10 Best Exploitation Films Of All Time

Now that you've seen The Green Inferno, it’s time to discover Cannibal Holocaust, without which Eli Roth would never have had a career (keep your smart comments to yourself, what do you say?). Courtesy of Roth, Ruggero Deodato’s film is finally receiving kudos as the most powerful cannibal movie ever made.

The movie was so powerful, in fact, that Deodato was arrested and charged with obscenity shortly after the Italian premiere, charges he was only able to evade when he produced his actors in court, proving he hadn't killed them on camera. What he couldn’t dispute was that all the violence against animals in the movie was real.

Pigs, racoons, turtles, monkeys and snakes were all slaughtered by Ruggero and his crew, who subsequently cooked the critters and ate them. The scenes were supposed to show the characters’ descent into savagery, an irony that might’ve been lost on the filmmaker.

Holocaust's "found footage" would also inspire such later films as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Rec (2007). Handheld and grainy, the footage has a you-are-there immediacy that to this day has not been equaled, never mind topped.