⚠️ The following transcript was AI-generated and this initial version is primarily intended to be useful to robotic readers and for SEO. It Definitely Contains ERRORS. (This is our first experiment with this and Blake is working on a much more human-friendly approach.)

Transcript is proceeded by episode summary:

🧠 MonsterTalk S05E02 — Cannibalism

Hosts: Blake Smith & Karen Stollznow
Guest: Dr. Brian Sharpless, author of Monsters on the Couch
Theme: Why humans tell, fear, and sometimes practice stories of cannibalism—from ritual to pathology to pop-culture horror.

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🎬 INTRO

Monster House presents … MonsterTalk.

Blake and Karen open with a reminder that the podcast relies on Patreon support for ad-free listening. A clip from The Shining sets the tone—introducing cannibalism through the legend of the Donner Party. Blake issues a content warning for frank discussion of murder, sexuality, and humanity’s most universal taboo.

The hosts welcome back psychologist Brian Sharpless, returning from the prior year’s “vampires” episode. His new book Monsters on the Couch mixes psychology, myth, and humor—even on grim topics like cannibalism.

“If you can’t put up with people laughing at cannibalism,” Blake jokes, “bite me.”

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🍽️ MAIN INTERVIEW — What Is Cannibalism?

Sharpless defines it as one member of a species consuming the flesh of another of the same species. Blood drinking belongs more to vampirism; hair and nails don’t count.

Historically, anthropologists once argued over whether cannibalism even occurred—some claimed it was a colonial smear. Consensus now: it happened in many times and places for many reasons.

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🔬 Cultural and Pathological Motives

Cannibalism may appear:

• Pathologically, as a paraphilia or symptom of psychosis
• Culturally, through ritual, survival, or funerary practice

Sharpless lists ten motives, later grouped here into major types.

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⚙️ TYPES OF CANNIBALISM

1. Survival Cannibalism

Classic examples: the Donner Party and Andes plane crash survivors depicted in Alive.

2. Benign Cannibalism

Unwitting consumption of human flesh—e.g., soldiers in WW II who were fed mislabeled rations.

3. Exo-Cannibalism

Eating outsiders as punishment or domination, as in exploitation films like Cannibal Holocaust and The Green Inferno.

4. Ritual or Token Cannibalism

Eating a hero or relative to gain their strength or qualities.
Karen adds an Aboriginal legend of Wurruri, whose body parts created new languages when consumed—an example of mythic ritual logic.

5. Medicinal Cannibalism

Europe once sold powdered “mummy flesh” and fat from executed criminals as remedies.
Blake cites his prior episode Cures of the Mummy’s Tomb.
They clarify that in parts of Africa, crimes tied to muti medicine involve mutilation, not eating; body parts are used symbolically in charms, not for consumption.

6. Criminal Cannibalism

Murder paired with eating victims for sexual or practical motives—think Dahmer or Ed Gein.

7. Gastronomic Cannibalism

Eating human flesh for taste preference, rare outside fiction but represented by Hannibal Lecter or Albert Fish.

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🧬 Rituals and Diseases

Sharpless describes the Kuru outbreak among the Fore people of New Guinea. Women and children who practiced funerary cannibalism contracted a fatal prion disease, leading to the discovery of prions—a Nobel-winning insight that also explained mad cow disease.

Even eating animal brains (e.g., squirrel or pig) can transmit similar pathogens.

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🧪 What Do Humans Taste Like?

Reports describe human flesh as sweet or salty, “a meat unlike any other.”
The myth of “long pig” appears exaggerated, though digestion studies show our bodies handle human protein efficiently—a macabre evolutionary irony.

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🎥 Cannibalism in Horror and Pop Culture

• Ravenous (1999) — blends wendigo legend and dark comedy.
• Bone Tomahawk — Kurt Russell Western-horror hybrid.
• The Hills Have Eyes & Texas Chainsaw Massacre — inspired by Ed Gein.
• Cannibal the Musical and Roald Dahl’s Pig show moral twists.

Blake notes Robert A. Burns, the production designer who supplied bone props for Chainsaw Massacre and Hills Have Eyes — a “props to both Bobs” moment.

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💋 Paraphilias and “Vor”

Karen raises vorarephilia—sexual arousal from eating or being eaten.
Sharpless distinguishes hard vor (bloody) and soft vor (cartoonish swallowing).
These fantasies often appear in anime or furry art and overlap with other paraphilias; they only become clinical when causing distress or impairment.

The conversation recalls Germany’s Armin Meiwes, the “Rotenburg Cannibal,” whose consensual killing shocked the world in 2001.

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🧠 Psychology of Criminal Cannibals

Most real cannibals show antisocial personality traits or psychosis.
Some kill to eat; others eat to hide evidence.
Examples:

• Ed Gein — made a “skin suit,” inspiring Silence of the Lambs and Chainsaw Massacre.
• Jeffrey Dahmer — killed for companionship, power, and consumption.

A few forensic cases show no clear diagnosis, but trauma and psychopathy are common threads.

