Meet the (Cannibal) Family - April Dark Narratives
Plus, a guide to narrative perspective, and some big announcements from the horror family
April is here, and with it comes proper spring weather at last. After dumping a half-foot of snow unexpectedly in late March, New Mexico at least has finally woken up to bloom (and brought the wind and allergies with it). But it’s okay. Because spring is a time of hope, fresh beginnings, and…cannibals? Well. Maybe not that last part, but stick around.
First, though, let’s get to those community updates!
My newest writing guide is live on Gumroad: https://tlbodine.gumroad.com/l/ymhos
This one is all about narrative perspective — choosing POV, narrative distance, how to write unreliable narrators, the rules of verb tenses, and so forth.
Some other announcements:
Eric LaRocca’s newest upcoming book, We Can Never Leave This Place, is now up for pre-order: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1685100236/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_RBW3DJY8PXJKHRQNB1XA
Adam Cesare just welcomed a baby into the family, which is as good a reason as any to go pre-order his new book, Clown in a Cornfield 2:Friendo Lives https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063096919
Our very own Bitter Karella, mad genius behind The Midnight Pals, has been nominated for a Hugo award. If you’re not already following The Midnight Pals, you definitely should start: https://twitter.com/midnight_pals
Brian Asman’s giveaway for Man, Fuck This House has recently unlocked a new prize tier, and is still going strong. If he sells 1 million copies he’s giving away a real haunted house, so…go help him make history:
And now…on to the “meat” of the the episode, if you know what I mean.
We’re no strangers to cannibalism around here. If you’ve stepped in my Discord server, you know it’s a fan favorite. We’ve talked about the topic in this newsletter before, back in August, when I argued that our primal fear of being eaten is linked to sexual desire, loss of self, and our uncertain place on the food chain.
But that’s only part of the story. The real question on my mind this month, is what do we make of those cannibal families — those whose depraved appetites will put you on the menu even as they hold each other dear?
Meeting the Monsters
Tobe Hooper's 1974 film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been described -- accurately, if simplistically -- as a "film about meat." The story follows a group of teenagers who travel to the country and run afoul of a family who had once worked in a slaughterhouse. When their work dried up, their skilled labor replaced by automated processes, they turned their butchery skills toward a different sort of prey. Hooper's film shows us humans hanging on meathooks, furniture made of recycled human bones, and a nuclear family unit not so much different from the classic sitcom. There's the bread-winning father, the withered patriarch, the rebellious teenager...and Leatherface, equal parts simple child and doting mother, donning an apron, putting on his prettiest face to go outside. That he sliced that face off someone else's body is, well...every family has its issues, right?
A couple years later, Wes Craven would release The Hills Have Eyes in 1977. This film introduces us to Jupiter, a twisted reject left in the hills to die who nevertheless takes a wife and has a number of similarly troubled children, all of whom survive by capturing wayward travelers and eating them. The film has variously been likened to a fairytale, a western, an anti-western, a rape-revenge fantasy, and a cornerstone of exploitation filmmaking. Whatever it is, it's certainly left a mark. (When the film was rebooted in 2006, with all the subtlety these 2000s era remakes tended to have, the family was explicitly the product of incest and radiation exposure).
The Wrong Turn film franchise, beginning in 2003 and including six installments plus a reboot, builds on the foundation laid out by The Hills Have Eyes. Each film follows a familiar and predictable formula: A group of outsiders fall into the clutches of deformed cannibals living in backwoods West Virginia. Different cannibals appear in each film, suggesting that the hills are positively crawling with them, though there are a few who return for multiple installments.
The cannibal family trope shows up in literature as well, from Jack Ketchum's relatively contemporary novels Off Season and Offspring, to the Robert Louis Stevenson gothic story Olalla. We also see cannibal families -- or even cannibal communities -- show up in zombie media, such as The Walking Dead (the TV show and video game each have separate cannibal family plotlines).
Lest you think all cannibal families are backwater hicks, it's worth noting that there are indeed more "civilized" people-eaters. Consider for example the 2010 Mexican film We Are What We Are, and its 2013 American remake -- both of which tackle cannibalism as a sister trope to religious extremism in an otherwise normal-seeming, respectable family. Or consider the 1989 horror-comedy Parents, directed by Bob Balaban, which is told through the eyes of a 10-year-old with a wild imagination...who discovers that his nightmares are true and his parents are in fact cannibalistic murderers (here the entire thing is played as more of a coming-of-age tale about rejecting twisted family values).
Of course, all of these stories exist in the shadow of the most famous cannibal family in history.
In the 1500s, Alexander "Sawney" Bean is said to have founded a large murderous clan in Scotland. Born to a ditch-digger, Sawney failed at the family trade and set out to make his own fortune with the help of Black Agnes Douglas, a woman accused of witchcraft. Together they ended up in a coastal cave, where they captured and murdered travelers by day, robbing them for money and eating them for meat. Their children interbred to produce a total of 14 children and 32 grandchildren. The whole lot of them were captured and executed by King James VI.
