What Is The Word

Ravenous is an unfortunately little known horror film set in the wilds of the Sierras during the winter of 1847. Captain Boyd’s commander sends him to Fort Spencer, California, as the small base’s third-in-command. Soon after he arrives, a half-dead soldier calling himself Colqhoun stumbles into camp with a fantastic story about a westward expedition gone horribly wrong.

I won’t be spoiling the film to reveal that its plot catalyst revolves around cannibalistic consumption; the precept is that eating the flesh of another human being not only cures you of any illness or injury, but also incites a hunger for more flesh that is unquenchable.

There’s one scene (and this is a spoiler) where Colqhoun, revealed as a cannibal, holds up his wounded, bleeding palm towards Boyd, who has recently consumed parts of a dead companion in order to stay alive. Colqhoun taunts Boyd, invoking in vivid detail the overwhelming desire to consume the other, while Boyd stares hungrily at Colqhoun. “But I don’t have to tell you,” Colqhoun mocks, “you’re feeling it [desire, hunger] right now”.

I had an interesting conversation with J about this scene; I suggested that there were definite sexual connotations here: Colqhoun inviting Boyd to consume his bodily fluids, the overlap between pervasive hunger/pervasive lust, etc.

J did not agree. “I don’t like reading things into scenes that aren’t readily there,” he said. “I don’t think these characters want to fuck each other.”

Well, I don’t necessarily think so, either. But it seems to me that there’s a marked difference between two characters wanting “to fuck each other” and the current of desire and hunger expressed through what we can all universally understand: sexuality. We have not all experienced starvation, hunger that consumes our bodies and turns us (by necessity) into instinctual creatures. We have (most of us, at least) experienced the strength of sexual desire.

So perhaps what is at work in Ravenous isn’t necessarily homosexual coding, but sexuality as vehicle. We can extend that distinction, I think, to vampire texts as well – the cannibals of Ravenous have an interesting overlap with vampirism that most other film cannibals do not. Earlier in the film, a character with a torn stomach awakes shrieking that Colqhoun was licking the blood from his wound while he (the wounded) slept; note that Colqhoun does not bite, or chew the flesh, but licks, an action more akin to the “suck” of vampirism – and an action that is far more sensual, and connotive of sexual desire, than a gnawing.