Beauty! Youth! Blood-sucking Parasites!

Moscow is home to a new therapy that promises to refresh and rejuvenate unlike anything else available. If that sounds intriguing to you, then you might think otherwise once you hear that it is based out of the International Leech Center, and the process involves the placement of sanitary, farm-raised leeches on the body to drain one's blood.

Leeches have been used in medicine since the middle ages, but it's only recently that they've been employed for anything practical, in reducing unwanted coagulation during surgeries. The saliva of the leech contains tiny amounts of a chemical called hirudin, which prevents blood clots from forming. The International Leech Center asserts that hirudin offers therapeutic effects for everything from one's skin to one's psychology. Children have been brought to the Center in hopes that the leeches can somehow correct hyperactivity (possibly through drinking their blood away until they're left in a stupor).

The majority of their clients, however, are women hoping to save their bodies from the inevitable effects of aging. In these cases, the leeches placed on the client's cheeks and forehead are burst, giving the client a warm, facial rinse in their own blood. One such leech-devotee is actress Demi Moore (which is bizarrely ironic given that this was one of her first films), who has gone on Letterman to regale a nauseated audience about the benefits of having one's body covered in blood-thirsty aquatic worms. Meanwhile several doctors have expressed skepticism about the practice, although this has had little effect on business. On the contrary, leech-breeding continues to be a highly profitable enterprise in Russia and new farms are being opened to meet the increased demand. All of this serves to highlight the great lengths people will go to maintain their appearance.

We at the Hyper Kitchen like you just the way you are.

Would you like to know more?
-Visit the International Leech Center
-See the interior of a leech farm with this series of photos (safe for the squeamish)
-Read this article from SkyNews

The Blood is Life (with Peppers and Onions)

In Ernest Hemingway's book The Green Hills of Africa, he describes a meal shared with the Masai tribesmen of Tanzania. As an aside, Hemingway mentions hearing stories of the Masai subsisting on blood, taken from their still-living cattle and mixed with milk. While ritualistic consumption of animal (and human) blood has been common all over the world, this was an early account of blood drinking for purely dietary needs. If you can get past the taboo, its nutritional value is considerable.

In modern Chad, meat shortages in the city of N'Djamena have resulted in a return to traditional blood-based dishes. A new variation, referred to as "vampire," consists of fried blood combined with peppers, onions, and other ingredients. The inexpensive blood can be purchased from slaughterhouses by the bucket, making vampire a real hit amongst families trying to save money. It has also become popular in bars.

Despite an exhaustive search, our Hyper Kitchen interns were unable to find any recipes for vampire, but given Hollywood's current infatuation with blood-suckers, it may not be long before some variation arrives in the United States eateries. Some may squirm, but we say that you can't go wrong with frying.

Would you like to know more?
-Read this BBC article

You Are Who You Eat

Among its other features, the town of Thetford, Vermont, is home to Sawnee Bean Cemetery and Sawnee Bean Road. This is rather anomalous as Thetford is a very ordinary town, and Sawnee Bean was one of the most infamous killers in history.

Because of sheer brutality of his crimes, Alexander "Sawnee" (or "Sawney") Bean has entered the realm of folklore in much the same way as Jack the Ripper. It is difficult to determine which details of his life actually happened and which are fabrication. There are even those who postulate that Sawnee Bean is a mere bogeyman, and never existed to begin with. Assuming he was a real person, here are the details of his savage life.

Born in 16th century Scotland, Sawnee Bean demonstrated only misanthropy and malice. As a young man he departed to a cave near the ocean shore, bringing with him an equally monstrous wife. After a few years of robbing unlucky travelers, the Beans took to murdering and ultimately devouring the bodies of their victims. Later they had a few children, who joined in the family business of robbery and human-hunting when they became old enough.

Thanks to incest, the Bean clan soon blossomed to forty-eight troglodytic cannibals, and the now-crowded cave was strewn with bones. They had become too numerous to conceal their crimes from the outside world, and word spread of their man-eating ways. Finally, King James the First decided that he had enough of all this depravity and dispatched an army of four-hundred men to track down the Beans. The loathsome family was rounded up and taken to Edinburgh. The male Beans had their limbs cut off and were left to bleed to death. The women and children, after being forced to watch the previous executions, were burned at the stake. A happy tale, to be sure.


Presumably Thetford had a citizen with the unfortunate luck of sharing a name with this notorious figure, but perhaps the town decided for unknowable reasons to honor the Scottish cannibal. Could it be that Thetford is populated by Bean's man-eating descendants? It may be too terrible to imagine, but travelers are urged to keep their wits about them while passing through.







