Im A Humanitarian / Live-Action TV

Cannibalism in Live-Action TV.

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• 1000 Ways to Die features a segment where a tribe living on an island in the South Pacific comes across two drug smugglers who drift ashore during typhoon season. The tribe hadn't had meat in ages, so they jump at the chance to serve up some drug-runner stew.
• In the Angel episode "Unleashed", Angel runs into a cult who eat freshly turned werewolf as a delicacy. Angel manages to save the woman, Nina, but when she bites the Wolfram and Hart employee who was procuring victims for the cult, Angel tells them that now they just have to wait a month.
• Babylon 5 featured an alien race called the pak'ma'ra (lower-case spelling canonical) who are carrion eaters, and regularly eat the corpses of sapient beings including other pak'ma'ra. Unlike many instances of this trope, pak'ma'ra are depicted as entirely benevolent, or at least harmless.
• The Ben Stiller Show had a sketch called "The Legend of T.J O'Pootertoot", about a theme restaurant based on a member of the Donner party. They advertise that their meat has a flavor that is "curiously familiar".
• An off-color joke by David Mitchell in Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2015 about how they've been in the studio so long they'll resort to cannibalism soon leads the panelists to discuss just whom would be eaten first, with them settling on Greg Davies. (Greg's only objection is he wouldn't make good meat due to his unhealthy body.)
  Greg: It's not a nice meat, it's a fatty meat.
• Blackadder:
  • In "Potato", Captain Rum rushes ashore on a tropical island and is eaten by offscreen Hollywood Natives.
  • The villain of "Money" is the Bishop of Bath and Wells, who drowns babies at christenings and eats them afterward.
  • In a series III episode, the French ambassador is murdered by an "evil revolutionary" who claims to have turned him into pate and implies that he ate it.
• In Season 3 of Bones, a recurring story arc is the hunt for a cannibalistic serial killer called the Gormogon, who in addition to eating his victims, will make a skeleton out of their bones using a ironic bone from each victim (knees of a bishop, jaw of a lobbyist, finger of a musician, etc.). Oh yeah, one of the members of the team is his apprentice.
  • In another episode, Bones and the team come across a man ritualistically killing people and eating them, to gain power from a Native American ritual. Interestingly, the man gets sick because he's eating raw human flesh, and they use his sickness to identify him as the killer.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Caleb seems like a really nice guy, until Peralta learns he's in prison for killing and eating nine people. That the authorities know of.
  Peralta: Are you a... cannibal, Caleb?
  Caleb: Well, that's not how I would define myself. If we're going by what I'm most passionate about, I would say that I'm a woodworker. Why did you think I was in protective custody?
  Peralta: I dunno, I guess I hoped you were another cop wrongly convicted of crimes you didn't commit.
  Caleb: Nope! I did all my stuff — and more! There's tons they can't even trace to me. The secret is eating the evidence.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Subverted in the episode "Doublemeat Palace". Because of the high staff turnover and repeated mentions of a "secret ingredient", Buffy thinks the fast food restaurant she's working at is using human meat in its products. It turns out that the disappearances are because of a demon that likes the taste of people who've eaten lots of Doublemeat foods, and the "meat" is actually a vegetable product, with a secret ingredient of... beef flavoring. Comes complete with a Shout-Out to Soylent Green, where Buffy runs through the restaurant screaming "It's people!"
  • Another episode uses cannibalism as a joke: Oz, while in werewolf form, eats a zombie and wonders why he feels so full the next day.
  • "The Pack", where a group of kids possessed by a hyena eat the principal! And then Xander almost tries to eat a kid!
  • This was how Warren and Amy survived under the Sunnydale sinkhole.
• Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Every year The Church Of Night holds the Feast of Feasts where one of the younger witches is named Queen of Feasts and eaten by the rest of the coven. They consider this a great honor and the Queen is waited on hand and foot for the days before she's sacrificed. The event is meant to commemorate the time a young witch named Freya sacrificed herself so the rest of her coven wouldn't starve during a harsh winter.
• Class of '07: Basically the plot of episode eight. After the group has eaten all of their food, they finally decide on cannibalism as the only option. So they decide to hold a vote on who gets eaten, and choose Megan at the end before Amelia volunteers in her place. This is avoided however when more survivors show up.
• Criminal Minds
  • "Blood Hungry" has a cannibal who takes and eats body parts with special significance in different religions.
