The Italian horror master, best known for the highly controversial ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, has died at the age of 83.
Italian director Ruggero Deodato has died at the age of 83, several Italian press titles announced on Thursday. This prolific filmmaker made a name for himself in the late 1970s thanks to a series of horror films with extreme and realistic images, including Cannibal Holocaust is undoubtedly the best known.
Born in 1939 in the Italian city of Potenza, Ruggero Deodato cut his teeth in the early 1960s as an assistant director to master Roberto Rossellini, as reported by the Spanish newspaper The Diarioas well as with Sergio Corbucci for the spaghetti western Django.
He began his directing career with comedies and thrillers, according to He Post, before directing series and commercials for Italian television. But it is by heading towards horror that he really makes himself known. And more precisely towards cannibalism, to which he will devote three films called the “cannibal trilogy”: The Last Cannibal World in 1977, Amazonia: the white jungle in 1985… and, in between, Cannibal Holocaust.
gore and pioneer
This film follows an academic and his two guides as they venture into the Amazon rainforest in search of a missing team of American reporters. Their objective was to make a documentary on cannibalistic indigenous populations.
Cannibal Holocaust is considered a pioneering film: years before the successes of Blair witch projectof REC or even of Paranormal Activityhe used the spring of the “found-footage”, when a feature film is presented as authentic images, filmed by the protagonists, and found later on the scene of a tragedy.
But it is also its scenes of extreme violence mixing rape, torture, murder, castration and, as the title indicates, cannibalism that have allowed the film to go down in history. the Guardian reports that the realism of the images led Ruggero Deodato to Italian justice suspected of having really killed his actors, which he denied by bringing one of them to court.
Censorship and condemnation
Some scenes of animal abuse, on the other hand, were not simulated. According to Releasethey cost the filmmaker a four-month suspended prison sentence:
“If I could go back, I would avoid animal murders,” Ruggero Deodato told the BBC in 2011. “I paid a heavy price for that, including losing the fun of bringing ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ to UK audiences.”
Because the film was banned in forty countries, including the United Kingdom until 2001.
Influence on Hollywood
Other feature films, often horrific, will follow: The house at the end of the park, Body Count, The little scoundrels, Mortal Vortice… The last of them, Ballad in Blooddates from 2016. The director has also occasionally worked as an actor.
Many Italian media talk about Ruggero Deodato’s influence on big Hollywood names, including Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino. In 2007, when the latter produced the film Hostel, Chapter II by director Eli Roth, the two filmmakers entrust a small role to Ruggero Deodato: that of an Italian cannibal.
