Ravenous and the Frontier Myth

In a pivotal scene in Antonia Bird’s cannibal Western, Ravenous (1999), F. W. Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle), a stranger suffering from frostbite and seeking solace in the California fort at the center of the film admits he survived a lost wagon train journey from Virginia by feeding on the travelers who “expired from malnourishment.” Instead of offering sympathy, however, the fort’s American Indian guide, George (Joseph Runningfox), grows anxious and calls him Wendigo, showing the fort’s commander, Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones) a Wendigo Ojibwa myth illustrated on a blanket. According to the myth, when a man eats another’s flesh, usually an enemy, he steals his strength, his essence, his spirit, so that his hunger becomes craven and insatiable. The more he eats, the more he wants, and the stronger he becomes. For George, when men become cannibals, they become Wendigo, superhuman monsters with insatiable appetites. In the context of the westward movement Colqhoun embodies, Wendigo may also coincide with the white man’s voracious hunger for land.

Set in 1847, immediately after the Mexican-American War and right before the California gold rush, Ravenous explicitly addresses the Wendigo cannibal myth. In Ravenous Wendigo is both reality and metaphor for Manifest Destiny and the environmental and human exploitation that accompanies it. Inspired by the Donner party incident of the same year and the trial of 1870s cannibal prospector Alfred G.Packer, the film follows Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) to Fort Spencer, a desolate military outpost in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He has been banished because he is viewed as a coward; yet he is also honored as a hero because he bravely defeated a Mexican fort after ingesting the blood of his peers. His commander General Slauson (John Spencer) belittles this bravery, however. After watching Boyd’s inability to consume a large steak at a victory dinner, he declares, “You’re no hero. I want you as far from my company as possible.”

In cannibal horror films like Ravenous, gendered bodies and the volatile agents of the material world they inhabit may become violently intertwined. At Fort Spencer, Boyd joins a group of misfits with little to do on this empty range: Hart, the commanding officer; Toffler (Jeremy Davies), the company chaplain; Knox (Stephen Spinella), the drunken doctor; Reich (Neal McDonough), the only real soldier of the group; Cleaves (David Arquette), the heavily medicated camp cook; and George and his sister Martha (Sheila Tousey), the troops’ Indian guides. The dull life they maintain in this wilderness fort is shattered, however, when Colqhoun/Colonel Ives arrives and introduces cannibalism and the Wendigo myth into the plot. Colqhoun also gives a name to the cravings Boyd so wishes to end and amplifies the impact of gender on its manifestation. Although an emasculated Boyd resists Wendigo, and Martha escapes its effects, Colqhoun embraces it.