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DPP 72cult
Director
Eloy de la Iglesia
Year
1972
Country
Spain
Runtime
98 min

Also released as

  • La semana del asesino
  • The Week of the Killer
  • Apartment on the 13th Floor
  • The Apartment on the 13th Floor
  • Week of the Killer
  • L'appartamento del 13° piano
  • Cannibal man - La semaine d'un assassin
  • Cannibal Man
  • A Semana do Assassino
  • Cannibal Man (Die Woche eines Mörders)
  • Das Haus des blutigen Grauens
  • 食人族

The Cannibal Man

The Cannibal Man is a 1972 Spanish psychological horror film directed by Eloy de la Iglesia. It is one of the 72 films on the Director of Public Prosecutions' video nasties list, and it was successfully prosecuted for obscenity.

Almost no cannibalism. A slaughterhouse worker, a body count and Franco-era Spanish class rage.

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There is almost no cannibalism in it, which is the first thing to know, and the second is that it is one of the best films on the DPP list.

Marcos works in a slaughterhouse in Madrid. He kills someone in a panic, and then kills everybody who finds out, and the bodies accumulate in his bedroom in a shanty district in the shadow of new luxury tower blocks.

Eloy de la Iglesia made it under Franco, and the class reading is the whole film: Marcos is trapped by poverty, watched from a penthouse by a wealthy man who is drawn to him, and the censors of the time were far more exercised by the homoerotic subtext than by the killings.

The slaughterhouse footage is real and is used as a rhyme rather than for shock.

Successfully prosecuted in Britain on the strength of a title that describes a film that does not exist.

Banned, seized, prosecuted

DPP 72 · successfully prosecuted

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Trailer

The sleeves

The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.

poster
EN · poster
ES · poster
DE · poster
IT · poster
DE · poster
EN · poster

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