Would you like to know more?
-Mysterious Britain's entry on Sawney Bean
-Virtual Scotland's entry on Sawney Bean

Vicious Video

Here's a slice of history for you.

During the eighties, the UK went through a national panic. Police were dispatched, raids were made, businesses were forcibly shut down, people were arrested. What was the catalyst for this unpleasant outbreak of martial law? Was it social unrest triggered by high levels of unemployment? Was it the protests made in response to the Thatcher government trying to effectively ban homosexuality? Had the installation of Orwellian security cameras on every street corner provoked rioters that resulted in brutal police action?

Nope. It all had to do a bunch've videotapes.

To place things in context, the VCR and Betamax player had only recently become available for the general public and video stores were a new retail phenomena.Things were vastly different from today in that movie companies were very hesitant to release their films. Amid uncertain new territory for copyright regulations and wild speculation that the videotape would doom the silver screen to obsolescence, few major studios wanted to commit their films to VHS or Beta tapes lest it lead to their own economic ruin. At the time, only a smattering of "classic" movies saw the light of day on videotape (with reluctance on behalf of their owners) and a good portion of these were colorized.

So, during this initial period, it was difficult to find contemporary movie releases for home viewing. Store owners were eager to access the fresh and growing market but when faced with a considerable lack of product, they turned to only alternative. Numerous small distribution companies had arisen specializing in:
1). Porn.
2). Schlock and trash movies. Public domain, poverty row thrillers from the forties alongside easy to procure exploitation movies from abroad, especially from the United States, Spain, and Italy. Before long, the shelves of British video stores were lined with films featuring cannibals, zombies, and psycho killers. Within all this sordid glop were some genuinely entertaining flicks and genre classics, but mostly these movies were notable only for being badly made and almost hilariously gruesome.


Titles like Gestapo's Last Orgy and Brain Damage Nightmare drew some complaints, but for the most part business was going well. Distribution companies were churning out new finds, and heavily promoted these videotapes. Vipco, a UK-based company, took out a full page in the Sunday Times to advertise the arrival of The Driller Killer, a lovely film about a crazed artist who takes to murdering homeless people with a cordless drill. Other companies followed suit, relentless hyping the notoriety of their movies. One company, Go Video, attempted to stir up some additional sales through a little engineered controversy, and sent an anonymous letter to conservative media watchdogs describing the depravity of Cannibal Holocaust.

This was a big mistake.

The letter wound up in the hands of Mary Whitehouse, a sour faced Christian crone who had launched a crusade against objectionable material on television. Convinced that Cannibal Holocaust was practically a threat to Western Civilization, Whitehouse spearheaded a community movement to ban the sale and distribution of such films. The tabloids were quick to exploit the public outcry, and ran spurious and half-baked claims that dreck horror was responsible for violent crime and delinquent youths. They coined the phrase Video Nasty to describe the infamous tapes. The term caught on like wildfire.

It was all hysteria and reactionary censorship. The "think of the children" argument was absurd as no retailer in their right mind would ever lend titles like SS Experiment Camp to kids. Additionally, there was never evidence to suggest that anyone would be actually hurt by watching such a movie. They were tasteless, stupid, violent, and often misogynistic, but they were ultimately harmless. Those that objected to them never seemed to consider simply never renting them in the first place.

Eventually, parliament passed the Video Recordings Act in 1984. The act redefined pre-existing obscenity laws to include explicit horror movies and foreign-import smut. Police would investigate the sale and renting of such videotapes, and would arrest shop-owners found with the illegal items in their stores. Some faced as much as eighteen months in prison. The tapes were collected in garbage bags and destroyed on police premises. It was insane. Even copies of Dolly Parton's Best Little Whorehouse in Texas were swept up, under the decidedly incorrect assumption that it was porn.

The liberal and counter-culture institutions of the UK were outraged, and the cheap gore movies that the government had sought to eradicate were suddenly lionized as expressions of free speech. The tapes gained more infamy than they could've hoped to achieve otherwise and movies like Make Them Die Slowly and I Spit On Your Grave became highly sought after items.

More than twenty years later, cooler heads prevailed and the restrictions were reevaluated. However, there are still movies that remain banned in Britain and others are allowed only in truncated, edited forms. Still, freedom won out in the end and the noble people of the UK can insert the special edition DVDs of The Toolbox Murders and Killer Nun and watch the ensuing carnage. For better or worse, the Video Nasties are here to stay.

For better or worse.