An image struck Chelsea G. Summers: a boyfriend, accidentally hit by a car on purpose, a quick job with a corkscrew, and his liver served Tuscan style, on toast.
That figment of her twisted imagination is what prompted Mrs. Summers to write her novel, “certain hunger”, about a restaurant critic with a taste for human (male) flesh.
It turns out that cannibalism has a time and a place. In the pages of some recent stomach-churning books and on movie and television screens, Ms. Summers and others suggest that time is now.
There are “yellow jackets”, a Showtime series about a high school girls soccer team stranded in the woods for a few too many months, which premiered in November. The movie “New”, released on Hulu in March, involves an underground trade in human flesh for the rich.
“Lapvona”, the novel by Ottessa Moshfegh published in June, portrays cannibalism in a medieval town overcome by plague and drought. Agustina Bazterrica’s bookTender is the meat”, released in English in 2020 and in Spanish in 2017, imagines a future society that farms humans like cattle. Also in 2017, “Raw”, a film by director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau, tells the story of a vegetarian veterinary student whose taste for meat increases after consuming raw organ meats.
It’s still to come “Bones and All,” starring Timothée Chalamet. The film, about young love turned into lust for human consumption, is expected to be released later this year or early next. Its director, Luca Guadagnino, has called the “extremely romantic” story.
Can you digest it?
A fascination with cannibalism, perhaps not surprisingly, can be very fine, as Mrs. Summers learned while writing “A Certain Hunger.”
When fact-checkers called about the frantic scenes in which the book’s antiheroine prepares her murdered lovers with grotesque, epicurean flourish, their questions about the intricacies of human carnage left Ms. Summers so perturbed she turned ” completely raw vegan for two weeks. The creator was horrified by her own monster.
Publishers may have been too. When Ms. Summers, who goes by a pseudonym, was shopping for the book in 2018, it was turned down more than 20 times before Audible and the unnamed press made an offer.
If she were selling “A Certain Hunger” today, Ms. Summers, who is 59 and lives in New York and Stockholm, thinks it would be easier. “God bless ‘Yellowjackets,'” she said in a Zoom interview, which was then interrupted by her dog, Bob, throwing up in the background.
Released in December 2020, her book began to experience a boom in popularity on social media: actress Anya Taylor-Joy posted it on Instagramand received much applause in the corner of TikTok known as BookTok – about a year later, around the time “Yellowjackets” debuted on Showtime.
The pilot episode of “Yellowjackets” sees a teenage girl trapped, bled like a deer and served up on a platter in a terrifying ritual. Bloodthirsty fans continue to dissect the scene on Reddit, where a subreddit message board dedicated to the series has more than 51,000 members.
The tension of the show is in the knowledge that you know cannibalism is coming, but when? And because?
“Yellowjackets” creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, who live in Los Angeles, say they wanted the plot to hint that human consumption wasn’t simply for the characters’ survival. Not only does this add a chilling tingle to the already dark story about the soccer team stranded in the wild, it also separates it from the true story of a Uruguayan rugby team trapped in the Andes in 1972, whose members resorted to cannibalism. to survive. (That event was later dramatized in a 1993 movie, “Alive,” starring Ethan Hawke).
“I think we’re often attracted to the things we’re most repelled by,” said Lyle, 42. Mr Nickerson, 43, chimed in: “But I keep coming back to this idea of how much of our disgust for these things is fear of ecstasy from them.”
Mrs. Moshfegh’s “Lapvona” is also not overtly cannibalistic; unlike “A Certain Hunger,” there is no bouquet garni stew. But a scene involving a toenail is heartbreaking.
Known for her haunting stories that delve into darkness, such as “Eileen” and “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” Ms. Moshfegh, 41, who lives in Los Angeles, wrote “Lapvona” during the spring of 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. “I wrote it in such complete isolation that I felt this incredible freedom to go wherever it took me,” she said.
