The bloodiest, most unsettling coming of age film since Ginger Snaps, Julia Ducournau’s Raw is lithe and feral body horror that turns budding teenage sexuality into a lawless apocalypse of teeth, claws, and gnawing, unholy hunger. Already a legend due to reports of moviegoers vomiting or fainting during viewings, this low-budget, high-impact French film repulses and titillates in equal measure, an authentically visceral cinematic experience. 
 

 
One of Raw’s many highlights is the soundtrack, a throbbing, neon-soaked collection of late-night club bangers, cutting-edge indie rockers and a grinding synth score by Jim Williams. The most audacious track is clearly Orties’  2013 hit “Plus Pute Que Toutes Les Putes” (“Bitchier than Any Bitches”), a snotty acid-rapper with alarming lyrics about murder (“I’m gonna drown you in my pool/I would eat your bones”), necrophilia (“I have sex with the dead/Pussy, I prefer you stiff and cold/Then you’re less of a chatterbox”), and good ol’ fashioned Satanism (“The king of darkness is in my heart/I’m sick of 69, I just want 666”).

Pretty goddamn edgy, especially when you consider it’s the work of two teenage sisters.
 

Kincy and Antha, the ghetto-goth rappers of your darkest nightmares
 
Orties was formed in a Paris suburb in 2010 by twins Kincy and Antha, who may or may not have been fifteen at the time. Misdirection is an important part of this whole operation. Anyway, they released their first album, Sextape, in 2013. They’re topless on the cover, and most of the songs are about cocaine, sodomy, and cannibalism, except for “Ghetto Goth,” which is about their pre-rap death-rock days. It’s obviously one of the greatest albums ever made.

Their most recent single, 2016’s “SEXEDROGUEHORREUR,” is less menacing than usual, but I’m sure they’ll be back in black any minute now. A new album is in the works. It will doubtless be a monster.  If anything’s gonna kill rock n’ roll once and for all, it’s gonna be French twin sister Satanic sex rappers.
 

“Plus Pute Que Toutes Les Putes” (“Bitchier than Any Bitches”)
 
More after the jump…

Waiter there’s an eye in my soup…

A restaurant in Nigeria has been shut down after it was found to be selling human flesh.

According to a news report on BBC Swahili, local police raided the hotel restaurant in Anambra, after being informed human meat was being served to customers. The police discovered various cuts of human flesh and two freshly severed (“still bleeding”) human heads stored in the kitchen.

Eleven people, including the restaurant’s owner, were arrested.

One local resident told the BBC:

“Every time I went to the market, I observed strange things going on at the hotel.

“Shifty, strange looking people made their way in and out of the hotel and behaved in a very suspicious manner. I was not surprised when the police uncovered such an illegal trade.”

Though “not a societal norm,” cannibalism is not illegal in most countries—including America and parts of Europe. Cannibalism has been seen in many wars—including the Siege of Stalingrad during the Second World War and most recently in Liberia and the Congo. According to those who know, human flesh has a texture like beef—though is a little sweeter and a little softer.

A priest who had recently eaten at the restaurant told the BBC that he had been surprised when presented with a bill for 700 Naira ($3.50) for a small cut of “beef.” The price was extortionate when considering the average daily expenditure in Nigeria is roughly 95 cents a day. The priest added:

“The waiter noticed my surprise and told me the bill so high because of the small piece of meat I had eaten.

“I did not know I had been served with human meat, and this was why it was so expensive.”

A cache of automatic weapons (AK-47s), hand grenades and several cell phones were also discovered in the raid.

Though rumors of cannibalism have long been rife in Nigeria, this is allegedly the first time a restaurant has been discovered selling human flesh.
 

 
However, this is not the first time this story has been reported. On September 5th, 2013, the exact same story appeared in the Osun Defender:

On Thursday Onitsha police arrested 11 people after they discovered 2 fresh human heads in a hotel (name withheld) very close to the popular Ose-Okwodu market in Anambra state. 2 AK47 rifles & other weapons were also discovered in the hotel.

The arrest followed tip-offs from area residents on Thursday morning. The hotel owner, 6 women and 4 men were arrested.

