Mar 12, 2026
Content Warning: Sexual assult, Misogyny
Art by Alex(a) Cruz-Abarca
The consumption of human flesh is utterly horrid and unimaginable to many people, and one of the most taboo topics in our society. Despite the incredibly morbid nature of cannibalism, the topic exploded within pop culture after media began to explore it. Like is shown in *Yellowjackets *and Hannibal, cannibalism can be used to portray love or obsession. However, when cannibalism is used as a metaphor for the female experience, it is equally capturing as it is grueling. This subgenre of the female cannibal brings a new type of ‘Final Girl’ to horror. These films show how a woman could, metaphorically, break free from society’s expectations and gain power. It demonstrates that when a woman satisfies her desires and is truly free, she is seen as a monster. The use of women as cannibals also greatly contrasts from the endless amounts of horror that pushes misogyny and directly demeans, sexualizes, and hurts women. Often in horror, sexual assault is used to shock or scare viewers; yet in this subgenre, many of these women are shown to gain their power back and take revenge on the men that hurt from them through cannibalism. Cannibalism, in all its obscenity and gore, captures and explores female sexuality and power—especially the taboo natures of such topics—in a way most media struggles to represent. It shows the feral, hypersexual, or unpleasant traits and actions women are taught to hide, as well as how women are viewed when taking back from the men that have taken from women for centuries.
When a woman wants to satiate her desires, she is monstrous. Raw, a 2016 film written and directed by Julia Ducournau, uses cannibalism to represent the main character’s human consumption as her power, as well as the animalistic side of female sexuality. After the protagonist, Justine, once a lifelong vegetarian, eats a raw rabbit kidney as a hazing ritual, she gainsgets a strong taste for meat. She then leaves behind what was once a core part of herself and her childhood. As her life changes more and more, she begins to bite and tear at her own flesh, especially during sex.
Justine eventually consumes meat from another human—beginning with her own sister’s finger, who is revealed to also be a cannibal. Like her sister, Justine loses control of her cravings, her entire life, and strays far from the girl she was.
Yet Justine welcomes her transformation and becomes much more promiscuous, struggling between animal and human during all of it. The cannibalism empowers her, enabling her to become much more confident in herself and her body. She constantly attempts to sink her teeth into and tear at the men she has sex with. Justine’s cannibalism is a direct correlation into her sexuality and relationships with others, as she desires flesh more every time she wants or has sex. Justine is often embarrassed by her urges, both for cannibalism and sex, representing how women are shamed for their sexuality and desires. Her struggles with cannibalism, as are faced by both her sister and mother, show the perils of being a woman passed down from generation to generation.
The film ends with a painful fight between the two cannibalistic sisters, ripping, tearing, and eating one another’s flesh, taking each other down from the inside out, and both seen as monsters. Raw, in the end, holds a reputation of being one of the most disgusting films in recent times, but the grittiness has a point. It is a film using the gruesome nature of cannibalism to represent the struggles women face with theirs and others’ flesh. Therefore, making the metaphor literal. When asked about the themes of the film, Julia Ducournau, the writer and director of Raw, said:
“I do think that somehow, symbolically, women want to get rid of that skin that has been sexualized, glamorized, and seen as something that is completely not relatable to women. They want to tear up that skin to be completely raw.” –Julia Ducournau, 2017, GQ.
How would a woman take a man’s body without committing the atrocities men do? Jennifer’s Body, a debut film released in 2009, directed by Karyn Kusama and starring Megan Fox, explores this question. Megan Fox had previously faced sexualization and exploitation before even reaching legal adulthood, boiling over in her role in the 2007 Transformers film. Jennifer’s Body was originally advertised as a film merely targeting sex appeal, using Megan Fox as a pushing point for this objective. After the film’s premiere, many men were highly disappointed that it was, in fact, a movie about a teenage girl navigating her recent assault, sexuality, and power—gained via eating men.
But recently, Jennifer’s Body has become a cult classic along with the boom of female cannibal films. Jennifer, played by Megan Fox, is kidnapped and assaulted by a band group, leaving her turned into a demon after a ritual gone wrong. The group believed she was a virgin and fit for the ritual, despite Jennifer being labeled as a slut by many. While it is highly alluded to that Jennifer was sexually assaulted, it was not shown, with the ritual being more than enough of a metaphor for how an experience like that changes someone. Jennifer’s possession corresponds to the trauma from her recent assault, especially with it being a direct result of the band’s sacrifice of her. After her transformation, Jennifer discovers that meat, particularly human flesh, keeps her beautiful and gives her monstrous strength. Luring men in with her body, she uses their sexualization of her body against them to isolate and eat them. This shows another theme of eating men as a form of taking back power and the sexualization of women and femininity by men.
Along with Jennifer’s new taste for flesh, her previous feelings for her best friend, Needy, are also exacerbated by her transformation, causing her to make many sexual actions towards Needy that likely wouldn’t have been made before, despite Jennifer always having the desire. The cannibalization is based around Jennifer’s sexuality and, in certain scenarios, motivated by her best friend, such as when she attacked Needy’s boyfriend. The cannibalization represented Jennifer’s need to hurt the men that sexualized, hurt, or threatened her. In the end, Needy was the only one able to take down Jennifer, yet Jennifer’s last concern was that her boobs were ruined as Needy stabbed her in the chest. Jennifer, like many women and girls, valued her body and adhering to beauty standards more than her life. Additionally, Jennifer and Needy’s complex relationship was greatly demonstrated throughout the film, the two having a somewhat toxic relationship that consumed Needy long before Jennifer had become a cannibal. During Jennifer’s Body, Jennifer became a monster to successfully hurt the men that hurt her. The cannibalism was able to convey Jennifer’s power within femininity, and her complex and grotesque emotions and urges.
These films, while controversial and facing mixed reactions from audiences, accurately capture the experiences of womanhood, femininity, and, in many cases, queerness. The cannibalism shows the ostracization, indignity, and villianization women face living in a patriarchal society. Cannibalism victimizes men’s bodies in a way that’s still not as cruel as what is so often done to women. The female cannibal has stuck with audiences due to how different this subgenre is compared to the many others in horror that demean women and show their worst experiences for the pure discomfort of their audience.
When women and femininity are constantly devalued within media, cannibalism enables women to gain power, in addition to the consequences or shame they face when doing so. These films also show the struggles of coming of age as a woman, such as Raw’s theme of Justine experiencing becoming an adult in college and navigating her sexuality, or Jennifer’s Body’s main topic of the sexualization of young women and becoming empowered after an assault. While many pieces of media attempt to tackle the themes of misogyny and sexualization, cannibalism can show the bloody and painful parts of being a woman not many other metaphors can. \
References
Julia Ducournau (Director). (2016.) *Raw. *Petit Film, Rouge International.
Karyn Kusama (Director). (2009.) *Jennifer’s Body. *Fox Atomic, Dune Entertainment.
Kristin Yoonsoo Kim. “The Woman Behind *Raw, *the Horror Movie so Scary It Makes Audiences Pass Out.” https://www.gq.com/story/raw-julia-ducournau.