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🏺 Legends of Giants and Cannibals

Sharpless recounts his fascination with Richard Dewhurst’s believer book The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America and its tales of giant skeletons allegedly suppressed by the Smithsonian.
Blake and Karen note that skeptic Jason Colavito has debunked these “double rows of teeth” stories, tracing them to 19th-century newspaper exaggerations and earlier myths of superhuman beings.

Sharpless visited Lovelock Cave in Nevada, tied to Paiute legends of red-haired cannibals called Si-Te-Cah.
Archaeology supports cannibal folklore there but not literal giants—another example of myth evolving through retelling and Bigfoot-era reinterpretation.

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🎞️ Cannibalism in Modern Film

When asked for favorites, Sharpless recommends:

• Bone Tomahawk (2015)
• The Hills Have Eyes (1977 / 2006 remake)
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

He praises their mix of horror, humor, and anthropology.

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🎤 OUTRO

Blake and Karen thank Dr. Sharpless for another lively, gruesomely enlightening conversation.
They plug his book Monsters on the Couch and Karen’s Bitch: Journey of a Word, reminding listeners that affiliate links help support the show.

The episode closes with a callback to 1932’s The Old Dark House and its absurdly polite menace:

“Have a potato.”

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🔍 SEO Notes & Suggested Tags

Primary keywords: MonsterTalk podcast, cannibalism psychology, Brian Sharpless, Monsters on the Couch, cultural anthropology, ritual cannibalism, Kuru disease, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, Lovelock Cave myth, Jason Colavito, double rows of teeth, Muti medicine, Bone Tomahawk, Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

MonsterTalk S05E02 — Cannibalism (Transcript)

Cleaned HTML version with section separators. Dialogue preserved verbatim; timestamps removed upstream.

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MOVIE CLIP FROM THE SHINING: Hey, wasn’t it around here that the Donner Party got snowbound?
I think that was farther west in the Sierras.
What was the Donner Party?
They were a party of settlers in covered wagon times.
They got snowbound one winter in the mountains.
They had to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive.
You mean they ate each other up?
They had to in order to survive.
Yeah.
Don’t worry, Mom.
I know all about cannibalism.
I saw it on TV.
See?
It’s okay.
He saw it on the television.

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🎬 INTRODUCTION

[INTRODUCTION]
Well, I can’t help it, but this episode is going to have to get a content warning due to its use of frank but explicit discussions of murder, sexual content, and the almost universal taboo of cannibalism.
There is a lot to digest in this episode, and where I could, I added a little sound bite appetizer.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m no longer much of a fan of true crime, but I certainly used to be, and pretty much every criminal case we cite is the subject of dozens, if not hundreds of podcasts, thought pieces, YouTube and TikTok videos, and most even have Wikipedia entries.
Check the show notes for links to most of the movies and books that we talk about.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature.
Part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Well, it’s week two of the spooky season, and our second episode of season five brings back Brian Sharpless.
This time, the topic is cannibalism, and despite the dark subject matter, Brian manages to inject humor and science into the topic in his book, Monsters on the Couch.
I know I say this in the interview, but the book’s very accessible and fun to read.
Brian’s clearly a monster talker, and while many of the issues dealt with are, of course, quite serious…
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with talking about the subjects with a bit of levity.
Like cannibalism, this might be seen as in poor taste.
But if you can’t put up with people laughing at cannibalism, bite me.

