Featured Image Credit: CNN
Topics: News, World News, Film and TV
Niamh Shackleton
A reporter was made to eat human brain during a TV series, and it's safe to say the show's not for the faint-hearted.
Reza Aslan hosted the 2017 CNN series Believers, where he 'immersed himself in the world's most fascinating faith-based groups to experience life as a true believer'.
As per the synopsis, Aslan did just that and didn't waver when a cannibalistic group urged him to try human brain.
Warning: Graphic content
Advert
Speaking out on Facebook about the experience, Aslan said the brains tasted OF charcoal - adding that it was 'burnt to a crisp'.
I take it he didn't leave a tip then?
At the time the series aired, Believers received criticism from some people in the wake of the gruesome nature of some of the episodes.
"It is unbelievably callous and reckless of CNN to be pushing sensational and grotesque images of bearded brown men and their morbid and deathly religion at a time when the United States is living through a period of unprecedented concern and fear," Vamsee Juluri, a media studies professor at the University of San Francisco, fumed at the time.
Elsewhere, the US-India Political Action Committee said in a statement: “With multiple reports of hate-fuelled attacks against people of Indian origin from across the US, the show characterises Hinduism as cannibalistic, which is a bizarre way of looking at the third largest religion in the world.”
The organisation went on: “In a charged environment, a show like this can create a perception about Indian Americans which could make them more vulnerable to further attacks.”
But Aslan isn't alone in experiencing life in a cannibal tribe for media purposes, photographer Tamara Merino also spent time with the so-called 'cannibal cult'.
In fact, Merino spent a whole month with them.
"It was an intense but beautiful experience," she recalled to Refinery 29 in 2018.
"The Aghor live and perform their rituals during the night, so in order to document the cult I regularly had to stay awake all night in the cremation grounds with them."
In regards to their interesting dietary choices, apparently the group see no issue with eating human flesh as, after death, the body has no soul anymore.
Merino explained: "With the consumption of human flesh, they affirm that nothing is profane or separate from God, because for them a corpse lacks the soul it once had."
Soul or no soul, I'll keep keeping human flesh off my weekly shopping list, thanks.