THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Once, in Christie’s auction rooms in London, I had seen a large and horrific painting titled “Cannibal Feast on the Island of Tanna, New Hebrides,” by Charles Gordon Frazer, a widely traveled English landscape artist.  It had been worked up in 1891 from a sketch he had made of a jungle scene he had actually stumbled upon on Tanna in the 1880s.  It has been claimed that Frazer was the only white man ever to witness a cannibal ceremony.  He recorded the scene faithfully in his celebrated painting, which showed two victims being brought into a shadowy jungle clearing – just like this – on poles, the gloating villagers (there are almost a hundred figures in the enormous canvas), the muscled, tufty-haired warriors, the women preparing the cooking fires.

Theroux/Oceania

A team of geologists attempt to remove a native cannibal population from an island to perform atomic research, but the cannibals’ female leader disposes of them one by one by seduction.

Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals, IMDB