---

🎤 MAIN INTERVIEW

[MAIN INTERVIEW]
Hey there, Monster Talkers.
We’re joined again tonight by Dr. Brian Sharpless.
Brian’s 2023 book, Monsters on the Couch, is one of those books we would have loved to have had when we were younger because it’s monstrously good as a primer for the many social and psychological insights into monster studies that we’ve had to come by the hard way.
So last time we had on Brian, it was actually almost exactly a year ago for season four, episode two.
No way.
I mean, season four, episode two.
This is season five, episode two.
Yep.
Wow.
And we discuss vampires.
Well, Brian has given us a lot to talk about.
He really has.
He has.
I try.
I try.
Keeps me off the streets.
So what are we talking about this week, Karen?
We’re going to be talking about cannibalism, the cheery topic.
This is Halloween, so I think this is a great topic.
And Brian, so you cover this in your book, Monsters on the Couch, and you have an entire chapter on this.
Could you begin by giving us a little definition on cannibalism because it’s a lot more complicated than it first seems.
Yeah, well, it’s a fun party prank, right?
But the definition, it’s when one member of a species consumes the flesh of another of the same species.
So as opposed to blood or other certain bodily fluids, which could make not only a differential diagnosis with clinical vampirism difficult, but it might make some normal and not so normal acts a bit creepy.
So we stick to the flesh for cannibalism.
So hair and fingernails excluded?
Presumably, yes.
Okay, okay.
I really did not actually think much about this before this interview, which is how widely has this practice been documented culturally as opposed to pathologically?
Because I’m thinking here about, obviously, there’s hunger or…
There’s these sexual devancies, but then there’s funerary practices.
These different motives, which you talk about in your chapter.
I’m curious about which of these qualifies pathological versus something else.
Yeah, well, there’s no definition for cannibalism, but it could be captured as a sexual disorder or paraphilia if that’s really what’s motivating it.
But yeah, I mean, if we’re looking back in the archaeological lit, which I did for this, being a psychologist, I don’t know all the ins and outs as much as the real anthropologists and archaeologists, but wow, was there a war in the late 70s and early 80s over this.
So there was a book published by Ahrens
on cannibalism, he was making the claim that essentially it didn’t happen.
And it was kind of a way of othering a lot of indigenous peoples.
And so this created kind of a firestorm in the anthropological community.
But I think the general consensus today is that, yeah, it happened.
It didn’t just happen to one culture.
It didn’t happen in just one time or place, but people have been eating each other.
for all sorts of reasons.
I broke it down into 10 for the book of 10 different individual motivations that someone could eat another person.
And yeah, we’ll get into that.
I just wanted to mention, I’ve been doing some research for another book I’m working on that’s about language acquisition and how language emerged.
So I’ve been doing some research into theories of monogenesis, which is the idea that
languages all came from one original language.
And so there’s a particular story among the Aboriginal people in Encounter Bay in Australia, and they claim that there was a woman who was really nasty.
Her name was Wurruri, and she died, and a number of people from different tribes came to visit her, and they ate different organs.
of her body and that caused them to speak different languages.
And then they went out and started spreading these languages.
So I don’t know if you came across that story.
It’s pretty specific, but I thought it was an interesting one.
That is fascinating.
I had not heard of that in humans, but there was a famous psychologist.
He was actually attacked by the Unabomber, believe it or not.
And his early research was looking at planaria or flatworms.
And he found that if you ground up, well, if you took worms and you put them through a little maze and you gave them like a learning task, behavioral learning task, and then you ground up those worms and fed them to worms who hadn’t gone through this learning paradigm, that they were able to actually do the learning paradigm without ever learning it.
Or people call it nays.
This had some replication problems, but there are some people.
I was going to ask.
Who believe that there might be something to this, like sort of a visceral learning.
So that would be the closest I’ve ever heard to anything like that, but geez.
Yeah, that would be an example of what’s called ritual.
Yeah, that’d actually be ritual if they were trying to get the traits.
So in ritual cannibalism, like if there’s a slain warrior who’s really great, you would eat him in the hopes of getting his strength or his skill.
So that would be an example of ritual or token cannibalism.
That’s a good lead in to ask about the different types of cannibalism.
So we’ve already mentioned a couple of them.
If you could just give us a little overview of those.
Sure.
Well, survival cannibalism is the one that comes to mind in America a lot with the Donner Party and alive, of course, the soccer players and the Andes.
Crash diet.
Yeah.
So that’s a common one.
And that has been, again, there have been cases of that in the past hundred years all over the place.
I won’t say it’s an epidemic, but there are certainly well-documented cases.
Then you’ve got what’s called benign cannibalism, which is where you don’t know you’re being a cannibal and you’re just eating flesh.
And there were, again, documented cases of this in World War II and lots of places where you’d be eating human flesh without knowing it.
In horror movies, which was one of the focuses of my book, they play a lot with what’s called exo-cannibalism.
so if you’ve ever seen like cannibal holocaust or more recently that eli roth movie green inferno this is where a group of people decide to eat outsiders so you piss off this indigenous tribe and they lose their patience with you and they decide well they’re gonna not only kill you but eat you so it’s very insulting and there are some really uh off-color insults that are hurled by real tribes that have that have engaged in this
And then you’ve got weirder ones.
I wasn’t aware of medicinal cannibalism.
This was a big thing in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
There’s actually mummy flesh advertised in a Merck catalog.