  • The UnSub in the episode "Lucky" turns out to be a psychopathic Satanist cannibal. Like many of the serial killers in the show, he injects himself into the investigation. Unlike the others, he brings lunch.
    Father Marks: God is in all of us.
    Floyd Feylinn Ferell: So is Tracy Lambert.
  • The killer in "The Performer" drinks the victims' blood.
  • The one in "Exit Wounds" eats an organ from at least one victim so as to keep the victim with him (he has severe abandonment issues).
• CSI:
  • In one episode, Sara Sidle and Greg Sanders are trying to remove a corpse that has rotted to the point of liquification from the trunk of a car.
    Greg: Oh my God, I think I got some in my mouth!
    Sara: You know, Greg... technically, that makes you a cannibal.
  • The villain of "Justice is Served" is a dietitian with a rare blood disorder called porphyria who keeps herself young and beautiful by drinking protein shakes made of ground-up human livers. She offers one of the shakes to Grissom at the end of the episode. Grissom calls her out on how untreated porphyria also causes psychological disorders, implying that she only thought it was her diet that kept her beautiful.
  • In another episode, a cheerleader dopes up on PCP murders and partially eats someone.
  • Let's just say that the episode "Appendicitement" is a Shout-Out to Fried Green Tomatoes.
  • In "Consumed", the CSI team track a cannibalistic serial killer who is preying on the vore fetish community.
• An odd variant in the CSI: NY episode "Point of No Return". Marty, a former employee of the ME's office, hits upon the idea of removing organs from the corpses of drug addicts and processing out the unmetabolized drugs. When he gets fired (not for that), he resorts to obtaining his own supply of dead druggies.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "Paradise Towers", some of the elderly Rezzies (residents) of the eponymous towers have resorted to cannibalism and attempt to eat the Doctor's companion Mel.
  • The Futurekind in "Utopia" have fallen into cannibalism.
• In the Dollhouse episode "The Attic", Echo and Dominic go into the Attic, a literal land of horror that includes a Japanese man forced to eat his own legs as sushi. The only way for Echo and Dominic to escape is for them to "enjoy ourselves". Squick.
• Double the Fist included a scene where the Local Council is invading the Fist Team's new HQ (the Council in question seems to be made up of zombies). Mephisto finds some Community Welfare Officers ripping through their washing, and attacks. We come back a few scenes later to find him chewing on their faces.
• In an episode of Eureka, a chemical causes all the women in town to become extremely attracted to Sheriff Carter, even to the point where they try to eat him. It's no wonder the episode was called "Maneater."
• Farscape featured a cannibalistic villain by the name of Kaarvok who duplicates his prey and eats "the clone". This happens from the Moya crew to at least Chiana, D'Argo and Crichton. Chiana, after witnessing her double being eaten, tries to convince herself it was just a clone and she couldn't do anything about it. It is later revealed, as Kaarvok says it himself, and as the two Crichtons survive, that they are not "cloned", but doubled, with no differences, no decay on any of them. Ever.
  • Kaarvok also has his twisted clone "family" routinely hacking off the arms of Rovhu's Pilot so they can be eaten, knowing that they'll grow back in a week or two. Or, as the Pilot put it, "They're EATING MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
  • Happens again in an episode were a creature's only diet is that of bones. She's left stranded on a planet with no animals left and is starving. When Moya's crew turns up investigating a distress call predictable events occur.
• The Reavers of Firefly, along with raping their victims to death, have a thing for eating them and sewing the skin into their clothing. If the victim is very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order.
• Forever: Several people unknowingly (and one knowingly) in "Fountain of Youth". The chemist who was making the de-aging drug wanted to use stem cells, but her partner forced her to cut corners, so she started using human pituitary glands harvested from pilfered corpses.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Implied during a riot in King's Landing, where the starving townspeople grab a member of the royal entourage, and rip him to bits, as witnessed by Tyrion. They're not actually shown eating him, but since they're literally starving...
  • Subverted in "Mhysa". Ramsay Snow has Theon's cock severed in the previous episode and sits down before his terrified prisoner to calmly eat a long piece of roasted meat. The character has already proven himself so psychopathic that few would doubt that he'd actually devour a man's penis in front of him, but Ramsay confirms that he was just messing with him and it's really pork. He actually sent it to Theon's father.
  • Season 4 introduces the Thenn, a wildling tribe whose hat is cannibalism. In an Establishing Character Moment, when they arrive at the wildling camp, they disdainfully clear away the rabbit the others were cooking and put a human arm over the fire. Their leader Styr tries to persuade his comrade Tormund Giantsbane to partake of human flesh, but he's disgusted.
