Vile, offensive, and shocking, the Italian cannibal boom of the 70s and 80s grew from ground tilled by the Mondo film--documentary features purported to show real violence and strange rituals from cultures around the world. The cannibal film took this desire to see "real" violence and applied it to a narrative structure, resulting in a subgenre more reviled than any other with grand Guignol-style simulated gore and actual animal violence.