Eat Or Die

Ravenous (1999) Dir. Antonia Bird

Set during the Mexican-American war of the mid 19th Century. At a remote military outpost in California, a stranger arrives who has developed some disturbing appetites.

“It's not courage to resist me, Boyd. It's courage to accept me.” - Colqhoun/Ives

Ravenous had a famously troubled production. The first two directors were fired mid-production (the second - Raja Gosnell - would go on to direct Never Been Kissed instead) amid last minute production changes, budget concerns and a mutiny by the cast. Eventually, Robert Carlyle suggested British director Antonia Bird to take over. She had one week of prep.

Considering all of the behind the scenes drama, it’s astonishing Ravenous turned out the way it did. It’s brilliant. Despite it having a bit of a cult status now, I still think it’s a film that a lot of people slept on or dismissed at the time. It deserves and rewards a re/watch.

Ravenous is a dark, biting satire about Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and capitalism in America. It’s about unfettered greed and a “kill or be killed” mentality that sits rotting at the core of everything. This is a film that very bluntly wants you to connect the American flag atop the military outpost with the bleak, bloody horror that is happening below it.

But it’s also a blackly comic, twisted bit of fun. The score, by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn(!) uses period appropriate instruments that riff on old Methodist hymns. The results are these looping, off-kilter, and sometimes jolly refrains that create an odd tonal balance in the film. You never feel entirely settled or sure about what to think or feel. It’s one of my favourite horror soundtracks.

It’s not a coincidence this is set in California. There’s a reading of the film that is entirely a satire about LA, Hollywood and aspirational immortality. The writer, Ted Griffin, apparently wrote the film as an allegory about Prozac and depression, and you can see that in here too. What Bird does well is to add all of this into the stew and let you take what you want from it. It’s about all of it. It’s about America.

Carlyle is great. He carefully modulates Ives’ gleefully monstrous side with a more measured, “civilised” mask, while fully embracing the homoerotic charge between Ives and Boyd (Guy Pearce) in the scenes of unrestrained seduction. Anti-capitalist allegories can be horny too.

A shout out here for everybody’s favourite Weird Little Guy - Jeremy Davies. Always a delight seeing this man and wondering whether he’s going to go Full Squirrelly.

This film is so much fun and it feels like a miracle that something so idiosyncratic and subversive got to be made by a major studio (with a week of prep!) If you’ve not seen it, you’re in for a treat.

"Ravenous butchers the fantasy that the United States is a banquet with room for everyone at the table. This is a landscape where 'manifest destiny' becomes a handy euphemism for all sorts of horrors, and a reminder that progress was never possible without savagery; the frontier was the Hunger Games, and it always has been. That may not be breaking news, but the film isn't interested in telling you something that you don't know, only showing it to you in a way so giddy and gruesome that you'll never be able to forget it." - David Ehrlich (Rolling Stone)

Where can I watch it in the UK?

You can rent it for £3.49 on YouTube/Google/Amazon/Apple or buy it for £5.99.

Pairs well with

I was going to suggest something like Raw (2017, dir. Julia Ducournau, available to rent for £2.49) or Fresh (2022, dir. Mimi Cave, available to  stream on Disney+) as a couple of great modern cannibal films that use the metaphor to explore very different themes in interesting ways. 

But ultimately, the film I most want to pair this with is Interview With the Vampire (1994, dir. Neil Jordan, available to stream for free on Now). It’s also very 90s, star studded, and is largely about one rich white man trying to seduce another into eating people. Similarly, Interview makes its homoeroticism overt and uses the metaphor of vampirism as a way to explore white men and their deleterious consumption throughout history.

Further Reading

• Hunger Hurts - a great video essay about cannibalism and why we’re obsessed with them by Lola Sebastian.
• The always excellent Faculty of Horror podcast discuss the film here.
• An archived interview with Bird and Carlyle about the making of the film on The Morning Call.
• A great piece - “You Are Who You Eat” - about Ravenous on Bitch Flicks.
• Scaredy Cats digs into the overt homoeroticism of the film in this fun youtube review.
• A clip of Jeremy Davis in Solaris going Full Squirrel.

Other Recommendations

• If you’re in Edinburgh and fancy seeing Wes Craven’s classic A Nightmare on Elm St in a cinema - this screening looks perfect. It’s at 6pm on the 27th October at The Cameo. There’ll be a Q&A after with Kirsty Logan, Rebecca Wojturska and Lighthouse books - discussing queer horror.
• I recommended a specific Ravenous article above, but it’s worth digging into the Bitch Flicks archives. Lots of great writing about horror films that isn’t being written in a daily panic!