Cannibal Clan

Does this taste funny to you?

On Sundays, your household dined with the curtains closed. Candles lit plates piled with red meat. It was not fish. It was not chicken. It was not pork. It was not beef.

— Sunday Dinners facet, Sunless Skies

One way to build family togetherness is to dine together on a routine basis. This is especially true when non-family are likely to end up as the main course for dinner. It becomes very important that everyone understands you are part of the family.

There is an old saying: A family that plays together stays together. The cannibal clan does both. They play with their food.

This horror trope can be traced back in Western storytelling at least to the 16th century. There are widespread stories, perhaps only myths, of the cannibal Sawney Bean clan in Scotland. Whether or not they existed doesn't matter much to us here. What's interesting about the stories is that all the elements of modern horror tales about families of cannibals are present in Sawney Bean Clan stories: inbreeding, pickled people-parts on shelves in the home, hunting forays where the hunters toy with the prey mercilessly, stranded travelers being lured in by offers of wayside assistance, all taking place in remote, desolate locations.

Unlike the Cannibal Tribe, who are Hollywood Natives eating people because that's their weird and foreign culture, the Cannibal Clan will usually represent an intranational, rather than international, cultural split. The classic Cannibal Clan will be deranged hicks terrorizing the City Mouse protagonists. They don't exist on the dark corners of the map where there be dragons, but in isolated pockets of savagery in the heart of what's supposed to be civilization.

Compare The Family That Slays Together. Also see Cannibal Larder, which these characters often keep. Contrast High-Class Cannibal where it's practiced by society's elite rather than the dregs.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Radiant: The Mesnie is a family of sorcerers that eat other sorcerers with useful infections to gain advantageous abilities and slow their aging.

Comic Books

• French comic series Les Crannibales plays it for funny. Target audience is 8-15.
• The Eaters, a Vertigo Visions one-shot written by Peter Milligan, centered on a wholesome family of cannibals.
• The Scottish comic Electric Soup plays up the Sawney Bean legend for laughs.
• An all-female, all-obese cannibal clan called the Blimps appeared in Judge Dredd on one occasion.
• In the Wolverine Bad Future storyline Old Man Logan, the west coast is ruled by a Face–Heel Turned Bruce Banner and the Banner Gang, the offspring of Bruce and Jennifer Walters. They routinely eat their foes, which backfires in the end, when Bruce eats Logan and later gets ripped apart from the inside.
• The furry family in Plush. Multiple children, all kidnapped/rescued from their family situations, are brought up under the watch of a patriarch who believes in ritualistically eating flesh. Somewhere along the line, fursuits got involved, and now they hunt for prey at conventions in the area to kill and eat attendees in souped-up battle suits.
• In Preacher, Herr Starr loses a leg to a family of cannibals.
• The Strontium Dog spin-off Young Middenface has the story "Brigadoom," a parody of the musical Brigadoon but with a twist: The mystical village of Brigadoom is made up of cannibals led by Sawney Bean, who happen to break into song for no reason.
• The Walking Dead has a group of survivors who resorted to cannibalism to survive. They're Affably Evil, and insistent that they only hunt people because they suck at hunting animals. It's revealed that they ate their own children first.
• Zombo: At least one Death World is inhabited by an inbred cannibal tribe.

Fan Works

• In The Lion King Adventures, the Scavengers are lionesses who delight in eating their own kind. It's a biological thing, though. They must eat their own to survive.

Film — Animated

• Isle of Dogs has Duke hearing a rumor about a cannibal pack of dogs living on the island. When they meet the cannibal dogs, though, their leader Gondo reveals that they only ate one dog (their former pack leader, who had gone comatose from starvation) due to not being able to help him, and Gondo is ashamed to have done it in the first place.

