Snuff film

For the 2005 film see Snuff-Movie (film)

A snuff film, or snuff movie, depicts the actual killing of a human being—a human sacrifice (without the aid of special effects or other trickery) perpetrated for the medium of film for the purpose of entertainment and distribution.

Problems of definition

The term snuff film does not, at least currently, have a clear definition. Neither the Motion Picture Association of America, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nor any U.S. agency have put forth legislation or terminology that would define the term "snuff film" authoritatively. Some possible definitions include a number of acts (killing of animals, faked deaths, suicides and murders) which are filmed and only later distributed. In most cases the only motive to risk any exposure of the filmmakers' involvement is commercial. Some definitions state that snuff films must be pornographic in nature The most common definition of a snuff film is of a motion picture showing the actual murder of a human being that is produced, perpetrated, and distributed solely for the purpose of profit. This definition thereby excludes recordings of murders caught by accident, and videotapes of actual murders that were never intended to be released as entertainment films (such as the videos and photos sometimes produced by serial killers like Leonard Lake as "trophies"). Given these criteria, the existence of snuff films is highly questionable, and commercial snuff films have long been relegated by skeptics to the realm of urban legend and moral panic. To date, no film generally accepted as fitting this definition has been found.

History

The first recorded use of the term is in a 1971 book by Ed Sanders, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion, in which it is alleged that Manson's Family might have been involved in the making of such a film (although none have ever been found).

The metaphorical use of the term snuff to denote killing is derived from a verb for the extinguishing of a candle flame, and can be traced to several decades before Sanders's book; for example, in Edgar Rice Burroughs's fifth Tarzan book Tarzan and The Jewels of Opar (1916). "Snuff it", meaning to die, was used repeatedly in the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962).

The concept of a "snuff movie" subsequently reappeared and became more widely known in 1976 in the context of the film Snuff. Originally a horror film designed to cash in on the hysteria of the Manson family murders, the film's distributor tacked on a new ending that allegedly depicts an actual murder. In order to generate buzz the producer wrote angry letters to the New York Times posing as a concerned citizen and hired actors to stand outside and protest against the film. The concept of snuff films was further publicised by the Michael Powell film Peeping Tom (1960), the Paul Schrader film Hardcore (1979), the Ruggero Deodato film Cannibal Holocaust (1980), David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), the Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Running Man (1987), the Alejandro Amenabar film Tesis (1996), the film Strange Days, the Anthony Waller film Mute Witness (1994), the Joel Schumacher film 8mm (1999), the 2007 horror film Vacancy starring Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale and was featured in the John Ottman film, Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000), Fred Vogel's film August Underground (2001) and its sequels. Online internet snuff movies came into play in such movies like the Marc Evans film My Little Eye (2002), the Showtime series Dexter and the Rick Rosenthal film Halloween: Resurrection. Most recently the subject has been addressed in British film director Bernard Rose's film Snuff-Movie (2005), the Nimród Antal film Vacancy (2007) and also in the WWE film The Condemned (2007) and the Gregory Hoblit film Untraceable.

Recorded murders

Some murderers have in various instances recorded their acts on video; however, the resultant footage is not usually considered to be a snuff film because it is not made for the express purpose of distribution. In the early 1980s, Charles Ng and Leonard Lake videotaped their torturing of women they would later kill. Serial killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka videotaped some of their sex crimes in the early 1990s. Though their crimes ended in murder, the actual murders were not videotaped. Only a select few people have ever seen this footage, as viewing was restricted to lawyers and other courtroom personnel. The footage has since reportedly been destroyed. Another example is the video taken in 2001 by the German Armin Meiwes of the killing of Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes.

In 1997, the Germans Ernst Dieter Korzen and Stefan Michael Mahn kidnapped a prostitute and recorded her torture, with the purpose of selling a snuff movie. The woman died before the movie could be completed, and they kidnapped another prostitute, who was able to flee and alert authorities. The two men were sentenced to life imprisonment. Prosecutors involved in the case claimed there is an international market for such videos.

There is undoubtedly a widespread market for genuine footage of murderous violence, whatever the context: as early as the 1940s, Weegee found fame for his photographs of victims of street crime in New York City. In later decades, the American public was fascinated by the Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the Zapruder film has since been featured in Oliver Stone film JFK, among other fictional works. Similarly, Professione: reporter, a film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, contains a sequence that depicts an actual execution by firing squad.

In the Maysles' documentary film Gimme Shelter , music fan Meredith Hunter is stabbed to death on screen by a Hell's Angel at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway.

The Faces of Death film series found popularity in the 1980s on videocassette, and even on broadcast television, shows like World's Wildest Police Videos have been successful (though for broadcast television, more gruesome footage is usually censored).

