The Anthropophagous Beast is a 1980 Italian horror film, directed by Joe d'Amato and co-written by d'Amato and Luigi Montefiore, who also starred in the film under the pseudonym of George Eastman.

The film also starred Tisa Farrow, Saverio Vallone, Margaret Donnelly, Vanessa Steiger, Mark Bodin, Bob Larsen, Simone Baker, Mark Logan, Rubina Rey and Zora Kerova.

The Story

A group of tourists arrive on a small Greek island, only to find it almost completely deserted. It seems that the only person still alive there is a blind girl who does not know what has happened to the rest of the town, but is terrified of a man who she describes as smelling of blood.

As members of the group disappear or are murdered by the mysterious man who smells of blood, the survivors search for clues as to what is going on. They find a diary which tells the story of a man who was shipwrecked with his wife and child. In order to survive, the man was forced to eat his dead family. This act drove the man insane and he went on to decimate the rest of the island's inhabitants.

In the film's most notorious scene, the killer strangles a heavily-pregnant woman, and then pulls the foetus from between her legs and proceeds to eat it.

In the end the killer is dispatched by means of an axe to the stomach, but before he dies he attempts to auto-cannibalise himself, chewing on his own intestines before dying.

Background

Anthropophagous the Beast was director Joe d'Amato's first 'straight' horror film, having previously made erotic horror films such as Emmanuelle in America and Erotic Nights of the Living Dead. D'Amato and co-writer Luigi Montefiore were long-time associates, and Montefiore often had lead roles in d'Amato's films, usually under his pseudonym of George Eastman.

As well as The Anthropophagous Beast, the film was known in by several other titles, including:

• Antropophagous
• The Grim Reaper
• Man Eater

In the UK, the film was placed on the DPP list and classified as a video nasty for a time in 1984. This was due mainly to the infamous 'foetus-eating' scene. In reality, the 'foetus' was a skinned rabbit; this did not prevent the film from being falsly described as a snuff film, a story which was even featured on BBC News. It is now available in the UK in a cut form, under the title The Grim Reaper.

D'Amato followed up this movie with a sequel of sorts, Absurd, the following year.

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