Film — Live-Action

• The feral children in Beware! Children at Play.
• These kinds of people are quite common to the inhabitants of the world of the The Book of Eli, even to the extent of people being able to tell that they are cannibals due to a quivering in their hands.
• The diary from The Cabin in the Woods implies that the Buckners fit this trope, although their crimes were more centered on torturing people and one another than on what use they made of the corpses afterward.
• Death Line features a cannibal clan hiding in the London subway system, the result of an 19th-century dig accident trapping a bunch of male and female workers in the tunnel system. By the time of the events in the film, there are only two exceedingly sickly, barely human descendants remaining.
• Dying Breed concerns itself with the fictional descendants of the historical cannibal convict Alexander 'The Pieman' Pearce. During the early days of the penal colony in Van Diemen's Land (what is now Tasmania), Pearce escaped into the bush and survived by killing and eating his friends.
• Elfie Hopkins: Cannibal Hunter features a Cannibal Clan who happen to move next door to an Amateur Sleuth.
• The bad guys in Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain are an incestuous clan of cannibals (supposedly descended from Sawney Beane) living in an abandoned copper mine.
• The premise of The Farm. A traveler couple gets kidnapped and trying to escape from a family of cannibals who run a farm and a diner. Let's just say the "animals" there would make you vomit.
• The Crane family in Fresh Meat. The father Hemi is a professor of religion who is obsessed with resurrecting a Maori cult dedicated to cannibalism.
• The Hills Have Eyes (2006): Inbreeding and nuclear radiation exposure. You can see why they don't eat each other. Nobody is going to eat something that looks like that.
  • In the original film there was no indication of inbreeding, and the radioactive aspect was only subtly hinted at; when you cast Michael Berryman as one of them, it goes a bit past implications. Regardless, they're still a family unit of thieves, rapists, killers, and cannibals.
• Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses — The clan looks more human. The inbreeding shows up in the utter dementia.
• The Angel Family in Judge Dredd. In addition to being pirates, murderers, scavengers and scumbags.
  Herman: I'm free, and you're toast!
  Dredd: Actually, you're toast. I forgot to mention it: your new friends...they're cannibals.
• Donna Dixon's character in Lucky Stiffs is a member of a Cannibal Clan. She invites a man home for Christmas dinner, for which he will be the main course.
• Nite Tales: The Movie: In "Karma", the bank robbers fall into the clutches of a hillbilly family of cannibals.
• Parents, while it subverts most of the elements of this trope by making its Cannibal Clan outwardly civilized and normal, gets bonus points for creepiness because it's told from the POV of a little kid. Who's just starting to figure out there's something strange about those leftovers his folks have been serving him for his entire life...
• The Road: In the post-apocalyptic future where food has become scarce, most of humanity has resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. There are many groups of people who form a clan and abduct people, lock them in their basement and then slaughter them when they want to eat them.
• The main antagonists of Sawney: Flesh of Man are a clan of Scottish man-eaters motivated by a literalist interpretation of Christian communion rites.
• The cannibal Reavers from Firefly and Serenity drew a heavy amount of inspiration from the Sawney Bean clan in general, and engaged in much the same practice of wearing the skins of their victims. They probably didn't engage in much inbreeding as it's been only twelve years since they were first created by the Pax on Miranda.
• The Merrye family from Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told is an Unbuilt Trope early example: the incest and isolation are there, but the Merryes' cannibalistic tendencies arise as an end-stage symptom of a progressive and hereditary brain disorder that reduces them to a bestial state, not willful maliciousness or twisted clan "custom".
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: One of the fun things about the Sawney Bean clan was their rumored practice of wearing the skins of their victims to make masks from their faces.
• The Mexican film We Are What We Are is all about a working-class family in Mexico City dealing with the death of their patriarch... which is a problem, as they're a cannibal cult and not only was Daddy the high priest, he "brought home the bacon." So it falls to the eldest son to learn the rituals and obtain a good source of food. The remake, which is actually linked in the above entry, has similar themes.
• Wrong Turn: Heavy emphasis here on the cannibalism, with inbreeding just sort of being acknowledged by the fact that the clan folk are severely disfigured. "Fugly" might be a good adjective.

