mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


neither/nor


“i wonder who the real cannibals are?”


if MONDO CANE is the film that began the Mondo craze, two films released at the end of the 1970s ended Mondo’s primacy as the definitive model for the outrageous compilation documentary, if not killed it outright, and moved the genre in another direction.


Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), wasn’t the first or the last entry in that most disreputable of subgenres, the Italian cannibal film. It was preceded by Deodato’s own Ultimo mondo cannibale (Jungle Holocaust, 1977), as well as Il paese del sesso selvaggio


(Te Man from the Deep River, 1972) and Emanuelle E Gli Ultimi Cannibali (Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, 1977), respectively the work of genre stalwarts Umberto Lenzi and Joe D’Amato. What set Cannibal Holocaust apart was its co-opting of aspects of documentary “style” as imposed by conditions and equipment in order to lend a new level of verisimilitude to a fictional story, using jostled handheld camera, flash frames, bad focus, and general wear-and-tear to create a doc simulacra and essentially invent the “found-footage” horror movie.


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