Plague of Strength

One of the most entertaining tropes in the history of horror cinema is that of the inbred cannibalistic mutant. From the only watchable episode of The X-Files, “Home,” to the Wrong Turn series to the Hills Have Eyes series to the Offspring, cannibalistic mutants are invariably some of the best villains. Insane and horrible to look at, usually hilarious, and superhumanly strong, these backwoods sister-fucking cannibals make for an opposition you would relish battling and consider joining, just for the lullz. Well, maybe not the Peacocks in that X-Files episode- their limbless mom was hard to fucking look at, and I can’t imagine there is enough viagra to get your dick up for that.

What most people fail to realize, however, is that the legend of the hillbilly slaughterbeast is *possibly* steeped in actual history- they’re based on the legend of the Sawney Bean clan. According to legends, Sawney Bean was a Scot in the late 15th century who moved into a cave with his homely wife. There, between bouts of banging that would produce the kids and grandkids he’d later fuck, Sawney waylaid hapless travelers, harvesting them for meat. He had fourteen children by his wife, and then that brood did enough fucking that in twenty five years they had a veritable army of lopsided mutants with a taste for nothing but human flesh and sister fucking, not unlike modern day residents of West Virginia.

Frankl.y, a run as long as they had is pretty impressive, because we’re not talking about high-level strategists- these were straight up, literal troglodytes. These cave dwelling brother-fuckers managed to make it almost three decades in the wild, but after an ambush gone bad, they had problems. For whatever reason, the Beans decided to butcher a woman in front of her still living husband, and that man somehow managed to wriggle free, hop onto a horse and bail the fuck out. He escaped to recruit help from the King’s men, which meant the Bean Clan were about to have a bad time, because they were used to having both numbers and surprise on their side rather than stand-up fights with heavily armed professionals. A posse was raised and the caves of the Bean clan were raided, and they arrested the entire twisted crew of bloodthirsty freaks.

“Their crimes were considered so heinous that the normal justice system, for which Scotland is so renowned, was abandoned and the entire family were sentenced to death. The following day the twenty-seven men of the family met a fate similar to that of many of their victims, by having their legs and arms cut off and being left to slowly bleed to death, watched by their women. The twenty-one women were burned like witches in huge fires” (Johnson).

As one might expect, the Scots take umbrage with this tale and claim it is of dubious veracity. No records exist to support it, and an examination of the cave system apparently failed to reveal evidence of 1,000 corpses butchered for meat within. Nevertheless, the Scots are basically just left with culinary sadness like haggis when you remove the human flesh from the menu, so it is easy to speculate that they were driven to eat their fellow man just in protest of the disgusting shit that was their alternative.

This story does leave us with a few questions, though, because this legend has persisted throughout the years, spawning English drinking songs, movies and books about cannibals, and peoples’ opinions of the inhabitants of mountainous areas like West Virginia and northern New Jersey (where I just discovered there is in fact a group of heavily inbred people called the “Jackson Whites” who have been accused of cannibalism) as the home of inbred cannibal clans- why are inbred cannibals always depicted as super strong? It is an excellent question, because the super-strong inbred eater of human flesh trope dates all the way back to the Sawney Bean legend.

For starters, with the exception of the people of Papua New Guinea (who waited until the meat was rancid and rotting to eat it), the peoples who remained cannibals into the last few hundred years are some of the biggest and strongest people on the fucking planet- Polynesians. According to researchers, the Polynesians of the pre-colonial period were big motherfuckers. The height of the average conscript into the French army in the period between 1836-40 was about 5’5″, which “would have represented the healthy and robust section of the population,” while that of of British males was allegedly 5’7″, though “for various reasons is probably excessive…. The view that the average Maori stature in this era was in the taller range is supported by other observers.  Savage wrote: “The men are usually from five feet eight inches to six feet in height” (Ibid).    They went on to say that “in general the New Zealanders are taller and more robust than the Tahitians…. They are rarely less than  five feet seven or eight inches tall…. These islanders are generally of tall stature, well proportioned…. Some, who appeared to be the tallest amongst them, and whom we measured, were all over 6ft. in height” (Ibid).

In other words, Polynesians in the precolonial era were fucking monsters of men, physically and mentally. Their cultures revolved around warfare, their bodies were built to brawl, and their taste for human flesh just added to the awesome.

