Original subtitles

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[Knob clicks, flame whooshes]

- [Speaking Italian]

Francesca: There is nothing that you don't want to see more

than this "Cannibal Holocaust." [Laughs]

It's gonna be remembered forever,

because how much ugly and disgusting--

you cannot--nothing's more disgusting and ugly than that.

Carl: Once they started killing things,

I thought, oh, I'm not sure what this is.

Things like this happen all the time in the jungle,

it's survival of the fittest!

So now it gets real. Now it's real.

Francesca: They were trying to make this movie

the most real horror ever.

It was real animals.

Luca: Talking about political correctness now,

we, we should all be sent to jail.

Eugenio: "Cannibal Holocaust"

is a fascinating phenomenon.

It's a problematic film,

to label it as an exploitation film

is not understanding it.

And at the same time, elevating it too highly

is equally problematic, I think.

The fact that one cannot find an easy way out

of interpreting "Cannibal Holocaust"

is why the film works.

It is exploitative, on many levels,

and of course, there's the actual killing of animals,

which is extremely problematic.

And at the same time, it's a film that points

the finger towards the public saying, you want violence.

So it's satisfying that,

as it accuses the public of wanting it.

- I wonder who the real cannibals are.

Nick: It's a very nasty thing to do to an audience.

It is something that is not only going to lure you in

with some kind of promise

of a taboo busted

or a forbidden image being revealed,

that will not only do that, but after doing that,

say, eww, you wanted to see that?

The attraction, not only of "Cannibal Holocaust,"

but all manner of dubious objects of the period

is they're bad.

[Laughs]

And you ought not be caught in their company.

And for a certain category of viewer,

to which I proudly belong, uh...

I want be keeping that bad company.

Eugenio: "Cannibal Holocaust" has one of the things

that makes Italian genre cinema

so historically relevant,

which is that it assimilated so much of what was going on

in that period.

Italian genre cinema is extremely reactive.

There would be a genre,

usually made popular by Americans.

[Gunshots pop]

We would initially try to reproduce

the same kind of effect.

Find a new interpretive theme.

♪♪♪

But the cannibal genre in itself,

is Italian.

- [Grunts]

[Howls]

Nick: It is difficult to think of any genre

or sub-genre that is as disreputable

as Italian cannibal films.

I don't think you can point

to any contemporary equivalent

to the kind of filmmaking

that was going on in Italy through the 1960s,

'70s, and '80s.

Eugenio: We see horror getting more and more violent.

Italian society was changing.

The public of the '70s didn't want capes

and dark towers and castles,

and old counts running around with candelabras.

The public of the '70s wanted something real.

[Woman screams]

Eugenio: We see a lot of films pushing the envelope

as far as what could be shown onscreen.

That search for the shocking element has to do with

kind of what they had to see on the news,

that idea that violence was all around them.

And cinema assimilated that.

[Loud wail, yells]

- Well, what do you think, Professor?

- That it's not the best way of establishing peace

with the Yakumo Tribe.

- This is nothing. Alan did much worse.

Just watch.

[Projector whirs]

Nick: When our intrepid professor is sitting down

at the flatbed reel-to-reel

and reviewing the footage,

immediately, I think of Mick Jagger and the Maysles

sitting down at the flatbed

and watching the Altamont footage.

Man: Could you see what was happening there?

Man 2: No, you couldn't see anything.

Whether it's another-- it's another scuffle, it was--

- There's the Angel right there with a knife.

Nick: For as long as there has been a documentary tradition,

there has been a tradition of falsification.

Going back to Flaherty and his "Nanook,"

I guarantee you

if you handed an Inuit man a record,

he would not try to take a bite out of it.

This is you know, very clearly

something staged for the camera.

There is this entire lineage

of semi-documentary approaches

in fiction films.

Realism ultimately is

whatever aesthetic

people seem to have agreed

constitutes reality at a given moment.

A shaky camera,

muffled sound,

and a general clumsiness of approach.

You can look, for example, at the opening

of "Citizen Kane,"

which gives us this newsreel presentation

of the life of Charles Foster Kane.

This is something that, you know, continues

long after "Cannibal Holocaust."

And in some ways, "Cannibal Holocaust"

just represents the logical endpoint of this.

And it also represents kind of an inversion

of the Mondo film.

