We’re living in the golden age of on-screen cannibalism

With The Walking Dead getting long in the rotting tooth, World War Z 2 indefinitely delayed, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter theoretically closing out its long-running franchise, and no more zombie blockbusters on the immediate horizon, it feels like zombies are slowly lurching out of the cultural zeitgeist. Like vampires before them, they’ve peaked and faded from the mainstream back into the horror canon, allowing another type of killer to have its moment in the spotlight. Recently, a new wave of stories — from the French art film Raw to Netflix’s satirical comedy The Santa Clarita Diet — have posited the humble cannibal as the heir apparent to the horror throne du jour, moving into more complex, disturbing territory than the zombie model allows.

Cannibals offer a richer core premise than the average walking corpse. Both subsist on human flesh, but zombification works like a disease, where cannibalistic tendencies creep in like an addiction. Writers and directors reframing cannibalism as an affliction of the mind rather than the body have turned it into a complex, often conflicted new archetype. Most of the new run of cannibal stories treat their subjects not as monsters, but as human beings wrestling with the all-consuming desire to do something revolting. They’re like zombies with a conscience.

It wasn’t so long ago that cannibals were solely a fixture of exploitation cinema, their taste for homo-sapien steaks a marker of exoticism and unrefined savagery. Trash-cinema junkies still revere Ruggero Deodato’s elegantly titled Cannibal Holocaust as one of the most gruesome films of all time, though the allegations that some of the murders on-screen were bona fide have been outed as apocryphal. Low-rent studios continued to churn out similar cheapies through the 1980s, with colorful titles like Devil Hunter, White Slave, and Cannibal Ferox. More recently, Eli Roth paid homage to this grandly disreputable filmmaking heritage with his grungy throwback The Green Inferno, while the recent Bone Tomahawk fused horror to the Western, both films ascribing savage-tribesmen qualities to a group of people-eaters.

But Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs was the pivotal moment for this line of the horror tradition. Any conversation about cannibalism must necessarily recognize the human element that Thomas Harris’ most famous creation brought to the material, showing that a man could be an urbane, composed sophisticate while gorging himself on still-warm human livers. (With the proper bean-and-wine pairing, of course.) On the severely underseen TV series Hannibal, Lecter’s penchant for impeccably prepared body parts is presented as a mark of a refined palate. When he invites some guests to unwittingly dine on a recent victim, they swoon over his cooking, suggesting that there’s an unironic upper-class appeal to eating people, if you can just divorce the act from the ghastly intentions usually associated with it.

Perhaps Lecter’s even classier return on TV was what sparked this spike in nuanced depictions of gourmet cannibals. Hannibal isn’t the only recent work that’s used cannibalism as a narrative jumping-off point for allegorical commentary, or craftier character studies instead of scares. The festival-fêted drama Raw has already earned a reputation as an uncommonly stomach-churning experience (the accounts of fainting and vomiting are already the stuff of legend), but critics wouldn’t be lining up with hosannas for mere gross-out stories. The account of a veterinary student’s dramatic metamorphosis from a soft-spoken brainiac into a voracious arm-biter is rich with parable potential. Her obsessive need to taste blood and the accompanying shock she feels at herself can stand in for the first terrifying brushes with sexual maturity, or personal reconciliation with an outré fetish. It also feels like a feminist cautionary tale in the same mode as Teeth. Raw takes cannibalism at face value, as another adolescent urge stubbornly refusing to adhere to reason.

The Santa Clarita Diet — the latest project from Better Off Ted creator Victor Fresco — works with a vastly different tone, but shares Raw’s willingness to seriously consider the implications of people eatin’ people. For the more persnickety: yes, Drew Barrymore’s SoCal suburbanite Sheila Hammond is technically a zombie, but she shows no sign of zombie physical decay or mental impairment. She’s just a chipper person with a sudden taste for raw flesh, which lumps her more squarely into the cannibal pile. Regardless, the show takes far more interest in how Sheila and her dutiful husband Joel (Timothy Olyphant) restructure their lives to accommodate her new quirk. When Joel decides to stand by his woman and help her procure deserving bodies to feast upon, the show reframes its Grand Guignol grotesquerie as an act of selflessness and devotion. Through the filter of bone-dry comedy, The Santa Clarita Diet approaches cannibalism as a test of marital bonds, not unlike any other midlife crisis that makes spouses feel like strangers.

Even in the realm of straight-up horror, cannibalism still offers a more narratively malleable concept for storytellers than zombieism. Consider 2016’s The Neon Demon, a lurid high-fashion fantasia from Nicolas Winding Refn in which the dog-eat-dog competition of the modeling world is more literally a girl-eat-girl world. Neon Demon takes the metaphorical route, commenting on the corrosive effects of the vicious haute-couture biz. But even among the films still casting cannibals for their terror value, viewers can find more empathetic perspectives on the taboo as well.

This new, more studied fascination with the cannibal and all it represents has even spread to the festival circuit, where well-pedigreed filmmakers have sunk their teeth into some left-field projects. Esteemed French filmmaker and two-time Cannes Grand Prix winner Bruno Dumont alternately amused and scandalized audiences at the prestigious festival with his latest picture, Slack Bay, a haughty class comedy where a proletarian beach family takes “eat the rich” literally to heart. Like right-minded viewers, the clan’s youngest reacts with shock to the family tradition. But over the course of the film, even he gradually develops a taste for human flesh that must be obeyed.

And Ana Lily Amirpour (writer-director of the singular Iranian vampire Western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) begins her upcoming sophomore feature, The Bad Batch, with a brutal DIY amputation and subsequent brunch that audiences won’t be able to shake for weeks. As the heroine’s captor goes about preparing his meal of human extremities, there’s a vacancy in his eyes that conveys a sense of solemnity. Squint a little, and it might even be sadness. The desperate cannibals banished to The Bad Batch’s wasteland evince bits of shame over how low they’ve stooped to survive, and one of them slowly emerges as a sensitive hero.

The relatively newfound inclination to situate cannibals as a film’s morally ambiguous subjects rather than its tooth-gnashing antagonists is the thread connecting these projects. There’s plenty of tension to be mined from characters who are as horrified by their own hunger as the audience is. The likes of Raw and Santa Clarita Diet imbue their flesh-eaters with a slight tragic edge by placing them at the mercy of their own bodies, and forcing them to ignore the guilt they feel for their acts. (Compare it to with Louis C.K.’s instantly notorious bit on how torturously tempting pedophilia must be to pedophiles.) Modern cannibals are as trapped by Maslow’s pyramid of human needs as anyone else — the need for food will always trump the need to live with themselves. And at a time when obsession over self-image has reached an all-time high (thanks, the internet), that guilt over base instinct has been multiplied.

Cannibals may be on-trend right now, but we’re not likely to see them refashioned as teen heartthrobs in the mold of Edward Cullen any time soon. They couldn’t be. There’s nothing sexy about cannibalism, no sense of forbidden mystery. And that’s because cannibals are still just people, no matter how many shards of teeth they pick out of their teeth. On the most basic level, they’re still just as human as their meals. In the wake of Twilight and romanticized horror movies like Only Lovers Left Alive, plenty of vocal fans wished they could become vampires. But no one can just will themselves into magical immortality. Becoming a cannibal, on the other hand, is easy. One little bite is all that separates the rest of us from cinema’s new favored ghoul. Bone appetit.