Folklore

• As noted in the introduction, many of these stories draw inspiration from the legend of Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean and his clan.
  • There's quite a few stories like this in English folklore, with said families usually located along the coast or in cave systems used for smuggling. The reader can decide for themselves why local residents might spread stories about insanely murderous cannibals to curious visitors.

Literature

• In And the Ass Saw the Angel, the protagonist's father is a defector from such a clan. Rather than killing and eating people, he now simply tortures animals, and eventually stabs his wife to death.
• In one of the new Judge Dee stories, the judge faces such a clan terrorizing the region.
• He Who Fights With Monsters: Jason's first encounter with people in the new world are a bunch of cannibals who everybody else thought were just another family of rich nobles with an out of the way vacation home. It's noted several times that even for this extremely dangerous world, that's pretty weird.
• Sawney Bean is discussed in Neil Gaiman's short story "Monarch of the Glen".
• The Jack Ketchum novels Off Season and Offspring have an inbred cannibal family stalking and killing people that they think are trespassing on "their territory".
• "Olalla" is a rare posh instance of this trope, about a dying family of nobility who it is implied have suffered from bad breeding, causing them to develop some odd habits.
• H. P. Lovecraft:
  • In "The Lurking Fear", the monsters terrorizing the town turn out to be descendants of a cannibalistic family who have devolved into subhuman creatures by generations of inbreeding and living underground.
  • In "The Rats in the Walls", the protagonist's family had not only practiced cannibalism in the past but also raised people like cattle for millennia. This caused their ancestral home to be cursed.
• In Redwall, most reptiles and amphibians, especially lizards and frogs, fall into the Cannibal Tribe territory. The adder triplets from Triss however, are a clear example of a Cannibal Clan, living alone in a hidden lair in the middle of the woods and emerging at night to feed on other sentient beings.
• In Spellsinger, Cannibal Clans show up as Wacky Wayside Tribe type antagonists roughly once per adventure, with so many appearing in Time of the Transference that even the characters started to complain about the monotony of encountering so many.
• David Drake's short stories of Roman legionary Vettius and his merchant friend Dama, collected in Vettius And His Friends, include a horrific tale of Vettius's group of travelers taking an overgrown road as a short cut and being ambushed by a horde of savage bandits, both men and women. On reaching safety, Vettius stops at an inn to report the attack and summon help. The innkeeper promptly informs him that the local Governor knows all about the bandits: an extended family of bandits who preyed on that stretch of road for years, destroying caravans and killing and eating their captives. The previous Governor wiped them out fifty years ago — but the stretch of road involved had to be blocked off because the bandits are still there.

Live-Action TV

• Angel:
  • In the episode "Bachelor Party", Doyle finds himself on the menu for a family of demons (quite Affably Evil) whose traditions state that it's proper to eat the bride's ex-husband's brain for dinner at the bachelor party.
  • In the episode "Unleashed", a group of diners have a particular taste — virgin werewolf, as in the flesh of a werewolf during his or her first transformation cycle. Angel and friends save the girl who came to them earlier for help, but when she bites The Mole, they leave him for the group's next monthly meal.
• Channel Zero: The main antagonists of the Butcher's Block season are the Peach family, who abduct people from their home city's Butcher's Block neighborhood and eat them.
• In the Farscape episode "Eat Me", the Mad Scientist Kaarvok has managed to create a cannibal clan out of the Peacekeepers assigned to guard him through judicious use of his handheld cloning machine: after twenty or thirty clonings each, all of them are incurably insane and all too happy to accept Kaarvok as the de facto head of the "family". Unlike most clans, though, these ones are quite happy to feed on each other if the need arises; even Kaarvok can't quite tell the difference between food and family.
• Invoked on Justified when Raylan barges into the home where Wendy and Kendall Crowe are staying with the excuse that he has to make sure the man they're renting from is still alive and not "knowing your family, stewing in a pot." The reality is that the Crowes are not cannibals...though they are involved in every other form of criminal activity known to man.
• Lexx: In "White Trash", the Golleans, a family of incestuous cannibal rednecks, stow away on the Lexx.
• The Supernatural episode "The Benders" is about a family of Serial Killers who call on a lot of the associated tropes. Whether they're actually cannibals is left ambiguous. It's based on the real case of the "Bloody Benders", and it's one of the few episodes of Supernatural in which nothing supernatural happens.
• The Torchwood episode "Countrycide" is an unusually gruesome treatment of the concept for British TV. Much to the main characters' horror, there's nothing supernatural or extraterrestrial about them.
• The X-Files:
  • The emphasis in "Home" is on the inbreeding, with the cannibalism just sort of a side-note.
  • This is a major focus in "Our Town" (no, not that Our Town).