In the Internet age, it is possible to download videos depicting actual murders or deaths (e.g. the filmed deaths of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Saddam Hussein, Paul Johnson, Kim Sun-il, Kenneth Bigley and a Russian sergeant, the shooting of Yitzhak Rabin and the gun suicides of Ricardo Cerna, and Budd Dwyer). In 1994, Russia was exposed to a stream of videos depicting real murders, production of which started during the conflict in Chechnya (1991-1994), and peaking during and between both Chechen Wars (1994-1996) and (1999-). A fair number of these are still available on peer-to-peer networks. Recently videos depicting suicide bombings and attacks on U.S. military in Iraq have been posted on video sharing website YouTube by extremist groups, which has become an increasingly difficult problem for the U.S. as replacement videos can be uploaded just as quickly as they are taken down.

Perhaps the most famous instance of an alleged recorded death is the scene in The Crow in which lead Brandon Lee was accidentally shot. Urban legend claims that the footage of his fatal wounding was included in the final cut of the film. However, after police review, that portion of film was actually destroyed, and the scene was re-created with a body double.

Another death on film is in the movie Twilight Zone: The Movie. Vic Morrow, and two child actors, were killed when a special effects helicopter crashed.

However, it is not clear that the fascination engendered by these records would extend to filmed murders carried out expressly for the purpose of filming a murder (actual snuff films). Since it is trivially easy today to produce a film that simulates a murder in a completely believable way, there is little commercial incentive to risk the legal repercussions of producing a film in which a murder is actually committed (much less documented on film).

In August 2007 a video was originally posted on the Russian version of LiveJournal by a user named "anti-Gypsy", which subsequently appeared on many Russian-language neo-Nazi internet sites. The video is titled “The Execution of a Tajik and a Dagestani". Reportedly a video of Russian neo-Nazis executing two men, one from Dagestan and one from Tajikistan. The Russian authorities say the video is a fake.

False snuff films

The Guinea Pig films

Main article: Guinea Pig (film series)

The first two films in the Japanese Guinea Pig series are designed to look like authentic snuff films; the video is grainy and unsteady, as if recorded by amateurs. In the late 1980s, the Guinea Pig films were one of the inspirations for Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki's murders of preschool girls.

The most infamous Guinea Pig film is probably Flower of Flesh and Blood, in which a woman, apparently drugged, is shown chained to a bed as a man in a samurai costume slowly kills her through torture and dismemberment. After viewing a portion of this film, actor Charlie Sheen was convinced the murder depicted was genuine and contacted the MPAA, who then contacted the FBI. FBI agent Dan Codling informed them that the FBI and the Japanese authorities were already investigating the film makers, who were forced to prove that the special effects were indeed fake.

While the actual Guinea Pig movies are not snuff films themselves, two of them purport to be based on real snuff films. The Devil's Experiment was supposedly based on a film sent to the Tokyo police in which a small group of people dismember a young woman in an attempt to see how much damage the body can take. Flower of Flesh and Blood was supposedly made after manga artist, Hideshi Hino, received a letter, 54 stills, and an 8 mm film through the mail. The letter described what was on the film. He watched it and shortly after turned it over to the Tokyo police, who could not identify either the girl or the murderer.

Other alleged snuff films

Italian director Ruggero Deodato was once called before a court in order to prove that the murders of humans depicted in his film Cannibal Holocaust had been faked.

During the early 1990s, rumors spread of gay bars in Boston showing a film involving homeless teenagers, who were told that they were going to star in a porno film, running away in horror from the movie camera until they were caught up with and shot to death on camera. The Boston Herald newspaper published an article on the subject of such murder films being shown in the Boston area, while articles on the Channel 1 computer bulletin board news groups alluded to such films and claimed they were made in New York City.

In 2000 an Italian police operation broke up a gang of child pornographers based in Russia who, it was claimed, were also offering snuff films for sale to their clients in Italy, Germany, America and Britain. It is unclear whether anything other than child pornography films were ever seized.

In 2007 an underground Argentinian film called SNUFF 102, directed by filmmaker Mariano Peralta, was premiered in the Mar Del Plata International Film Festival in Argentina. The premiere was scandalous because members of the audience claimed some scenes in the film were real and demanded the film be banned from the festival. After the end of the premiere the director was attacked by members of the audience.

The August Underground series is a false depiction of a snuff film, with very realistic special effects and realistic "snuffings." They are filmed with a hand-held camcorder and feature nudity, killing and special effects.

The 2007 film Amateur Porn Star Killer is meant to look like a real snuff film. It depicts a pseudo-killing in grainy resolution from a handhand camera.