Eugenio: Deodato has never made a secret

of the fact that he took a lot of inspiration

from Jacopetti with "Mondo Kane,"

and with the "Mondo" movies,

which maybe now we could define as kind of,

a sort of a mockumentary.

Male Narrator: The women are very pretty,

and very nonchalant about matters of love.

For centuries they have played a sport on these beaches

which is very popular here, too, man-hunting.

- But they definitely intertwined reality

and staged reality.

But they're always looking for some kind of realism,

shocking, absurd, grotesque,

With "Cannibal Holocaust,"

you see the search for some kind of realism within it.

- [Yells] What has happened!

Help us!

Eduardo: "Cannibal Holocaust" really is the original

"Blair Witch Project," for sure.

Heather: This is fuckin' crazy shit!

Eduardo: Right after the movie premiered at Sundance,

somebody on our website said, hey, I saw the movie,

have you ever seen "Cannibal Holocaust?"

I definitely hadn't seen it, so they sent me a VHS,

and I told- you know, and he--

you know, the guy told me the setup, and I was like,

holy crap, that sounds exactly like "Blair Witch."

And obviously there are distinctions between

"Cannibal Holocaust" and "Blair Witch," after watching it.

The original idea that Dan and I came up with

in the early '90s,

was inspired by pseudo documentary-type movies

and TV shows that really scared the crap out of us.

Like, "The Legend of Boggy Creek."

- [Panicked gasps]

[Gun booms, creature roars]

- And then there was a show called, "In Search of..."

that you know, had a Bigfoot episode, and there was--

and it seemed to be like there was a Bigfoot documentary

you know, every other week when I was a kid.

Narrator: To have eluded us for so long,

Bigfoot must understand men very well.

The burden will be on us to understand him.

- You watch an old rerun of "Unsolved Mysteries,"

Like, if it's the right story, man, that's some creepy shit.

I think what makes those things scary

is that they're presented as real.

They're presented as news.

- Montgomery College film students Heather Donahue,

Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard,

were reportedly shooting a school project

about a local myth called "The Blair Witch."

- After three days of searching,

local officials will continue to look for--

- Cut. Beautiful.

Eduardo: They used techniques that you've only seen

in documentaries and newscasts, and you know,

we-our brains are accustomed to like, oh, okay,

this is real, so we were like,

I wonder if you could do that now.

Like, do something where, you know,

basically make a fake documentary and make it scary.

I'm lucky that I never watched "Cannibal Holocaust"

until after "Blair Witch,"

because I would not have made "Blair Witch" if it was--

if we had seen "Cannibal Holocaust."

- [Speaking Italian]

Joe: Robert Kerman was a classically trained actor

who, like a lot of independent actors

had a very hard time finding work

in theatre and film,

and commercials and television,

and had a very easy time finding work in sex films.

He worked for Roberta Findlay a lot.

- All right, I won't need you for now.

And please hold my calls.

Roberta: Who else would employ him to be in a film?

You've told me that he is the star of uh,

"Cannibal Holocaust,"

whatever that may be.

I can't imagine how he got that job.

Jay: What do you remember about Robert Kerman?

- Well, he of course was one of the New York crowd,

and he was very serious about acting,

and he thought he was a great actor.

- Oh, Honey. - Oh, come on, get outta here.

Roberta: He also thought he was wildly attractive,

and good-looking.

I found that to be amazing.

Woman: Oh, you turn me on.

- An amazing self-deception.

He wasn't much of a lover.

Jay: You're not speaking personally, you mean on...

- No, not--oh God, no.

Oh! Oh!

[Laughs] I'm gonna be sick.

Um... no.

Onscreen.

The greatest shock, to me,

was finding his face

in three, four shots

in "The Goodbye Girl."

That seems to be the greatest accomplishment.

Joe: I feel like he definitely was sad

that he would be remembered for

having sex on camera,

and being in "Cannibal Holocaust."

Jay: Which is worse?

- In... he,

not that I can speak for him,

but I would venture to say, based on his interviews,

being in "Cannibal Holocaust."

[Siren wails in the distance]

Luca: I was 18-years-old, 18 and a half.

We were a bunch of young kids.

Excited, ready to kill to get a role.

And, you know, I didn't even read the script.

They said, do you want to do a movie in Colombia?

