Guest post written by Where The Dead Wait author Ally Wilkes
Ally Wilkes, Stoker Award-nominated horror author, looks at the fascinating links between imperialism and cannibalism, both in real life and horror media, and explains how they influenced her recent novel Where The Dead Wait.
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.”
This Nietzche quote opens Antonia Bird’s 1999 horror-comedy film Ravenous. It’s one of the most famous nihilist quotes in the world, and one which perfectly encapsulates the film’s bleak (yet absurd) message: morality is relative and shifting, but one truth remains; we are all meat, whether we’re the ones consuming or the ones being consumed.
Manifest Destinies
Ravenous opens with John Boyd, a ‘war hero’ – the quotation marks here are very necessary – of the 1846-1848 Mexican-American war, who is sent to be forgotten about at Fort Spencer, a remote outpost in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It’s no accident that Boyd is a veteran of that particular war – an expansionist project by an America greedily looking for new territory – or that he ends up somewhere intended to watch over the ‘settler’ route taken by white colonists moving west to California. Ravenous is explicitly about imperial expansion, culminating in the murderous Colquhoun’s magnificent speech about his plans for those remaining at Fort Spencer: to prey on travellers passing through to pursue the American dream in California’s gold rush. He justifies himself by reference to Manifest Destiny, the settler-colonial belief of the time that white Americans were entitled to all lands between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Ravenous is also, of course, about cannibalism. The film is shockingly gory – the production team famously ran out of fake blood in the finale – and Colquhoun is the dark fringe-dwelling cannibal of fairytales, brought in from the cold; now he’s cosying up around the fire with Boyd, persuading him to share in the feast.
When I was writing Where The Dead Wait, a novel about cannibalism and human monstrosity in the Victorian Arctic, Colquhoun often came to mind, with his demonic charm and distinct homoerotic undertones: “It’s not courage to resist me, Boyd. It’s courage to accept me.” The film explicitly points out that colonial expansionism is a form of cannibalism: land, bodies, resources, entire ways of life are simply grist to the mill of Manifest Destiny. And I was writing about white exploration of the Arctic in order to carve out trade routes (that fabled Northwest Passage! the fictitious Open Polar Sea!) and exploit natural resources; not to mention claiming territory. Imperialism and cannibalism represented a marriage of theme and grotesque that – as a horror writer – I couldn’t resist.
Expansion, of course, has long been a project which might, bluntly, require survival cannibalism of its foot-soldiers. After all, it’s on the fringes of Empire that men might find themselves in situations of extreme privation, cut off from the supply chains and managed resources that characterise ‘civilisation’. And it’s to those fringes that young men have always flocked, eager to make a name for themselves and find out what they’re made of. This impulse was what drove my first novel, All The White Spaces, about a young man who felt driven to prove himself in the hyper-masculine world of Antarctic exploration after ‘missing out’ on the First World War. Alas, sometimes, these idealists find out that they’re simply meat.
In the annals of survival cannibalism, Sir John Franklin must merit a dishonourable mention as someone whose stint as a colonial governor of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania, or lutruwita in Palawa Kani) was bookended by two particularly ill-fated expeditions. The first, the Coppermine expedition of 1819, earned him the reputation as the man who “ate his own boots” (while other British officers were very probably fed human meat by Michel Terohaute, a French-Canadian voyageur who would have occupied a particular place in the pecking order, so to speak). The second, another attempt at the North-West Passage in 1845 – this time by sea! – famously ended in the events which inspired AMC’s acclaimed The Terror.
In Ravenous, Colquhoun tells a bitter story about “a detestable man… and a most disastrous guide. He professed to know a new, shorter route through the Nevadas. Quite a route that was. Longer than the known one… and impossible to travel.” This can only be an allusion to Lansford Hastings, an American explorer who developed the so-called Hastings Cutoff: a route which was meant to speed up the journey west to California, taking travellers across the mountains and salt flats of Utah rather than the comparatively well-travelled (and supported) Oregon trail. Famously, this was the route the Donner Party was persuaded to take in 1846, resulting in one of the best-known tragedies in the history of American westward expansion.