“At the time of the discovery of the Polynesian islands, cannibalism was practiced by Maori, Rarotongans, Paumotuans, and Marquesans. It was introduced late among the Tongans from Fiji and, although rare, was practiced on Tongatapu more than in other Tongan islands.  In Rarotonga cannibalism began as a means of revenge after a war; it was against the law of the aliʻi to practise it in time of peace” (Beckwith).

Who gives a shit, though, right? Polynesians were tall. Who cares? Well, for one, the biggest motherfuckers on the planet at the time of European colonization were the Fijians, and they were the most cannibalistic people on the planet, and possibly the most prolific man-eaters in human history. And given that the Maoris were among the biggest their height is again important, because the Maoris had hunted all of the large game to extinction centuries prior- their main source of meat was human. Though their cannibalism is not strictly considered to have been a food issue, human flesh comprised a significant portion of their protein intake. According to Professor Moon, a Pakeha history professor at the Maori Development Unit at the Auckland University of Technology,

“‘people were eaten often as part of a post-battle rage. Enemies were often captured and killed later to be eaten or killed because of a minor transgression.

‘Rather than disposing of the body it was prepared to be eaten,’ he said.

Part of the practice was also to send a warning to other tribes.

‘One of the arguments is really if you want to punish your enemy killing them is not enough. If you can chop them up and eat them and turn them into excrement that is the greatest humiliation you can impose on them’” (NZPA).

In other words, the Maoris just hated each other so much they would eat them just to turn them into shit. The Fijians went even harder, though- their islands were actually referred to as “The Cannibal Isles” for centuries in the West, and it is still reportedly possible to eat human meat, served with sides of breadfruit and sweet potatoes. Christianity could make no inroads on those islands because every missionary who landed there, and the Fijians are not shy talking about it to this day.

“Fijians would eat people from other “races” to protect their property and as a form of revenge. When hunting down and eating their enemies, locals used a stone axe (matau vatu) and a spear (moto), along with an eye-gauger (totokia) and a sea (pronounced say-ah), which was like a brain-smasher. Then they’d eat their victims with a special cannibal fork called an ai cula ni bokola.

After Fijians killed their enemy, they’d drink the blood in order to become more powerful, because, as Rapuga noted, “the blood runs through the entire body.” The corpse would then be divided into portions, with the chief eating the heart and brain because everyone believed he’d literally “absorb” his enemy’s knowledge and courage. Next, a village priest would perform a ritual to one of the gods and the tribe would gather for a big celebration under the moonlight, dancing with their spears around a bonfire while the feast was cooking” (Laden).

And you might think that was some sort of special occasion, but contemporary accounts claimed that every single ship that landed on or wrecked near the Fiji Islands had its crew eaten. The Fijians fucking hated missionaries and treated them even worse than they treated war captives. That said, they never let the meat go bad, because they absolutely loved the taste of the “long pig.”

“The crew of every boat that was wrecked upon these shore was killed and eaten in some parts. Often a man would order to be clubbed some man or woman that he considered would be good for cooking, his plea being that his ‘black tooth was aching’ and only human flesh could cure it. Such was the absolute right of a man over his wife that he could kill and eat her, if he wished; which has been not rarely done.

Such inordinate gluttons were some of these chiefs that they would reserve the whole bakolo, as a human body to be eaten was called, for their own eating, having the flesh slightly cooked time after time to keep it from going putrid. As a rule a Fijian will touch nothing that has become tainted, but sooner that lose any part of a human roast, they would eat it when the flesh would hardly hang together.

So great was their craving for this strange flesh that when a man had been killed in one of their many bruits and quarrels, and his relations had buried his body, the Fijians frequently enacted the part of ghouls and, digging the body up from the grave, cooked it and feasted thereon. So customary was this that the relations of a buried man who had not died from natural causes watched his grave until the body had probably become too loathsome for even a Fijian’s appetite.

The flesh was either baked whole in the ovens, or cut up and stewed in the large earthenware pots they use for cooking. Certain herbs were nearly always cooked with the flesh, either to prevent indigestion or as a sort of savour stuffing – I know not which. The cooks who prepared it and placed it in the ovens filled the inside of the body with hot stones so that it would be well cooked all through.