The legend of Sawney Bean is infamous, becoming a big part of local folklore and a point of somewhat twisted pride in Scotland -- but there's little historical evidence that any part of it is true. The story seems to have originated in British chapbooks (sort of pulpy rumor magazines of the day), and there's not a lot of contemporary sources backing up the claims.
And I'm not exactly an expert in Scottish history, but I feel there may have been an ulterior motive for Britain to make up stories about murderous incest cannibals living in Scotland, given the ongoing political tensions between those two countries.
The Ultimate Act of Dehumanization
Most cultures have pretty firm taboos in place against both incest and cannibalism. Indeed, Sigmund Freud speculated that those are the only universal taboos, respected by every culture and forming the foundation of human civilization. That claim is not wholly accurate -- several cultures have actually encouraged brother-sister marriage at times, and some groups have historically practiced ritual cannibalism as part of a death memorial ritual -- but for the most part Freud is right.
This makes sense, in practical terms. In-breeding can lead to birth defects (to say nothing of the social implications of the power dynamics at work in many incestual encounters). And cannibalism, at least when practiced in Papua New Guinea, led to the development of a neurodegenerative prion disease called kuru (probably a form of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease).
But I think there is another, more practical reason we shy away from cannibalism.
All but the most intense animal rights activists would agree that there is a critical divide between humans and animals. If you remove that divide, or move its goalposts a little in either direction, you create space for monstrous acts. Slavery, obviously, is the worst of these in human history -- and just a few ticks beyond slavery on the sliding scale of degraded humanity? Cannibalism.
A single lone cannibal realizes that he is an aberration against nature. He may consider himself superior, but he knows in his heart that he is abnormal. Not so the cannibal family. A group of people is the starter seed of a culture -- an “us” against the outside “them.”
All it takes to justify hunting, skinning, butchering and eating someone is to decide that they are not human. To create a definition of “human” that excludes anyone outside of your particular group. Because that’s the key to this, isn’t it? These cannibal families do not murder and eat one another. Within their family units, they are just like us. They kiss their children goodnight and tuck them into bed and sit down at the table to eat together without losing a wink of sleep…because from their perspective, what they are doing is not monstrous. No more monstrous than sitting down to a plate of bacon or steak or venison stew, right?
Of course, this dehumanization of human prey is only the story occurring within the bounds of the narrative. On a meta-textual level, the dehumanization runs the opposite direction. We sit in our living rooms and watch these people who are, to our sensibilities, barely human. They break our cultural taboos. They are frequently physically deformed. They are almost always silent, or else communicate crudely.
“These people are not human,” we say, pointing to these out-group families. “They are so inhuman that they will eat you alive, if given a chance. Look how monstrous, these people who deny the humanity of others.”
Thinking of this, I’m reminded of a classic tactic of interpersonal conflict: Party A abuses Party B, then turns around and accuses B of abusing them. They get the story out first, destroying the credibility of the other person, winning over the sympathy of the crowd. Abuser becomes victim by hijacking the narrative, leaving the victim to be shunned.
Little wonder, really, that “accuse the locals of cannibalism” has been such an enduring colonialist narrative for centuries, huh?
Truth Stranger Than Fiction
Of course, all of this is not to say that real-world cannibal families have never existed in any context. It does happen from time to time. Although Sawney Bean is almost certainly a legend, a rather similar scenario played out for certain in Kansas in 1871. The Bender family, aka The Bloody Benders, were a family of German immigrants who ran a general store and offered food and a place to stay to travelers passing through. They also murdered a great deal of their houseguests.
But that’s just murder. There’s no record that they were eating anybody, unlike the Sawney Bean story. But I think the similarities are enough to be noteworthy, especially held up against fictions like Wrong Turn.
I’d also be remiss not to mention Dmitry and Natalia Baksheevy, a Russian couple arrested for murder and convicted in 2019 after killing a woman in a drunken fight. Dmitry kept photographs of himself and parts of the woman’s body on his phone, and the crime came to light when a work crew found his phone and discovered the photos on it. After interrogation, he admitted to the crime and human remains were found in the home.
Interestingly enough, though the couple was only ever charged with one murder, rumors started spreading swiftly that they were responsible for killing and eating 30 people, with increasingly unlikely and grisly embellishments being added with each retelling. I have to wonder…what is it that made those rumors spread so quickly? Were people’s imaginations just ignited by such a modern case of brazen murder? Or was there something specific about this couple — a romantically involved pair of antisocial weirdos, low class and living on the fringes of society — that lent itself in particular to speculation?
Hmmm.
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