The internet has brought the snuff film legend back big time. It seems
obvious that distributing snuff movies would be easier than ever,
thanks to that series of tubes. After all, child pornography – which
was almost impossible to distribute back in the day, and which was once
restricted to small groups of cretins who produced the stuff themselves
– has blossomed in the internet age. Kiddie porn rings were, like snuff
film rings, once the province of the fantasies of alarmists and
anti-porn advocates, but today they’re a real thing, operating out of
some of the same nations where imaginary snuff rings are based. It
seems quite plausible that a real snuff film ring might one day emerge.

Of course the definition of snuff film that I used before is vital when we’re talking about modern day snuff films. Serial killers have recorded their horrible deeds in the past, although until this month I haven’t seen any claims that they taped the actual murders. Serial killer tag team Laurence Lake and Charles Ng made videos of themselves tormenting their victims, but nothing I’ve read indicates that they taped the actual killings. Another tag team, Lawrence Bittiker and Ray Norris, made audio tapes of themselves raping women, but again, not of the actual murders. Snuff film arrests happen occasionally, but there have never been any convictions. In all likelihood what happens is that people make fake snuff films and dupe gullible types – who’s going to go to the police and complain that they got bilked out of a few grand by a guy claiming to have a killing on tape? Once in a while these tapes fall into the hands of authorities, there’s a tussle and an arrest, and once it’s proved to be fake everybody just forgets that it ever happened, in an attempt to keep egg off the faces of law enforcement. One of the most recent cases happened in 2000 when Dmitri Vladimir Kuznetsov was arrested by Italian police for distributing child snuff films all over Europe, and especially in Great Britain. That case never seemed to go anywhere, and as far as I can tell Kuznetsov was released from custody. He was also accused of being behind a kiddie porn ring, but I guess that didn’t stick either.

This month an exceptionally disturbing video made its way online. It’s cell phone footage taken by the so-called Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs, a trio of well-off Ukrainian kids who have been convicted of the murders of TWENTY ONE people over the course of a month last summer (or in 2005. This stuff is hard to nail down). They apparently filmed their crimes on their cell phones and then went to the funerals of their victims; the footage I saw was unbelievably graphic, played out without an edit and showed the kids caving in a man’s face, stabbing him repeatedly in the gut and then, when he was still alive and wheezing after almost ten minutes of torment, bashing his brains in with a sledge hammer.

Interestingly, this case seems to have gotten almost no media attention. Aside from a report on the English language Russian news channel RT, I have not seen a single reference to these murders or the boys convicted of committing them in any place except for internet forums and blogs. Surely a case this sensational – twenty killings in a month, perpetrated by three teens! And filmed! – would cut through the Western media’s disinterest in the former Soviet Union. Yet nobody is reporting on it. I wonder if the ghost of Allan Shackleton isn’t at fact at play here.

At any rate, even if that video is real, it wouldn’t be a snuff movie. The kids in the video weren’t planning on distributing it – at one point you see their car, a pretty good way of getting caught – so it was meant for personal use. And by definition, a murder movie shot for personal use just isn’t a snuff movie.

Which brings us to the other strange internet murder video phenomenon – the videos made by Islamic extremist groups. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was horrifically beheaded on camera, sights and sounds that will forever haunt me. Jihadists have taken up the indie filmmaking challenge by producing a wide array of sickening execution tapes, and there’s even a sniper in Iraq who goes by the name of Juba who tapes his exploits and releases edited videos on the web, accompanied by jaunty Middle Eastern music. Juba’s videos – which some have claimed are faked, but which would require some excellent production value (and the assistance of white people in the Middle East willing to pretend to be shot in the head) – are remarkable sniper’s eye views of US soldiers getting headshotted, but again, wouldn’t fall under the snuff film definition. These movies aren’t meant to ‘entertain’ in the strictest sense of the word (although the editors of Juba’s videos have certainly tried to make them ‘watchable,’ if not actually ‘entertaining’). They’re propaganda films, meant to incite folks at home and terrify us here in the USA. They’re skirting the edge – there’s no doubting that the Islamic fucktards making these movies like what they’re doing – but they’re not really snuff films.

