The oldest question in this trade, the one this newspaper was practically founded to ask, got its definitive workout in a Milanese courtroom: is the tape real?
Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust premiered in Milan on February 7, 1980. It is the story of a documentary crew that goes into the rainforest to film a "green inferno" and does not come back, and of the footage that does. The found-footage grammar it invented was so airtight that audiences had no antibodies for it. Within ten days the film had grossed around two million dollars and a magistrate had ordered it seized. Deodato was charged with obscenity. Then the French magazine Photo suggested in print that certain deaths in the film were real, and the obscenity case grew a shadow: the suspicion that somewhere in the reels was an actual snuff film.
The legend says Deodato was charged with murder and forced to produce his cast alive in open court. The record, as usual, is duller and stranger. He was never formally charged with murder, but with magistrates circling he did bring cast to court, actor Luca Barbareschi among them, to demonstrate that the dead were on payroll and breathing. Deodato explained he had signed his actors to contracts keeping them out of the media for a year, to protect the illusion. Even that part of the story refuses to sit still: one of the "dead", Carl Yorke, later denied ever signing such a contract. It did not matter. The panic never needed the paperwork to be real. The production also had to explain its most notorious shot, the girl on the stake, as the trick it was: a bicycle seat, a short stake, an actress holding very still.
The verdict came anyway. Deodato and five others, writers, producers, a distributor, were convicted of obscenity and violence and handed four-month suspended sentences, and the film spent years banned in its own country before the courts relented in 1984, first with cuts, eventually without.
Deodato spent his final years, from 2019 until his death in 2022, writing one more expedition into the green inferno, a screenplay that was never filmed. It is being built instead. That case file is still open, and this desk is on it.