CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST - The Italian Cult Movie back in theaters

Cruel, extreme, explicit, shocking, sometimes revolting. Can a film that condemns sensationalism itself be sensationalist? This is just one of the many questions that Cannibal Holocaust, directed in 1980 by the late Ruggero Deodato, still manages to raise today. In an era of profiles, leaks, fake news, challenges and stories, now that a certain type of self-aggrandizement is within everyone's reach, the question is more open than ever.

Anticipator of today's faux-documentary horror – found footage, from The Blair Witch Project to The Visit by M. Night Shyamalan, passing through Rec, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity – and of a whole way of storytelling through images "found", Cannibal Holocaust remains a crucial title in the history of cinema and its language, a film cursed or to be cursed for how it combines horror and realism, torture and morals, brutality and ethics.

The film is in fact divided between an adventure first half and a second half made up of images shot in 16mm by four exalted and unscrupulous documentary filmmakers among the indigenous people of the Amazon forest, intent on creating disconcerting moments for their film, ending up causing a escalation of violence.

Here the cruelty of images, thoughts and intentions, mixed with fury and frenzy by the style of Deodato and the music of Riz Ortolani, divided between experimental and melodramatic, make Cannibal Holocaust a point of no return, a hell capable of uniting voyeurism and suffering.

A tilt of sensations realized according to a currently inconceivable model, whose brazen and raw sincerity remains unmatched and irreplicable. Between true and false, reconstructed and stolen, Cannibal Holocaust with its realism lays bare perversion, going beyond simple horror and mere obscenity.

At the time of its release it was censored in 23 countries around the world, while in others it was enormously successful (in Japan it was the second highest grossing film of 1982, behind E.T.). In Italy the cuts, the scandals and the well-documented judicial vicissitudes decreed its flop, then making it taboo for years. At the same time the film became a point of reference for directors such as Oliver Stone, Eli Roth and Nicolas Winding Refn who defines it as one of the films from which he "stole everything possible, both visually and technically".

Even today, "Cannibal Holocaust" is a film that takes the concept of "civilization" to the extreme from any angle you want to consider it, but Deodato will be among the directors honored at the next Venice Film Festival.

Katie Hatt