In this little town,

I think it was called Leticia,

and they liked me and the other guy,

the guy with white hair, blonde,

blondish-white hair, that is in the movie,

I forgot his name now, I'm going blank.

[Seagulls cry]

Francesca: I had an agent, that told me

that Ruggero Deodato was looking for an actress

for the movie "Cannibal Holocaust."

- I was young and stupid,

and so I decided to do this movie because I was young,

and really stupid.

- I'm Carl Yorke, I played Alan Yates

in "Cannibal Holocaust."

I flew to Leticia,

which is down on the Amazon River,

and then once we land in that,

I get to be in "Cannibal Holocaust."

All right! All right! Let's go!

We landed in Leticia, and then they put me in a boat,

drove me up the river to go to the set,

and-and one thing that floated by was a dead monkey,

and then a human leg floated by.

I kinda thought the monkey was real.

I didn't know that the leg wasn't real.

It was a fitting introduction, I'll put it that way.

Francesca: I flew with Lusa Barbareschi.

He was a lovely guy, Luca.

Luca: Francesca,

you know, she was very easy, she had fun.

We all tried to have sex with her,

but nobody succeed. [Laughs]

Francesca: I think he was hoping that we would get close.

But it didn't happen.

[Laughs]

Carl: The first night, I got to read the script.

You know, as an actor, there's these times where you're...

they ask you to do something that you normally

wouldn't do in your life.

The first time you read a script,

when you get to one of those things,

you tend to, I tend to,

I will go maybe into a little bit of denial, like,

maybe we don't have to do this scene, you know?

Um, the rape scene was one of those.

- I think we got one! Grab her!

Carl: I didn't want to do that scene, and I um...

- Look what we found!

- I woke up that morning,

and I told everybody I was sick.

I was actually trying not to go to school that day.

I was hoping that Mom would say you can stay home from school.

Because I didn't wanna shoot that scene.

And um...

but I did. - Ah! [Grunts]

Carl: What a spectacular actress she was.

- Do you want me to keep shooting or what?

Carl: And she also, you know, went along with the rape.

Francesca: This was a scene that upset everyone.

And so everybody was very tense, and...

because Ruggero was very aggressive at this point,

was screaming to everyone, and uh, to Carl,

to-to Perry, he wasn't happy.

And it was a difficult scene.

And so I went mad. And I, and I bit him.

- [Shouting] - Shut up!

- And he went around saying, oh, she's biting me,

she's biting me! Ohh! Ohh! Oh!

[Laughs]

Carl: And then Francesca, who was playing my girlfriend...

- Jack! What do you want to use it for?!

A porno film?!

Carl: pulled me off of this girl,

and I sat down right in the mud.

And the mud went squirtin' right up my ass.

- And then at this point, I became really crazy,

I started beating him.

- Ah! - Stop it!

Bam! Bam! Bam! And then threw it in the mud.

- She clipped me in the chin, and she chipped my tooth.

That was another thing that pissed me off,

'cause I'm an actor, I'm vain, you know?

I'm like, oh, you fuckin' chipped my tooth?

- Oh! Ah! - You're bad!

[Fighting grunts]

- I-I have to say that that girl,

she was, I think, 14.

- It's one test after another, who am I?

Am I a rapist? Um, no.

Am I a guy who can...

pretend to rape somebody?

If you pay me.

And they were payin' me, so I pretended.

The love scene.

That was a whole different problem.

Before we did it, Francesca said,

let's go out in the jungle and practice this, you know?

Like, for real.

- Yeah, I told him, why don't we try--

why don't we try for real?

Carl was a really lovely boy, he was really nice.

[Laughs]

- You know, I'm not taking my pants down

out there in the jungle. I see what's out there.

I'm-I'm--uh, you know.

- He passed? Oh my God.

No, I tried, but at the time,

I was trying to fuck everything that was moving.

Carl: And we do it the first time,

and my first thought is,

God, I hope we don't have to do this again.

And Ruggero goes, cut! Okay, this time...

and then he pulls me aside, and he says, this time,

when you take her shirt off,

I want you to show her tits to the camera.

Okay. [Clears throat]

I can do that.

So as I'm taking her shirt off,

she says, what are you doing?

And I'm like, Ruggero said I needed to show

your tits to the camera, and she goes,

well, fuck Ruggero, I don't wanna--

I don't want him to show my--

I don't want you to show my tits to the camera.

