Mommy’s Little Monsters: Mutant Cannibals

Mutant Cannibals, how thoroughly do you violate our cultural taboos? Let me count the ways. With everything from inbreeding to being ugly, from atrocious table manners to violating the sacred order of the food chain, nothing makes as effective a screen monster as you, Mutant Cannibal.

Being married to a Mutant Cannibal Enthusiast, the spectacle of the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes was recently visited upon me.

He: You gotta watch it. It’s so gory.

Me: I don’t like gory so much.

He: It’s got great violence…

Me: Well, I do like violence…

He: You’ll love this. Trust me.

And even though I refused to go into the basement to retrieve the clothes from the dryer afterwards and demanded the light be left on in the bathroom overnight, he was right. Not only because of the gore, which was so Herculean that even I was astonished into appreciation of it, but because of the Mutant Cannibals.

MCs provide one of the few Enemies of Humanity that even peacenik kumbayahers like me can hate without guilt. They are a door through which suppressed xenophobia can come out and play.

Their violations span all levels of objectability. Beyond the obvious one of eating people, I mean.

First off, a Mutant Cannibal is beyond ugly. Sure, he sports physical deformities sprung from radioactive exposure and/or his mother mating with her brother. But he’s also wearing a wifebeater t-shirt with all manner of unspeakable stains and what teeth he might have remain virgin to toothpaste. It’s impolite to openly deride those struck down with unfortunate genetics. But if they can’t even brush their teeth now and again, they are fair game for total irrational hatred.

Next, a Mutant Cannibal hunts and eats people in the most degrading manner possible. Our smug sense of food chain superiority is shattered. Not just shattered: betrayed. We can intellectually handle the idea of aliens swooping down to eat off our faces. But MCs are exhibits of humanity that we, from the fortress of our sanitized, plasticized, buffed, waxed and polished selves, can safely make fun of. Then they violate the social rules, hunt us down and chew us up. It is a reversal of the most basic order, causing the most visceral revulsion.

Mutant Cannibals: they are the Ugly American Stereotype Gone Wild. They don’t bathe, they don’t brush their teeth. They don’t watch American Idol and they don’t post on Match dot com. They don’t chew with their mouths closed — hell, they don’t even bother to grill up our corpses and experiment with marinades. They are the ultimate unsophisticates weilding ultimate power. How can anyone resist the pleasure of hating and fearing them?

Lurking under the obvious objections are the sexual aspects, so vividly illustrated in the Hills remake. Putting aside Donner Pass necessity-type cannibalism, the force driving a human to break The Big Taboo and eat another human is all about being covetous. The eater wants what the eatee has, in the most elemental sense. Want your enemy’s courage: eat his heart. Want to possess a person sexually and can’t for a variety of psychological reasons: become a serial killer and eat your victims. Ingestion and rape are A and B themes in the same disturbing sonata of They Want Something You Don’t Want To Share.

The visual of the Mutant Cannibal trips all our instincts against breeding. Kissing the harelip. Consorting with the unclean. Bearing an ugly baby. And the spurned MC responds predictably: if you won’t fuck us, baby, we’ll eat you. It’s sexual coercion in the extreme, and while some romance readers will, after a while, admit to the fantasy lure of the forced seduction, it’s never with anyone who looks and behaves like the Mutant Cannibal.

So when you give the Mutant Cannibal a thoughtful deconstruction instead of a visceral reaction, you realize that it isn’t the actual eating another person that repulses us. The cannibalism is just a cover for much more unpleasant xenophobic impulses. It’s just not proper to openly fear and hate the ugly and deformed, the dirty and the badly mannered. But, if they eat people, too…Villagers, Light Your Torches.

And if you disagree, thinking girl you are way wrong, it’s the eating people, consider this. Take a Mutant Cannibal, attend to him with plastic surgery, dental implants, Clorox bleach. Dress him in a cashmere instead of stained ribbed cotton. Replace the inbred cackling and obstructed airway heavy breathing with lyrical lectures in Italian. Change the table manners from ripping raw flesh off the bone with his teeth to tenderly sautéing brains in butter across a copper-bottom sauce pan. Now you have the ultimate subversive Mutant Cannibal: Dr. Hannibal Lechter. And nobody hates him.