After a battle, the victors would cook and eat many of the slain at once, but generally some of the bodies were borne home to the victors’ village, where they were dragged by ropes tied round their necks through the open place to the temple. There they were offered to the gods, and afterwards cooked and divided among the men, the priests always coming in for a large share. By the side of the temples great heaps of human bones lay whitening in the sun – a sign of how many bodies had been thus offered to the gods. Women, however, were not allowed to take part in the awful banquet, yet women’s bodies were considered better for the favourite portions. So delicious was human flesh held to be, that the highest praise that could be given to other food was to say: ‘It is as good as bakolo‘” (Johnston).

“Some of the most famous of the great cannibals have eaten an enormous number of human beings, many of them in their time having consumed hundreds of bodies” (Johnston).

The Marquesans were even more brutal, and they were as big as the Maori. In fact, according to one paper, the Maori are theorized to have been Marquesans who colonized New Zealand, which explains their love of human flesh, their Cannibal Corpse-style brutality, and their size. According to one account, they were doing shit straight out of Green Inferno.

“It was considered a great triumph among the Marquesans to eat the body of a dead man. They treated their captives with very great cruelty. They broke their legs to prevent them from attempting to escape before being eaten, but kept them alive so that they could brood over their impending fate.

Their arms were broken so that they could not retaliate in any way against their maltreatment. The Marquesans threw them on the ground and jumped on their chests, so that their ribs were broken and pierced their lungs, so that they could not even voice their protests against the cruelty to which they were submitted. Rough poles were thrust up through the natural orifices of their bodies and slowly turned in their intestines. Finally, when the hour had come for them to be prepared for the feast, they were spitted on long poles that entered between their legs and emerged from their mouths, and dragged thus at the stern of the war canoes to the place where the feast was to be held.

With this tribe, as with many others, the bodies of women were in great demand. Very often a man who was condemned to be killed and eaten could be visited by his relatives, always naked and painted black. There are records of cases where the relatives have volunteered to be killed and eaten in their stead, but it is probable that the bodies of these self-sacrificing individuals merely constituted an additional course when the time came” (Rice).

And not only were the Polynesians taller than Westerners- they were invariably described as stout or robust, rather than fat or skinny. The Fijian males ranged in size from 105-300 pounds (I’d assume the 300 pounder was the chief) with an average weight of about 170 on the East coast of the island (Houghton). While that’s not particularly massive by our standards, you have to recall that includes the third gender in Polynesia, which goes by a variety of names but is essentially a femme male. While you wrap your heads around the fact that all Polynesian cultures have always recognized a wide variety of genders that aren’t limited to “alpha” descriptions of a fictitious binary gender system (all with different naming conventions that sometimes, but not always, indicate a preference for dick), those femme dudes are going to bring down the average stature considerably. In any event, given that the average West Point cadet weighed 138 pounds at that time, the Fijians were fucking monsters by comparison even taking into account the smaller, femme males… and still are.

Which leaves us, then, in an interesting place, because it seems that a steady diet of human flesh might indeed turn people into gigantic, musclebound slaughterhouses with a penchant for torture. We do know that the weird little fuckers in Papua New Guinea were the only ones dumb enough to eat uncooked human brains, so it was there that kuru popped up- nowhere else. Kuru is the human version of mad cow disease, a wasting disease on the brain that essentially just turns your brain into swiss cheese as you go insane and die. The inhabitants of that island are not known for their intellect, though, and aside from their skill at building treehouses seem to be entirely useless. Thus, unless you’re a pinhead with dwarfism who lives on the shittiest island on the planet, cannibalism isn’t going to lead to any health issues beyond extra muscle and aggression.

That leaves us, then, with what it tastes like and the nutritional content, right? I’m not suggesting you eat your neighbors, but you might as well know what you’re getting yourself into in the event they start to look delicious. Though human flesh has traditionally been referred to as “the long pig” in the Pacific Islands, that seems to be because the Pacific Islanders had no access to veal- an Englishman named William Seabrook tried human meat while living with cannibals and remarked that it “was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal.” Human flesh is red meat, as it is much higher in the protein myoglobin than pork, lamb, or beef (it’s got almost 20mg of myoglobin per gram of muscle, as opposed to 2, 6, and 8 grams in the other meats), making it way fucking redder than the absolute reddest red meat you’ve ever ordered at a steakhouse (Borrelli).