- He took her off into the jungle

and screamed bloody murder at her.

He-you know.

So the jungle has this canopy, right?

So all these gigantic leaves, way up there.

And it's echoing off of the leaves.

Everybody heard it.

- He was shouting and screaming like you can't imagine.

You know, something like really was abusive.

Abusive, so if you can say something

about Ruggero Deodato, he was an abusive director.

- And she's fighting, and fighting and fighting,

and then, boom,

here comes the moment where she starts crying.

And as soon as he got her crying,

he knew he got her where he needed her,

brought her back as soon as he could.

We did the next shot, the next uh, the next take.

She came back very somber.

Boom, let's do the love scene.

- He has never been discreet, this guy, never.

- Well, I was not prepared,

this-this hard experience, no, I wasn't.

- I knew that I-I had to be naked at some point,

I knew that it was going to be a rape scene,

but please, you be discreet.

"I see, I promise you, I promise you."

And then he went too far,

and so I was really disappointed that I--

it was a disaster.

The feeling of this-of this movie has been a disaster

all my life.

- He's a bit rude, Ruggero. [Laughs]

Ruggero is the cowboy of the film, you know?

Let's shoot, let's make the scene in which he fucks her,

let's do-you know, it was very basic.

Ruggero's a basic man, he's not um...

uh, super intellectual.

Carl: And then comes this moment where Ruggero says,

I want you to shoot this pig.

So the challenge was, can I um...

can I say no to the director?

And he's like, we're gonna eat that pig tonight, you know?

You can-it's okay to shoot it, we're gonna eat it!

I... [Sighs]

I-I don't wanna say that's the way he manipulated me,

but I told him I wouldn't kill him, and I--

so I can't do it.

But Luca, you know, Luca grew up on a farm,

it was no big deal for him.

He was like, yeah, I'll shoot the pig.

- I shot the little piggies, you know,

this scene is real.

[Actors and crew chatter]

Luca: Killing a pig is not nice to watch.

But people eat ham every day,

so somebody has to kill the pig.

Ten years ago, I had to call DIGOS with the Secret Service,

because I was having a show in Venice,

and 200 madmen with dogs,

of course, they are all against animal killing,

they put poster all over Venice saying,

let's kill Luca Barbareschi.

And honestly, this was a bit annoying,

because you never know if, you know,

it's enough one crazy that shoots you,

and that's the end.

Carl: And you should be careful about

what future regrets you pick.

Jay: Do you think that was a future regret you did avoid?

- Absolutely.

And I...

I can only measure against the other people in the movie.

One of 'em being Perry.

He's the one who did the turtle.

I don't think he was happy with the fact

that he did some of that stuff.

[Splashing]

Francesca: Yeah?

Uh, at the turtle.

He was doing for real,

I never imagined he was doing for real.

Never, never, could imagine it was so--

Never, nobody was thinking something like this.

Of course it is an abuse.

Isn't it not? It is the most enormous abuse.

It's an enormous abuse.

You cannot have an abuse more than that.

You're imprisoned in the jungle,

and you have to assist in the killing.

My God.

♪♪♪

I don't want to remember.

Jay: You don't want to talk about it?

- No! No.

Carl: We flew home together to New York.

I saw him one more time when I was still living in New York,

and um, and that was it.

- No, he doesn't talk about the film anymore,

because he was involved in everything, in everything.

Simon: I think "Cannibal Holocaust"

has become the film that represents animal slaughter,

but it's actually got a far kind of deeper,

and-and kind of richer tradition in cinema.

I mean, we see it right back at the start of cinema,

with Edison's electrocuting an elephant.

It obviously happened in a lot of westerns,

with the "flying W," which was a trip wire,

which used to trip over the horses,

and they used to die when that happened.

Another famous example is something

like "Apocalypse Now,"

and that scene of the water buffalo getting killed

at that ceremony.

In "Cannibal Holocaust,"

especially with the turtle scene,

we see that...

turtle completely eviscerated.

The animal slaughter in exploitation films

becomes another set piece.

The focus on animal slaughter has always diverted attention

away from the kind of colonial discourses that existed

in this film, and you know,

the racism, and the treatment of women.

- The animal killings are...

something that,

not without justification,

people focus on.

