In the history of splatter and exploitation movies, cannibal films are a notorious – and interesting – subgenre. Between 1973 and 1983, famous sleaze movie directors like Umberto Lenzi, Ruggero Deodato, Joe d’Amato, Jess Franco, Sergio Martino and Antonio Margheriti (Anthony M. Dawson) made about a dozen of cannibal films, some of them marketed under the title “Mondo Cannibale”. Most of them play in jungle territory where white American heroes are confronted with the “last” cannibal tribes. The typical iconography of the genre involves bloody orgies, body mutilation, humans being gutted out and eaten, (real) animal slaughter in front of the camera, voyeuristic nudity and sex and, at least in the early years of the genre, straight forward exoticist and racist stereotyping of “the savage”.

In later cannibal movies, however, these depictions become ambivalent. Deodato’s controversial master piece “Cannibal Holocaust” for example manages to be exploitation and critical reflection, trashy and complex at the same time. In Jess Franco’s cannibal movies, genre stereotypes turn into bizarre camp. As a mutant of classical adventure movies enriched with elements of the older “Mondo” pseudo-documentaries, soft porn and zombie flicks, cannibal movies are no-holds-barred mainstream cinema and, at the same time, an early “cinema of transgression” with striking aesthetic parallels to underground films.

Along many film examples, the lecture will tell an illustrated critical history of the (chiefly Italian) cannibal cinema.