Cannibal

The Italian cannibal film had a shorter life than most people assume. Draw the boundary generously and it runs 1972 to 1985. The part everyone is actually thinking of is about four years long.

It comes out of mondo, not horror

Mondo Cane (1962) proved a format: send a crew abroad, film customs and deaths, narrate it in tones of appalled fascination, sell it as documentary. A large and unmeasurable share of mondo footage was staged, and the audience half knew. The possibility that it was real was the product.

Umberto Lenzi's Deep River Savages (1972) is the hinge: structurally A Man Called Horse, relocated to Thailand with the mondo apparatus bolted on. It did not start a boom. It sat there for five years.

Cannibal Holocaust

Deodato's 1980 film is the one that matters, and its reputation is deserved in more than one direction at once.

The structure is decades early: a rescue party recovers film shot by a missing documentary crew, and a New York broadcaster decides whether to air it. That is found footage nineteen years before The Blair Witch Project, and built more rigorously than most of what followed.

The target is its own genre. The documentary crew are the villains, staging the atrocities they claim to record.

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.

The legal aftermath is usually left out. Deodato was arrested 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 charges stuck.

Why it ended

The Video Recordings Act killed the UK market, the Italian industry collapsed, and the cycle had nowhere left to escalate.

The American cousin

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is filed here as well. It shares the premise and almost none of the method: it is nearly bloodless, and its horror is heat, noise and exhaustion.