And the function that they serve is obvious,

because the film is attempting to give a...

simulacra of reality,

and when you see the viscera

of a tortoise slithering around...

that then adds an additional level of verisimilitude

to the butchery of humans,

which, to the best of my knowledge,

did not actually happen.

Carl: Once we started killing things,

I started bringing my passport,

and all my money,

and my plane ticket with me, every day, to the set.

I wasn't sure if I--

this was a snuff movie or not.

I didn't know...

what their intention was.

Eduardo: It feels like about as close to a snuff film

as you wanna see.

I mean, these guys did kill a turtle,

so maybe they really-- did these people really die?

Like, what the hell?!

How the hell did they make this movie, you know?

- Pretty powerful stuff, huh?

- To use that contract

between filmmaker and audience,

and take advantage in some ways

of the audience's credulity

is part of the game being played.

I know that there was some kind of fuss kicked up

by the Mercury Theatre

"War of the Worlds" broadcast in 1938,

which is using some of the same tactics

as does "Cannibal Holocaust."

Orson: This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen.

Out of character,

to assure you that "The War of the Worlds"

has no further significance than as the holiday offering

it was intended to be.

- But I don't know to what degree an audience of 1980

who saw "Cannibal Holocaust"

thought that they were watching

human lives snuffed out on camera.

I would guess there was certainly a...

smidgen of the audience that did.

- Four youngsters who never came back.

- Yes, the agreement was that we have to hide ourself,

with the-and we don't have to show in any other movie

for a certain period of time.

- Well, the plan was to tell that we really died.

- He said, okay, everybody thinks it's uh, it's real.

That you have been-this is a real documentary.

Eugenio: He wanted to market the film

as if it was a snuff movie.

- I mean, "Blair Witch" is a different story,

because it was a different time,

and obviously we hadn't killed the filmmakers, but...

with "Cannibal Holocaust,"

the filmmakers basically hid the actors,

and I think that's part of why they got into trouble.

- I think it was like a real court case and stuff,

like, right, he had to like, prove himself in court

that they-that you know, of just the techniques,

and the actors had to like, come out and actually like,

you know, show themselves.

Carl: So I don't really know much about that story.

And I generally don't talk about it,

but I will this time.

This is what I'll tell you.

I didn't sign anything,

and they never brought me into court.

I think it's a brilliant sales idea.

- Uh, no, no. Um...

a lot of elements,

a lot of elements that are tied to the trial,

that return in many interviews,

are often part of that wanting to...

create a legend, basically, you know.

What we do know, for a fact,

is that there was indeed a hearing

that involved Sergio D'Offizi, the cinematographer,

the producers, Deodato.

The thing they were accused of was uh,

Eugenio: The film was removed from theatres completely.

The film, you know, had to be literally cancelled.

- I was very happy. I was so happy that the--

that the movie has been banned,

so that nobody could see it.

- That series of events really kind of changed

the course of Deodato's career,

and pretty much everybody who participated in the film.

- Hey!

- We find the cannibal genre to be the last big phenomenon.

Italian cinema was a giant

and then the giant dies.

It doesn't die softly in the night.

It dies shouting, and screaming, and kicking,

and that's how Italian genre cinema died.

In the jungle with people being ripped apart.

- That it is a film.

It's only rock 'n' roll.

One day I went to see Alice Cooper.

And I was shooting, you know, in film.

And I shot part of the concert.

Then I went back in the editing room,

and I-we couldn't match the singing and the lip.

I did the clap, can't you see?

We go slowly, you know the Moviola,

I was really rr-waa-waa-wah! [makes slow motion sounds]

And it was out of sync.

How can Alice Cooper sing out of sync?

Then I realized he was not singing.

He was faking. It was all recorded, the show.

And it's only rock 'n' roll.

So I think, "Cannibal Holocaust,"

it's only rock 'n' roll.

Francesca: It is the something that I regret the most,

of course.

And uh, apart to have to deal with myself

for a long, long time,

to have been part of this "Cannibal Holocaust,"

so I never know if I'll ever forgive myself

uh, to be in the movie.

- I can't understand the reason for such cruelty.

Jay: When you watch "Cannibal Holocaust,"

what do you feel?

- [Laughs] Nobody's ever asked me that.

Um... wow.

That's a good question.

[Sighs]

Well, the first word that came to mind was "awful."

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