Hacker Cinema
Cannibal Holocaust
1980 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Ruggero Deodato
A New York University professor returns from a rescue mission to the Amazon rainforest with the footage shot by a lost team of documentarians who were making a film about the area's local cannibal tribes.
4 positive5 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
Like the 1980 movie Cannibal Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibal_Holocaust
The issue isn't sample size (nor many of the other things people are pointing out).
First off we're ultimately talking about ordinal data here and even the Evan Miller post in another comment misses that ordinal data is fundamentally tricky. Everyone is talking about the p("most loved") but that makes assumptions that "most loved" has a consistent meaning.
The problem with ordinal data is that the only thing that's known about it is an ordering of the values, but the distance between values is undefined. That is the difference between a 5 star and a 4 star review is not necessarily that same a between a 2 and 1 star review. This means that you can't meaningfully average these.
However there is an even bigger problem, which is what I think parent is feeling here, and that is selection bias. It's very hard to compare the average rating of a film such as Star Wars and a film like Cannibal Holocaust. The first is a general audience film and the later is an extremely niche subset of gore horror. If you show Cannibal Holocaust to the general population it will receive wildly lower rating than Star Wars. However if you were to do a survey of all people who have a DVD of Star Wars and a DVD of Cannibal Holocaust, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Cannibal Holocaust was more loved. There are plenty of people that have Star Wars on their shelf and feel 'meh' about it, but almost no one who owns Cannibal Holocaust on DVD that doesn't feel like it is an essential horror classic.
The annoying truth is, there's really no statistical way to solve this. There are some solutions to better modeling ordinal data (you could for example, transform this problem into an ordinal regression problem). But ultimately "loved" is not really a measurable thing, so we're always looking for imperfect proxies.
Human ethics are tricky :-)
There's a lot more at play than just killing vs not killing. Some types of killing may be acceptable, and some may not. For example meat-eaters, which as you pointed, effectively kill animals, may disagree with other ways of killing - for example movies production or fur coats.
The most interesting case I've heard about this subject is in the movie Cannibal Holocaust. Among the other animals, two monkeys have been killed for script purposes, however, they have been eaten afterwards. Which are the ethics of this killing? There's no absolute answer¹
¹=I'm not implying, just exposing.
I watched Cannibal Holocaust not long ago. Actually a pretty good movie, not dumb. The very first 'found footage' movie apparently. Features anthropologists behaving badly and later being torn apart and eaten by the natives. The director was charged with the actors' murders, but it turned out they'd just signed a deal to disappear for a year after filming. Brilliant marketing I guess.
I mention that because it features an extremely graphic and lengthy sequence of a turtle being killed, shell removed, cut open etc. Very colourful insides, you can almost smell it. I felt sick from that point on.. [I watched the director's cut]
You're right, of course, it DID predate BWP. But it did not inspire a genre. Perhaps because so few people saw Cannibal Holocaust when it first released? It was a film that gained an audience gradually, on video for many years after it came out.
Parent comment doesn't say that BW was the first, just that it inspired a bunch of movies. Which is far more true of it than Cannibal Holocaust.
Cannibal Holocaust was probably the first "found footage" horror film and predates Blair Witch Project by almost 2 decades.
>I would consider something as awful the film Cannibal Holocaust to be fine art before I used that term for some idiotic kickstarted pick up artist book.
Calling Godwin's Law here. Nazis were proud of burning books that were not art.
Two things: One. Freedom of speech is a first amendment right to protect you from censorship by the government and the government only. Anyone, anywhere running their own service is fully within their rights to boot you off.
Two. A sleazy pickup artist book isn't anywhere remotely near any previous works of banned art. I would consider something as awful the film Cannibal Holocaust to be fine art before I used that term for some idiotic kickstarted pick up artist book.