  • While camped at the Nightfort, Bran tells the story of a Night's Watch cook who tricked his king into eating his own son.
  • Biter makes the mistake of taking a bite out of the Hound in "Mockingbird".
• Gotham sees its version of the Penguin react to his father's murder by his stepfamily by killing his stepsibling, eating them and feeding to them to their mother.
• Hannibal:
  • The title character is a Serial Killer and cannibal who prepares his victims in a Food Porn like fashion. Even more disturbingly, he served human flesh and organs to those at his dinner party in "Sorbet", and it's implied that almost everything he serves is made of people.
    Hannibal: Before we begin, you must all be warned; nothing here is vegetarian. Bon appetit.
  • Garret Jacob Hobbes, an ethical hunter who believed in using up every part of his kills, snapped when he realised his beloved daughter would soon leave for college. He began to kidnap, kill and eat girls who resembled his daughter to cope with her impending absence. And yes, eating them was absolutely necessary in his mind — it was to love, respect and honor them (otherwise it would just be murder). One victim's corpse was returned to her bed as "an apology" due to her cancerous liver, which rendered her flesh inedible.
• Debunked with Sylar, from Heroes. He gains the superpowers of others by doing something with their brains but it's never shown how he does this and since he tended to use food metaphors and culinary references, it lead to lots of jokes by fans about him eating the brains. Word of God says that this was the original plan, but they realized how ludicrous it would sound, so they just said that he had an ability to "see how things work" and left the actual procedure unspecified.
  • This was given a Shout-Out in a first-season episode where he refers to finding the list of Differently Powered Individuals names and locations as "...something I can sink my teeth into!"
  • And was finally Lampshaded and debunked on in season three, when it's shown what he really does with the brain. "Eat your brain? Claire, that's disgusting."
• In Highlander, an ancient immortal named Caspian, who turns out to be the historical basis for Famine, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, practiced cannibalism for thousands of years, became known as an infamous serial killer in the modern day, and ended up in an insane asylum in Eastern Europe by the time of the series. When we're introduced to him, he's being broken out of the asylum by the other horsemen, and takes the time to gnaw his doctor's face off before escaping. Death's response to this?
  Methos/Death: [sighs] Lovely.
• In the last minute of the House episode "Fall From Grace", it turns out that the patient that the team has successfully treated from his illness has suddenly fled, and his hospital room is swamped with law enforcement officers. The guy was actually a cannibalistic serial killer, and they've unwittingly helped him remain at large.
• In I, Claudius, Caligula impregnates his sister Drusilla, cuts her open, and eats the fetus.
• In one second season episode of The IT Crowd, Moss reads a classified ad stating, quite simply, "I want to cook with you." Thinking it's for a cooking course, he goes to visit the man who placed the ad. Unfortunately, it turns out that the man was a German immigrant with a less-than-perfect grasp of English, and wanted to cook with the reader... as an ingredient.
• Subverted in the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode "Manhunters," where Frank claims that the steaks Charlie and Dee had just stolen and eaten were made of human meat. Charlie and Dee become overwhelmed with hunger and search for more human meat. Ultimately Frank reveals that the steaks were really raccoon meat, which was lousy with tapeworms.
• Hyde in Jekyll keeps referring to cannibalistic urges, but is never seen acting on them, even though he occasionally uses his teeth as weapon. It's unclear if he actually likes the taste of human flesh, or if he's just messing with Jackman and others.
• In one The Kids in the Hall skit, a man is on trial for cannibalism, Alive style. It turns out that he is the only survivor of a 30-minute delay, haven taken a bite out of each passenger. "Your honor, I am not an experienced cannibal. I simply took a bite out of each one hoping that the next one tasted better. I'm sure your honor has done the same thing with a box of chocolates."
• A sketch in the German nonsense series Klimbim has the familiar setting of a plane crashing in the middle of nowhere and the survivors having to feed on the corpses of the unlucky, until they finally get saved. When a reporter comes to interview them about their predicament, they immediately begin to tell horror stories about the inedible airplane food. When that is on the verge of Overly Long Gag, the reporter, becoming impatient, bluntly ask about the cannibalism. "Oh. The people. We ate them first, of course."
• One episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent was about a man who killed a woman and ate her calf muscle out of a desire for intimacy. Horrible, but at least he didn't use his job as a chocolatier to feed her to other people.
