Anthropophagous is a film about a deranged maniac terrorizing hapless tourists and eating them at will. It is also a film about the fall of Western Civilization. The anonymous cannibal in Anthropophagous is not, as is typical of this genre, a native from the depths of the Jungle, but a European, with all the connotations of culture and refinement that such an identity suggests. He doesn’t crudely rip open victims, he only indulges in a taste. Taste -- this word requires the film critic to pause. Taste is precisely that which a film, even a film that depicts cannibalistic feasting, cannot represent. Taste is unfilmable, you could say. But if it isn’t represented in Anthropophagous it still strikes me as central to its thematic discourse: taste conveys something that is both crudely physical and gustatorial, and something that is highly spiritual and refined, a nuance we associate only with the most cultured minds. The concept and activity of taste contains an internal eternal circulation of oppositional meanings that is also at work in Anthropophagous. Within its European cannibal a desire for human flesh mingles with a culture of refinement. He represents two inheritances: one the one hand, he has inherited something barbaric from the dark depths of desire itself; on the other, he has inherited European culture, which is to say, science, rationality, law, morals, progress, sensitivity.

These two contrasting inheritances not only circulate through all the film’s meanings, they are gathered together and distilled in one of the most infamous and acrid images in the annals of cannibal horror. It is an image that is censored in many versions of this film. Freud would have understood this censorship, as he would have understood my desire to analyze this particular image for the insights it yields into the way this film functions. Having strangled a pregnant woman, this European cannibal removes the fetus of her unborn child and begins to eat it. When I saw this image for the first time I began to think of roe -- unfertilized fish eggs -- perhaps because this mass of fish eggs is not dissimilar to a still-developing human fetus, and because the manner in which they are farmed is not dissimilar from the way in which he removes the unborn child. Fish, mostly female sturgeon from the Caspian Sea, are caught and cut open so that their eggs can be removed and eaten, often raw. It is clear to me that this mental image of roe was an unconscious evocation of the cultural refinement of eating, and in relation to the fetus scene, of a particularly European elegance. This is the point in the film that director Joe D’Amato most effectively articulates the continual exchange that occurs between the savage and the civilized, and in which he most clearly expresses a belief in the fundamentally cruel nature of Western civilization. This scene, depicting the meal of a fetus, is not only an image of cruelty in its most pristine state, but also an image of a society with no future, a society that devours its own offspring.

The strategy that D’Amato uses in Anthropophagous is the strategy of all, or at least most, Italian cannibal films. It consists of making an equation between civilization and savagery, civilization and the jungle, civilization and the appetites which would break every civilized taboo. Freud viewed and understood Antropophagous before it existed. Nietzsche also. He sums it up when he describes civilized man as "...resting on the pitiless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, and, as it were, hanging in dreams on the back on a tiger." It is apt that the tiger is a ferocious predator defined by his invisibility as much as by the sharpness of his claws and teeth. And in the light of this comment by Nietzsche, it doesn’t seem to matter that these Italian cannibal films are not great works of refinement and art. They don’t aspire to represent Civilization. They aspire, in fact, only to be a cheaply-made picture of Civilization, "hanging in dreams on the back on a tiger."

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