2022 Was the Year of the Cannibal. What Does That Say About Us?
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In an undeniably great year for horror, the most unsettling scene from one of the more popular series featured a man offering his neighbor a sandwich. Granted, that man was cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, his neighbor the woman who got him evicted, and the sandwich possibly contained human flesh, but the menace and uncertainty of the exchange — and the show at large — captured the horrified attention of millions of viewers. Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, starring Evan Peters, is one of Netflix’s most-watched (and most controversial) shows of all time, and just one of many cannibal narratives that kept viewers in its thrall this year.
From Dahmer — both the fictionalized series and an accompanying docuseries — to the insanely buzzy Showtime drama Yellowjackets to the horror-comedy of Fresh and achingly tragic Bones and All, flesh-eaters entered the ethos big-time in 2022 (and not just in a swaggering, Chianti-slurping Hannibal Lecter kind of way). This year, the horror trope undoubtedly mirrored the very unique concerns we’re facing today: economic uncertainty, environmental anxiety and a distrust of the seemingly normal guy next door along with his cold cuts.
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Zombie films have long served as an allegory for societal upheaval — starting with the legendary George A. Romero and his Night of the Living Dead series. Mass consumerism (1978’s Dawn of the Dead), the military-industrial complex (1985’s Day of the Dead) and the Iraq War (2005’s Land of the Dead) — Romero skewered it all. Although that trope is still shambling along, the glut of cannibal movies in recent years signals to psychiatrist and horror aficionado Steven Schlozman that there’s a whole new bogeyman in town through which to view our foibles.
“Any human eating another human is by definition the great taboo,” Scholzman, who has both written zombie novels and collaborated with Romero, tells Rolling Stone. “The difference is, you can’t get mad at a zombie — it’s like getting mad at a crocodile. Cannibals… they’re sentient. They’re eating with gusto — or because they need to.” (Translation: society is afraid of itself these days; slow-walking monsters unthinkingly ransacking a shopping mall not so much.)
It’s telling, then, that the year started off with roughly five million people a week tuning in to Showtime to see whether a girls’ soccer team marooned in the Canadian wilderness will devour each other. Yellowjackets kicked off tantalizingly with scenes of a tribe of girls in antlers descending on their would-be victim, and although we’ll have to wait until Season Two to see who (or if anyone) was eaten, that sense of dread propelled us through 10 increasingly tense episodes and left us wanting more.
“The show is not about if cannibalism, it’s about why cannibalism, and how cannibalism,” showrunner Jonathan Lisco has said. “[The girls] may have to resort to cannibalism. But it may not be just because of scarcity. It may be because of something much more complex: the new micro-society that they need to build, and the rules that they need to form to survive. Not just physically, but psychologically and mentally.”
Scholzman compares that micro-society to social divisions that range from heightening political discord to the kind of vicious glee some denizens of social media seem to take in pillorying people for doing something as mundane as, say, bringing their neighbors chili or enjoying their garden with their husbands. “If anybody’s going survive in their wilderness, it’s going to be a team that’s figuring out how to win,” he says. “And yet they don’t use the best parts of themselves. They use the worst parts of themselves. That to me seems like an important message. Like, we’re pretty good as a species when we work together, but we seem not to be doing that so well lately.”
The Luca Guadagnino-directed film Bones and All also deals with othering members of society — only this time, the outcasts are the eaters, not the eaten. That film follows two teen cannibals, played by Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell, as they travel across the country while dealing with the reality of what they need to do to survive. The announcement of the film came in tandem, quite unfortunately, with multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against Armie Hammer, including an alleged cannibalism fetish, but Guadagnino — who directed both Hammer and Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name — has denied any connection. “The relationship between this kind of digital muckraking and our wish to make this movie is non-existent, and it should be met with a shrug,” he told Deadline in August.
In fact, the premise for the movie is around seven years old at this point; it was based on a YA novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. And the author tells Rolling Stone that she set out to tackle consumerism and self-loathing when she first conceptualized the story of Maren (Russell) and Lee (Chalamet). Going vegan, she says, gave her “a new perspective on why these monster narratives are so compelling. With zombies, everyone just thinks it’s about overconsumption in general, mindless consumption. I’m thinking, more specifically, about who we consume.”
Along with being a parable about environmentalism — which we see echoes of in the film as Maren and Lee share their first kiss at a slaughterhouse — Bones and All is more about life as an outsider, DeAngelis says. The author grew up feeling like she existed on the periphery, loathing herself for not fitting in and, then, for not trying harder to fit in. Her main character and proxy, Maren, wants love, a family, and a home, DeAngelis says, but she can’t escape who she is — she has to feed. “This horrible compulsion traps her in an endless cycle of devouring and remorse,” DeAngelis wrote in a previous blog post.
Chalamet echoed that same sentiment in an interview about the film. “To be young now, and to be young whenever — I can only speak for my generation — is to be intensely judged,” he said. “I think it’s tough to be alive now. I think societal collapse is in the air — it smells like it — and, without being pretentious, that’s why hopefully movies matter, because that’s the role of the artist… to shine a light on what’s going on.”
Schlozman — who also suggested the film echoes the current desolation of the opiate crisis — agrees. “It becomes this great metaphor for being othered — necessarily othered. You can’t be part of this world,” he says. The most horrifying character in the movie becomes, then, not Maren and Lee, but a cop-turned-drifter they meet along the way who chooses to be what they call an “Eater” — an obvious nod to the ongoing epidemic of police corruption. He’s not eschewing the world and all its rules because he has to, but because he’s curious. Because he can.
