Cannibal movies
Cannibal horror is the one that stops being about a monster almost immediately. Whoever is doing the eating has a culture, a household, and usually a set of rules, and the film's real subject is what the visitors think of them and what that judgment is worth.
The American strand came first. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre put a household at the centre of it in 1974, though its cannibalism is implied rather than shown, and The Hills Have Eyes made the family's appetite explicit three years later.
The Italian jungle cycle overlapped rather than followed, and Cannibal Holocaust is its notorious end point: prosecuted in Italy, banned in more than fifty countries, and still difficult for reasons that have nothing to do with the fiction, since the animal killings in it are real. The recent films are quieter and more interested in appetite as a condition, which is what Raw and Bones and All are both about, while Bone Tomahawk goes the other way and gives its cave-dwelling clan no language at all.
Notable cannibal movies
If you only ever watch a handful of these, make it these.
New cannibal movies
Not a large field, and the recent entries tend toward the intimate rather than the expedition.
You can find these and every other cannibal movie in our database. And if you want to keep track of the ones you have seen and the ones you are saving for later, start a profile and log them as you go.