Ruggero Deodato: The director of the film “Cannibal Holocaust”, which was banned in many countries, has died

The Italian director Ruggero Deodato passed away at the age of 83, according to Italian media, leaving the artistic world poorer, after not only creating the famous film “Cannibal Holocaust”, but also a new kind of movies.

In more detail, as stated by theguardian.com, the 83-year-old director may have made several horror films, but the one that stood out and made him world famous was ‘Cannibal Holocaust’. In this particular 1980 film, an anthropology professor seeks out a group filming a documentary in the Amazon about wild tribes and finds their films, in which they themselves appear to have been eaten by cannibals who are indigenous.

So this technique, i.e. showing a film through a “documentary”, was a genre that inspired many films afterwards – eg the Blair Witch Project-, while the wild scenes of the film led Ruggero Deodato to court.

Characteristically, the judges believed that he had actually tortured and murdered the actors, forcing them to appear in court to show that they were alive. This resulted in the film being banned in many countries – such as Britain – while the director was finally convicted, because he had tortured animals in “Cannibal Holocaust”.

“In my youth, growing up, I spent a lot of time in the countryside near animals and therefore often saw the moment of their death. The death of animals, although unbearable – especially with today’s urban mentality – always happened to feed the film’s characters or the crew, both in the story and in reality,” he told the Guardian in 2011, explaining how he was inspired by the scenes with the abused animals.