“It was the home video that nobody wanted to watch: the Cannibal of Rotenburg’s stomach-curdling, bite-by-bite chronicle of how he amputated, cooked, ate and froze the limbs and organs of a software engineer. Now one of the few experts to have seen the four hours of grisly footage has broken his silence. Manfred Risse, the pathologist who examined the remains of Armin Meiwes’s victim, has revealed all in his book, Last Supper of the Murderer… Meiwes, 45, was jailed for life last year for killing Bernd Jürgen Brandes, 43, in 2001 after Brandes agreed in an internet chatroom to be eaten by him. One of Professor Risse’s first tasks was to confirm that the body parts found in Meiwes’s freezer belonged to the same victim. ‘There was the foot, for example,’ he said in an interview with Focus magazine. ‘Meiwes had placed it on a plate, stuck it with a knife and a fork, poured sauce over it and photographed it with the intention of putting the picture on the internet. Then there was the skull, bones, chunks of skeleton and soft organs as well as about 30 sealed packets of meat waiting to be eaten. Written on one was Cator Fillet of Neck 10/03/01.’ Cator was Brandes’s chatroom name… The film was so shocking that one of the judges vomited after she saw it in a closed showing, while the jury was shown only 19 minutes. In one sequence Brandes urges Meiwes to cut off his penis so that they can fry it. At one point, while bleeding heavily, he jokes: ‘If I’m still alive in the morning, we can eat my balls for breakfast…’ [Risse] added: ‘The extraordinary thing about this film is that . . . one can follow the suffering and death of the victim step by step. You can see directly how Mr Brandes is responding to the pain of his destruction, you can see when he loses consciousness and how long he clings on to life.’” — Times Online (UK)

(Thanks to Jackson for the link.)

PervScan has been online since May 2003, and in the past four years one of the most sensational cases has surely been that of Armin Meiwes. PervScan has discussed it twice: Let’s Eat My Penis, Then Kill Me and The Cannibal Video. From the comments, you wouldn’t know that the cannibal video was one that “nobody wanted to watch.” To the contrary, everybody wanted to watch it. Some commenters asked where to download it on the net. There was even a report that bootleg copies of it were being sold, but nobody claims to have actually purchased a copy. It must have been a rumor or a scam.

If you were one of those filled with a lust for disgust — “I have no taste but distaste,” as a Dada manifesto once declared — you still won’t be able to see the video. But thanks to Manfred Risse’s new book, Abendmahl der Mörder (Last Supper of the Murderer), you can at least read what somebody else remembers seeing. That must be one hell of a video if a whole book can be written about the experience of watching it. Hannibal Lecter, eat your heart out.

That people should want to see the video is not so surprising. It’s not a simple matter you can dismiss by saying, “Oh, people are sick.” There may well be a good deal of health in the universal impulse that causes people to rubberneck at accidents and cheer at public executions. Perhaps it works like an inoculation, a little injection of sickness that fosters a superior health. It would be an interesting subject for a scientific study. Show one group of viewers a comedy, say, a Marx Brothers film. Show another group the cannibal video. (Which also has its comedic aspects. A guy declaring “we can eat my balls for breakfast” may have a death wish, but at least he hasn’t lost his sense of humor.) Which group do you think would be better for the experience?

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