After police got access to the hotel, they made a startling discovery of two human heads wrapped in a cellophane bag, two AK47 rifles, two army caps, 40 rounds of live ammunition and so many cell phones.

The quotes from a resident and a local priest tally with those carried by the recent article on the BBC and today’s Metro newspaper.

“Each time I came to market, because the hotel is very close to the market, I always noticed funny movements in and out of the hotel; dirty people with dirty characters always come into the hotel. So, I was not surprised when the police made this discovery in the early hours of yesterday,” said a vegetable seller in the area

A Pastor who was among the people who tipped off the police on Thursday said: I went to the hotel early this year, after eating, I was told that a lump of meat was being sold at N700, I was surprised. So I did not know it was human meat that I ate at such expensive price.”

What is this country turning into?

What is news reporting turning into? is perhaps a more relevant question, as the high demand for a constant stream of interesting and unusual news reports means many stories are just lifted and processed without checking sources or whether the story is even genuine “news.”

From its first appearance on Osun Defender in September 2013, this tale was lifted almost verbatim onto the IB Times in February 2014 and then Live Leak without apparently seeking any verification. A year-and-a-half later, the story is now being “regurgitated” by quite a few respected newspapers who should know better.

It would appear the latest version of the story merely relates to the restaurant being recently closed down, following on from the police raid last year. What has happened to the eleven who were arrested is not known.

Via BBC Swahili and Metro.

 
A “Hannibal Lecter” style cannibal was tasered to death by police after being found eating a woman alive in an hotel room in Wales.

Matthew Williams was discovered by security guards at the Sirhowy Arms Hotel in Argoed, Caerphilly, chewing on 22-year-old Cerys Marie Yemm’s eyeball “like a Creme Egg”. He was then seen eating half her face while in a “zombie-like” state.

Hotel staff called police who arrived and tasered Williams as he resisted arrest. It has been reported that Williams was high on cocaine and collapsed and died when hit by the electric shock.

The cannibal killer and his victim were both pronounced dead at the scene.

One shocked local, Lynn Beasley, told press:

“He went Hannibal Lecter on the woman. He gouged her eyeball out, ate that and then ate and half her face. He had just been released from prison and was high on coke.”

Another local woman, Jill Edwards, who lives near the hotel said:

“This animal was eating this girl to death. He murdered her so police stopped him – good on them. Security said they told him no girls in his room and he didn’t answer when they went to check. When they opened his door he was eating her face.”

It is believed Williams was in a relationship with Cerys Marie Yemm, who he had brought back to the hotel for a drink. Williams, who was nicknamed “Fifi,” was staying at the hotel following his release from prison after serving only half of a five-year prison sentence for an attack on his ex-partner. The hotel is used as a hostel for homeless, “vulnerable people” and recently released offenders.

Police said they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the “incident.”
 

 
Via Daily Record & Daily Star
 

 
A man has been arrested in Pakistan’s Punjab province on suspicion of cannibalising a young girl. Mohammad Arif Ali was arrested after neighbors complained about the smell of rotting flesh coming from his house.

Arif Ali and his brother, Mohammad Farman Ali, were jailed two years ago after they were found to have disinterred and devoured up to 150 corpses over ten years from a local graveyard. It is said the brothers used body parts to make curry. As there are no laws against cannibalism in Pakistan, the pair were sent to jail for desecration of graves, and fined Rs50,000.

The brothers spent most of their time in prison at the King Edward Medical University in Lahore, where they were examined by doctors at the neurophysiology department.

After their release from jail, the siblings maintained a very low profile. However, after complaints about an overpowering stench coming from the brothers’ house, local police raided the premises where the discovered the skull of a child. The police then arrested one of the brothers, Arif Ali, and are now searching for the other brother, Farman Ali.

Proof that short prison sentences don’t work…?

Cannibalism can be dated as far back as the Lower and Middle Paleolithic, where it is believed to have taken place during times of famine or for possible rituals. More recently, cannibalism has been documented during the Russian famine of the 1920s, and during the Second World War at the siege of Stalingrad. It has also been reported in the 1960s and 1970s in Cambodia, and famously after the 1972, Andes flight disaster, when survivors cannibalised other dead passengers to stay alive. There have also been several notorious serial killers who cannibalised their victms including Jeffrey Dahmer and Andrei Chikatilo (who killed and ate a minimum of 52 women and children between 1976 and 1990) being perhaps the best known.