Music

• The song "Sawney Beane Clan" by the Real McKenzies warns the listener about the savage and dangerous family, but ends by saying they'll be caught and executed by the forces of the Queen ^note probably Artistic License – History, since at the time Sawney Bean supposedly lived, Scotland was under the rule of James VI.
• London neofolk band Sol Invictus also dedicated a piece to Sawney Bean's story on their 1990 album "Trees in Winter".

Tabletop Games

• The Call of Cthulhu supplement Blood Brothers had a series of one-shot adventures designed to simulate various genres of horror movie. One scenario featured in Blood Brothers 2 - called "Simply Red" - featured a normal suburban family running afoul of an Inbred and Evil pair of cannibals similar to The Hills Have Eyes (1977).
• New World of Darkness:
  • The Mage: The Awakening Sourcebook Boston Unveiled features the Red Word cult, a cult of cannibals made up largely of families dotted across rural New England (including a coastal town where all of the people are cannibals and members of the Red Word, which is also home to their temple) who believe that eating people causes that person to become erased from reality (which happens in the aforementioned temple) so that an Eldritch Abomination embodying a horrific alternate timeline can overtake existence. Many of the members suffer from the Hunger, a degenerative curse/disease that causes those affected to become increasingly feral and uncontrollably devour human flesh. It's also noted that many members of the Red Word (especially in the town of Howard's Rock) are forced to join out of fear of what their family will do to them if they don't.
  • Hunter: The Vigil supplement Slasher mentions Freaks and Mutants, who both have a strong inclination toward cannibalism, and are the most likely slashers to live in groups and families.
• Pathfinder: Ogres and their half-breed spawn, the ogrekin, fill this role in the game, with their love of inbreeding, cannibal tendencies, and penchant for sadism all lifted from The Hills Have Eyes and other similar works.
• One published adventure for the hard science fiction horror game Shadows Over Sol has players discover that the caretakers of a mothballed space station, and their children, are supplementing their diet of canned food by killing and eating the occasional visitors.
• In Vampire: The Masquerade, the Giovanni clan began its existence as a wealthy and decadent merchant house, the members of whom had long since turned to incest, necrophilia and black magic to amuse themselves. In and of themselves, though, they didn't meet the criteria of this trope, at least not until they encountered the Dunsirn, a Scottish family of wealthy bankers, who DID fit it. Upon discovering them, they did the only natural thing at that point: Made them part of their family.
• In Warhammer, the Ghouls from the Vampire Counts' army are like a race of Cannibal Clans: twisted, inbred, swamp- and tomb-dwelling cannibals. In earlier versions of the army, they were actually alive (in contrast to EVERYTHING else in the army, which is undead) and served the Vampires by choice, with rules to reflect this. While the backstory in newer versions of the army still refers to them as being alive, they function the same as any other unit, with a Hand Wave for why they act like undead.