As to the amino acid profile, it’s pretty comparable to beef, and even compares favorably to whey. As to the breakdown of fat to protein, the calories are pretty evenly split. A human body contains about 81,000 calories, with 700 of those in the heart and 10,000 calories per thigh.

If you read articles on the subject of humans as food, you’ll find very odd suggestions that it is more efficient to kill horses and bears for food, as they’re far more nutritive from a caloric standpoint… that is, until you consider how fucking easy it would be to kill a human as compared to a goddamned bear. Then there is the fact that bears are chock full of parasites, and horses are so lean that you could get rabbit starvation from attempting to live off one. In short, the consensus is “don’t eat people” because the people writing the articles don’t want to have to look over their shoulders when they’re walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night- humans are a damn good option for a calorie source.

Nor am I alone in my thinking.

“Stockholm School of Economics professor and researcher Magnus Soderlund reportedly said he believes eating human meat, derived from dead bodies, might be able to help save the human race if only a world society were to “awaken the idea.”  

Soderlund’s argument for human cannibalism was front and center during a panel talk called “Can you Imagine Eating Human Flesh?” at the Gastro Summit, reports The Epoch Times. “Conservative” taboos against cannibalism, he said, can change over time if peoples simply tried eating human flesh” (Gaynor).

In short, cannibalism is a great option for food, but combining it with sister-fucking is a recipe for disaster. If you’ve gotta, rub one out to some of that bizarre step-sister porn on Pornhub, but given how ubiquitous that shit is I am starting to think that y’all motherfuckers need more Satan in your life. Stop jerking off to incest porn, for fuck’s sake- there is plenty of other weird shit out there that doesn’t end in cleft palates and pinheads.

For More Information on Cannibalistic, Inbred Hillbilles see:

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series

Though their cannibalism isn’t well established in the first film in the series, TCM 2 definitively makes them and their customers cannibals. Insofar as I recall there is no statement regarding their inbreeding, with backwoods West Texas yokels inbreeding is generally assumed. My favorite of the series is the much maligned TCM 3, which was so heavily edited in post-production it apparently is but a mere shadow of the original. In spite of that fact, it’s a fucking beast of a movie, and I have an awesome recollection of having been taken by my dad to see it in the theater on a Wednesday in middle school. He was still wearing his wingtips and three piece suit after a long day and a two hour commute, but was such a badass he sat through the entire flick without ever once vocally regretting my birth, haha. I realize this is heresy, but I think the original TCM is fucking unwatchable- I want to kill the whiny cripple and the last 45 minutes is nothing but screaming and running and chainsaw noises- like Eraserhead and Tetsuo the Iron Man, it manages to be dull and profoundly annoying all at once. So if you’ve not seen any of them, start with the reboots and work your way back.

And if you’re going to put yourself through the OG TCM, you might as well just get it over with and watch Tetsuo and let your hearing suffer the indignities of both films at once. Eraserhead is hot garbage, however, so avoid that.

The Wrong Turn series

While this series certainly diminished in quality as it dragged on, the original stands as one of the all time great horror movies. In it, seriously inbred backwoods yokels mercilessly stalk and slaughter college coeds, though Eliza Dushku manages to hot her way through the movie and turn the table on the superhuman mutants at the end. The series is fun as shit through the fifth movie, then falls to absolute and utter rubbish in the sixth. Hey, they had a hell of a run, and the third one (while objectively terrible) does feature one of my favorite D-list actors, Tamer Hassan of the Football Factory. I just discovered that this series is getting rebooted in 2020 and will star Charlotte Vega as the final girl (a trope begun in the aforementioned TCM series).

Offspring

The Offspring was a far better book than a movie, having been written by Jack Ketchum. In it, a cave dwelling clan of inbred cannibals (pulling directly from the Scottish legend) hunts the more isolated inhabitants of rural New England. The sequel, The Woman, was a far better film, though it isn’t technically an inbred cannibalistic clan film so much as a scathing rebuke of “civilized” suburban Americans and a very favorable view of feral people. The third film in the series is not terrible, but pales in comparison to The Woman and is even further from the original trope. In any event, this bad boy is free on Prime if you want to watch some cannibal slaughter.