There are still people who will claim that snuff films are real. Some will incorrectly point you to sites like LiveLeak, which specializes in video of shootings, suicides and accidents, as a place where you can see real snuff. Others will believe that snuff film rings operate in third world countries, convinced by rumors and by a long Hollywood history of making movies about snuff films (check out Videodrome for probably the best movie about snuff films ever made). And yet others will tell you they’ve met people who have seen snuff films, but these people they met were almost certainly like Charlie Sheen – folks duped by gore effects.

It’s interesting that this legend continues. And it’s even more interesting that we’ve created a nightmare for our society that it can’t actually meet. Growing up in a post-Holocaust world any inhumanity seems not only possible but probable. The horrors of John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer are so extreme that the idea of the next step – these creeps filming what they did and putting the footage out on the internet – seems almost tame. Well, of course they’d do it. But nobody has.

What’s scary about snuff films isn’t the idea of being murdered on camera, although that’s pretty scary and creepy. It’s the idea of being murdered for money. It’s the idea that drives Eli Roth’s Hostel, that atrocities visited upon you are borne of business. Nobody wants to be killed by a serial killer, but at least with your average maniac there’s some sort of motive, some sort of driving force that makes this person kill, something that feels like a force of nature. But being killed on camera so money can be made? That’s just cold.

This article wouldn’t have been possible without the following sources:

Snopes.com

The May/June 1999 Skeptical Inquirer: “The Making of an Urban Legend”

Killing For Culture: Death Film From Mondo to Snuff by David Kerekes and David Slater
It’s hard to imagine that any of the people protesting the film
actually saw it. If they managed to make it through the 98% of the
movie that had been Slaughter,
they would have seen an obviously unconnected bit at the end: a film
crew has just finished shooting a scene; as they wrap things up one of
the guys starts hitting on a girl. In a ludicrous dialogue exchange he
convinces her to fool around with him on the bed on set while the crew
is still there. She gets upset as it becomes apparent that they’re
being filmed, and the guy produces a blade and starts stabbing her in
the neck. Next he cuts off her hand – you can see the hole in the bed
where the real hand sticks out of a bloody prosthetic – and then
disembowels her as she gurgles her last breaths. It’s all so utterly
fake. There’s a camera crew filming it, but we keep seeing the action
from other angles where nobody is filming. While nicely juicy, the
disemboweling is patently unreal, and the guy appears to be yanking her
heart out of her lower digestive tract. Then, to add to the ‘realism,’
the picture cuts out and we hear on the soundtrack someone say ‘Damn!
We’re out of film!’

Shackleton’s carnie promotion tactics were inspired. He created a fake group called Citizens for Decency and started a protest against his own movie. When it turned out there was a real group called Citizens for Decency they actually took up the cause for him, attacking Snuff and backing Vincent Sheehan, a crusader he had invented out of whole cloth. It was insane, and the police soon got involved; Shackleton never came out and said that Snuff contained real footage of a murder, but he certainly never denied it, instead dancing right on the edge of making a claim one way or the other, letting audiences decide for themselves. The tagline of the movie was “A film that could only be made in South America, where life is cheap!”

One of the really interesting sidenotes of the whole Snuff controversy is that it represents the first time the term slasher movie was ever used. According to Mark Whitehead’s Slasher Movies: Pocket Essential Guide, the term was uttered by New York City police detective Joseph Horman, who was quoted by the Kingston Ontario Whig-Standard as saying “the 8-millimetre, 8-reel films called “snuff” or “slasher” movies had been in tightly controlled distribution” . Horman was, of course, wrong, and the NYPD would later back off that claim.

But the ball had been set rolling. The group Women Against Pornography used Snuff as a rallying point, and feminist authors and anti-pornography advocates began simply claiming that snuff films existed. They would point to the world of porn as the entry way to snuff; former Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace testified to the Attorney General that washed up porn starlets were routinely killed on camera for snuff films! She was, of course, absolutely fucking bonkers and at the time of her testimony had already spent many years as an activist against the porn industry.

A few years later Ruggero Deodato would find himself at the center of a snuff film controversy, one that almost sent him to prison. His masterpiece, Cannibal Holocaust, had premiered in Italy to much public outrage and shock. Not long after the director was arrested for obscenity and his film was seized and banned. He soon found himself facing more serious charges, though – murder. It seemed that the authorities were so taken by the gore effects and Deodato’s cinema verite style that they thought he actually committed these killings on film. Deodato was forced to produce the still living actors to dodge a life sentence. Of course in many ways this is the ultimate compliment for a sleazy goremeister, one that hack filmmakers like those behind the Murder Set Pieces and Amateur Porn Star Killer movies would certainly love to be paid.