I’m not kidding.
We did an episode on that and I called it Cures of the Mummy’s Tomb, which I really liked a lot.
Oh, go ahead.
Oh, sorry, I was just going to say, isn’t there something kind of similar to that in some cultures where, I believe, maybe not South Africa so much, but Haiti, where you hear stories of where they capture albino people once.
Oh, in Africa, yeah.
Yeah, that’s Africa.
Africa’s a big continent, but it is a practice I’ve seen.
Here we were misremembering something called muti-medicine.
In parts of southern Africa, a small number of ritual murders have been linked to what is known as muti-medicine.
a traditional belief that body parts can bring luck, power, or prosperity.
Victims sometimes, including people with albinism, are attacked for specific parts such as limbs, hair, or blood, which are used in charms or potions made by witch doctors.
These acts involve mutilation, but not cannibalism.
The remains are typically buried, carried, or symbolically mixed into medicine rather than eaten.
Human rights groups describe these crimes as rare but persistent, with dozens of confirmed cases in countries like Malawi and Tanzania over the past two decades.
In Europe, it was common.
Well, I don’t know how common, but pretty common from what I understand.
I should probably fact check this.
There’ll be an insert here if I’m wrong.
So corpse medicine was widely known, but that doesn’t mean it was common.
So I put some links in the show notes for further reading.
It’s a gruesome but fascinating topic.
Anyway, that they would use the flesh of hanged people as a kind of medicine or treatment for things.
In addition to, obviously, the magical rituals you could do with the hand of glory.
Yeah.
And I saw hanged men and they would also, some believe that in Europe even believe that virgins might have sort of curative properties.
And they prepare it in all sorts of ways.
They powderize it.
They wouldn’t snort it as far as I can tell, but they would soak it in honey.
They would like essentially make it into ham and eat it.
Wow.
Wild stuff.
And then we’ve got criminal cannibals.
So this is where you engage in cannibalism in the process of doing another criminal act.
And this might be to kind of add insult to injury or some sexual motive or potentially just to try to get rid of the evidence.
There are some cases of that.
And then there’s the weirdest one that I would probably, I would, I called it gastronomic cannibalism.
And this was where human flesh actually is a preference and it’s eaten for culinary reasons.
You know, you usually have to murder someone to get access to it, but I’m thinking of like, yeah, I’m thinking of like in real life.
Yeah.
Not, not too often without getting caught, but I was thinking of like Albert fish and of course Hannibal Lecter from the film.
Yeah.
A census taker once tried to test me.
I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I guess we’d be in trouble if we didn’t mention Cannibal the Musical as well.
The sky is blue and all the leaves are green.
The sun’s as warm as a baked potato.
I think I know precisely what I mean.
When I say it’s a scriptoical day.
Well, I was thinking you were talking about benign cannibalism.
And did you ever read a story by Roald Dahl called Pig?
I think it was called Pig.
And it was about this young boy who’s raised vegetarian.
And I think this is during, could have been World War I or something like that.
And he’s never tried meat before.
And he ends up going and spending time at an abattoir and at slaughterhouse, as you’d say here, and finds out about the meat industry and then gets strung up and used as meat himself.
Wow.
That’s a dark tale.
Spoiler.
No, I have not read that.
Spoiler.
You talked about it briefly.
So is there or is there not a historical case?
Well, you sort of said there is.
This idea of culturally condoned cannibalism.
Maybe you have answers.
Yeah.
I mean, this is what led to actually a Nobel Prize.
Okay.
So the discovery of prions, which are these irregularly folded proteins.
Yeah, yeah.
Was it Kuru?
Is it?
Yeah, from the four people in New Guinea.
Yeah.
So they practice what’s called funerary or endocannibalism.
So in our culture, you know, if they were looking at our culture, they would think it was massively cruel and unthoughtful to bury our dead in the earth and let them just kind of rot there.
So they thought it was actually more appropriate to have them stay with them forever, essentially, and through consuming the flesh.
And interestingly, only…
women and young children in the culture would actually engage in this this form of cannibalism and the men wouldn’t but what they found was by looking at this tribe they started suffering from what they called initially the shaking sickness and it was this
horrible condition with sometimes uncontrollable laughter but more frequently shaking and inevitable death there was nothing western or eastern doctors could do to cure this thing so they started studying this tribe and they found out that the people who had died had practiced this funerary cannibalism and so as they started dying then of course there are more bodies to consume so this spread and spread and started getting uh
yeah and and so they discovered that through consuming human neural tissue you can pass on prions and these your body can’t deal with them like a normal virus or a bacteria and they uh in some cases kill you so mad cow disease is a prion based disorder
They’re very scary.
I’m terrified of prion-based disorders.
Yeah, no.
It devastated the British beef industry for a while.
I don’t know how.
I’ve heard of some cases in the United States of people, I guess in the southern United States, eating things like squirrel brains, scrambled squirrel brains.
Yes.
And yeah, causing a similar kind of thing.
That sounds a little sus though.
I mean, there’s not much in there for squirrels, but pig brains definitely get eaten.
My relatives, I had some relatives who preferred those.
Like when we slaughtered pigs, which we did, you know, they wanted the pig brain, you know?
So it’s real fatty and sweet from what I’ve been told.
So I didn’t try it myself.
If you’re going to eat one part of the human body for calories, you want to eat the brain.
In one brain, there’s 2,700 human calories and lots of cholesterol and fat.
That’s several Snickers bars.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s high.
But it’s dangerous.
You don’t want to get Quora.
No, absolutely not.
But dare I ask, what do humans taste like?
You hear, oh, they taste like pig.