Below the original news report on the arrest of the two brothers form 2011:
 

 
Via The Independent

 
This May 30th – the day Montreal police held a press conference naming Canadian Luka Rocco Magnotta as the fugitive suspect for the filmed murder of Chinese international student Lin Jun – I happened to end up in a North London pub enjoying a drink with David Kerekes, co-author of Killing for Culture, the definitive study of death on film. Kerekes (who is currently completing some extensive revisions for a new edition of that 1994 work) has the apparently-not-mutually-exclusive distinction of being both the nicest chap you could hope to meet and perhaps the world’s leading authority on snuff cinema.

So, I was hardly going to neglect to bring up this Magnotta character, whose 1 Lunatic, 1 Icepick (the title of his filmed killing – reportedly featuring dismemberment, decapitation, necrophilia, cannibalism and more) sounded something like snuff’s Citizen Kane. 

The mention of Magnotta, however, got more than it bargained for, as Kerekes instantly lowered his voice and – making a large show of not naming any names – regaled me with an incredible account of a long term friend and associate of his who had been on Magnotta’s trail for months, a member of a secretive cabal of amateur online sleuths incensed by Magnotta’s earlier series of kitten-killing films (there were three prior to 1 Lunatic, 1 Icepick). Weeks later, and with Magnotta safely offline and behind bars, I asked Kerekes if his friend might consent to an interview for Dangerous Minds. The next day I received an email from a certain “Alex DeLarge” – a Kubrickian pseudonym we’ll have cause to revisit – informing me that the so-called “Animal Beta Project” were happy for him to go substantially on-record regarding these events for what amounted to the first time (previously two ABP members had given just one short interview for Canadian news).

A relative latecomer to the cause, DeLarge’s odyssey began towards the end of 2011, when he first stumbled upon one of Magnotta’s kitten films while looking for soccer news online. Appalled, DeLarge found a likeminded Twitter feed on the subject, then a Facebook group, “For Great Justice,” where to his amazement he saw that the individual in these videos had been identified by thousands as Luka Rocco Magnotta.

“The Facebook group was initially set up by someone known as ‘R’ around December 2010 when Magnotta released the first video – that video’s known as “VKK,” which stands for Vacuum Kitten Killer. In that, Magnotta puts two kittens inside a vacuum-sealed bag and then attaches a vacuum cleaner to it and sucks in the air until they die. You’ve got to understand how horrendous this shit was. I mean, I’d seen Faces of Death. I think that when they’re eighteen everyone wants to test themselves by watching the grossest thing possible. But this was no accident – and it was no act. This guy was actually killing and doing so for some demented reason.”

For most, presumably, membership of For Great Justice was a case of adding their own “boo” to the wider chorus. DeLarge, however, was not satisfied at just registering disapproval, and began to investigate Magnotta in earnest, the emergent obsession coinciding with a long-awaited month off work, holiday he half-ruefully recollects was spent doing little other than “search for Luka Rocco Magnotta.” Primarily, this entailed DeLarge (who works in film and video) trawling through Magnotta’s hundreds of Youtube accounts for leads and information. “You’d be amazed by how much you can find out from people just through a Youtube account. Sometimes, for instance, you’d be able to track back through comments – you’d search a username and the username would reveal stuff through Google etc etc.”

Unbeknownst to DeLarge, his dedication and professionalism had alerted the attention of certain persons behind the scenes at For Great Justice, who asked if he would be willing to produce a video identifying Magnotta for the general public. Collaborating with two others from the group admin, DeLarge had the video ready in just sixteen hours, and it rapidly received upwards of 150,000 views. These efforts earned DeLarge an invitation to join a secret Facebook group he hadn’t even suspected existed and has since assumed the name Animal Beta Project.

Upon admittance, DeLarge’s own obsession with stopping Magnotta was put into perspective, as he came into contact with data analysts, animal rights activists, and others who had been assiduously tracking Magnotta much longer than a few weeks. The group – “20 or so persons, half of them active,” and guided by key members such as “Baudi Moovin,” “Nicee Punk” and “John Green” – characterize themselves as “miners” (they “mine for information”) and DeLarge was now confronted by the remarkable and sophisticated wealth of excavated data: it had enabled them, among other things, to correctly pinpoint Magnotta as then residing in Montreal.

