ABSTRACT
Amidst the explosion of the current obsession with food and eating lurks a strange figure. The figure of the cannibal has returned to haunt Western societies, from which, of course, it originally came. In the food pages as well as the business pages of newspapers we now read about restaurant strips being ‘cannibalised’. Often this refers to the phenomenon whereby fast food outlets eat into each other. This behaviour has also spread to up-market restaurant areas: an owner complains, There are too many places that jumped on the bandwagon of the successful operators and cannibalised the market by offering identical operations’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 10 August 1999). The cannibal also lurks in other corners, starring in reworked genres of horror films. Silence of the Lambs immediately comes to mind, with the urbane Hannibal the cannibal Lecter. A more recent release is Ravenous (1998), which replays the story of a family of settlers in America, who cross the Sierra Madré, and, caught out in the mountains for the duration of the winter, take to eating each other. In this version, a vehicle for the actor Robert Carlyle, the film lurches between cannibalism and vampirism. It pits evil against presumed innocence. From the opening scene, where a young officer (Guy Pearce) throws up at the sight of his fellow officers gorging on slabs of rare meat, to his unceremonious end in a mortal embrace with Carlyle in a bear trap, this film graphically displays widely held ideas about cannibals.