They taste like chicken.
Yes.
Do we know?
Do we know?
Yeah, well, I’ve been a vegetarian since 11, so I can’t, this is coming from the secondary literature, but yeah.
So you heard all about the calling us the long pig.
That seems to be a bit mythological.
It doesn’t seem like that’s really the case.
When people have discussed eating meat, they describe it as very sweet or very salty.
And some people have described it as a meat unlike any other.
And there’s some weird evidence that humans might be able to digest other humans easier than other animals, just from a purely digestive process.
Everything I’m hearing says better than goat is what I’m hearing.
Yeah.
Idi Amin apparently ate human flesh and was very upfront about it in interviews.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I don’t know for sure, but that idea that taking the power of others, you know, is a cultural idea that has existed in multiple cultures.
Oh, yeah.
So, yeah.
Interesting.
It has an intuitive kind of sense to it, doesn’t it?
It does.
If I consume something, I become it.
You are what you eat, right?
Now, I guess that should lead us into some horror films, because aren’t these…
horror movies that have stories of cannibalism or i can’t think of the name isn’t there some horror movie where someone kills a person eats them and takes on their personality traits oh that’s interesting yeah i called that one in particular should know but it’s a great idea if yeah i think so
Well, there’s a Stephen King story, a really good Stephen King story, where a guy crashes on an island and he’s on a drug run.
So he’s not expecting anybody to come to look for him.
And he’s basically got heroin, I think.
And so basically, in order to survive, he’s…
taking heroin to numb the pain to cut off parts of himself to eat.
Oh, wow.
It’s a good story.
I don’t want to spoil the ending.
But they also use that idea in the One Piece cartoon in the live-action version where a couple of characters are stuck on an island in order to survive.
One of them eats his own leg.
Yeah.
Wow.
There’s only been 11 cases of that in the psychiatric literature.
That’s autosarcophagy or self-cannibalism.
Is that 11 too many?
Right.
It might be underreported.
These are the ones that got published.
Yeah, I think I mentioned to you guys when we were preparing for this that we used to play the game Zork, the Infocom text adventure, and it was always built around these two-word things, like a verb and a noun, like get, light, or, you know, hit, you know, take sword, that kind of thing.
And one of them, if you just type one, like a verb, like run, walk, it would ask you where you wanted to do or what you wanted to do it to.
And so if you typed eat…
it would say, what do you wish to eat?
And you’re thinking, well, I want I want to eat.
I want me.
So I type me.
And then it says auto cannibalism is not the answer, which always amused me all through the 80s.
So, oh, there’s clever.
I mean, it’s kind of fits into the cannibal movie Ravenous.
uh if it’s not literally taking on the trace but you’re stealing the strength of the victims which is just fun it’s one of the few wendigo movies where it’s always right it’s a very dark comedy too it has it is strange elements yeah it’s got some very funny parts in it so yeah when i was researching my book uh bitch i came across an example with uh one of the nightmare on elm street movies and
where he kills, no, he forces a model to eat her organs and says, Bon Appetit, bitch.
So I haven’t seen it myself.
Blake, you’ve probably seen it.
I’ve seen most of those.
I don’t remember that moment.
I think that was the Dream Warriors one.
Was it?
Oh, my God.
So that’s got what?
Patricia Arquette?
Is that right?
Yeah, she’s the heroine.
And it’s got that soundtrack by Dokken.
Cannibalism is everywhere, isn’t it?
I mean, we have to mention the Hills Have Eyes.
You look good enough to eat.
Allegedly based on Sonny Bean.
Not really.
Yes.
Which is a bucket list site for me.
I know where the cave is in Scotland.
Oh, really?
Yeah, but I haven’t been yet.
I did recently travel to two cannibal sites.
I went to where the Donner party happened and three of the cabin locations.
Are there picnic tables there?
There is a picnic area.
I’m not kidding.
That’s in bad taste.
Somebody, some park ranger was having a really fun moment with that.
And I went to Lovelock Cave, which is the site of some giant cannibal mythology.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which we can talk about that in the big Smithsonian cover-up later, but with these movies… Yeah, we have to, yeah.
We can definitely touch on it.
That’s such a deep topic.
It needs its own…
Deep dive.
That’s a good one, though.
Yeah, we can touch upon it, though.
We sort of skipped over vorophilia.
Yes.
Well, I’ll let you ask about that.
Okay, so that’s the idea of someone who has a sexual desire or fantasy for eating or being eaten or observing simulated or real cannibalistic acts.
I’m going to have to throw in a clip here because one of my favorite comedy shows, The IT Crowd.
Look, I’ve got your advert here.
I’ve printed it out.
Yes.
I want to cook with you.
Oh, no, no, my English is not so good.
Oh!
You want to cook with me.
Using me, you mean.
Oh, yes, yes, you see.
I see where the confusion was.
I thought this was a cookery course.
Aha!
No, no.
But you were looking for someone who would agree to let you kill and eat them.
Yeah, yeah.
You see?
That is funny.
So you’re not interested?
Oh, no, thanks very much.
It’s not for me.
I watched it.
It was very funny.
Oh, I have seen that, yes.
So funny.
Yeah.
And wasn’t there a German guy?
What we’re remembering here is the case of Armin Meivis.
Armin was a German computer technician who, in 2001, posted an online ad seeking a willing volunteer to be killed in Eton.
A man named Bernd Jürgen Brandes responded, and the encounter ended in Brandes’ consensual death and partial cannibalism.
Meivis filmed parts of the acts, leading to his arrest in 2002.
He was eventually convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, becoming known worldwide as the Rottenberg Cannibal.
But what you could tell us about it, the condition.
Absolutely.
So there’s a few different varieties.
So we don’t have any, there’s only been one peer reviewed article on this.
So we really don’t have any idea of the prevalence, but there is a bunch of online sites that talk about it.
And even more indicative, there’s a lot of online pornography.
You got to be careful when you Google this.
For this book, you should have seen my search history.
