We Eat Our Own is a 2016 thriller by American author Kea Wilson.
In the year 1979, an American actor, sick of only getting small parts in student films and artsy touring troupes, finally gets the role of a lifetime: a leading role in an arthouse horror film, to be filmed on location in the Amazon rainforest. Our hero, known only to us as "Richard" (the name of his character in the film), has no idea what actually happens in the film or what his character's motivations are. Nor does he know that the director, Ugo Velluto, is willing to do anything to make his film more "raw", at the expense of his crew's safety and sanity. And nobody, not even Ugo, knows about the cartels and guerrillas operating in and around the shooting location. The result? An absolute nightmare for all involved.
The story may sound familiar to horror fans, and that's because it's a Roman à Clef about the making of Cannibal Holocaust. Velluto is a stand-in for Ruggerto Deodato, Richard for Carl Gabriel Yorke, and so on. Real incidents that occurred on the set of Cannibal Holocaust are depicted in this novel, in addition to some perils from Wilson's imagination.
We Eat Our Own contains the following:
- Animal Metaphor: Teo is associated with an anaconda. He's a slimy, sexual predator who has already raped an underage girl and is currently harassing the teenage Anahi. Anahi, meanwhile, is represented by an unspecified prey animal. She is surrounded by predators, not just Teo but also the cartel men, much as a prey animal is constantly in danger out in the jungle. Both metaphors become explicit when Teo is walking in the jungle, sees an anaconda eating some kind of terrified animal, and is immediately reminded of Anahi when he looks into the prey's eye.
- Bland-Name Product: Jungle Bloodbath, the film the characters are making, is almost identical to Cannibal Holocaust. Both are found-footage horror films, shot on location in the Columbian Amazon, that involve a group of journalists committing atrocities against the natives for the sake of getting cool footage. Both feature gratuitous rape scenes, unsimulated animal killings, and an eerie synth soundtrack. Both even end on the same line ("I wonder who the real cannibals are?").
- Hungry Jungle: The film Ugo is making, Jungle Bloodbath, has this premise, in which a film crew must save a young girl from cannibals, encountering various dangers as they go. Ugo's crew encounter danger, as well, but it's not int he form of traditional jungle horrors like cannibals or large animals. Rather, it's microorganisms (like the parasites that cause malaria and elephantiasis) and guerrillas that prove to be the most deadly.
- In addition to the dog scene, the book also says that the characters kill turtles and monkeys for the film, and one of the prop designers buys and kills a pig to make edible fake corpses from. Cannibal Holocaust really killed two squirrel monkeys, a turtle, and (as mentioned above) a pig.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: The last scene that the characters film is Richard's rape of Victoria, a teenage character played by Anahi. Ugo feels that the film doesn't have enough sex in it, and decides to add a rape scene because, in the narrator's words, "the audience will already hate the film crew for what they've done, but a rape-a rape will make them want to cheer when they die. A rape will make the film infamous". Nobody on set (except Teo, one of her harassers) knows that Anahi herself is a victim of sexual harassment who narrowly avoided being raped by a cartel man earlier, and is essentially reliving that for the camera now.
- Shown Their Work:
Believe it or not, many of the incidents described in the book really happened during the filming of Cannibal Holocaust.- The scene when Richard refuses to kill a dog and subsequently flubs his monologue actually happened, except in real life, the animal in question was a pig.
- Near the end, Ugo considers killing off a character by having piranhas eat him, but decides against it because using an underwater camera wouldn't make sense in a found-footage film, and you can barely see any action when filming from the land. A piranha scene was planned
for Cannibal Holocaust, but ultimately scrapped because the underwater camera malfunctioned and the fish were too hard to control. - Irena flirts with Richard and tries to sleep with him to prepare for their love scene. Richard kisses her, but because he has a girlfriend at home, he can't bring himself to go farther. Francesca Ciardi wanted to have sex with Carl Gabriel Yorke in preparation for the Cannibal Holocaust sex scene, but he declined, as he had a girlfriend at home and felt guilty about it (Ciardi nonetheless still claimed years later that they really did it).
- Both Richard and Yorke only got their roles because they both wore size 10 1/2 shoes; in both cases, the original actor for the role dropped out, but his wardrobe had already been bought and thus the replacement actor had to fit the clothes.
- Skewed Priorities: Ugo, like the real life Ruggerto Deodato, is so committed to his artistic sensibilities that he allows himself to be tried for murder for almost a year before his lawyer finally convinces him to give a straight answer and produce the actors. Additionally, the major reason the trial even went forward is that one of the props masters gets set on fire during a stunt gone wrong, and the Ugo films everything rather than even try to help.
- Snakes Are Sexy: Sexual predator Teo flirts with Anahi by asking her how long anacondas get, and pretends to be attacked by one when she loses interest. As said in Animal Metaphor above, he is associated with snakes-a classic phallic symbol-and has no problem hurting people for his sexual gratification, only feeling challenged when he meets the flirtatious and sexually confident Irena.
- What You Are in the Dark: At the climax of the novel, as Ugo, Richard, and Irena are alone in the jungle, shooting a love scene, Juan Carlos, the young guerrilla from earlier, holds a knife to Irena's throat and threatens to kill them all. It is at this point that Ugo and Richard prove who they really are:
- Ugo has been the main antagonist until now; not only is he a crazy perfectionist who forces actors to repeat takes over and over, but he also okays the killing of real animals for attention and does not show any concern for his crew's safety, even when a prop designer literally goes on fire. And yet, when Juan Carlos attacks the trio, Ugo doesn't get violent; instead, he kneels to the ground, hands in the air, and tries to calmly talk him out of killing them. After Juan Carlos is killed, Ugo is opposed to just leaving the body in the jungle, because, in Ugo's words, "He's a human being. He's someone to somebody, he must be."
- Richard is The Everyman, an actor who came here for the job and a cool experience, who had no idea how hellish that experience would actually be. He pukes upon seeing a scene where another actor's prop leg is cut off, refuses to kill a dog for the film, and is pretty squeamish about living in the insect-infested jungle. This makes it all the more shocking when he severs Juan Carlos' leg tendon with a machete, forcing Ugo to Mercy Kill the young man. When Ugo insists against leaving the corpse behind, with the aforementioned "he's someone to somebody" plea, Richard coldly responds, "But is he someone anybody will miss?"
