While Hannibal Lecter is no doubt cinema’s most infamous cannibal, we don’t see him actually chow down in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Cannibalism is one of the most taboo subjects for movies to explore, but there have been a few gutsy enough to venture into the people-eating side of things. Caveat: these are my picks for the best, not the most notorious, so don’t expect to see Cannibal Holocaust (1980) listed, sickos.
10. Parents (1989, dir. Bob Balaban)
In 1950s suburbia, a 10-year-old boy (Bryan Madorsky) suspects that Mom and Dad (Mary Beth Hurt and Randy Quaid) are killing and eating people, including the guidance counselor at the kid’s school. Quaid was born to play a cannibal.
9. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007, dir. Tim Burton)
Johnny Depp is the eponymous 19th-century barber and London serial killer who disposes of his victims by having his nice neighbor Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) use their bodies to make delicious meat pies. Our deepest suspicions about British cuisine are confirmed.
8. Soylent Green (1973, dir. Richard Fleischer)
Spoiler alert: “It’s peeeeeooople!”
(See more in “The 10 best film dystopias” list.)
7. Eating Raoul (1982, dir. Paul Bartel)
Happily married Paul and Mary (Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov) have a rocky stretch when Mary takes up with a con man named Raoul (Robert Beltran). The title sort of gives away how the marital discord is resolved. “It’s amazing what you can do with a cheap piece of meat if you know how to treat it,” says Paul.
(See more in “The 10 best performances by film directors not typically known for acting” list.)
6. Hannibal (2001, dir. Ridley Scott)
In this sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) opens the skull of a heavily sedated and thoroughly despicable federal agent, Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta), removes a piece of his brain, and feeds it back to Krendler. And to think, we thought fish was brain food.
5. Bone Tomahawk (2015, dir. S. Craig Zahler)
This go-for-broke Western finds Kurt Russell as a sheriff leading a rescue posse to save some townsfolk kidnapped by a tribe of cannibalistic troglodytes—an invention of the filmmakers, it must be noted—who carve up their victims while they’re still alive before consuming them. John Ford meets Wes Craven.
4. Fresh (2022, dir. Mimi Cave)
After an awful stretch of bad dates, Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) meets the guy of her dreams in Steve (Sebastian Stan): good-looking, financially secure, funny, smart, and a good cook. OK, so he uses his sexual conquests to feed an elite cabal of international cannibals—but relationships are all about compromise, no?
3. Raw (2016, dir. Julia Ducournau)
Vegetarian Justine (Garance Marillier), desperate to fit in with her fellow veterinary school students, develops a taste for the carnivorous life after she is forced to eat meat during a hazing incident. It isn’t long before she graduates from raw chicken to literal finger food … of the human kind.
2. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989, dir. Peter Greenaway)
In a film with no shortage of grossness and brutality—a man smeared head to toe in human feces, a woman getting a fork to the face, and maggot-covered meat—a monstrous gangster played by Michael Gambon is forced at gunpoint by his long-suffering wife (Helen Mirren) to eat the cooked body of her lover (Alan Howard).
1. Society of the Snow (2023, dir. J.A. Bayona)
This is the third and best dramatization of the infamous 1972 airplane crash in the Andes. Most of us already know the story: a number of surviving members of a Uruguayan rugby team resorted to cannibalism in order to stay alive. J.A. Bayona doesn’t sensationalize things in this harrowing tale, but then again, he doesn’t need to.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 