The character eating another human being, the greatest sin in her religiously vegetarian village, does so in an act of “depraved desperation”, said Ms Moshfegh, also a vegetarian.
Tales as old as time
Bill Schutt, the author of “Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History,” says that fictional plots about eating human flesh are as old as literature itself.
Pointing to examples including the man-eating Cyclops in Homer’s “Odyssey,” he said the taboo has been used artistically to horrify for centuries.
“When you take something that’s so horrible and put it through this fictional lens,” he said, “we worry about it, but we know we’re safe.” At least most of the time: Mr. Schutt only got halfway through Hulu’s “Fresh” before having to stop the movie. “He was almost too well done,” he said.
But as his book documents, cannibalism has occurred all over the world throughout history, giving these fictional tales a sickening smell of “And yes?”
Historical examples in the book include “mumia”, a practice of using crushed mummified bones to alleviate various ailments that was popular in 17th-century Western Europe; the infamous Pioneers of the Donner Party that he was trapped in the Sierra Nevada in 1846; ritual cannibalism that took place in Papua New Guinea until the 1950s; and famine-induced cannibalism in China in the 1960s.
Schutt’s book also features the story of the so-called Cannibal Cop, a former New York Police Department officer who was arrested in 2013 for participating in fetish forums that fantasized about cannibalizing women and was later acquitted. the new york post has published more than 30 articles about the case, including one that suggests the Halloween costume of a police uniform with a severed hand on a plate.
Flavors of that saga can be found in the most recent allegations of sexual and physical abuse against actor Armie Hammer, which have included allegedly sending cannibalistic messages to a romantic partner. Mr. Hammer has denied the allegations and, through his lawyer, declined to comment for this article.
After the accusations became public, his agency dumped him, checked him into rehab, and now he’s, Variety Reports, timeshare sales in the Cayman Islands. Coincidentally, Mr. Hammer worked with Mr. Chalamet and Mr. Guadagnino on “Call Me by Your Name.”
‘The unthinkable’
As for what may be fueling the desire for cannibalism stories today, Ms. Lyle, the co-creator of “Yellowjackets,” said: “I think we’re obviously in a very strange time.” She listed the pandemic, climate change, school shootings and years of political cacophony as possible factors.
“I feel like the unthinkable has become the thinkable,” Lyle said, “and cannibalism falls squarely in that category of the unthinkable.”
According to Ms. Summers, cannibalism is always symbolic. For the protagonist of her novel, eating human flesh can be seen as a way of holding on to a relationship that ended. For Ms. Summers herself, the plot of “A Certain Hunger” cannot be separated “from my own personal experiences with eating disorders, with the repression of female appetites, the way the media chews up and spits out writers , consumption of spark plugs”. – And the consumption of Mrs. bougie,” she said.
More generally, Ms Summers thinks the recent wave of cannibalistic plots could also be comments on capitalism. “Cannibalism is about consumption and it’s about burning from within in order to exist,” she said. “Burnout is essentially overusing yourself, your own energy, your own will to survive, your sleep schedule, your eating schedule, your body.”
Ms Moshfegh said her theory was “that it could be an antidote to the real horror of what is happening to the planet”. Like Ms. Summers, Ms. Moshfegh sometimes couldn’t stand her own work and she described the process of writing about cannibalism in “Lapvona” as “a bit disturbing”.
“I had to think about what part of the body would be an interesting place to start,” he said, “and what it would feel like to hold someone’s amputated hand in yours.”
The “Yellowjackets” prop team had an equally perplexing task determining what to use as fake human flesh in the show’s pilot episode.
Should it be the lab-grown human steak made from stem cells that sparked outrage at a London museum? The animal-free substitutes for chicken, beef, salmon and dairy that some companies are creating using similar technology?
In the end, the prop team opted for venison.
But they will have to find an alternative for future episodes, Lyle and Nickerson said, because so many of their cast are vegan.