Probably the greatest snuff furor after Shackleton was started by none other than whore loving actor Charlie Sheen in 1991. Sheen, it seemed, had been at some kind of Hollywood party where scenes from a grotesque Japanese torture film was being played. Sheen saw a man in a samurai helmet and pancake make-up torturing, brutalizing and slicing up a woman. Horrified, and apparently unaware of what a movie looks like, Sheen thought that he had seen a snuff film and reported it to the proper authorities. And so a whole new brouhaha began.

The movie was 1985’s Flower of Flesh and Blood, the second film in the extraordinarily controversial Japanese Guinea Pig series. Flower of Flesh and Blood is disturbing, and it is presented as a faux-snuff film, and it is exceptionally graphic… but it’s also pretty obviously not a real murder on film. You’d hope that a guy in the movie industry would recognize that, or at the very least realize that any movie that contains insert shots and close-ups is probably a semi-professional production. Of course, that may be part of what fuels the snuff film legend – that these aren’t just the work of sickos with a camera and a tripod and a corrupted morality but are actually slickly produced entertainments. It’s not a guy in a basement doing this, there’s a whole crew and there’s post-production and a lab where the film is processed. It’s an industry.

At any rate, the FBI got involved, as did the Japanese authorities. They traced it all back to Chas. Balun, a writer for Deep Red magazine, who had made a splatter compilation tape, which is what Sheen had seen. From there the authorities managed to suss out that Flower of Flesh and Blood was fake, at least partially aided by a behind the scenes documentary released in 1986 which showed how all the gore effects were done.

But the Guinea Pig films wouldn’t get off so easily. While they weren’t snuff films themselves, they apparently influenced an already diseased mind. Serial Killer Tsutomu Miyazaki was a huge fan of the Guinea Pig series – so much so that he based one of his killings (he murdered four young girls and then sexually molested their corpses) on Flower of Flesh and Blood. Japanese authorities overreacted a bit and banned the films. Obviously Miyazaki was going to kill those girls no matter what films he watched, so blaming a gore movie seems like a stupid waste of time and a diversion from real problems that cause people to do some truly sick shit.

This is a special edition of CHUDsploitation. Rather than focus on a single film, I’ve decided to open things up a bit and examine a film phenomenon. A sick and disgusting film phenomenon known as snuff. The next edition of CHUDsploitation will return to the previous format. Look for that some time in January.

It took you a long time to find this place. Months of asking around, greasing palms. You started on a newsgroup, made contacts and nosed around, always dancing around the subject of your quest. You would call what you were looking for ‘the real thing.’ You found an underground slowly opening for you, each stack of cash getting you a little bit deeper. Finally it led here, a little store in Chinatown. It’s the kind of place that sells everything – videos, incense, trinkets, rugs, jade statues – and you have to give a password to the old man behind the counter. He lets you into the back room, a dirty, smoky little place where three or four hard looking guys – Triads, surely – are seated around a table, jabbering in a language you don’t understand.

They look at you suspiciously, trying to figure out if you’re on the up and up. If there’s the slightest thought that you’re a fed, you’re never making it back to the street. Your heart is beating pretty hard, and there’s a slight sheen of sweat forming on your forehead. Your deodorant has surely failed you.

You say the password again, and one of the toughs understands. He looks you up and down, more than a little disgusted. He names a price – it’s thousands of dollars – and you hand over an envelope with the cash. He counts through it and turns to one of the other thugs, saying something in whatever dialect they’re speaking. The second thug opens a cabinet, slides back a false wall, and spins the combination on a safe. He reaches in and pulls out a manila padded folder. Inside is what you came for. A video tape.

Shaking, you make it back out onto the street. You get home an hour later and after pouring yourself a stiff drink you put that tape in the VCR that you had to pull out of the closet. The tape is only about fifteen minutes long, but it’s the real deal: a girl is tied to a chair, terrified. And slowly, graphically, lovingly killed. It’s a snuff film.