One fascinating aspect of this hunt was Animal Beta Project members’ inevitable online acquaintanceship with Magnotta himself. This was mostly due to For Great Justice activists and supporters lavishing him with the kind of obsessive scrutiny craved by his omnivorous narcissism, meaning there was no more dependable presence lurking about its pages than Magnotta, albeit under a vast succession of fake Facebook profiles, behind which he would slander, spread rumors, and generally muddy the investigative waters with endless false leads and double bluffs. (Suspicion was so ubiquitous that, when DeLarge was first admitted into the secret group, members apologetically instructed him to ignore a recent thread theorizing that he was another Magnotta dupe.)

I asked DeLarge how members could usually go about seeing through a Magnotta mask. The answer is telling. “Every comment Luka Magnotta made was about himself, was pro-Luka Magnotta, that was the first thing to look out for. If someone thinks he’s ‘hot,’ that’s usually him.” This familiar phenomenon resulted in an especially memorable incident on Christmas Eve 2011. DeLarge, sensing that this kitten-torturing Über-narcissist might not be wading in festive cheer, intentionally smoked him out with a cheeky post musing aloud what Magnotta might be doing that evening – “I’m sure it’s a joyous occasion” and so on.

Duly stung, Magnotta (at that moment hiding behind a female profile that had joined the group the previous day) fired back: “No, I think you’ll find he’s out with his friends, visiting family, having a great Christmas…” Magnotta then proceeded to compulsively post an unprecedented couple of hundred times over the next twenty-four hours. “He was on his own,” DeLarge remembers, “he had nothing better to do than talk to people that hated him. The whole of Christmas Day he stayed online and posted and posted and posted.” (Which goes to show it’s possible to pity just about anyone.)

When he wasn’t being painfully pathetic, however, loopy Luka could be ingeniously elusive, disruptive and – at times – outright intimidating. One day, conducting one of their regular Social Media trawls, Animal Beta Project came upon a new Magnotta account.

“Magnotta knew he was communicating with us through his videos on Social Media accounts, but this one time was particularly scary. He had just set up a video account in which he’d favorited a load of videos – and in the videos he’d favorited a video of the exact workplace of one of the ABP group, and all five or six films in the account related to the personal locations of secret group members.”

Magnotta’s message was clear. When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back…

DeLarge defines this entire tragic course of events as one in which “the general public tried to help, and the system knocked them back every time.” The overall purpose of the Animal Beta Project’s efforts had always been to amass enough concrete information regarding Magnotta’s crimes and location so that certain inherent obstacles impeding the intervention of the proper authorities could be removed (such as the issue of jurisdiction that arises with any ostensibly anonymous online film).

Accordingly, the group had been in contact with various authorities “since day one.” Thanks to the ABP’s establishment of Magnotta’s identity and location, in early 2012 the case was finally assigned an officer from Toronto police. But it was, stresses DeLarge, “one officer.” Worse still was when local police submitted their conclusion that it “seemed” as if Luka Rocco Magnotta “doesn’t exist.” This triggered something of an epistemological crisis in DeLarge.

“All the members of the secret group had communicated with Magnotta at some point: if the police can’t find him, then what the hell is going on? There are certain areas I can’t say anything about right now, but sometimes I’d wake up and think, ‘It’s like we’re dealing with more than one person, or as if we’re dealing with some really weird, fucked-up troll story – someone just playing with our heads on the internet.’ I was just starting to think, ‘what have I done – I’ve put to much into this,’ and then…”

And then, one of the ABP members received a Google Alert. It was 1 Lunatic, 1 Icepick. They posted it to the ABP Facebook group: DeLarge and a couple of other members immediately clocked the still frame of Magnotta crouching in his purple hoodie, Casablanca poster behind him on the wall. “I was just waking up,” DeLarge recalls. “It was 11’o’clock Sunday morning, the sun was shining: I was looking forward to a nice chilled day.” 

