The most famous of horror's Italian cannibal movie cycle, Cannibal Holocaust was fraught with controversy, from animal cruelty to murder charges. In the 1980s, Italian horror had a much bigger presence on the world stage than it does today, with dozens of highly entertaining fright flicks emerging from the European nation. Surreal films by directors such as Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci would become highly influential, but elsewhere in Italy, a different sub-genre dominated, that being cannibal films, preferably set in the jungle.
While it's not hard to understand why jungle cannibal movies aren't really a thing anymore - the potential unfortunate implications involving depictions of different races and cultures are many - audiences in the 1980 loved them, especially those looking for lots of gore and sleazy behavior. Unquestionably sitting at the top of the Italian cannibal movie food chain is Cannibal Holocaust, released in 1980, and directed by Ruggero Deodato. Robert Kerman starred in the film, after having previously cultivated a career in the adult film industry.
Cannibal Holocaust was also an early innovator of the most controversial horror movies ever, for multiple reasons.
Why Cannibal Holocaust Was So Controversial
The most often brought up point of controversy surrounding Cannibal Holocaust is its onscreen depiction of animal death, which most would argue qualifies as animal cruelty, due to the fact that the creatures were killed solely for the purposes of film production. The most graphic animal demise is that of a large turtle, but a monkey is also brutally killed, in a scene filmed twice, meaning that it actually required two monkeys to die. Several available home video releases of Cannibal Holocaust allow the viewer to watch a cut of the film that removes the animal cruelty scenes.
Cannibal Holocaust's graphic gore and sexual violence have also repeatedly drawn the ire of regulatory boards, with the film having been banned in dozens of countries at various points. It was also part of the UK's infamous "Video Nasties" list of banned films, and it took until 2011 for an (almost) entirely uncut version of the film to receive approval for release by the BBFC. During the film's initial theatrical run, a magazine article in posited that several of the human deaths shown onscreen were real, making Cannibal Holocaust effectively a snuff film. This was of course false, but before that could be proven, director Deodato was actually charged with murder. Thankfully, the still very much alive actors in question were summoned to disprove the allegations, and Deodato also revealed to the court how he accomplished some of the shocking gore effects.