Thank God I wasn’t being monitored.
Ours are pretty strange too, so.
Yeah.
The necrophilia chapter was a rough one.
But with vor, there seem to be like two subtypes.
There’s what’s called hard vor and soft.
So hard vor is more.
That’s terrible.
So hardvore would kind of be like what you see in horror movies where there’s lots of bloody mastication with the teeth and ripping off flesh.
But then there’s softvore, which might not even have any chewing at all.
And this is where it gets into kind of anime, furry, My Little Pony pornography territory, where they will have…
essentially small humans being consumed by giants but they’re not being chewed they’re swallowed whole and part of the fantasy for the people with sophomore leanings is the idea of being slowly suffocated or digested and maybe even expelled as a waste product so that works into the fantasy as opposed to the more grisly stuff you’d see on you know
Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Is this furry curry?
I don’t know what to say about some of this.
And they mix it up with other paraphilias.
And a paraphilia is essentially a sexual behavior outside the norm that causes clinically significant distress or impairment.
So if you have a little fetish and it doesn’t bother you and it doesn’t get you into trouble and it doesn’t interfere with your life, that’s not diagnostic.
So you have to have a set of symptoms as well as clinically significant distress or impairment.
But some people do.
This might be the only thing that they might find arousing.
And if that were the case, or if they’re troubled and distressed by the fact that they’re fantasizing about My Little Pony swallowing people whole, that could be a paraphilia not otherwise specified.
But the fantasies have giants.
They have animation.
They have all these really intricate things.
So what is it?
Attack on Titan giants, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But even like giant ponies, it could be.
Or giant furry beasts.
Yeah.
What kind of trauma, childhood trauma, did these people have?
I mean, where did these come from?
That’s a great question.
We don’t even know that they have higher trauma rates than the general population as of now.
We do know that cannibals do, though.
like real cannibals and necrophiles and a lot of the uh the other and clinical vampires who uh take blood without getting being in a consensual relationship shall we say there seem to be fairly high rates of traumas with the one study that’s been done of clinical vampires uh 43 of them i believe had histories of pretty severe childhood physical or sexual trauma
We don’t know.
And these folks, people of war practitioners, I’ve not had one come through my office doors yet.
So they probably see it as either not a problem or wouldn’t be very keen on reporting it to a skeptical psychologist like myself, even though it could be something we could potentially work on.
I got a long question, but I don’t think it’s – I guess it has a lot of context.
So you’ve helped us contextualize a lot of this cannibalism lore, and obviously there’s lots of misconceptions.
But as you noted in your chapter, the practice of cannibalism is not in the DSM, and due to the varieties of reasons why people do it, that makes good sense.
But we’ve –
We’ve talked about before about how there’s this concept of satanic ritual abuse and there’s no indication there’s any cults actually doing it.
Yet there are cases where criminals are like systematically killing people in cult like behaviors.
But it seems like it’s almost like homicidal ostention.
And I’m wondering, you know, what’s happening here in these cases of cannibalism?
Is there a psychopathy associated with this?
Or like we have cases like Jeffrey Dahmer or Ed Gein who…
Both got some really, really disturbing overlap between cannibalism and all kinds of things.
Yeah.
So, like, is this usually, like, tied in with psychopathy or is that something else going on?
Yes.
Well, for the criminal cannibals, certainly.
So you see high rates of antisocial personality disorder.
You will see other behaviors that are similar to serial killers.
And then it raises the question to know, are they kill is the is the cannibalism secondary or primary?
So are they are they cannibalizing after killing something to get rid of the evidence or is or do they need a corpse to eat?
So that’s why they’re killing the body.
So there’s there are little subtle psychological distinctions there.
But I mean, yeah.
With Ed Gein, I mean, he killed two people that we’re aware of, possibly his brother.
There were some rumors of that.
And then he was trying to create a skin suit, essentially.
of female, which inspired Buffalo Bill from Silence of Lambs, of course, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface.
And then Dahmer certainly had his own antisocial piccadillo, shall we say.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, if you’re willing to kill somebody to eat them, I would, I dare say there’s something off with you.
Baby’s fat.
You fat.
Fat and juicy.
And in the cases of forensic cannibals, the majority of them have had either psychotic disorders that might have made them feel they needed to consume human flesh for some reason.
God commanded them or aliens controlled by…
Who knows?
And then you see lots of antisocial behaviors and personality disorders too.
But a small percentage of them did not come up diagnostic, which I found shocking at first, but then they were aggregating several different studies.
So they were using heterogeneous methods.
I think if they really did a deep survey into people who actually consume human flesh, especially those who killed a human being to consume human flesh, you’re going to find something probably pretty odd.
I would hope so.
Otherwise, it’s even more disturbing.
It’s just such a taboo.
But I guess we should dig into the legend tripping a bit more in the Giants link.
Yeah, yeah, man.
Like, I ran across this book that was published in 2013 by Richard Dewhurst.
It was called The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America, The Missing Skeletons in the Smithsonian Cover-Up.
I couldn’t put the damn thing down.
I’ve always liked the ideas of giants, but what this guy did, and he won an Emmy, actually, for writing for an HBO special, and he was an editor of the Miami Herald.
So this was a guy, a legit guy.
He had some cred.
He’s got a pretty good career.
And he started studying reports of giants.
He’s apparently very tall himself.
So he was always kind of picked on as being a giant.