After skimming through the footage DeLarge attempted to back out, telling his fellow members he wanted nothing to do with this film… even though he was entirely convinced that 1 Lunatic, 1 Icepick was “a very well made fake” (a presumption initially shared by the entire ABP). Another group member, however, reminded DeLarge that they at least needed to ID Magnotta. DeLarge, being the “video guy,” felt obliged:  “I felt I had to stand up and be counted for.”  So he dragged himself upstairs, drew the curtains, locked the door, logged onto Skype with other ABP analysts, and spent the next forty-eight hours going over the film “frame by frame by frame” – everyone horrified by what increasingly seemed to be its irreducible authenticity…

Here let us momentarily pause this footage to acknowledge, with some superstitious awe, the high irony behind Alex DeLarge’s pseudonym, plucked out of thin air months prior to those days during which he would so closely resemble his namesake in the defining scene of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange – “the” Alex DeLarge strapped to a chair, eyes raked open, compelled to ogle ultraviolent films while choking back horror and disgust. 1 Lunatic, 1 Icepick itself is mired in weird intertextuality, the icepick a nod to Basic Instinct, the soundtrack – New Order’s “True Faith” (in place of Beethoven’s Ninth) – a wink to the opening strains of American Psycho. Killing for culture indeed!

“Magnotta murdered the guy while filming it, so he’d have to set up the camera, get the video going – afterwards he’d have had to turn to his laptop, with all the body parts lying around, and think, ‘I’ve got to edit this.’ Now, there’s dodgy sound in this video. We think it’s because he tried to use the music in the background, but realized it sounded shit and decided to put a soundtrack on it. Then he had to upload it onto the Internet… can you imagine what it must’ve been like in that room? And all you’re focused on is getting your video out there.”

While Magnotta slipped out of Canada, the Animal Beta Project’s growing conviction that the film was bona fide began to be echoed in a run of mainstream media reports: body parts were being mailed to various Canadian institutions… a torso had turned up in Montreal. DeLarge felt himself sink into a dream world of foreboding. Then came that May 30th press conference.

“I was stood there after a job with a bunch of camera equipment, and my partner phoned and said: ‘he’s on the news.’ At that time, it was as close as you can get to a feeling of a family member dying. Just that feeling of when your heart hits your feet and carries on through the floor.”

Magnotta existed alright. Belatedly, the ABP had everyone’s complete attention. “I was actually quite paranoid and just had a feeling the police were going to close the whole group down. Thankfully they didn’t.” On the contrary, a police division now approached them (via PETA, who DeLarge is quick to credit and praise for their involvement throughout), seeking to join the Animal Beta Project. Within hours, a solitary “amazed” representative was admitted and gifted what amounted to a comprehensive foundation for what had overnight become a global manhunt. “You know it’s serious when Interpol release a code red notice saying ‘Magnotta has not been apprehended.’”

Months later, and with Magnotta awaiting trial in Montreal, it sounds as if some of the benevolence the ABP extended to the police has waned: particularly when the police not only seem to have taken the evidence and ran, but can appear to be presenting it all to the wider public as the fruit of their own professional diligence.

“Look, we were never looking for glory in this. We just wanted to get the guy the help that he needed, but if it’s getting to the point where the police start claiming credit for it… that’s wrong. I’d just hope that at this point the police could be cool enough to say, ‘You know what, we really had no idea that the guy was going to do what he said, and we were contacted many times. We did screw up and the general public needs to be credited.’ It’s ultimately the system that’s failed. I just hope they do the decent thing and admit that this guy should have been looked into a long time ago.”

It is the proper investigation into those who document animal cruelty online that the ABP continues to instigate and advocate. “People who post videos of themselves torturing animals on the Internet usually have abuse associated with them one way or another.” It is, in short, “a big red flag,” as the case history of Luka Rocco Magnotta quite egregiously demonstrates. In July alone, the ABP could claim credit for identifying and locating two such perpetrators of online animal abuse – both are now facing appropriate charges.

“If people are gonna post these videos online – we’re gonna look for them. You’re traceable. Look, I’m a liberal. But I’m an extreme liberal. Do as you wish, as long as you don’t hurt others.”

Which sounds like a threat, in a really, really good way.