[Pride 2021] It’s Lonely Being a Cannibal: Hungry Homoerotic Friendship in Ravenous and Hannibal

“You remember this? You smell it?” Colonel Ives (Robert Carlyle) asks Captain Boyd (Guy Pearce), holding his cut and dripping hand to Boyd’s face. Boyd has drunk the blood and eaten the flesh of other men on multiple occasions—once accidentally, once for survival—and Ives knows it. He’s done it plenty of times himself. “Remember the energy? The potency of someone else coursing through your veins… You know the disappointment as it dissipates… The growing, killing need to replenish. But I don’t have to remind you of that. You’re feeling it right now.”

This speech marks a pivotal moment in Ravenous, director Antonia Bird’s criminally underrated, darkly comedic horror film from 1999. Having already killed and cannibalized most of the other soldiers positioned at the remote Sierra Nevada outpost where Boyd has been exiled for cowardice, Ives has set his sights on Boyd. But he doesn’t just want to eat him, though he will if it comes to that. No—he wants Boyd to join him in feasting on the many unsuspecting travelers who will pass through the mountains when the snow thaws.

Ravenous is not the horror classic it deserves to be, thanks in part to a piss-poor marketing campaign that seemed determined to position the film as a wacky teen comedy (it’s not), likely due to the presence of David Arquette, who was fresh off the first two Scream films at the time. I was lucky enough to have a roommate who was a fan, which is how I heard of it many years after its release. The same roommate also introduced me to Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, a show that bears some fascinating resemblances to Ravenous, beyond the fact that both explore cannibalism and feature performances by the great Jeremy Davies. Both center around homoerotic relationships between the male leads, relationships that are antagonistic and sensual in turn as one man fights his urges while the other beckons with blood-drenched hands. And both explore the idea of loneliness and the desperate need to bring another into the fold, even if it means risking destruction. 

By the time Ives starts trying to recruit Boyd, he doesn’t need him to execute his plan. He’s already converted the much more pliant Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones), who doesn’t enjoy the cannibalism but isn’t going to actively try and stop it (the furthest he will go is setting the chained Boyd free to do it for him). Ives seems to want Boyd, despite his resistance, solely because he likes him—perhaps in more ways than one. 

This is best evidenced in a scene where Ives visits the shackled Boyd and swipes some blood from his leaking nose. Closing his eyes, he lifts his bloody fingers to his own nose and sniffs them, making a guttural sound of desire. He then makes eye contact with Boyd, puts his fingers in his mouth, and sucks them. It’s a deeply erotic moment—bordering on a straight-up orgasm—and one which suggests that a different kind of hunger is brewing inside Ives. A hunger that neither Hart nor the brief company of ill-fated travelers can satisfy.

Similarly, Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) does not need Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) when they meet. Lecter has been killing under the radar for decades without it interfering with his psychiatric practice or busy social life among Baltimore’s elites. But in another very real way, he does need Graham, because he’s more alone than he looks. None of the people he dines with ever get to see the real Lecter, the creature behind the well-tailored person-suit he wears—not until they end up on the menu, that is. Revealing himself would mean imprisonment, possibly death. Unless he can find someone who wants to join him in indulging his taboo desires. 

“It’s lonely being a cannibal,” Colonel Hart tells Boyd. “Tough making friends.” The joke is that the cannibal both disgusts and horrifies most people and is compelled to consume even those he gets along with. This is something that Ives and Lecter know only too well. As they lay dying on top of one another in Ravenous’s climactic scene, Ives tells Boyd, the man he risked everything to pursue, that he won’t hesitate to eat Boyd if Boyd dies first, before cheekily questioning what the other man will do if the situation is reversed. Similarly, in Hannibal’s third season, Lecter decides that the only way to forgive Graham for betraying him is to consume him.

