Jay Rohr
Author Nathan Wardinski’s new book, Dissecting Cannibal Holocaust, is an academic book about horror that’s as unsettling as any horror story. Not only does it involve probing the infamous aspects of the gruesome film that inspired it, but there are some ugly truths about reality which require exploration. As Wardinski points out, writing is a conversation that doesn’t have to be one-sided. That’s why Film Obsessive was fortunate to have him donate a generous portion of his evening to discuss Dissecting Cannibal Holocaust.
As host of the weekly radio show Sounds of Cinema, Wardinski has conversed about a variety of cinema topics over the years. Besides film reviews, he’s explored controversial movies—what made them as such and why they got banned—allowing for commentary on censorship. And like his current book, these pieces aren’t simply diatribes from an opiniated cinephile, but well-constructed arguments based on facts. For instance, his exploration of the controversy surrounding films like L’Amore (1948) and The Moon is Blue (1953) involves the history of the Hollywood Production code as well as the 1952 Supreme Court case Joseph Burstyn Inc., v. Wilson that gave movies more free speech rights.
Wardinski majored in Radio-TV-Film Communication while minoring in Philosophy and English at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and at Minnesota State University–Mankato, earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing. In Dissecting Cannibal Holocaust, he examines the notorious film, its censorship, and the urban legends that surround it. He hopes to inspire readers to perceive the messages in horror movies; that this is art with a purpose and should be treated as such.
But no one says it better than the writer himself: the video below captures our discussion with Nathan Wardinski regarding Dissecting Cannibal Holocaust. The transcript below has been edited for space and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Welcome to Film Obsessive. I’m Jay Rohr. And joining us is Nathan Wardinski, the author of Dissecting Cannibal Holocaust an intriguing book that I had the pleasure of reviewing recently. And now we have the author here to help elaborate on the book itself. Thanks for joining us.
Nathan Wardinski: Good to be here. Thank you.
So, what’s your background like? Have film studies always been a pursuit, or is that something you came to down the line?
No, it’s been pretty steadily a part of who I am and what I’ve been doing all these years. I attended the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh for my undergraduate degree. I majored in radio, TV, film communication, minored in Philosophy and English. And what I while I was getting that degree. I stumbled into a class on film criticism.
And it really changed the way that I talked about movies because I had analyzed literature in my English classes all the time, but I had never had that applied to film. So, after getting, completing my undergraduate degree, I went and got a graduate degree. I got an MFA in Creative writing, but while doing that I took courses in film criticism. There was some terrific classes taught by some great professors there, and while doing that while I was working on my MFA degree, I started working with a public radio station 89.7 KMSUFM, the Maverick in Mankato, MN. And started producing a weekly radio program that has now been on the air for 20 years.
Were you approached to be a part of this series, or did you pitch this book to Lexington?
No, I pitched this book to them.
What was your first experience with Cannibal Holocaust? Did you hear the urban legend first? Then finally, see the movie and what was your reaction? How did you even see it back in the day? Because that was always a problem. Like when I was growing up, it took forever. I think the first time I ever saw it was like a grainy copy of a copy of a copy on a VHS.
I first discovered the film through Stanley Wiater’s essay the most disturbing horror films ever made Disturbo 13… and so having read that essay… I finally got a copy of Cannibal Holocaust through eBay. I wish I’d I wish I’d kept it, but it came in a clamshell box. I think it might have been pirated… and I was sort of blown away by the thing when I saw it because on the one hand, it was what I expected in terms of the violence and whatnot.
But it was also so much more but yes, I finally watched the thing on DVD and that was kind of a revelation seeing it that way for the first time.
When you were putting this book together did you think that might help illuminate the genre’s ability to make culturally relevant statements. Like, was that part of the purpose with this book—not only to elevate Cannibal Holocaust but to bring up the genre as a whole?
Well, yes and no. I mean, horror actually has quite a bit of scholarship to it… I was thinking about this film in particular because of how interesting it is and how it’s a text that people are aware of. That a lot of people have Cannibal Holocaust has high name recognition.
I feel like there’s not that much written about it, and there was a space there to say something and to say something substantive and provocative, which is indeed what I think the film does. And I think in the popular press there is sometimes a disregard for horror… I think there had been a loss of respectability around the time Cannibal Holocaust is made right in that period in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, and that has to do with the indulgence of mechanical effects, the reliance on gore. And the catering towards a teenage audience, which I think oftentimes things that cater towards that audience tend to get dismissed.
And what I’d hope to do was to get people to think not. Maybe not so much about horror, but about exploitation, cinema and this kind of thing in a way that they maybe they wouldn’t. It wouldn’t first occur to them to do.
One of the things I appreciate about this book is that it’s really an accessible read… this book feels like it was written for a more general audience. Did you do that on purpose?
Yes… I also felt that the audience for this book could go beyond academia. And that I think there would be a lot of interest by horror people, horror fans, you know, the kind of people who will spend 50 bucks on a Blu-ray might be interested in in a book like this.
So how long did it take to put this all together? Because this is clearly not like the three weekend with a six pack on the side situation.
No, no, no, no. Altogether, well, the proposal process was drawn out because this I wrote this book partly during Covid. So that presented its own challenges in terms of doing research, I had to go to my local college library and use their databases and because of COVID that restricted my access to some of these things. But I think it was about two and a half years from the time that they greenlit the proposal to the time that the book hit the shelves.
