Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters w/ Kevin J. Wetmore

On this spooky season edition of Parallax Views, from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus to Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the idea of corpse-eating, monsters and cannibalistic killers have fascinated and terrified people for years. Throughout the world there's variations on this trope: the ghoul, the Wendigo, and the Aswang just to name a few. In this previously unpublished and recently rediscovered conversation, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. joins Parallax Views to discuss this macabre subject as explored in his book Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters.

Among the topics covered:

- The tradition of mortuary cannibalism as a way to honor the dead in some culture; Catholic transubstantiation; survival cannibalism and the Donner Party; Idi Amin and political cannibalism

- Why are we fascinated by flesh-eating monsters; the popularity of Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Hannibal the Cannibal) and The Silence of the Lambs; taboos, the allure of the forbidden, and the Thanatos drive

- Zombies!!!; how we got from the racist trope of the Haitian voodoo slave zombie to the flesh-eating, reanimated dead; the zombie as a metaphor

- How our perception of death has changed in the past 100 years

- The rural/urban divide, fear of the primitive and the regressive, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

- The Filipino legend of the monster known as the Aswang

- The First Nations monster called the Wendigo, which represents "the spirit of hunger and the heart of ice; the Wendigo as an entity that possesses its victim and drive them to madness and cannibalism; weird fiction author Algernon Blackwood' and the Wendigo in H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos; the Wendigo and colonialism

- The Ghoul, a pre-Islamic, Arabic dog-like corpse eater and how it became part of Islamic culture; how we perceive the ghoul has changed over the years; the 1980s horror anthology The Monster Club

- The Scottish legend of Sawney Bean and his cannibalistic, the inspiration for The Hills Have Eyes; Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street; and the connection between cannibalism and Herman Melville's Moby Dick

- Humorous portrayals of cannibalism such as in South Park and the connection between comedy and horror

And much, much more!