If you’re a reader, the Dead River series I mentioned by Jack Ketchum is pretty badass. It starts with Off Season, which was the first splatterpunk novel to really hit a wide audience, and then continues with Offspring. In the first, a writer goes to an isolated cabin in Maine to write, only to find himself besieged by a clan of cannibals, who he has to fight off in decidedly Straw Dogs fashion. The sequel, Offspring, is set ten years later with the original sheriff having to fight the clan he thought he’d exterminated a decade prior.

The Hills Have Eyes

Frankly, I cannot say with confidence that the original two are better than their remakes- Alexandre Aja directed the 2006 reboot an d it’s a fucking beast of a film. All four films are arguably the definitive films of this trope, and because the original came a couple of years after the original TCM and really played up the mutant aspect, they really set the stage for the Wrong Turn films that came later (though in The Hills Have Eyes their deformities are due to radiation from nuclear testing). Both films in the rebooted series were phenomenal, and are highly recommended if you’re on a Sawney Bean-style kick, and the originals are worth watching if you’re in the mood for a bit of schlock.

X-Files: “Home”

This episode was only shown on Halloween for years after it first aired, being deemed too gory and generally horrifying for your average Midwestern Walmartian. Though you have to endure Scully’s robotic acting and Mulder’s insufferable monologues, it’s a badass example of this trope and it’s only 37 minutes long. Having just rewatched it today, I can confirm that it definitely holds up. And to the people who think that American Horror Story is a show worth watching, a horror show, or in any way impressive, they’ll change their tune when they see this single episode, which aired on broadcast TV like a fucking boss when Gen X ruled everything around us.

So there you go- as we close in on the coolest holiday of the year, some movie recommendations and a fairly compelling treatise on why eating your neighbors is preferable to eating the candy they feed your portly little prediabetic womb goofs next week. Should you fail to heed my suggestions, I’m sure your crotch goblins will have incredibly sweet meat when the sight of them rolling down the street in their Rascal proves to be just too much for my inner predator to resist. Wall-E was certainly a cautionary tale no one heeded, but I know a guy with two thumbs and a hibachi that has your kids’ name on it who will be happy to take advantage of the situation.

Sources:

Borreli, Lizzette.  Side effects of eating human flesh: cannibalism increases risk of prion disease, and eventually death.  Medical Daily.  19 May 2017.  Web.  19 Oct 2019.  https://www.medicaldaily.com/side-effects-eating-human-flesh-cannibalism-increases-risk-prion-disease-and-417622

Cole, James.  Prehistoric cannibalism: an act of nutritional necessity or a result of socio-cultural conditions?  University of Southampton.  2006. 

Engber, Daniel.  Ask anything: would cannibalism make you fat?  Popular Science.  27 Jun 2014.  Web.  19 Oct 2019.  https://www.popsci.com/article/science/ask-anything-would-cannibalism-make-you-fat/

Gaynor, Gerren Keith.  Swedish scientist floats eating human flesh as solution to global climate change: reports.  Fox News.  9 Sep 2019.  Web.  22 Oct 2019.  https://www.foxnews.com/world/swedish-scientist-eat-human-flesh-climate-change

Houghton P, Leach BF, Sutton DG.  The estimation of stature of prehistoric Polynesians in New Zealand.  J Polynesian Soc. 1978; 84(3): 325-336.

Johnson, Ben. Sawney Bean- Scotland’s most famous cannibal. Historic UK. Web. 19 Oct 2019. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Sawney-Bean-Scotlands-most-famous-cannibal/

Johnston, Alfred P. Camping Among Cannibals. Sydney: Leopold Classic Library, 1883.

Laden, Tanja M.  Fiji: still the Cannibal Isles.  Daves Travel Corner.  18 Jul 2014.  Web.  19 Oct 2019.  http://www.davestravelcorner.com/journals/destination-south-pacific/fiji-still-cannibal-isles/

Nuwer, Rachel.  Human flesh looks like beef, but the taste is more elusive.  Smithsonian Mag.  3 Feb 2014.  Web.  18 Oct 2019.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/human-flesh-looks-beef-taste-more-elusive-180949562/

NZPA.  Maori cannibalism widespread but ignored, academic says.  Stuff.  31 Jan 2009.  Web.  22 Oct 2019.  http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/national/565544/Maori-cannibalism-widespread-but-ignored-academic-says

Rice, Arthur P. Cannibalism in Polynesia. The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal, Volumes 31-32.  Steven Denison Peet, Ed.  Salem, 1909.

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