So he started looking through archive newspaper articles and found hundreds of them that would go very similar to what I’ll say now.
So they opened up a Native American burial ground in the Ohio Valley, somewhere like that.
And the people discovered giant-sized bones in there, oftentimes wearing very unusual funerary garb that you wouldn’t see in Native Americans.
They had lots of gold.
They might be wearing necklaces.
They might have even iron weapons.
And what was weird, a lot of them would report having double rows of teeth and that they would have red hair.
Friend of the show Jason Colavito explains that the double rows of teeth often mentioned in old mound builder newspaper stories were not evidence of ancient giants at all, but results of 19th century misunderstandings.
He notes that phrases like double teeth all around sometimes just meant both the upper and lower rows of teeth.
or described rows of worn, flattened teeth that appeared unusually thick.
Over time, these innocent descriptions were exaggerated through retelling until they became markers of a mythical race of giant humans.
Colavito traces the idea even further back to ancient myths about superhuman beings with multiple sets of teeth, showing how old legends and modern misreadings merged into the durable pseudo-archaeological trope of double rows of teeth.
So then the newspaper article would report this fantastic finding and say that researchers from the Smithsonian Institute were dispatched and were examining the finds, and then they would take them and then you’d hear nothing else of it.
So literally hundreds.
And I double checked this.
I wanted to do my research.
So I went on there.
I went on New York Times.
I found two or three from the New York Times and I think some from Washington Tribune.
And I located one that was in walking distance of my house.
I might actually next summer go down there if I can find precise locations.
And this one happened in 1942, I think.
So there might even be living people who are reporting on opening up this mound.
But the weird thing is, the names they give were actually on the books as Smithsonian researchers at the time.
So Dewhurst makes the claim that there was a doctrine called the Powell Doctrine that was essentially very rigid in what they would allow to be a legitimate archaeological find.
So anything that would go against evolution, anything that would go against the Bering Land Bridge theory of how Native Americans migrated here was forbidden, and they were working to suppress all of this stuff.
So this is kind of the opposite of how science actually works.
Right.
Right.
And yeah, I mean, they’re serious.
You make your career by overturning a paradigm, not by suppressing it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That’s what they’d like you to believe.
Right.
But I think a friend of the show, Jason Colavito, has written a lot about this and the mound builder myth.
And Kenny Fader, too, of course.
And confeder, yeah.
He would have been tearing his hair out reading this book, but I had a lot of fun.
So I was going to ask, is this book, so this book is not skeptical of the topic.
It’s a believer book.
It’s a believer book, and it lays claim.
I’ve read it several times now, and the motivations, again, are a bit fuzzy.
They’re not terribly convincing.
He lays out, essentially, he just overwhelms you with evidence for these newspaper reports.
And then pointing out some anomalies in the archaeological record.
But the motivations for why the Smithsonian would really cover it up for this long is a bit opaque.
I mean, I don’t think, you know, people challenge the theory of evolution all the time.
There’s punctuated equilibrium, you know.
And the idea of catastrophes, too, was part of the POW doctrine.
So the idea that…
that um there were massive human catastrophes like you know the things that occurred in the younger dryas and things like that they were very popular these days they would suppress evidence of that as well but i gotta say my my my lady has an appointment at the smithsonian so we’d get invited to smithsonian parties and she would always tell me don’t bring up the fucking giants which of course i would
That’s funny.
I would, and I had a few on the record.
They assured me there were no giant bones.
You’re like, yeah, let’s laugh at this, and everybody just gets really quiet and stares at you.
Oh, no.
Yeah, exactly.
It’s like in that great scene.
What was the sequel to Shaun of the Dead?
Hot Fuzz.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Remember that scene at the end?
Yeah, it would be like that.
But yeah, I would love to know if there were giants.
I would love it.
But I’d also like to clear the Smithsonian’s good name.
So I want to know what’s going on.
For the greater good.
Yeah.
So you went to one of these sites.
What did you find?
Did you find giants?
Did you, were they, did they have red hair?
But I went there and it was fascinating.
You really have to want to go to this place.
I’m telling you, it is way back there.
The closest town is Love Lock.
So I went in there the night before and I did some on the ground field research.
But the myth is essentially that the Paiute were…
being slowly killed and their people were being um you know they’d go off wandering in one direction they’d never come back and it turns out there was another tribe who spoke their language and they were called the sitika which translates to tool eaters and tool is a form of bulrush that you can eat um the roots and things like that i would think they’re
predilection for cannibalism would be more name worthy, but they called them tool leaders, but they would cannibalize the poor Paiutes and they would warn them, hey, stop it, you know, leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone, and they wouldn’t.
So they herded them all somehow into Lovelock Cave.
they put a bunch of brush in front of it and they said hey will you promise not to eat us anymore essentially and they no answer came from the cave so they lit the cave on fire and consigned them all to the flames so i got to go to the cave where the entrance is and they they supposedly discovered giant bones there and then around 1924 excavating guano for gunpowder
and for fertilizer.
And so there are some historical documents, newspaper articles like that, that will talk about that.
But if you read what the Paiute actually talk about, they talked about cannibals.
They talked about that cave.
