Cannibal Holocaust

A rescue party recovers film shot by a missing documentary crew, and a New York broadcaster has to decide whether to air it. That structure is decades early and more rigorously built than most of what followed it.

The target is Deodato's own genre. The documentary crew are the villains: they burn a village and stage the atrocities they claim to be recording, and the film's argument is that the mondo tradition manufactures the savagery it sells.

Six animals were killed on camera to make that argument. A coati, a turtle, a snake, a monkey, a tarantula and a pig. Deodato said later that he regretted it and that his son's reaction changed his mind.

The legal aftermath is usually left out. He was arrested in Italy on obscenity charges and, because the marketing claimed the footage was real and the four leads had contracted to stay out of sight for a year, he was also suspected of having murdered them. He produced them alive in court. The animal cruelty charges stuck.