The Donner Party as cannibal disaster has been well-mined, most notably in Alma Katsu’s magnificent historical horror novel The Hunger, which unflinchingly tells the story of the mismanagement, human fallibility, and sheer hubris which resulted in only 48 members of the 87-strong party surviving their ordeal at Truckee Lake. Katsu also adds a supernatural twist to the tragedy, drawing on Native American legends of the Wendigo and contemporary American werewolf sightings to create man-eating monsters in the shadows. The Wendigo, an ancient belief most often associated with the Algonquin, Ojibwe, and Cree First Nations peoples, is sometimes described as an evil spirit that personifies hunger and starvation; sometimes as a creature that started life as a man but has become a Wendigo either by eating human flesh or being possessed by a Wendigo spirit.
In most iterations, though, the Wendigo is a kind of cannibal force which has – as its defining characteristic – the desire to consume and spread. It’s unsurprising that it’s been used as a potent metaphor for the consumption of land and resources by white settlers, and the consequences of individualistic greed, by First Nations writers such as Waubgeshig Rice in his fantastic novel Moon Of The Crusted Snow. Of course the Wendigo myth finds its place, too, in Ravenous, as George and Martha – Native Americans living at Fort Spencer – explain that cannibalism eventually becomes an addiction: once you begin to eat, you must continue. Colquhoun agrees with this analysis, telling Boyd that “this time our hunger was different. More severe… savage…”
As Margaret Atwood says: “Fear of the Wendigo is twofold: fear of being eaten by one, and fear of becoming one.”
‘Going native’
This idea – that we are all capable of becoming Wendigo – once found its expression in a psychological affliction: Wendigo Psychosis. This was described by the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune in 1661 as a condition which “affects [the] imaginations and causes…a more than canine hunger… without being able to appease or glut this appetite.” The idea of this psychosis as a psychological disorder was widely debunked in the 1960s and appears, at this distance, to be a manifestation of the western need to pathologise Native peoples as animalistic and seized by wild irrationality.
Curiously, Algernon Blackwood (a notable British writer of the Weird), in his 1910 short story The Wendigo, guts the creature of its cannibalistic impulses (making it a moss-eater) but retains the central idea that once one encounters the Wendigo, the real danger is that one might become one. The fear is that by ‘becoming’ Wendigo we lose our human natures and become something else, entirely non-human: “the Call of the Wild personified, which some natures hear to their own destruction.” To the characters of Blackwood’s tale, to go ‘Wild’ is a very bad thing.
This fear of ‘going native’ is also situated at the very core of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. Marlow is sent into the Belgian Congo, a site of rapacious colonial extraction and horror, to find the legendary Colonel Kurtz and bring an end to his reign of terror. The typical English colonial novel of the time sent civilised heroes into far-flung deserts and jungles to be pitted against cannibals and other ‘savage’ forces: Conrad, like Nietzche, knew that the so-called ‘civilised’ heroes might be irretrievably altered by the experience, and reserved the text’s most baroque expressions of horror for the acts of Colonel Kurtz, a white man ‘corrupted’ by the jungle and heavily implied to have descended into cannibalism. (This is not unproblematic – it implies Africa itself as a malign influence – but Conrad also shows an ambivalence towards the project of Empire as it devours peoples and lands.) And, as will be discussed later, one of the perpetual themes of cannibal media is whether the cannibal Other is really more savage than the ‘good’ forces of civilisation when they come face to face. The anxiety is that cannibalism might be an unfortunate implied consequence of the conduct of imperial expansion.
This framing provides a welcome riposte to the more traditional narrative, which populated the fringes of Empire with ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’ in order to justify their annihilation and subjugation, from the ‘cannibal Indian’ of the Americas to the cynocephali, dog-headed cannibals who lived on the margins of Europe to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Not to mention Sawney Bean, whose legend gave rise to the popular depiction of the ‘backwoods cannibal’: Bean reputedly lived in a cave on the west coast of 1700s Scotland and – with his wife and incestuous clan – robbed and ate travellers who took that unfortunate road. At a time when Scotland represented anxieties about the politically, linguistically, and religiously resistant, this convenient legend allied its peoples with the less-than-human Other.