They talked about killing these cannibals in the cave, but they don’t actually mention giants, but they were described as having red hair and they were more primitive than the Paiute.
So the Paiutes would use bows and arrows.
These folks only use spears.
And so it was very similar, I thought.
After I read this book and I watched Bone Tomahawk, I thought, oh my God, did the guy rip off the story of Bone Tomahawk from this story?
But I tried to contact the writer.
He never responded, sadly.
I tried to reach him on Twitter.
That idea, I mean, even among tribes all over the United States, they would have legends of a primitive…
sometimes giant other tribes.
And now all the Bigfooters have turned those into, well, those are clearly Bigfoot, but they were clearly not.
They were giant.
They were just giant humans, you know, and then that got changed.
So it’s now been sort of homogenized.
And I think it’s kind of sad because now I see native tribes talking about Bigfoot as though it’s their story.
And I guess it has become their story, but it’s sort of through the process of,
like synchronous secretism like it’s this blending bigfoot lore with their own lore and becoming this new thing and it just it makes me sad that you know that that’s kind of cultural dilution and it’s yeah i don’t i don’t like it like the wendigo myth if wendigo ended up fighting wolverine and well there’s that and then um you know now it’s being turned into like a antler skull monster that has nothing to do with anything i mean you know
Probably not even a cannibal.
Yeah, I mean, right.
Back in my day.
You know, it had a very specific, you know, native meeting among those tribes that recognized it.
And it was not good.
It was like really a serious problem.
So whether that was a story about mental illness or what, you know, it’s it had to do with cannibalism being the ultimate taboo that turns them into monsters.
Yeah.
And, you know, even as much as I enjoy mythology, too.
Yeah.
I mean, it’s like it’s just it’s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why can’t we just leave stuff alone?
I mean, I guess everything evolves over time anyway.
You know, that’s true, too.
So I’m always struggling with how I feel about these kind of changes.
Yeah.
We homogenize things, don’t we?
We do indeed.
Brian, we’ve had you on the show a number of times, so we’ve already asked about your favourite monster, so we thought we’d tweak that question a little bit.
And since it’s the spooky season, we’d ask you if you have any favourite cannibalism movies that you would like to recommend to our listeners.
Ooh, yeah.
Well, Bone Tomahawk, a lot of people haven’t seen that, but it stars amazing Kurt Russell.
And it is a genre bender.
It starts out kind of as a Western with some comedy.
And then it goes really, really dark.
Really quickly.
They have some very gory scenes at the end.
I won’t ruin it, but wow, that’s a great one.
Of course, The Hills Have Eyes.
I even like the remake, which starred the guy who played Buffalo Bill.
Oh, wait.
Was she a great big fat person?
Yeah, she was a big girl, sir.
That was Ted Levine playing Buffalo Bill, or possibly Ted Levine.
I’m really not sure.
Silence of the Lambs.
He plays the father now.
Yeah, he’s a great character actor.
And then, of course, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
So those are great.
Yeah, we have some shows on our playlist for YouTube based on a true story where we look at those two films.
and kind of separate fact from fiction.
So listeners can go and check those out as well.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Elves Have Eyes have a lot of the same, like literal same special effects as far as like the sort of bone sculptures and dead animals and stuff.
They were supplied by the same supplier.
Yeah.
Well, this has got to be some kind of record for the show for number of inserts.
Well, today I learned that I had been conflating two famous Hollywood prop men because they were both named Bob Burns.
So first, let’s deal with cannibals.
Robert A. Burns was a production designer and actor who worked on several famous monster movies.
He provided the bone art for both Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes.
He also worked on The Howling and Reanimator.
let’s call him Robert A. Burns, passed away in 2004 at the age of 60.
The other Bob Burns is also a prop collector and actor, and he’s famous to me for playing the gorilla on the 1970s TV show The Ghostbusters, which starred Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch.
He’s the subject and author of the great prop book, It Came From Bob’s Basement.
And as of this episode drop, he’s still alive at the age of 90.
So there, some disambiguation for two giants of Hollywood legend and monster cinema.
I guess I should say, props to both of you.
But yeah, yeah, those are great.
Well, I mean, they’re horrible, but they’re great.
Well, as always, Brian, thanks for coming.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Always fun talking to you too.
Yeah, we’re steadily getting through your book.
All right.
Yes.
I mean, we’ve been through your book, but just a few years we’ll be through the whole thing.
That’s right.
That’s right.
Treating each topic on Monster Talk is what I mean.
Yeah.
One page at a time.
I really wish I had had that book when I was 10 or 11.
I mean, no, it would have saved me a lot of reading.
I did too.
That’s why I wrote it.
A lot to chew on.
It’s good stuff.
It’s a wonderful book.
And this is a great topic.
We have talked about this before, years and years ago.
So it’s good to revisit cannibalism.
There’s more to tease apart with this topic.
Monster Talk.

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🏁 OUTRO

[OUTRO]
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Brian Sharpless about cannibalism as written about in his book, Monsters on the Couch.
Check the show notes for affiliate links that will send a little money to the show without raising the price of your purchase.
Also, be sure to check out Karen’s latest book, Bitch, Journey of a Word.
A link to that is also in the show notes.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
You know, of course not every horror movie needs cannibalism to be scary with food.
In 1932’s The Old Dark House, there is a strange mix of comedy and malevolence in the recurring line, Have a potato.
Have a potato.
Have a potato.
Have a potato.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
He’s just a cook.
Shut up, you bitch hog.
He let a fish do all the work.
He don’t like it.
Ain’t that right?
You’re just a cook.
Shut your mouth.