Curiosity — and excess — also factor deeply in Hulu’s Fresh, which stars Sebastian Stan as a charming cannibalistic playboy and Daisy Edgar-Jones as his would-be prey. In order to feed the overly rich and easily bored men of the world, Stan poses as an eligible bachelor to flirt with and ensnare women, whom he packages bit by bit in nightmarish HelloFresh boxes. Director Mimi Cave says she was attracted to the script as part of the #MeToo conversation. “I’ve never had any fascination with cannibalism more than the average ‘ew’ and ‘gross’ curiosity, but there was something about the symbolism it held within the context of the story for me,” she tells Rolling Stone. “Relating specifically to women’s bodies, I immediately saw so many layers of visual metaphor in my mind.”
“Fresh is an allegory for many things,” Edgar-Jones previously told RS. “You could say it’s an allegory for the commodification of females in society. And also it sort of explores the aspects of dating in the contemporary world — we almost shop for each other, you know, like you would for a jumper. There’s also the balance of being open to meeting new people, but also knowing that there’s a risk involved.”
Schlozman notes that the film highlights a kind of repulsive consumerism — the kind that, perhaps, leads people with too much money to buy a social media platform for billions of dollars just to destroy it. “These people have so much money that when they get something they want everything,” he says. “It might not even be great to eat someone, but it doesn’t matter. They have a few billion. They’ll find out. Which is creepy!” he pauses, laughing. “But the very, very, very rich are pretty creepy.”
And then, of course, there’s Jeffrey Dahmer — a sobering reminder that cannibals aren’t usually lovesick teens who can’t help themselves or handsome men with great jawlines shaking their hips as they make mincemeat of their latest conquest. They’re monsters. And like many horrors, they’re hard to look away from.
When Murphy’s fictionalized Dahmer series premiered on Netflix almost in tandem with Joe Berlinger’s docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, Berlinger recalled seeing the two side by side as the top trending series on the streaming service. The interest in the cannibal killer was there, and it was strong, but it was also fraught — especially after victims’ family members began coming forward and asking why Murphy hasn’t contacted them before turning their loved ones into characters (Murphy contested those claims). Dahmer killed several marginalized men before his capture in 1991 and dishonored their remains to the most extreme degree, and people weren’t sure if they should be watching, rapt, as Evan Peters embodied him. But, obviously, they watched, even if they didn’t talk about it. Peters picked up a Best Actor nomination at the upcoming Golden Globes and the show itself was nominated for Best Miniseries.
“What are the rules now? Should we never do a movie about a tyrant?” Murphy argued in a recent interview in response to heavy criticism, pointing out in a cast roundtable that the show isn’t meant to be a lingering, voyeuristic look at one man’s horrible acts, but an interrogation of an increasingly dark world. “I think it came out at a time where people are looking to put their anxieties into something to express anxiety, or maybe to watch something that’s more anxious than the world they’re experiencing,” he said. “I also think that since COVID people are very interested in examining pieces that talk about mental health and all of your characters, every one of you, have those scenes. Where you’re either at rock bottom and you ask for help or you say, ‘I’m not doing very well.’ Even Dahmer.” (Murphy was not available for an interview for this story.)
Berlinger — who has not yet seen Murphy’s series — also spoke about mental health while discussing his series with Rolling Stone. “Dahmer’s cannibalism and entire MO to me is an issue of mental health — he was obviously very ill and his whole reason for killing and consuming was to be close to his victims — he didn’t want them to leave, ever,” he says. “If only someone had intervened… I am saying that a documentary about him might make a viewer realize that either they themselves need help or a viewer might recognize the need for help with someone they know.”
Berlinger is no stranger to having to defend his work, which sometimes focuses on monsters; his Conversations series previously covered Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. However, Berlinger says he was inspired to make the first when his daughter told him she didn’t know who Bundy was, which worried him. Shouldn’t young people be aware of monsters like Bundy — that even the most normal-seeming people can be dangerous?
“I think people are super sensitive about humanizing somebody who’s done something so evil,” he says. “To me, that’s a slippery slope. I’m not saying this holds true for every show about a serial killer, but to me, the key to understanding this perversion and the reason to tell these stories is precisely because these are three-dimensional human beings that sometimes act like human beings. The people who do evil in this world, as someone who has covered crime, usually are not people who act like monsters 24/7.”
Schlozman posits that the Dahmer story took off this year due to this distrust, fueled at times by the rampant popularity of true crime content. “There is a paranoia right now in the United States that we don’t really know people the way we think we know people,” he says. “And our fascination with Dahmer speaks to that.”
And that brings us back to the sandwich: The dread we feel as we watch Peters’ Dahmer offer a sandwich to his neighbor, played by Niecy Nash (in another Golden Globe-nominated role), as a supposed peace offering. It’s may be just a normal sandwich, but given that Nash’s character knows what Dahmer is up to next door, it’s violence masquerading as normalcy. Just like Dahmer himself.
And what does that say about us? That we can’t trust food from a neighbor, that we can’t guarantee that our dates won’t eat us or our own friends and teammates won’t feast on our flesh? “If we put on a paranoid cloak, it occurs to you that anyone could do anything to you. We’re trusting people to be good,” Schlozman says. “The bottom line is, most of the time people are good. And then the big question is: Why are they good?”
Maybe that’s a topic for 2023.
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