Video Games

• In Digital Devil Saga, you arguably play as one of these. The Embryon is very close. The game cleverly dresses up the issue through its primary mechanic: the protagonists (and everyone else) are given the power of Atma, allowing them to transform into powerful incarnations of mythological figures (hence the full Japanese title Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner), with the cost being that they must regularly devour others in order to stay sane (or else transform into a mindless monster). In-story, it's played for tragedy and pathos. In-game, devouring enemies (always in monster form) as an inevitable result of battle actually rewards you with Atma points that allow you purchase new abilities - some of which allow you to instantly devour foes during battle for bonus Atma points.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3 has several: The trope is played straight by the residents of Andale, but a less conventional example is the Family, a group of people suffering from some form of cannibalism-inducing psychological disorder who started acting like vampires in order to keep their hunger in check. The "Point Lookout" DLC also introduces the "Swampfolk"; several new enemy classes (Scrapper, Creeper, Brawler, Tracker, Bruiser) made up of grotesquely deformed cannibal hillbillies, the result of two hundred plus years of inbreeding and radiation contamination.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, the White Glove Society used to be this back in the days when they were a savage tribe, before Mr. House reformed them. A few members have "regressed" back to the old ways, though, and the Courier has the option of either stopping them or allowing the Society to follow their lead.
• In the videogame of Megaman Sprite Game, at some point of the game the heroes get captured by a tribe of Slashman who plan on eating them. Zero escapes from the cage he is in, and if he is discovered by a Slashman, he will say he is not ready for dinner yet and will send Zero back to the cage.
• Rebuild: Gangs Of Deadsville has the Pig Farmers. They start off as a reasonably friendly, if somewhat gruff, group of farmers who are happy to sell food to your faction. Spend some time getting cozy with them, though, and you find out that they ran out of pigs a long time ago.
• Red Dead Redemption II has three villainous factions who invoke this trope. Unlike the conventional banditry of the O'Driscoll Boys and the Del Lobo Gang, or the politically-motivated crimes of the Lemoyne Raiders, they seem more like bands of serial killers. It's unclear whether any actual cannibalism occurs, but they both tick off enough boxes, and leave enough body parts strewn around, that most players assume they're probably cannibals.
  • The Night Folk (sometimes spelled "Nite Folk") are a band of murderous crazies who lurk in the swamps of Lemoyne, using primitive weaponry and never speaking. They like leaving their victims hanging from trees, sometimes dismembered, and often leave occult-looking markings around.
  • The Murfree Brood are a more Hillbilly Horrors version of this trope, roaming through the Appalachia-like region of Roanoke Ridge, and they mostly live in a big cave in the hills. While capable of speech, they're portrayed as savage and animalistic, and are only slightly more sophisticated than the Night Folk. They're also highly inbred.
  • The Skinner Brothers Gang also lean into the Hillbilly Horrors angle, though they're a lot smarter and more dangerous (though apparently less inbred) than the Murfrees. They don't show up until very late in the game, in the more Sierra Nevada-like region of Tall Trees.
• Resident Evil 7: Biohazard has the Baker family, who capture protagonist Ethan and attempt to feed him dinner in a Shout-Out to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Also, they are nigh-immortal due to having a regenerative factor from whatever's infected them.
• The Walking Dead (Telltale) has the St. John family, consisting of Brenda St. John and her sons Andy and Danny. They invite Lee and the group around their farm, supposedly to swap food for gas, and eventually trick the group into thinking they could stay in their safe and well fortified home for good. Lee and Kenny begin to have doubts about their trustworthiness after Andy and Danny's increasingly suspicious behaviour, and Lee eventually discovers a bloody slaughter room supposedly used for the farm's cows. Despite this, their starvation causes them to accept a meal from the family after they invite them to dinner. As you may guess, the 'BBQ dinner' they offer is actually human flesh; namely, the legs of your friend Mark. If you're not quick enough, Clementine eats some. After Lee discovers and confronts the St. Johns on the truth, Brenda reveals their plan to slowly kill off and eat the rest of the group - they've killed and eaten humans before, and apparently traded some of the flesh to bandits for protection.

Web Animation

• Helluva Boss: In "Murder Family" a seemingly wholesome family turn out to be Satan-worshipping cannibals who decorate their kids' playroom with the skins of their victims.

Western Animation

• In Dinosaur Adventure, some of the survivors of a volcanic eruption have resorted to eating other dinos. The leader claims that they get stronger every day because of this.

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