FLESH AS FORBIDDEN FRUIT

Our ragged-clothed protagonist sits huddled under a makeshift shelter, bones protruding in sharp angles from flesh thinned by hunger, ravaged by cold. She’s a lonely child, eyes red-rimmed from loss and terror, trying to traverse this unfeeling world by herself. Our protagonist is a human being, her teeth rounded, her touch hesitant, unsure, as if waiting for permission that cannot come.
It won’t come, reader, because her only guardian is dead at her feet. Her father’s heart attack was sudden and ill-timed for a duo escaping this post-apocalyptic world. But the flesh-eating monsters that lurk in the shadows haven’t gotten to him yet, and his body is well-preserved from the cold. He’s plump, carrying more flesh on his bones than he needs in the underworld; and reader, our protagonist is faint with hunger. She suddenly cannot stop picturing the crackling skin of a freshly roasted turkey, or the grease that coats her fingertips as she sinks her teeth into a burger, the rich explosion of flavour that bursts in her mouth as she consumes.
Is she human, still, as she reaches out that shaking, skeletal hand? As she takes her knife – for use only in emergencies, naturally – and slices a meagre sliver of flesh from her father’s rib? Is she human still when her mouth closes around meat, when her teeth sink into it? As it makes its way through her mouth, down her throat, settles uneasily upon her stomach? Can our protagonist be human ever again, now that she has known the taste of human flesh – now that she is a cannibal?

                Cannibalism has become something of its own horror subgenre, gaining traction in recent years with the release of media such as Hannibal, Yellowjackets, Fresh, and many more. Horror has always been, since its conception, a genre that reflects the fears of current society; bearing this in mind, it’s unsurprising that people have flocked to cannibalism in recent years. As noted by Chelsea G Summers, author of cannibal thriller A Certain Hunger, “[in] our post-pandemic present, a time of quiet quitting and low-key unhinged disaffection, cannibalism speaks our language."[1] She notes that cannibalism can provide metaphor for frustrations around the capitalist world that is slowly eating us alive, and the way women’s bodies have historically been commodified for male consumption – cannibalism subverts this, allows the consumed to take something back in an act of gory vengeance. Yet something less often discussed is what the act of cannibalism makes a person. Regardless of if a cannibal becomes such by unwanted circumstance, desire, by accident, or even by birth (as is the case for the protagonist of Bones and All), the truth of that person’s state of being is undeniable. Hannibal Lecter is as much a cannibal as our aforementioned protagonist – both have consumed human flesh and committed what Summers describes as “the defining inhumane act.”[2]  This fact bears the recognition that there is a single, liminal moment where a person is neither human nor monster, but something stuck in a purgatory of in-between: but when does this moment occur? Is it the same for every cannibal? Within this chapter, I will dissect how the horror genre discusses the moment of cannibalism as a vehicle for transformation, and how a cannibal exists within the time before, during, and after the cannibalistic act.

 

The Before

                Can a monster be made, or are the monstrous among us born with something disturbed within them? Considering, as aforementioned, that the act of cannibalism lies not in one moment, but in three separate states of being, The Before is, perhaps, the most arguable of the three liminal states of the cannibal’s lifecycle. In theory, if it is the moment of The Bite that makes someone a cannibal, it stands to reason therefore that the person in question was, once, not a monster at all. Certainly, those we encounter in media such as Terrence Martin’s The Donner Party (2009) and AMC’s The Terror (2018) can be assumed to be, within their own rights, amiable and ‘normal’ people who would never dream of cannibalism. Both describing the true stories of doomed explorers who only turned to cannibalism as a last resort for the sole purpose of survival (although we cannot know, for certain, whether the act sparked pleasure regardless – but I self-indulgently digress), we can safely presume that any monstrosity that befell our ill-fated pioneers was only at the moment of the bite, and the satisfying fullness that followed. However – there was still that singular, liminal moment between the moment before cannibalism had even been considered and when it was decided upon in which a spiritual shift took place within even these unwilling, last-resort cannibals. Is that, then, the moment where the monstrosity occurs – in the moment of the premeditation of the cannibalistic act? Is the moment the consumption of human flesh is even considered the final one where the cannibal can be deemed an innocent?

                Like many things when dealing within liminality, the answers to these questions are unlikely to be fixed. Take, for example, the fate of the doomed teenage girls in Yellowjackets (2021); a highschool soccer team encounter a plane crash that leaves them stranded in the wilderness with no food, no shelter, and no way to escape the encroaching madness. Yellowjackets poses an interesting question in terms of when monstrosity begins within these girls – although they are children at the beginning of the story, and therefore the very essence of innocence, the show poses to the audience that there has been an inherent darkness in each of them (especially in the six[i] who survived the wilderness and grew into adults) which could prophesise their eventual turn to monstrosity. Giving credence to this concept is the teased idea of a supernatural force working within the wilderness, pushing the girls to accept their primal urges and hungers, and driving them faster towards the madness we know, eventually, will take them over. Yet this idea mainly explains what comes after, in the ‘present’ timeline, when it becomes evident that the wilderness has followed them and left something rotting inside them. We will return to Yellowjackets later in this chapter – but the question remains, at this point, whether the wilderness is something that left its marks in them, or something they were called to from the darkness that always resided within them; was there ever really a Before for the Yellowjackets?

                The idea of a person fated to be a cannibalistic monster is interesting when we consider media such as Guadagnino’s Bones and All (2022). Within this story, we find a protagonist who has been a cannibal all her life, by means that seem stitched into the very fabric of her being. Maren has, from a young age, experienced episodes where she blacks out entirely, and awakens to find that she has cannibalised a person entirely – bones and all – and is left covered in their gore. As she travels to find herself, she meets several other characters who suffer the same affliction, albeit with different ‘triggers’, who equally have no control over their cannibalistic acts. Some of these, like her, repress the urge, while others lean into it, accepting it as an intrinsic part of who they are.
Bearing in mind the earlier discussion about the moment of transition between human to monster, and its potential to lie in the moment the cannibalism becomes premeditated, Bones and All presents an interesting divergence from this train of thought. Maren, and those like her, never had a choice to not be cannibals. Much like The Donner Party, the crew of The Terror, and the Yellowjackets, there’s an element of a lack of choice – but ultimately, the former three of these still made the decision to eat human flesh. Maren does not. Does this mean, then, that there was never a chance for innocence – or is Maren not monstrous at all, despite her consumption of flesh, because it is beyond her control? Are the only monsters within Bones and All those who accept their fate and turn fully to cannibalism, without attempt at repression? The answering of these questions seems to rely on firm decision of whether a cannibal must be willingly and knowingly so to be considered one, whether someone is truly a monster if they never stood a chance to be any other way, and if the moment of cannibalism truly takes place when the act is decided upon, and not acted upon.

Perhaps, then, the tragedy of the cannibal is that regardless of willingness or active participation, the cannibalistic monster’s jaws will always find their way to flesh. The monstrous will always be monstrous. There was never any other fate that could befall them.

 

[1] Summers, Chelsea G, From Yellowjackets to Dahmer, How Cannibalism Took Over Culture, (British Vogue, 2022)

 

[2] Summers, Chelsea G, From Yellowjackets to Dahmer, How Cannibalism Took Over Culture, (British Vogue, 2022)

 

 

[i] At time of writing

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