This character is so dastardly, hated and popular that this character was voted most hated character of: January 2024.
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“
Here we are at the edge of the world in human history. Things like this happen all the time in the jungle; it's survival of the fittest. In the jungle, it's the daily violence of the strong overcoming the weak! JACKKKK!
„
~ Alan Yates preparing to burn down a native village and pin the massacre on another tribe.noicon
“
I tried working with Alan a couple of times, and I just couldn't handle it. You know he...he pushed his people to the limit, demanding everything, including blood. And talk about paranoia. God have mercy on his soul, he was one ruthless son of a bitch.
„
~ James Brabant, an old colleague of Alan's describing him to Professor Harold Monroe.
Alan Yates is the main antagonist as well as the villainous protagonist of the controversial film Cannibal Holocaust. He is an arrogant, racist, violent, and sociopathic person who likes calling innocent humans "monkeys". He also saw other humans as little more than victims to be filmed in order to earn him fame as a director. His documentaries were almost always staged and he had no problem in paying people to commit atrocities or engaging in such actions himself if he felt it would "improve" his documentaries - he was also extremely sadistic and treacherous, as he was seen grinning and laughing during scenes of intense violence (including rape and murder).
He is extremely racist to the native people of the Amazon, as he constantly calls them "monkeys".
He staged real executions in Uganda and Vietnam for a movie called "The Last Road to Hell", paying soldiers to be a fake approaching enemy army.
According to James Brabant, an old colleague of Alan, he pushed his people to the limit, demanding everything, along with blood.
He had Mark and Jack torch an entire Yacumo village down to the ground while he and Faye recorded it for a documentary called "The Green Inferno", during which most of the natives (children included) were forced into a single hut and burned to death. After the deed was done, Alan and Faye had sex in front of the now-homeless survivors.
He, Jack and Mark gangraped a Yanomamö girl while ignoring his girlfriend Faye's protests, after which she was impaled on a very long stick. It's left unclear as to whether her tribe killed her as punishment for premarital sex (since they're shown doing that do a different pregnant woman earlier) or the filmmakers killed her just to frame said tribe, but either way Alan shows no genuine remorse for his actions and even smiles at the gruesome sight before Mark tells him to "watch it" during filming.
He wasn't even above sacrificing friends to save his own skin, shooting a wounded Jack and then abandoning Faye to film her being gangraped and beheaded when the Yanomami surrounded them in the woods. Although he showed some care for Faye and wanted to save her at first, he was then somehow talked out of it by Mark, thus shedding his only redeeming quality.
Although he has numerous comedic moments that are played for dark comedy like when he comically ignoring his girlfriend's objections of filming themselves raping a native or when he sees his crew watching Faye getting changed, they don't detract him from his villainy and actually just shows how much of a jerkass can he be.
His gruesome death at the hands of the Yacumo tribe is well-deserved karma for all of his horrific actions.
Overall, he was so inhuman and vile that even his actor Carl Gabriel Yorke hated his guts and those of the film's director Ruggero Deodato. The character was not only created to be hated, but also to demonstrate the hypocrisy of capitalism and Western imperialism, of the mass media and the levels people would sink to just to get fame and money uncaring of who they might hurt.
Trivia[]
Yorke was extremely uncomfortable playing Alan and gave him controversy.
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