When There's No More Room in Hell...

Sugar Hill (1974)
AKA The Zombies of Sugar Hill, Voodoo Girl

The news about the Blackwater company and their $1000 a day subcontractors in Baghdad, beholden neither to American nor Iraqi law, is such classic conspiracy theory fodder that I bet even the 9/11 nuts are feeling some residual smugness right now. I would hate to see anyone’s paranoid fantasy confirmed, especially my own, but I’ve got to say it (with apologies to Patton Oswalt): shadowy conspiracies are so common now, they’re amusing. It could come out next week that the government has a zombie hit-squad and I’d double over laughing. It would be the unhinged laughter of a lunatic, however, since that schtick was already taken by Sugar Hill, the first blaxploitation horror movie. It’s a fantastic movie where racist pigs get fed to the pigs and the Grim Reaper wears a spangled jumpsuit. It’s a wild story, but 100% fantasy- how reassuring in these troubled times.

White Zombie (1932)

Even those who prefer to begin in medias res, as I do, must eventually come back to the beginning. And as far as zombie movies go, you can’t get any earlier than 1932’s White Zombie. There had been a stage play featuring the walking dead, and a short story about them, but White Zombie was the first to capture zombies on celluloid. The launch of zombies into the American popular consciousness, like that of most monsters, reflected the events of the time. And at the time, Haiti, home of voodoo and zombies, was under military occupation by the United States of America.

Haiti loomed large in the American public’s imaginations partly because it was the first free, black-run nation in the Western Hemisphere. Haitians were slaves who rose up and slaughtered their French masters, the most frightening thing imaginable to racist Americans of the 19th century. For this and many other reasons, when another revolution, this one to overthrow the dictator Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, threatened American business interests in the Caribbean, President Woodrow Wilson sent Marines to Port-Au-Prince in 1915. They weren’t supposed to stay long but for nineteen years, Americans had troops on the island battling rebels while attempting to reorganize the Haitian government in the American model. It was for the good of the Haitian people, Americans rationalized, who needed saving from themselves (sound familiar?). Almost universally ignored in U.S. history books, the memory of 20th century U.S. imperial experiments persists in Latin America and Asia. These little-discussed conquests shaped the American foreign policy which led to the “Global War on Terror,” and kick started the U.S.-centric cultural exchanges some call “soft imperialism;” the similarities between colonial occupations of the early 20th century and the current occupation of Iraq are very instructive.

Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio (1972)
AKA Man from Deep River, Deep River Savages, Sacrifice!

Cannibal Ferox (1981)
AKA Make them Die Slowly, Woman from Deep River

Besides our friend Ruggero Deodato, Umberto Lenzi is the Italian director most associated with the cannibal horror subgenre- and they’re almost all Italian. For better or for worse, Lenzi is credited with starting the genre with his 1972 film Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio. Interestingly enough, cannibal films were absent from grindhouse screens for five years after the film’s release; Deodato brought it back in earnest with 1977’s Ultimo Mondo Cannibale. The deluge of cobra/mongoose battles and “native” breasts that tumbled out of South American location shoots thereafter is surprisingly different from Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio, including Lenzi’s later contribution to the canon, Cannibal Ferox. It’s not a horror film per se, but a blend of the adventure, ethnographic, and romance genres.

Where Cannibal Holocaust is the granddaddy of twenty-first century “gore porn,” Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio resembles cable TV survival stories, albeit with loads more nudity. It begins as a sun-baked film strip extolling the pleasures of the anarchic East; our English hero, Bradley, takes photos of some adorable children in Bangkok, stabs a man with little to no police consequences, and floats lazily down a river, surrounded by chattering monkeys. Until, of course, he’s strung up in a tree like a trapped bear and hung out to dry. Banish those Cannibal Holocaust fears from your mind, dear reader, for although the people of this river village are, shall we say, lacking in character development, they do not gut our hero. This is not to imply, however, that Lenzi’s racial politics are in any way progressive; about 70 minutes in, an ape-like, darker-skinned tribe commits the lone act of gory cannibalism in the movie. Lenzi merely believes that there are “good savages” and “bad savages,” degrees of difference from the European ideal. After some bloody initiation rituals, the friendly tribe makes Bradley a warrior. At first, he dismisses them as “animals,” but eventually he adopts the tribe’s moral code as well as its way of life. In its ambivalent attitude to its own prejudice, Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio more closely resembles early American accounts of capture by “Indians” than the other cannibal movies.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Touristas(2006)
Speaking of the colonialist fears conjured up by a film like Zombi 2, talk turns naturally to the frontrunner in the competition for the most violent genre ever: cannibal films. Cannibal films enjoyed their greatest popularity in Italy (and the grindhouse theaters of the U. S.) during the 1970s and early 1980s; these films are unified by a number of thematic and visual characteristics, namely extreme gore, jungle locations, vaguely anti-colonial sentiments, and the real-life killing of animals. Unfortunately, another thing that ties them together is that they’re sadistic bullshit, and racist to boot. Condemnations of both the “civilized” and “primitive” worlds, these films share the nihilistic opinion of Lucio Fulci that human beings are animals at best, nauseating bags of guts at worst. But unlike Italian zombie movies, cannibal films do not trade in metaphors. They are not monsters munching on entrails, but people, and with that extra layer of artifice goes all the fun of a splatter film. What’s left is the discomforting feeling that something must be wrong with you for willingly watching such a display.

Zombi 2 (1979)
A.K.A. Zombie, Zombie 2: the Dead are among Us, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Island of the Living Dead, Island of the Flesh Eaters, Gli Ultimi Zombi, Sanguelia

When George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was released in Italy, it was re-christened Zombi and re-edited under the direction of giallo director Dario Argento. (Typical of the differences between Italian and American approaches to horror, Argento’s cut removes several minutes’ worth of humor from the film.) Zombi proved to be a hit, and talk in Rome turned to a sequel. Not a job for Romero himself, but an entry into the canon of figlia, series of shamelessly unauthorized sequels of any film that made decent Italian box office. An already completed screenplay set on a Caribbean voodoo island was book ended with scenes set in New York City, and director Lucio Fulci was recruited to direct. Fulci had made powerful enemies in Italy with his virulently anti-Catholic 1972 feature Don’t Torture a Duckling and had difficulty finding work thereafter. However, this new project, Zombi 2, would propel him into international renown and provide the impetus for his later horror work.