Your migrant ate my dog, says America’s gory far right

Before making his monumental Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, and long before King Kong and Get Back, Peter Jackson got his start as a director in a less prestigious genre: gore. The term defines films that are extremely violent, with plenty of blood, guts and amputations, but that use this horror for comedy. Jackson’s directorial debut was Bad Taste, and his first big hit — which became a cult phenomenon — was Braindead. In Spanish, it had the tagline: “Your mother ate my dog” — a reference to one of the most popular scenes in the movie, which Jackson directed when he was just 30.

Braindead — a movie as gory as it was funny — was released in 1992 and went viral, back when nobody had the internet, as it was passed from hand to hand on VHS (today, it can be seen on YouTube). The movie is set in New Zealand, where a timid man is caught between his tyrannical mother and his innocent girlfriend. The mother is bitten by a strange creature — a Sumatran rat monkey — and turns into a zombie. The son is patient with her, even when she eats his own ear. In the most famous scene of the movie, the girlfriend’s dog runs up to the mother’s room and is devoured: only the animal’s bones and skin can be recovered from her mouth. “Your mother ate my dog!” yells the girlfriend. “Not all of it,” he replies. This scene is followed by the spread of the zombie virus and a bloody orgy.

Peter Jackson doesn’t believe in zombies, he laughs at them. He doesn’t want us to be afraid that someone will eat our dog. But in this age, when paranoid stories go viral, Donald Trump played an outlandish xenophobic card in his debate with Kamala Harris on Tuesday. His comment gave rise to many memes, but he was trying to sound credible. Trump said that in Springfield, Ohio, illegal immigrants, supposedly Haitians, are eating pets: “They’re eating the dogs — the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.” Harris looked puzzled and said only: “Talk about extreme!” The moderators quickly clarified that the Springfield authorities had not received any credible reports of this happening.

The Republican ticket appears to have a certain fascination with pets. Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, also lashed out at women who have cats instead of children, describing them as “miserable” and arguing “they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” This time, Trump has hit the grotesque in his efforts to dehumanize immigrants. In the debate, he also said that the crime rate has dropped throughout the world, even in Venezuela, because these countries are sending all the murderers, rapists and psychopaths to the U.S., and no longer have anyone left in their prisons or mental institutions. More fake news.

Trump is more fond of another horror film: The Silence of the Lambs. He often quotes Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal so well played by Anthony Hopkins. He used him as a reference to warn that dangerous mentally ill people are arriving at the U.S. border: “The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner.” Just to clarify, Lecter — who is a fictional character — did not die, nor did Robert Maudsley, the British prisoner who inspired the character.

Like in both fiction and reality, a pathologically lying far right is imposing its gory messages, encouraging social division and hatred of strangers. As did the most sinister propaganda of recent history.

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