Deadlights: Family Dinner

Cannibalism is a psychologically potent act, a kind of ultimate violation of human social values in which the victim's basic humanity is either denied or disregarded. The meaning of the act, though, depends on the participants and setting. In Antonia Bird's Ravenous, for example, the frontier setting and post-Civil War military cast suggests that the film's cannibalistic acts relate not just to the brother-against-brother carnage of that struggle but to the vicious, heartless hunger inherent to colonial expansionism. In Nick Antosca's Butcher's Block, the third season of his Channel Zero horror anthology series, this idea of self-destructive American rapacity strikes much closer to the home front.

The affluent Peach family exists in a kind of perpetual summer in a dimension gifted to them by a capricious god to whom they sacrifice abducted children on a monthly basis. The Peaches are next to immortal, their riches transmuted into a kind of old money untouchability by their arcane pursuits, and they maintain that quasi-immortality by eating their fellow human beings. They choose their prey from among the poor and unwanted of the titular neighborhood, a slum left behind after the collapse of the Peaches' meatpacking business in the wake of their retreat to their private world. The symbolism is brutally clear: to the rich, the poor are meat.

That the Peaches live in a kind of perpetual American daydream of relaxed family dinners and lazy summer days points toward the rotten heart of that very dream. The kinds of lives the rich enjoy and the rest of us are encouraged to fantasize about can only be supported by suffering and misery. In the real world that misery is too vast and too far away to fully grasp, but in the patrician appetites of Butcher's Block's antagonists it takes on an immediate, undeniable ugliness. The idea of wealth itself has raw meat stuck between its teeth.