This essay studies coprophagia and cannibalism in horror films, arguing them as constitutive of a savage dietetics. Considering coprophagia as a savage, punishing practice, the essay analyzes the three films of The Human Centipede franchise in the company of their antecedents, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), and Svetlana Baskova’s The Green Elephant (1999). Coprophagia features in all these films as a mode of torture and as a spectacle delineating the boundaries of madness, and in all the films, people are captured, held prisoner, and forced to eat excrement. Meanwhile, it is cannibalism that has been outlined as that brightest of lines distinguishing civilization from savagery. The essay will analyze the operations of this distinction by considering the taming of the cannibal by tracing his literal domestication from the film Cannibal Holocaust (1980), through Ravenous (1999), and into Cannibal: A Love Story (2014) and the first season of the television series Hannibal (2013). If cannibalism measures the civilized man’s savage appetite, then coprophagia renders this border with an even sharper instrument—and then deconstructs it by underscoring uncontainability and excess.
About the presenterDelores Phillips
Delores B. Phillips is an Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature and Theory at Old Dominion University, where her work focuses on the fringes of culinary culture.