• Giggerota the Wicked from Lexx, whose dress is made of the skin of her victims.
  • She's far from the only anthropophage, either. Being eaten by one thing or another is practically a Running Gag.
• Played with on an episode of The Love Boat. A man is trying to score with a woman by claiming he has an incurable disease and will die soon. When the woman talks to Dr. Bricker about it, Bricker tells her that the only way to contract said incurable disease is if you're a cannibal.
• Occurs off-screen in the Maddigan's Quest episode 'Greentown', where it's heavily implied that the butler and cook have been drugging, fattening, killing and finally eating the town's guests. This might be the first children's show to have featured both cannibalism and mind-altering drugs in the same episode...
• Masters of Horror:
  • In "Cigarette Burns", when the Artifact of Death film-within-a-film 'La Fin Absolue du Monde' is presented in a private theater at the end, Annie, Kirby's dead girlfriend, emerges out of the theater screen. Her father comforts her, but she's "hungry", and takes a bite out of his neck. It's a hallucination.
  • Also Season 2's episode "The Washingtonians"; see its entry in the Literature sub-page.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus has in the same episode (the one which they considered Queen Elizabeth would watch...) two sketches about cannibalism, Lifeboat and Undertakers (the latter, as John Cleese reminded in his eulogy for Graham Chapman, includes the line "Look, we'll eat your mum. Then, if you feel a bit guilty about it afterwards, we can dig a grave and you can throw up into it.").
  • Another sketch had a naked man with an apple in his mouth being carted on a tray. He casually stops for a moment to chat with some customers in the restaurant about how he's the main course — and discourages them from eating a vicar whose been sitting in the corner for a week.
• In Mr. Brain, GACKT's ham-tastic character Takegami Teijirou is a cannibalistic serial killer who considers eating human flesh to be the equivalent of eating beef or pork.
• Grendel in Once Upon a Time in Wonderland.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Lion's Den", the Lewisborough High School wrestling team, who have become Cat Folk, eat the retired coach Terni and later their own coach Peter Shotwell when they try to stop them from taking Neuroflex 500. One of the members of the team is Peter's son Morris so it doubles as Patricide in his case.
• It's not like she did this often, but in Power Rangers Turbo, Divatox clearly had no qualms against trying to devour the Rangers after they had been shrunk to minute size. (This ended very badly for her, as one of them shot her in the tongue when she tried to snag them with it; the whole rest of the episode had them trying to avoid and hide from the very sore and pissed-off villainess as they tried to escape.)
• In The Pretender, it's revealed in the last season that Mr. Lyle is one of these.
• General psychopath Young Young McGurn in Rab C. Nesbitt, who apparently eats anyone who crosses him, as well as his own Rottweiler.
• The first episode of Rake has Professor Graham Murray (Hugo Weaving), a non-villainous example in that he only ate a man who had committed suicide and had already agreed to be eaten (as proven by a chatroom transcript and a filmed Suicide Note). That said, he does lose some sympathy for keeping the remains in his freezer and lying to his wife about them.
• Red Dwarf:
  • In "Tikka to Ride", Lister and the Cat eat "barbecued person", assuming it to be chicken. Kryten's guilt chip has been removed, and they'd asked him to get them something to eat, and the corpse was right there...
  • In "Lemons", the Cat steals some pork that Lister had found and cooked up from deep freeze storage near Kryten's quarters on B-deck. Later they learn that the "pork" was actually Lister's organs that Kryten had secretly surgically removed (due to medical necessity, but without Lister's knowledge) and stored in the freezer near his quarters.
• Invoked in an episode of Scare Tactics (2003). The victim and her friend were sent dinner invitations, and arrived in a fancy mansion with over a dozen other, beautiful, girls. Their male host greeted them, introduced a nude woman to the group and informed them dinner would be ready shortly. Several minutes later, said nude woman is wheeled out, appearing to have had her stomach slit and her organs arranged on dinner plates — which the other woman eat. But, this being Scare Tactics, it's all an elaborate prank, the woman was only pretending to be dead, and the organs aren't really human organs at all...
• Played with in the Seinfeld episode "The Butter Shave" when Kramer decides to start using processed butter as a new shaving implement, which eventually graduates to covering his body in it to help get a tan. After falling asleep under the sun, he ends up with a very deep tan and a lingering smell of cooked meat (which Jerry points out is due to technically being sauteed) that, according to George, smells like "game hen". Unfortunately, Newman catches onto the smell pretty quickly, even at one point hallucinating Kramer as a baked turkey. At the episode's end, after a series of accidents gets Kramer covered in oregano and parmesan, Newman hands him a bush of parsley and grins maliciously. Shortly after, he apparently bit Kramer.