Throughout history, therefore, cannibalism has been framed as one of the reasons why ‘civilisation’ needs to be expanded, to combat the ‘savages’. Marina Warner, a mythographer, has referred the usefulness of these stories to the continuing need for “the centre… to draw outlines to give itself definition. The city has the need of the barbarians to know what it is.” (What a wonderful echo of “the centre cannot hold…” which gave the title to Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, about the threats posed to traditional Igbo society in a colonialist context – Achebe was a fierce critic of the depiction of Africa/Africans in Heart of Darkness).
We’ve seen one way in which imperialism might lead indirectly to the creation of cannibals – in that hapless western explorers have often had to resort to survival cannibalism when in desperate straits. Or colonial extraction of resources might leave the indigenous population with no choice, as in the reported cases of survival cannibalism during the 1845-52 Irish Potato Famine. However, there is another notable way in which genre fiction engages with the origins of the cannibal monster: we can see echoes of it in the Sawyer family of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974). The Sawyers are classic ‘frontier’ cannibals who have turned to hunting humans as their meatpacking factories have closed down, progress and prosperity have moved elsewhere, and their area becomes emblematic of the ‘backwoods’. In much of horror media, of course, whether the Wrong Turn movies (before their folk horror-tinged reboot) or Jack Ketchum’s novel Off Season (1980), cannibals reside in these backwoods.
In this and related stories, the tools of imperialism literally create their own cannibal monsters (as capitalism does in Texas Chainsaw) – and create them as a particularly chilling afterthought, underlining the casual disregard for human life typically involved in colonial expansion. In The Hills Have Eyes (1977), set in the Mojave Desert, Wes Craven explored the idea that: “the most civilised can be the most savage, and the most savage can be the most civilised”, which is an interesting off-shoot of the Nietszche quote above (indeed, isn’t the appeal of cannibal stories that we see just how far the supposedly ‘civilised’ will go in order to survive?). The 2006 Hills remake, directed by Alexandre Aja and produced by Craven, leans more heavily on the location of the cannibal clan as nuclear test-site: a group of miners were warned by the government to leave the area, refused to abandon their homes and livelihoods, and were exposed to severe radiation. Their deformed descendants survive in the desert by preying on travellers: these frontier cannibals were directly created by the American weapons programme. The tools of Empire beget cannibals.
“All of them… better worlds”
Space, of course, is the final frontier. Joss Whedon’s 2002 space-Western TV drama Firefly is set in an expansive universe of ‘core planets’ and terraformed colonies: the former belong to the Alliance, a rigid empire wishing to assert dominance and control over the fringes; the latter are akin to the Wild West. It’s no surprise that, as in Bone Tomahawk (2015) – another fantasy of the American West – cannibals lurk in the margins. In the Firefly-verse these take the form of Reavers, spaceships full of violent, depraved, and unhinged monsters who subject their victims to spectacularly horrible fates. They’re not driven by hunger, necessarily – they’re shown to leave supplies behind in favour of torturing, mutilating and sexually assaulting their victims – so what created them?
The first explanation offered, by ostensibly reasonable characters such as the ship’s mechanic Kaylee and travelling preacher Book, is that Reavers are simply men who’ve travelled too far into the vastness of space and been driven mad by the nihilistic expanse of it – there’s that Nietzsche quote again, this time its second sentence: “And when you gaze long into the void, the void gazes also into you.” This is the quasi-contamination theory seen as an explanation for Colonel Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, and is echoed in the show’s second (subsidiary) explanation: that some are men who have survived previous Reaver attacks and are so traumatised by the experience that they have internalised the violence. Reavers, therefore, beget Reavers.
The third explanation, and the most complete one, is found in the spin-off film Serenity (2005). There, we learn that the Alliance has been adding experimental chemicals into the air supplies of some of its terraformed planets to make people ‘better’ (more docile); but on a colony called Miranda, its citizens became so docile they simply lay down and died of starvation, while a small percentage had the opposite reaction and became Reavers. While the Alliance is said not to be an ‘evil Empire’, this is imperialism literally begetting cannibals, and the worst form of cannibals that can be imagined. It’s a potent re-framing of the theme.
