titled film.

This is a movie about sensationalized news and the bloodthirsty trends of modern media (at the time, but certainly applicable now), about the morally bankrupt approach society bent toward in this era. It is an indictment, a scathing one, that asked where the line was. In the wake of the Vietnam War, Tobe Hooper made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in part as a visceral reaction to the news reports from the war (and the lies contained therein). Cannibal Holocaust is its spiritual successor, responding to a media further degraded by a blind reliance on violence and sex to sell itself rather than any sort of journalistic integrity.

This film is one that I would…

Cannibal Holocaust is quite possibly the best film ever made. Cannibal Holocaust should not exist. It isn't just the historical and material conditions that allowed for and led up to Cannibal Holocaust which should not and should have never existed, it is the actual film Cannibal Holocaust, a film whose very existence is an atrocity, which could not have been made without atrocity, a film which to willingly consume is to expose yourself to atrocity, to make it part of yourself, a self which is now complicit in the production, manufacture, sale and recirculation of a film which is a crime, a crime committed in the midst of a genocide many hundreds of years long, not a single genocide, a…