This is truly one of my favorite, under-appreciated horror films. It works beautifully, with an exceptional cast, and a surprisingly subtle, for the subject matter, metaphor at it’s heart. It blends wonderfully different strands of horror themes; ambiguity, the supernatural, isolation, a Cassandra-like hero.

The film opens with disquieting imagery, possibly the most disturbing piece of steak I’ve ever seen, and Captain Boyd, recently promoted hero of the Mexican-American war physically sickened by the sight of his fellow officers eating meat. We soon find out that his revulsion is related to his promotion. Far from being a hero, he pretended to be dead, and the blood of his fellow soldiers dripped into his mouth as their bodies were piled on top of him. When he emerged from the pile, after a sudden burst of strength, he just happened to capture the Spanish commanders. Since exposing him as a coward would be bad for morale, his commanding officer punishes him instead by sending him to a remote fort in the Sierra Nevada mountains, staffed with a skeleton crew for the winter. Shortly a half-starved man arrives at the camp, telling the soldiers the story of his escape from a lost wagon train that has turned to cannibalism and murder to survive. The soldiers go to investigate, only to discover that the strange man was not entirely telling them the truth. From that point on, the story largely becomes a battle of wits and determination between Boyd and the cannibal, with the Native American legend of the Wendigo hovering over them, as it seems that eating human flesh really does make people stronger.

It’s the battle between Boyd and the cannibal that really drives the action. Boyd feels shamed for his cowardice in the war, and the cannibal is a charismatic figure who seems to offer a practical method of dealing with shame by joining with him in a sort of sect, and it is only by resisting the cannibal through an assertion of morality that Boyd is able to ultimately triumph. What’s intriguing about this is, by this point in the film, it’s clear that Boyd and the cannibal are not actually talking about eating people anymore; they’re actually talking about the concept of “Manifest Destiny” and American imperialism. It’s not that far off, as far as metaphors go, as the proposed “victims” of the cannibal’s plots are chiefly planned to be those who are heading over the mountains to California out of a desire to join in the Gold Rush. He plans to live off those whose goal is unfettered capitalism and commodity exploitation. The tone is darkly comic through much of this, very black-humored, and the ultimate resolution is both fitting and somewhat cynical in its acknowledgement that, however the drama between Boyd and his adversary works out, there will always be more men willing to live off their fellows to come along.

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