So, when you were doing this copious amount of research for this book… was there ever an instance where you were doing the research, and… did you ever encounter something where it was like oh maybe I am thinking about this the wrong way?
A little bit. Well, one of them was a more of a factual issue and that had to do with the claims of Cannibal Holocaust being believed to be a snuff film because initially I was working off as far as the background of the making and release of the film. I was working off of the official making of documentary and the interviews that Deodato and others did in which they talked about them being accused of murder. And then I watched this interview with the film scholar Eugenio Ercolani, who then suddenly reveals. Oh, actually—he done the footwork to his credit; he did a lot of the shoe leather reporting and looked into the court records and other official documents and found that that was probably nonsense.
When you were working on this, was there ever a point where you tell yourself I have to stop? I have enough material to prove my point. Now it’s time to compose this whole thing.
Yeah, sure. So, this was my first book. So, it’s the first time I’ve written anything of this length that was this complicated.
And I think what I ended up doing was going through the book in passes. I kind of outlined what the chapter would be, and then I identified, OK, here’s general topics I need to go research, and so I did research on those, and then I worked on it long enough that I could create a draft of that chapter. Hitting all the points and then I’d note where I kind of had holes. Then I would go back and do more research and I’d go back and fill those holes wherever the gaps were in the research.
There’s a really interesting exploration of how there’s a tradition of colonialism and forming the stories that we tell. What, in your opinion, is the reason why we keep telling these same stories over and over again because… there’s a demonstrable thread running throughout films and stories that we have been telling for at least the 20th century… what are your thoughts on why we keep doing that?
Well, the cynical part of me says because nothing has changed.
So that kind of leads me into your breakdown of nature which is very fascinating to me. I’ve never seen it personally. I’ve never seen it broken down quite that much in this particular way, but it made complete sense to me. Would you like to walk us through that a little bit?
Sure. So that chapter, what I was really interested in exploring was the mankind’s relationship to nature as depicted in Cannibal Holocaust… so I talked actually about Aldo Leopold and his views of the biota and how that is somewhat at odds with some of the more mainstream views of nature — the most significant voice in at least Americans conception of nature is probably Disney… there’s an acknowledgment in the very in the circle of life idea that animals prey upon one another, right? But it also omits any of the violence that is inherent in that predation. And so, it’s this very sanitized view of nature.
And the other documentary I talk documentary and I talked about are the the BBC documentaries often narrated by David Attenborough, and these are certainly not as egregious as some of the Disney films, but they do try to impose narratives on nature, and they do try to sanitize nature in a way.
You know, they’re and one of the implicit messages of Cannibal Holocaust is there is no distinction. We are animals and animals are us, which is part of the function I think of the of the animal killings that exist in the film, but also the parallelism of predation, the way that human beings prey upon each other and prey upon the animals and the way that the way in some cases, animals prey upon human beings.
And then… the Herzog films and Herzog has obviously this very different view of nature that the world is not a cuddly place, but Herzog nevertheless does seem to uphold that division between human beings and nature, that Cannibal Holocaust seeks to collapse.
I think that’s something that kind of ties back in with Cannibal Holocaust because then you have these corporate individuals who are like we should just put this out anyway. We know that this is egregious. We know this is fake, but it’s captivating. It tells a story, and it depicts these savages the way that we expect them to be. So. Well, like it sort of all feeds into this whole like notion of, like, capitalism will ignore the truth in favor of a profitable product.
Yeah, well, they’re — all media is built, it exists within a capitalist system, and it has to generate profit. And you, you do that by generating views and clicks.
Even though, like I said, you have well laid out arguments for people, there’s still a possibility that people are not gonna necessarily agree with your interpretations like you expect that you know, down the line.
Well, I think writing is a conversation, and that’s true of all sorts of writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, you’re engaging with the reader, and you’re also engaging with the people who have written on this topic already and I kind of engage with that deliberately and wanted to suggest that other areas where people could do research.
I tried to present my arguments as well as I could, but also anticipate that people would have objections to them and try to respond to some of those preemptively, but yeah, I hope that the book prompts… people to think about their entertainment, but also maybe their dismissal of certain other kinds of entertainment. What does qualify for scholarship?
And for that reason, they’ve been kind of dismissed. I mentioned earlier in a lot of horror, you know, appeals to a teenage audience, which oftentimes you know, is dismissed as just schlock and disposable. But this film does more than that. You know, I think it’s a more interesting film than a lot of film pictures that have won Academy Awards recently, for example.
I don’t want to get into too much of the different content in here because I want people to read the book, but I think that we’ve covered a lot of the bases on what makes this interesting and what makes this compelling. You already mentioned you have a podcast radio show.
Yes, Sounds of Cinema.
And then so what does the future hold? I know that you’ve just completed this big project and I know what it’s like to finish a big project, believe me and like the last thing you want to do is think about work, but do you have some idea where you’re going to go next?
Well, in terms of writing, I’ll keep writing. I mean, I keep producing the show, keep reviewing things. I’m still plugging the book and trying to get it on people’s radar. I think the next thing I’d mentioned that my degree was in creative writing. And so, I think the next thing I want to do is a novel. I have some ideas that I’ve been working on, but we’ll see where we go from here.
Well, I’d like to thank you again for taking the time to talk to us.
Absolutely. My pleasure.
