Cannibalism, the act of eating human flesh, is a recurring theme in popular culture, especially within the horror genre, and has been featured in a range of media that includes film, television, literature, music and video games. Cannibalism has been featured in various forms of media as far back as Greek mythology. The frequency of this theme has led to cannibal films becoming a notable subgenre of horror films. The subject has been portrayed in various different ways and is occasionally normalized. The act may also be used in media as a means of survival, an accidental misfortune, or an accompaniment to murder. Examples of prominent artists who have worked with the topic of cannibalism include William Shakespeare, Voltaire, Bret Easton Ellis, and Herschell Gordon Lewis.

As a cultural norm

Many works in popular culture depict groups of people for whom cannibalism is a cultural norm.

Film

The cannibal tribe theme has been exploited in the genre of cannibal films. This subgenre experienced a period of popularity through the work of Italian filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s. These films commonly concern the discovery of cannibalistic tribes by documentary filmmakers or anthropologists. The first major film of this type was Umberto Lenzi's Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio ("The Man from the Deep River", 1972). Later filmmakers followed, and the genre reached its peak in the cannibal boom of 1977 to 1981. The best known of these films was Ruggero Deodato's influential Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Considered one of history's most gruesome movies, Cannibal Holocaust was commonly believed to be a snuff film, and Deodato was brought to trial on suspicion of having killed his actors. Other genre films include Ultimo mondo cannibale (1977)Shipka, D (2011). Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960 – 1980. p.318 and Cannibal Ferox (1981).

Later horror films to feature cannibal groups include The Hills Have Eyes series, with its clan of cannibalistic savages, and the cannibalistic mountain men of Wrong Turn and its sequels. The film Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, 1971), by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, details the alleged cannibalistic practices of the indigenous Tupinamba warrior tribe against French and Portuguese colonizers in the 16th century.

Literature

American literature

In Tennessee Williams' play Suddenly Last Summer (which debuted 7 January 1958) and its subsequent adaptations, the fate of the deceased son of Mrs. Venable is revealed to have been death at the hands of natives who then ate his remains.

In Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), human culture is transformed as a result of the Martians' practice of eating their dead friends as an act of great respect. In contrast, his novel Farnham's Freehold (1964) is set in a distant future where both cannibalism and slavery have become normal institutions. Here there is nothing respectful about the custom, instead human flesh is eaten as a particularly tasty dish and traded as a commodity much like any other. To produce it, children are bred on ranches and slaughtered when reaching puberty, if not already as babies.

Jack Ketchum's horror novel Off Season (1980) features a clan of cannibalistic savages in rural America. Inspired by the Scottish legend of Sawney Bean, the novel was initially harshly criticized for its depictions of extreme violence.

Anne Rice's novel The Queen of the Damned (1988) references an ancient culture who practice necro-cannibalism because they consider the consumption of their loved ones' remains a more fitting funeral rite than burial or cremation.

Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth fantasy series (1994–2020) features the Mud People, a wild tribe which consumes the dried meat of their enemies before important events and rituals, believing it a way of gaining the enemies' wisdom. The Mud People are known to sometimes receive visions about the intentions of the victims and their people, and Richard Cypher himself receives such a vision during one of the times he has to eat human flesh in order to participate in such an event. Kahlan Amnell, aware of the custom, pretends to be a vegetarian whenever visiting the tribe.

In Rudy Rucker's novel Freeware (1997), a character named Wendy clones her own muscle cells and sells the product as Wendy Meat. As it is her own body, offered voluntarily, it is not considered unethical in the novel.

The Transmetropolitan comic book series (1997–2002), by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, includes cultural cannibalism in its setting, where many bizarre and outlandish lifestyles are now common. Most notable is the fast-food chain "Long Pig", which serves the meat of clones who are grown without a brain and thus never considered "alive" as such.

Michael Crichton's techno-thriller novel State of Fear (2004) features scenes where the characters encounter cannibals on a remote Pacific island.

Our Lady of the Inferno, a novel by Preston Fassel published in 2016 that was also adapted into an audio drama (2021), is about a woman in 1980s Times Square who believes herself to be a reincarnation of the Minotaur and as a result only consumes human flesh.

South American literature

Tender Is the Flesh is a 2017 Argentinian dystopian novel written by Agustina Bazterrica focusing on a society which consumes human flesh instead of animal flesh as a satire on capitalism.

British literature

The Wanting Seed (1962), a dystopian novel by Anthony Burgess, depicts a future haunted by serious overpopulation. The government's attempts to curb population growth through strict laws and encouragement of homosexuality ultimately fail, leading to a period of chaos and lawlessness where people start to openly kidnap, kill, and consume others. A new government then sets up a secret system of organized mass killings and cannibalism to stop the population explosion.