In fiction

Snuff films have occasionally inspired fictional works (such as Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom). As noted above, there was a wave of such films in the mid-to-late 1970s, and the mid-to-late 1990s saw another cycle of snuff film-inspired motion pictures. The Great American Snuff Film tries to take the viewer inside the mind of a killer who seeks revenge for his abusive foster home upbringing, by kidnapping two girls to make a snuff film. Mute Witness (1994) depicts the eponymous heroine's discovery of a snuff film in progress. Strange Days (1995) revolves around several snuff films involving murders of prostitutes and high-profile African American civil rights heroes. The Spanish horror movie Tesis (1996) revolves around a student discovering a library of snuff films hidden in a room beneath her college. 8mm (1999) is a similar movie about a private investigator hired by a widow to determine if the film her husband kept hidden in a safe is a real snuff film. My Little Eye, a 2002 Marc Evans horror film depicts the story of several teenagers in a Big Brother style house who end up being part of an elaborate live snuff movie. Similar to this is Halloween: Resurrection which features several deaths occurring on web cameras. FeardotCom and most recently Untraceable revolve around victims who are slowly tortured to death live on the internet. The Brave (1997) tells the story of a man who agrees to be in a snuff film in return for $50,000 to help his poverty-stricken family. Polish movie Billboard (1998) is a story of an ad agency worker who discovers a snuff tape apparently recorded on the set where he works. Most recently, the film Vacancy concerns a couple who discover a motel room is the site of a series of snuff movies. A more post-modern take on illusion, reality and sexploitation in this genre is taken in British film director Bernard Rose's 2005 film Snuff-Movie.

In Joe Hill's novel Heart-Shaped Box the main character, Judas Coyne, possesses a Snuff Film which is said to be cursed. In José Carlos Somoza's novel La caja de marfil a story is about a snuff films director, who kidnaps a young girl being searched for by main characters. In the Japanese movie Pyrokinesis, a girl named Yukie, the recent friend of the main character and the sister of the main characters crush and colleague, is kidnapped and killed for the purpose of making a snuff film.

Universal Studios theme parks Halloween Horror Nights has repeatedly used an original character to promote the event. This character, the Director, is a deranged Eastern European Snuff Film maker who is obsessed with capturing the "realism" of pain and fear, going so far as to torture and kill his reluctant "actors" on camera.

In video and computer games, Manhunt is possibly the first example of such depiction: the story of the game revolves around a convicted criminal, who avoids his execution when a wealthy producer "buys" him to star in his snuff movies.

Martha Grimes chose the production of a snuff film as the motive for the investigated double child murder in her 1999 Inspector Jury Novel The Lamorna Wink.

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis has a chapter where Clay watches a (supposed) snuff film. One of his friends was pretty sure it was real because a castration couldn't be faked.

In the pilot episode of the television series Dexter a murderer is killed after admitting to creating a snuff movie and posting it on the internet.

In the third season of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the Las Vegas Crime Lab investigates a murder that was filmed and sold as a pornographic movie.

In the climax of a Punisher MAX story arc called The Slavers, the titular character (out of universe infamously) created a snuff film where he set an old man on fire, for the express purpose of warning the victim's associates away from America, and possibly to have a colluding police detective killed off (by forcing him to deliver the message and have the recipients "shoot the messenger").

The anime series Black Lagoon features two Romanian orphans Hansel and Gretel, who were forced to star in snuff films by the personel of the orphanage that they stayed in, and, as a result, became sadistic killers, believing that this would keep them alive.

In the anime and manga series Gunslinger Girl, the character Triela is inducted into her life as an assassin after being rescued from the site of a snuff film by her future handler, Hillshire.

In music

The music video for Broken Movie by Nine Inch Nails, features a young man being kidnapped and forced to watch music videos while tortured and later murdered by a psychopath. The "snuff" part of the movie is shot on amateur stock film, making the impression that the footage is real. One of the actual music videos shown during the film, "Happiness in Slavery", depicts performance artist Bob Flanagan being tortured and "executed" by a machine.

The vocalist of the deathcore band The Texas Chainsaw Massacre goes by the name "Infant Snuff."

The acclaimed Athens, GA indie band Of Montreal have a b-side called "The Actor's Opprobrium" in which said actor, narrating, regrets signing on for the lead part in a snuff film, possibly from beyond the grave.

Further reading

• David Kerekes and David Slater. Killing for Culture: Death Film from Mondo to Snuff (Creation Cinema Collection). London: Creation Books, 1996.

Alternative reading

• Joël van der Reijden, Beyond the Dutroux Affair: The reality of protected child abuse and snuff networks (2007).

A note of caution: This article goes into the Belgian X-Dossiers, which originally were part of the Marc Dutroux dossier, and compares it to other, previous controversial child abuse cases. The testimonies of these "X" victim-witnesses are rife with references to snuff movies and part seven of this article specifically goes into the history and evidence for snuff movies. All this being said, the details and (censored) child abuse pictures contained within this article are likely to be very upsetting to the average person. It is also an article with views that are as far removed from the mainstream as possible, but to a large degree it does rely on official documents and the work of experienced journalists.

External links

• SnuffMovies.it - Italian Website about Snuff Films
• Snopes Urban Legend Reference Pages article on 'Snuff films'
• The Dark Side of Porn: "Does Snuff Exist?": 'British Documentary on Snuff Films'
• The Straight Dope: "Is there such a thing as a snuff film?"
• "Snuff Said": 'Mark Kermode on Snuff films'