Swallow the world
One telling way in which cannibal monsters – as opposed to cannibals-as-survivors – are depicted is by reference to excess. Overkill, if you will. This is loud and clear in the case of the Reavers, or the monsters in Bone Tomahawk, and is a useful way to ensure the audience’s sympathy is not with the cannibals. It’s present in some of the reporting of survival cannibal tragedies, as part of a strategy of Othering – to drive home the point that these people have transgressed. When the second relief party arrived at the Donner Camp they reputedly found “Jake’s children… sitting on a log, their faces messy with blood, eating the half-roasted heart and liver of their father.” The squalor is emphasised: “around the fire…. long hair, bones, skulls and fragments of partly-eaten limbs.”
This is the sheer voracity imagined in Heart of Darkness: Colonel Kurtz opening his mouth wide ‘as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.” When I was writing Where The Dead Wait, I was very aware that survival cannibalism per se might have lost its horror to modern audiences – it’s been so often reduced to a thought experiment, an “if you were on a desert island…” ice-breaker question. And few would condemn the desperate plight faced by the survivors of the Uruguayan Flight 571 disaster, portrayed so vividly in the 1993 film Alive or the 2022 Society of the Snow. Where I wanted to situate my horror was in the mouth of Colonel Kurtz, so to speak: in creating a character so rapacious and lacking in the restraints of conventional morality that he might entirely be capable of ‘eating the world’. Or, as Kaylee puts it in Serenity: “reached the edge of space, saw a vasty nothingness, and went bibbledy over it.”
Our bodies, our cannibal selves
The cannibal monster, therefore, is something we might all be capable of becoming, in a world where individualism and consumption are relentlessly encouraged. The hyper-consumer society of the 1980s was memorably what gave rise to Patrick Bateman (American Psycho), after all. And it’s often suggested in riposte that we are the cannibals ourselves, already – as George reminds the white characters in Ravenous, Christians engage in ritualistic cannibalism during Mass (and the Romans stigmatised them as baby-eating monsters). Colonised peoples have seen the insatiable appetites of their colonisers as a form of white cannibalism: kettles boiling on the deck of slave ships, for example, were interpreted as signs that the Europeans engaged in the Atlantic slave trade were cannibals capturing humans for food wholesale (and a chilling exploration of what it might be like to normalise cannibalism of an underclass, literally bred for consumption, is found in Agustina Bazterrica’s 2017 novel Tender Is The Flesh).
How can we spot the cannibal? One way is by looking out for their tell-tale body modifications. Elongated and/or altered canine teeth have a particularly long tradition in cannibal tales, marking out the perpetrators as animal or sub-human: the cannibals in Heart of Darkness have filed teeth, Sawney Bean is depicted as barely human, the Reavers split their tongues and emphasise their teeth. Again, it’s this emphasising of excess, the glorification of it: between the filth of the Donner cabins and the severed heads on pikes around Colonel Kurtz’s camp. I enjoy this strain of ghoulish body horror, and I couldn’t resist including a few nods in Where The Dead Wait, whether heads-on-pikes or body modification – serving as a way to delineate Us and Them.
That’s how to spot the cannibal monster; it’s much harder to spot other kinds of cannibal, those who aren’t framed as a cautionary tale about the Other. Perhaps they’re traumatised by their ordeal: I’m always fascinated by how those who’ve engaged in survival cannibalism narrate their experiences – the way the Uruguayan disaster survivors framed their actions in terms of their Catholicism, for example. Their cannibalism doesn’t prevent them from being “fine fellows” (Marlow’s ironic remark in Heart of Darkness), capable of showing the greatest restraint in the jaws of hunger and privation.
Ravenous opens with Nietzsche, yes, but also a blunter, more focused quote: “Eat me.” This underlines the film’s dark humour, in which the pointedly-named Private Reich is introduced while naked and screaming in the middle of an icy river. “The soldier,” Fort Spencer’s commander says dryly. “I’d steer clear of him.” In a world in which cannibalism can very easily be a byproduct of capitalism or imperialism – inexorably turning people into victims or monsters or, more thrillingly, a combination of both – perhaps the commander’s warning is one to the wise.
For further exploration of the themes of this article, see Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters by Kevin J. Wetmore Jr and Cannibalism in Literature and Film by Jennifer Brown.
