How the horror film broke its promise: Hyperreal horror and Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust

Abstract

In this article I build on discussions of the masochistic viewing model offered by film scholars Gaylyn Studlar and Steven Shaviro by arguing that horror films operate on an implied promise between the viewer and the images on the screen. Despite witnessing sequences of violence and death viewers may still leave the theatre with the comforting thought that what was witnessed on-screen was an illusion. Visual pleasure in the horror film is permitted by the promise that such pleasure is not at the expense of genuine suffering. Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 film, Cannibal Holocaust repeatedly breaks its promise to the horror film viewer. The film contains sequences of both animals and humans being killed. In the breaking of this promise, the film does two things: first, it equates images of both staged and genuine death through the hyperreal effects of the film’s complex narrative structure; second, it is the hyperrealism of the film (rather than its ‘realism’) that allows for visual pleasure to result from the equalization of images of genuine and staged death. My article explores how genuine death functions within the hyperreal film world of Cannibal Holocaust and theorizes the consequence this function poses for visual pleasure.