October 16th, 2013 
Tyler Osborne 
Of all the holidays celebrated worldwide, no single day is more loved by the UTG staff than Halloween. With the arrival of October, the time has finally come to begin rolling out a plethora of features and special announcements we have prepared in celebration of our favorite day, including the one you’re about to read.
31 Days Of Halloween is a recurring daily feature that will run throughout the month of October. The hope and goal of this column is to supply every UTG reader with a daily horror (or Halloween themed) movie recommendation that is guaranteed to amplify your All Hallows’ Eve festivities. We’ll be watching every film the day it’s featured, and we hope you’ll follow along at home. If you have a suggestion, contact us and we may include your favorite scarefest in an upcoming column!
Day 16: Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
In the 1980s, Italian director Ruggero Deodato created one of the most notorious and highly censored films in horror history: Cannibal Holocaust. With a name like that, it’s pretty easy to surmise what you’re getting into: a group of film students go over to the Amazon to film cannibal tribes, but eventually get “lost.” The film canisters from their expedition are found, and are played out on screen in the found footage format. I have a pretty high threshold for gore and depravity on screen. I’ve seen a lot, been grossed out by a bunch, never once have I ever consciously turned off a film because it was too much, but Cannibal Holocaust was frankly the first time I just couldn’t stomach it. Maybe my roommate at the time and I weren’t in the right frame of mind to watch extremely brutal and graphic adultery punishment rituals, or knowing beforehand that a large majority of the animals getting killed on screen were actually being butchered in real life, but when I say Cannibal Holocaust is not for the weak of heart, I damn well mean it. That phrase gets overused, and it’s usually used to describe movies that are normal to higher levels of scary, but Cannibal Holocaust is hard to handle, and isn’t just for your typical horror fan. Call this week exclusive, but this week is for the film viewer that either feels like they’ve seen it all, or simply wants to push where their threshold really is.
To put things in perspective, immediately after Cannibal Holocaust was screened in Italy, the police arrested Deodato under the allegations of obscenity, because it was thought that the director made a snuff film (a film where people dying on screen actually died in real life, not just pretend). Luckily he didn’t, but the film nevertheless remains highly intense. All of this hyping of intensity aside, Cannibal Holocaust is considered one of the first found footage horror films, and as such, it’s entirely important in a horror genre that is genuinely over-saturated with really terrible found footage films. This film is also considered the ultimate Italian cannibal film, and for good reason. To this day, Cannibal Holocaust remains the black mark on my horror watching career- the film that got away, the film that I turned off. Are there other films that are more intense than this one? Maybe. I guess that has to do with your interpretation of intensity, or what you can handle. I would never suggest to any normal person to watch this film, and while I know I am basically mirroring years of hype and notoriety, the fact still remains and for good reason: Cannibal Holocaust is one of the most gruesome, hard to watch, but originally realistic films in the horror genre, and any fan who wants to test themselves, this is the movie you need to sit down and watch this Halloween season.
Editorial written by: Tyler Osborne — Follow him on Twitter
Last year’s Day 16 film: The Shining
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