Eating people is wrong

It has been a good week for connoisseurs of Grand Guignol. On Monday morning, a 67-year-old man was attacked with an axe on a street in Belsize Park, north London, and murdered in front of several astonished onlookers. The news reports varied in the lubricity of their detail - but more than one managed to imply that a complete decapitation had taken place, and the published photographs of the body (surely an unwelcome development in media manners) were taken from an angle that left the matter tantalisingly open.

Then, on Tuesday, there was widespread coverage of the life sentence handed down to Peter Bryan, a psychiatric patient who took advantage of the liberal regime under which he was being treated to beat a friend to death with a hammer, fry up a portion of his brain and eat it. One journalist noted that he'd used Clover to oil the pan - a bathetic detail that was, at one and the same time, completely unnecessary and completely unforgettable.

Both events gave a certain queasy piquancy to the Today programme's discussion, on Wednesday morning, of the literary appeal of monsters and villains. "Why do we find them so appealing?" Sarah Montague asked Simon Sebag Montefiore and Ian Rankin. Well, probably for the same reason that no journalist or editor worth his salt would have dreamt of putting the most toothsome element of the Bryan story anywhere else but in the opening paragraph. And, talking of salt, if he'd used seasoning they'd have told us that, too.

Which is probably a good moment to recall that a good week for connoisseurs of Grand Guignol was a truly terrible week for the families of the victims. And if that seems heartlessly belated, that's really my point. The truth is that, for all but those intimately involved, the frisson of appalled curiosity is the instinct and the human sympathy is the afterthought. Indeed, perhaps even for those intimately involved.

"It's like something from a horror film," said the niece of the man whom Bryan had butchered. What was interesting about her choice of words was the unstated assumption they contained - that the proper place for brain-eating and dismemberment is on screen, where we can enjoy them unperturbed by the thought that real humans have been harmed in the making of this film.

The problem is that it's not that easy to separate our responses to fictional atrocities from our responses to real ones. If you'll forgive the expression, they tend to bleed into each other. Since we unabashedly take pleasure in the details of violent death in one arena, it's a little difficult to see how some of that pleasure isn't implicated in our reactions to real crime.

I don't mean to suggest for a moment that violent cinema has corrupted our human sentiments - that tired old reflex of disapproval. Because, if anything, it's surely the other way around - a pre-existing curiosity and fascination with grisly murder ended up contaminating a medium that began in the pure innocence of magic tricks and factory girls leaving work.

When the real Grand Guignol theatre in Paris closed down in the Sixties, after more than 60 years of satisfying Parisians' appetite for lurid and baroque forms of bloodletting, its last director blamed the rivalry of contemporary fact. "We could never compete with Buchenwald," he said. "Before the war, everyone believed that what happened on stage was purely imaginary; now, we know that these things and worse are possible."

But the truth is that audiences always understood that they were possible, and worse was exactly what they wanted. In the end, cinema gave it to them, taking over the Grand Guignol's customer base and massively expanding it. Hannibal - in which the hero (yes, hero) ends by spoonfeeding a man his own brains - was mass-market entertainment, not a daring night out for a handful of jaded thrillseekers.

The shameful truth is that there is some part of us - a decently furtive part - that craves the worst, and popular fictions have always been good at feeding it. Journalism frequently pretends that the opposite is the case - that we dread bad news and have to be coaxed through our distress - but then journalism usually betrays itself by what it includes to fill out the story. How many times have you read, in a story about a serial killer, phrases along the lines of "Britain's most prolific" or "America's most brutal" - implicit assurances that the subject of this story has a record-setting commitment to grisly homicide. And because strangers remain a kind of fiction for us, it's all too easy to forget that this time round it's not just a horror film.