Warning: This article contains discussion of animal cruelty and sexual assault which some readers may find distressing.
Actor Carl Gabriel Yorke was a changed man when he returned from shooting notorious horror film Cannibal Holocaust in the Colombian rainforest.
Speaking to LADbible, he says the woman he was dating at the time recently told him: "You were a wreck when you came back from Cannibal Holocaust. I mean, you were really a wreck."
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"And I believe her,” he adds
Cannibal Holocaust is one of the most violent and controversial movies ever made.
The 1980 movie follows a group of American filmmakers - Yorke’s Alan Yates is their leader - travelling through the Amazon rainforest murdering indigenous people as they go, all while faking news footage for a sensationalist documentary.
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Eventually, a tribe with cannibalistic tendencies decides enough is enough.
Featuring scenes of gang rape, genital mutilation, and the graphic, on-camera slaughter of several animals, the movie was banned in the UK, the US and several other countries.
In Britain, it was completely banned until 2001, and gorehounds could only get their hands on the full uncut version in 2011.
Over in Italy, director Ruggero Deodato was actually arrested for murder after duping people into thinking Cannibal Holocaust was a real snuff movie, eventually being fined for obscenity regardless.
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But while the film is difficult to watch for the viewer, it was even more terrifying for those making it.
Yorke describes Deodato, who passed away in 2022, as a ‘tyrant’ who ‘wasn't really very concerned about anybody's mental health’, only ‘getting the shot’.
The actor says he was ‘worried’ for his co-stars’ safety, and after witnessing animals being killed on camera, he feared he might be next.
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"The circumstances became more and more scary once I saw them killing animals," he says. "I wasn't sure if they were going to kill us or not.
“I carried my passport and my money and my plane ticket everywhere I went.
"Jack [a character in the movie] was the first one to get captured and killed, and after they didn’t actually kill him, I thought, ‘We’ll probably be OK'.”
‘They offered me an adventure’
Yorke, a seasoned theatre actor, was a last minute replacement, and joined the production midway through filming in Leticia, Colombia.
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He ‘had no idea’ what the film was about, or the atrocities his sociopathic character commits onscreen.
“They offered me an adventure, and I took them up on it. All I knew was that I'd be out of the country for a month," he recalls.
Yorke finally read the script the night after his flight landed in the rainforest.
“Reading it over dinner was probably a mistake. I think the rape scene jumped out to me. That's probably when I thought, ‘God, what am I doing here?’”
‘People were vomiting’
Alarm bells really started to ring when Yorke realised the cast were actually expected to kill animals on camera, and things came to a head during a scene where a live monkey had its skull sliced open.
“I went to Salvatore [Basile], the assistant director, and said, ‘You guys are going to kill this monkey?’
“And he goes, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘What happened to the magic of the movies? You know, there's so many ways you can kill the monkey without killing the monkey'.
“People were vomiting because you couldn't help but watch. There were people hiding behind trees who didn't want to be anywhere near the action. There was almost a revolt on the set.”
By this point, walking away from the shoot wasn’t an option.
“I was on a set 45 minutes from the only town. I had no idea how to get back to it and there were only two planes a week.
“If life is a series of compromises, I make the ones that I have to make.”
Yorke did, however, put his foot down and refuse to brutally kick and shoot a pig dead on camera; his co-star Luca Barbareschi ended up doing it instead.
He was so shaken by the moment he fluffed his lines, and then had no idea he’d just given the cue for his co-stars to set fire to a village of indigenous people, who were played by local actors.
“I saw people huddling in the flames there, and it was a scary moment. I was definitely worried for those people. I had no idea that was going to happen.”
‘Be more savage’
The most difficult scene to film, Yorke says, was the scene where he and his fellow filmmakers take turns raping a young indigenous woman. It’s later implied they murder her offscreen, before impaling her body on a stick and blaming her death on her tribe in their faked news footage.
“That’s the only time I saw Ruggero really pound the men to be more savage.
“That day I got sick and I'm pretty sure it was psychosomatic. They said, ‘OK, you can get in the last boat’. I'm like, ‘God, I wonder if I can not get in the boat', because I knew what we were doing that day.
“We can all kind of push the envelope a little bit, but for me to convey to you that I'm actually raping this girl, I gotta get in touch with that part in me that would actually rape somebody. That's pretty hard to find.”
After going through all this, does Yorke enjoy watching the film back?
“No,” he says definitively. “It’s just not my kind of movie, although I have a lot of respect for what Ruggero did."
As grisly as Cannibal Holocaust was to film, it’s earned its reputation as a pioneering horror classic. Its depraved imagery is seared into viewers' brains, and its 'found footage' set-up went on to inspire the likes of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.
It’s far from the only film to feature real-life animal killings; Deodato’s 1977 movie Last Cannibal World did too. There's a reason Cannibal Holocaust is the film that's still talked about 40 years later.
In spite of his terrifying stint in the jungle, Yorke is clear that actors sometimes need to be pushed to their limits.
"They never really ask you to do anything that's comfortable," he says. "If it's comfortable for you, it's not entertaining for the audience."
Topics: Film, TV and Film
Simon Fearn