Italian director Ruggero Deodato has died at the age of 83, several headlines in the Italian press announced on Thursday. This prolific filmmaker made a name for himself in the late 1970s thanks to a series of horror films with extreme and realistic imagery, including Cannibal holocaust is undoubtedly the best known.
Born in 1939 in the Italian city of Potenza, Ruggero Deodato began in the early 1960s as an assistant director to maestro Roberto Rossellini, according to the Spanish newspaper The newspaperas well as with Sergio Corbucci for the spaghetti western django.
He began his directing career with comedies and thrillers, according to he publishes, before directing series and commercials for Italian television. But it is by going towards horror that he really makes himself known. And more precisely towards cannibalism, to which he will dedicate three films called the “cannibal trilogy”: The last cannibal world in 1977, Amazonia: the white forest in 1985… and, in between, Cannibal holocaust.
gore and pioneer
This film follows an academic and his two guides as they venture into the Amazon jungle in search of a missing team of American reporters. His goal was to make a documentary about cannibalistic indigenous populations.
Cannibal holocaust is considered a pioneering film: years before the successes of Blair Witch Projectfrom REC or even of Paranormal activityhe used the spring of “found-footage”, when a feature film is presented as authentic images, filmed by the protagonists, and later found on the scene of a tragedy.
But it is also its scenes of extreme violence mixing rape, torture, murder, castration and, as the title indicates, cannibalism that have allowed the film to go down in history. the guardian reports that the realism of the images led Ruggero Deodato to Italian justice as a suspect of having actually killed his actors, which he denied by taking one of them to court.
Censorship and condemnation
Some scenes of animal abuse, on the other hand, were not simulated. According to Releasecost the filmmaker a suspended sentence of four months in prison:
“If I could go back, I would stop killing animals,” Ruggero Deodato told the BBC in 2011 to the British public.
Because the film was banned in forty countries including the UK until 2001.
Influence in Hollywood
Other often terrifying feature films will follow: The house at the end of the park., Body count, the little scoundrels, deadly vortex…The last one, ballad in bloodit dates from 2016. The director has also occasionally worked as an actor.
Many Italian media talk about Ruggero Deodato’s influence on the big names in Hollywood, including Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino. In 2007, when the latter produced the film Shelter, Chapter II by director Eli Roth, the two filmmakers entrust a small role to Ruggero Deodato: that of an Italian cannibal.
Source: BFM TV