• The Sea-Thieves in the Sinbad episode "Queen of the Sea-Thieves".
• Smallville:
  • An episode had a Kryptonite-mutated "fat vampire" (played by Amy Adams!) who had to devour the adipose tissues of living beings to survive. In a farming town full of livestock, she chose to go after her classmates. Hmm.
  • In Season 6, Phantom Zone escapee Aldar hunts and devours victims down by the docks. When Clark demands to know why he's doing it, he replies "We all gotta eat!" While he's technically an alien he looks completely human and unlike other escapees isn't simply bodyjacking someone.
• Space: 1999. A Generation Ship that's suffered a long ago catastrophe invites the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha to pool resources and settle on a planet together. But Koenig and Bergman realise the recycling plants don't have the raw materials to work... except the crew are harvesting people from the population (who have devolved into savagery) by convincing them via God Guise to give up human sacrifices.
• Discussed, but averted in The Stand (1994). Lloyd considers eating the dead guy in the next cell and drags his leg close enough to do so, but then Flagg breaks him out. This deviates from the book, where this trope is not at all averted.
• On Star Trek: Discovery, it's mentioned by the Klingons that they ate Captain Georgiou's body. Given that they were marooned in a disabled starship for six months and had run out of supplies and starving to death, it's possible it's not something they'd normally do but had no issue with it in a survival situation.
• Strangers From Hell: Everyone at Eden Studio are cannibals. Ms. Eom butchers their victims' bodies for them to eat. Moon-jo tricks Jong-woo and Seok-yoon into eating it too, and sarcastically admits what it is.
• Supernatural:
  • In "My Bloody Valentine," a man and woman on a date really, really want each other, so much so they go from kissing to devouring each other alive. The woman's roommate says that when she found them, the man, while dying, was "still chewing." It turns out that they are driven to this by the presence of Famine, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
  • Wendigos were humans who became monsters by succumbing to cannibalism.
• Taboo: We're not quite sure if James is actually a cannibal, but the rumors coming out of his time in Africa certainly raise the possibility. Pettyfer, Thorne, Zilpha, and Atticus all make references to James's supposed cannibalism, and one of the hallmarks of James's kills is taking the heart or internal organs of his victims, which he may or may not eat. In a scene with Atticus, James also refuses to eat pork, which is historically connected with cannibalism (i.e. "The Secret of Long Pork Pies").
• Tales from the Crypt:
  • In the episode "What's Cookin'?", the owners of a failing steakhouse encounter a stranger who promises he can turn their business around. He does this by (unknown to them) serving up human meat on the menu. They fail to keep the local police chief from finding out, but since he and they have now developed a taste for human flesh, they simply kill and eat the drifter.
  • Another episode, "The Assassin", revolves around three CIA agents bursting into the home of a woman whose husband is believed to be a renegade assassin. She reveals that she is the assassin, and has gone to rather more drastic lengths to disguise herself than they thought. The episode ends with her revealing herself, killing the agents, and serving the remains to her husband.
• In Tim & Eric's Bedtime Stories a doctor that performs toe removals is revealed to have been eating them.
• The Torchwood episode "Countrycide" is The Hills Have Eyes WITH FAT WELSHMEN!. Made even creepier near the end when the team, and the viewer, realize that, unlike normal Torchwood episodes, there is nothing science-fictiony going on at all. They're just perfectly normal humans... for a given value of "perfectly normal", in any case.
• In one episode of True Blood, Maryann, the evil goddess in disguise, cuts up a human heart, makes it into souffle, which she then gives to Tara and Eggs. They proclaim it to be unbelievably delicious.
• The Walking Dead (2010): The inhabitants of Terminus turn out to be cannibals, luring people with the false promise of sanctuary in order to kill and eat them.
• A literal Cannibal Clan abduct Virgil and Gabrielle in an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess.
• The X-Files: In the episode "Our Town", Mulder and Scully investigate a cannibal cult that has developed the disease Kuru from eating human brains.
• Yellowjackets is about a girls' soccer team who is forced to survive in the woods of Canada for 19 months after the private plane carrying them to the U.S. nationals crashes. While never said directly, the first episode makes it very clear that at least one of the initial survivors of the plane crash was cooked and eaten by her teammates. Publicity materials directly confirm it.

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