Theoretically this scenario plays out all over the world. Deep underground rings of mobsters and opportunists, probably based out of countries where life is worth a little bit less than the computer on which you are reading this, create and distribute artless, sickening tapes that detail the last moments of a helpless victim’s life. These people don’t get any real pleasure out of what they do – they’re just filling a very profitable need, satiating the extreme desires of the most hardened, most despicable perverts and weirdos in the world. Somewhere a torture room sits empty, plastic on the floor, a camera sitting on a tripod aimed at a stained chair awaiting its next victim.

Except this never happens. There quite simply is no such thing as a snuff film. And yet the urban legend persists to such an extent that the FBI spent 20 years chasing the ghosts of snuff filmmakers. And eventually even they had to admit that there simply was no underground market of snuff film creators or customers.

It’s important to understand what a snuff film is and what it isn’t. Faces of Death is not a snuff film, and that’s not a critique of the many faked scenes on display. Most of the (real) deaths in Faces of Death or other sick footage compilations are simply fatalities caught on camera and not murders committed for the camera. A newsman filming a suicide isn’t making a snuff film, and neither is an third world army private filming a firing squad. The death must be staged specifically for the camera, and more than that must be filmed with the intention of distribution. That’s the element that sets murder videos apart from actual snuff films. Some would argue that a real snuff film would have a sexual aspect, especially rape or sexual torture, but let’s not hem this fictional genre in too tightly. Let’s say that any film where a person is murdered just for the camera and which is intended to be sold or traded is a snuff film.

The term snuff film entered the lexicon as part of the hysteria surrounding the Manson Family murders. Ed Sanders, in his 1971 book The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (now that’s a band name if I ever heard one), recounts a story told by an unnamed former Family member. According to this highly suspicious source, Manson and his ladies did some home-made porn using Super 8 cameras (they also once stole cameras from an NBC news truck, and some versions of the legend have them using this equipment to make their movies); one of these sex films included a decapitated woman. The book is unclear on whether the decapitation happened on film or if the body was already beheaded. In fact the guy telling the story doesn’t even sound like he saw the thing: “She was nude but nobody was fucking her. They said her head was just chopped off and she was just laying there.”

It’s the perfect beginning for the urban legend. Nobody’s ever seen a snuff film, of course, but they know somebody who once did. Even the origin of the term comes from a book written by a guy who never saw the footage in question, based on an interview with a guy who probably also didn’t see the footage in question.

Still, even if that footage existed it wouldn’t really fit the definition of snuff film as it came to be understood. That definition would be essentially provided by a perfect combination of schlockmeisters and feminists.

Michael and Roberta Findlay will probably come up again in a future CHUDsploitation column; the couple was an important step in the evolution of truly sick exploitation cinema, acting as a transitional form between Irving Klaw’s Bettie Page bondage loops and the weird and wild world of 70s hardcore and sleaze. Their 1967/1968 Flesh trilogy – The Touch of Her Flesh, The Kiss of Her Flesh and The Curse of Her Flesh – is a truly fucked up revenge/slasher/S&M series. Michael directed the greatest Yeti movie ever, Shriek of the Mutilated, and went on to find his own brand of infamy when he was famously decapitated in a helicopter accident atop New York’s Pan Am building.*

In 1971 or so the Findlays shot a movie called Slaughter. What happened to that film is arguable – some say it went unreleased while others claimed it played a small run in grindhouses – but the film itself is a crummy, shoddy take on the Manson Family. Shot in South America, Slaughter is about a charismatic motorcycle gang leader who uses attractive young women as his murder pawns. There’s some nudity and not much else – even by the low standards of exploitation cinema, Slaughter is a bust.

The film was bought up by a guy named Allan Shackleton. In what may have been the one moment of genius in Shackleton’s life, he shot a new ending for the film, released it in 1976 under the new title Snuff and then began feeding the media the rumor that the movie ended with an actual murder perpetrated for the camera. Feminist groups became enraged and began protesting and the film became a huge hit. In New York City it was the highest grossing theatrical release for three weeks running.

* For you 3D enthusiasts: Findlay’s death may have changed the course of 3D filmmaking forever. He was on his way to France to present to financiers a new, portable 3D camera he had invented. He used it to shoot a porn film called Funk. Up until that point 3D cameras had been bulky and difficult to use; Findlay’s test model was destroyed along with him.