Cannibalism is a topic of two of the six interwoven stories in David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas (2004), which was also turned into a movie (2012). The first story, "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing", mentions a historical attack of a group of Māori on the Moriori living on the Chatham Islands, where the story begins. The fifth story, "An Orison of Sonmi~451", is set in the future and describes how "genetic clones are specifically bred to be a working underclass [and] exploited not only for their labor but for the nutritious protein that their physical bodies represent" – once they are no longer considered useful for working, they are turned into fast food for the ruling class. By making cannibalism a feature of the future as well as the past, Mitchell "raises questions about the myths of progress and linear time that underlie Western thought."

Asian literature

In Mo Yan's satirical novel The Republic of Wine (1992), male infants, called "meat children" or "meat boys", are slaughtered around the age of two and served whole, "boiled, steamed, or braised", as gourmet dishes in a fictional Chinese province called Liquorland. The book has been read as criticizing the increasing disparities in wealth and status in Chinese society, where the "pleasure and desire for delicacies" of the wealthy matter more than the lives of the poor, until "the inferior in social rank becomes food" in the novel's satirical exaggeration.

New Zealand literature

The historical novel Kāwai: For Such a Time as This by the historian Monty Soutar is set in New Zealand before and during the first contacts between Europeans and Māori. Inspired by Māori oral history, it treats cannibalism as a normal, if not frequent part of life. Enemies are eaten "as a final and irreversible insult to the defeated" and occasionally slaves (pononga) are killed for feasts, where their flesh is preferred to that of animals.

Video games Aboleths in the Forgotten Realms setting of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game consume their parents on birth, and in so doing receive their parents' memories.

The Fallout series of video games, set in a post-apocalyptic America, has recurring themes of cannibalism. The most commonly seen ones are the Raiders, clans of savage killers living in the wasteland who habitually eat their victims flesh, which can be gained as an item called Strange Meat. Fallout 3 also has the community of Andale, a two-family clan emulating the faux-1950's culture of pre-war society, while simultaneously practising both inbreeding and cannibalism, similar to the notorious Sawney Bean legend. Fallout: New Vegas has another notable example in the White Glove Society, an upper class aristocratic group based out of the luxurious Ultra-Luxe casino in Las Vegas, who are in reality the descendants of a cannibal tribe that once inhabited the ruins of Vegas before it was restored by Mr House. One of their chairmen is intending to return the group to its roots by serving the members human flesh without their knowledge, with the player having the choice of either helping or stopping him. From Fallout 3 and onward, the player may also become a cannibal through a perk. The perk allows the player to regain health at the expense of "karma", the series' in-game morality meter. In addition, as most survivors abhor cannibalism, eating human flesh in-game may cause nearby NPC's to become distrustful or even hostile to the player.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, features a quest in which the dragonborn (player) discovers a clan of worshipers of the daedric prince, Namira, who consume the flesh of corpses found in the catacombs underneath Markarth. Players can then choose to either partake in the cannibalism, or put an end to it. Partaking will involve the player unlocking a ring that allows them to consume any humanoid corpse they find in order to recover some health.

The Last of Us features a group of cannibalistic survivors who kidnap Ellie during a winter snowstorm.

The plot of Until Dawn heavily features cannibalism. Near the end of the game it is revealed that after Hannah and Beth fell down a ravine and were presumed dead, Hannah actually survived and had to eat her sister's flesh to survive, which awakened the wendigos the player encounters throughout the game.

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley features several instances of cannibalism, serving as an important representation of the titular characters' moral decay. This includes them eating their seemingly deceased neighbour to prevent starvation, and later one or both of them eating their parents' remains. An optional scene features an attempt to cook a family of campers over a campfire. The game's tagline on Steam is "Cannibalism and codependency!"

The survival horror game The Forest features strong themes of cannibalism. The player can consume the limbs of slain enemies, and the island the player inhabits is infested with hostile cannibal tribes.

As a means of survival

Cannibalism historically has been practised as a last resort by famine sufferers, and popular culture has portrayed true stories of such acts of cannibalism.

Inspired by actual events

One often retold event is the story of the survivors of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which was chronicled in Piers Paul Read's book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974), in Alive (1993), the book's film adaptation, and in the documentary Stranded: I've Come from a Plane that Crashed in the Mountains (2008). The story was most recently told in the 2023 film Society of the Snow. It also inspired the American TV series Yellowjackets (2021–), in which a group of high school students (mostly members of a girls soccer team) who survive a plane crash in a remote area are driven to cannibalism.