Ruggero Deodato, Cannibal Holocaust director, dies at 83
Ruggero Deodato has died at the age of 83. The Italian filmmaker was both famous and infamous for his gruesome 1980 horror film Cannibal Holocaust, about a documentary team who are killed while shooting footage of indigenous people in the Amazon. Deodato's death was reported by the Italian newspaper Il Messagero.
Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images Director Ruggero Deodato
Deodato's early credits included working as assistant director on two 1966 spaghetti westerns directed by Sergio Corbucci: Django and Navajo Joe. He went on to direct the 1976 thriller Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man and, a year later, his first movie about cannibals, Last Cannibal World. He returned to the genre with Cannibal Holocaust, which the director shot in Colombia.
"I found myself at home alone with my son and we would watch the news together, which was terrible at the time," Deodato said in an episode of the Shudder series Cursed Films devoted to the film. "So, at dinner, you'd see all the conflicts that were going on. The victims of the Red Brigade. It was continuous carnage, and you would see it all. Everything. All the time. So I came up with the idea of journalists who set off to make a documentary on what happens along the Amazon River. Their aim was to film as many atrocities as possible, and when there was nothing they would invent them."
Over time, the film became notorious for its gore and explicit violence, part of which involved the real killing of animals onscreen.
"In my youth, growing up, I spent a lot of time in the country close to animals and therefore often seeing the moment of their death," Deodato told The Guardian in 2011. "The death of the animals, although unbearable — especially in a present-day urban mindset — always happened in order to feed the film's characters or the crew, both in the story and in reality."
The found footage format pioneered by Deodato would later be popularized by the makers of The Blair Witch Project, although Blair Witch directors Dan Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, had not seen Deodato's film at the time they shot their own.
"People sent us Cannibal Holocaust when Blair Witch came out," Sanchez said in a 2011 interview with IndieWire. "Dan and I were talking afterwards and agreed that if we had seen Cannibal Holocaust as kids, we probably wouldn't have done Blair Witch. So we got lucky in that we weren't hip enough to have seen it."
Following Cannibal Holocaust, Deodato directed several more horror films including 1986's Body Count and 1988's Phantom of Death, which starred Michael York and Donald Pleasence. The filmmaker also made a cameo, playing a cannibal, in Eli Roth's 2007 horror sequel Hostel: Part II.
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