Later, he notes that his compassion for Graham is inconvenient, with Graham astutely pointing out that “if you’re partial to beef products, it is inconvenient to be compassionate towards a cow.” The act of taking the body of another into one’s own is inherently intimate, so it’s no surprise that the lines between love and cannibalism quickly become blurred in both texts as the cannibals struggle to reconcile their conflicting desires. Robert Carlyle puts it best—and in the most Scottish way possible—in an interview where he acknowledges that he saw the homoerotic subtext in Ravenous from the very beginning: “[Ives] disnae just want to eat Guy Pearce; he’s going to have Guy Pearce at the same time.”

While Ives and Lecter are busy trying not to eat their bae, Boyd and Graham are resisting walking through the doors that are being held open for them—essentially pushing down any queer feelings that these men might have awakened. Both are also achingly lonely before meeting their cannibals; Boyd is shunned by his peers and traumatized by his experience on the battlefield, while Graham has a house full of dogs in place of serious relationships.

But where Boyd’s sudden hunger for man meat is explained away by Ravenous’s invoking of the “Wendigo,” a figure from Indigenous folklore that was said to develop an insatiable taste for human flesh after engaging in cannibalism, Graham’s motivation is a little more complicated. Throughout Hannibal’s three seasons, Graham wrestles with the knowledge that he would not only be good at killing but would enjoy it. “I’m as alone as you are,” Graham responds when Lecter points out that he is alone because he is unique. The truth is, neither of them would have to be alone anymore if Graham would only do what comes naturally to him, thus becoming more like Lecter. Lecter knows this, noting that “If you followed the urges you kept down for so long, cultivated them as the inspirations they are, you'd become someone other than yourself.” 

We get to see this person in “The Wrath of the Lamb,” the final episode of Hannibal’s third season—and the final episode period, assuming the show isn’t revived—when Graham takes Lecter’s advice, killing joyfully at his side. What follows is the series’ most homoerotic moment (which is saying something): Lecter, holding the panting Graham closely while shyly struggling to meet his eye, murmurs that this is all he ever wanted for both of them, to which Graham replies, “It’s beautiful.” The moment feels like the embodiment of a statement that Ives makes to Boyd: “It’s not courage to resist me. It’s courage to accept me. You’re already one of us.” For Graham, finally following his repressed urges is an act of courage. He is no longer afraid, and no longer alone. Even if only for a moment. 

Of course, if you’ve seen Hannibal, you’ll know that the moment doesn’t end with Graham and Lecter holding one another, or with them passionately kissing (despite the actors flirting with the idea while filming). Knowing that they will not survive separation and that joining Lecter means killing and eating for sport, Graham pulls them both from the edge of a cliff. Boyd makes a similar decision at the end of Ravenous, pushing Ives into an open bear trap using his own body, ensuring their mutual destruction. But while Boyd is determined that they both perish (since Ives ultimately dies first, and Boyd does not eat him, which may have kept him alive until they were discovered), Graham seems to be letting fate decide. Based on the final shot of the series, which shows a terrified Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) sat at a table bearing her own cooked leg, we can assume that at least one man survived the fall. But there are three places set at the table, suggesting that Lecter and Graham lived and are continuing to pursue their queer cannibalistic lifestyle. Werk. 

Before 50 straight men message me (again) to say that discussing homoerotic themes in relation to representations of cannibalism is bad, let me state the obvious: no, I am not saying that real-life queerness is analogous to real-life cannibalism, or that I think these texts are trying to say that, or even that I consider either to be the pinnacle of empowering queer representation, because that’s not remotely what they set out to do. But to get personal for a second, both Hannibal and Ravenous came into my life at a time when I was questioning my own sexuality, so they’ve always been inextricably linked in my mind with my own journey toward acceptance.

When I first watched Ravenous, I had recently stopped forcing myself to try and date men, recognizing that it was making me miserable, but it would still be a few more years until I was ready to admit that I was a lesbian, a truth I was finally able to acknowledge with the support of the loving queer community I met through Hannibal. So while I’ve never been chased by a queer cannibal in the snowy wilderness or realized that my psychiatrist is in love with me, the idea of feeling lonely, empty, and not knowing why hit close to home. 

Hannibal and Ravenous were both underappreciated in their time but are easy to seek out today. Do yourself a favor and add them to your Pride menu. I must warn you though: nothing here is vegetarian.