• Source: Snuff film

A snuff film, snuff movie, or snuff video is a theoretical type of film, produced for profit or financial gain, that shows, or purports to show, scenes of actual homicide. The victims are supposedly typically lured to their murders by false pretenses and their murder is then filmed and the video depicting it is sold to buyers.
The concept of snuff films became known to the general public during the 1970s, when a conspiracy theory alleged that a clandestine industry was producing such films for profit. The rumor was amplified in 1976 by the release of a film called Snuff, which capitalized on the legend through a disingenuous marketing campaign. But that film, like others on the topic, relied on special effects to simulate murder. According to the fact-checking website Snopes, there has never been a verified example of a genuine commercially produced snuff film. Videos of actual murders (such as beheading videos) have been made available to the public, generally through the Internet: however, those videos have been made and broadcast by the murderers either for their own gratification or for propaganda purposes, and not for financial gain and thus do not qualify, by definition, as a "snuff film".




Definitions


A snuff film is a movie in a purported genre of films in which a person is actually murdered, though some variations of the definition may include films that show people dying by suicide. According to existing definitions, snuff films can be pornographic and are made for financial gain but are supposedly "circulated amongst a jaded few for the purpose of entertainment". The Collins English Dictionary defines a "snuff movie" as "a pornographic film in which an unsuspecting actress or actor is murdered at the climax of the film"; the Cambridge Dictionary defines it more broadly as "a violent film that shows a real murder".
Horror film magazine Fangoria defined snuff movies as "films in which a person is killed on camera. The death is premeditated, with the purpose of being filmed in order to make money. Often times, there is a sexual aspect to the murder, either on film (as in, a porn scene that ends horribly) or that the final project is used for sexual gratification." Films featuring deaths that are authentic but accidental "are not considered snuff because the deaths were not planned. Other death on video, such as terrorists beheading victims, are done to fulfill an ideology, not to earn money."




Reality


Some filmed records of executions and deaths in war exist, but in those cases the death was not specifically staged for financial gain or entertainment. There have been a number of "amateur-made" snuff films available on the Internet. However, such videos are produced by the murderers to make an impact on an audience or for their own satisfaction, and not for financial profit. Some specialized websites show videos of actual killings for profit, as their shock value will attract an audience; but these websites are not operated by the perpetrators of the murders.
According to Snopes, the idea of an actual snuff film "industry" clandestinely producing such "entertainment" for monetary gain is preposterous because "capturing a murder on film would be foolhardy at best. Only the most deranged would consider preserving for a jury a perfect video record of a crime they could go to the executioner for. Even if the murderer stays completely out of the camera's way, too much of who the killer is, how the murder was carried out, and where it took place would be part of such a film, and these details would quickly lead police to the right door. Though someone whose mania has caused them to lose touch with reality might skip over this point, those who are supposedly in the business for the money would be all too aware of this. It doesn't make sense to flirt with the electric chair for the profits derived from a video."
Furthermore, Fangoria has also described the very concept as a "myth" and "a scare tactic, dreamt up by the media to terrify the public."




History of the concept






= Origins of the urban legend

=
The noun snuff originally meant the part of a candle wick that has already burned; the verb snuff meant to cut this off, and by extension to extinguish or kill. The word has been used in this sense in English slang for hundreds of years. It was defined in 1874 as a "term very common among the lower orders of London, meaning to die from disease or accident".
Film studies professor Boaz Hagin argues that the concept of films showing actual murders originated decades earlier than is commonly believed, at least as early as 1907. That year, Polish-French writer Guillaume Apollinaire published the short story "A Good Film" about newsreel photojournalists who stage and film a murder due to public fascination with crime news; in the story, the public believes the murder is real but police determine that the crime was faked. Hagin also proposes that the film Network (1976) contains an explicit (fictional) snuff film depiction when television news executives orchestrate the on-air murder of a news anchor to boost ratings.
According to film critic Geoffrey O'Brien, "whether or not commercially distributed 'snuff' movies actually exist, the possibility of such movies is implicit in the stock B-movie motif of the mad artist killing his models, as in A Bucket of Blood (1959), Color Me Blood Red (1965), or Decoy for Terror (1967) also known as Playgirl Killer." Likewise, the protagonist of Peeping Tom (1960) films the murders he commits, though he does so as part of his mania and not for financial gain: a 1979 article in The New York Times described the character's activity as making "private 'snuff' films".
The first known use of the term snuff movie is in a 1971 book by Ed Sanders, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. This book included the interview of an anonymous one-time member of Charles Manson's "Family", who claimed that the group once made such a film in California, by recording the murder of a woman. However, the interviewee later added that he had not watched the film himself and had just heard rumors of its existence. In later editions of the book, Sanders clarified that no films depicting real murders or murder victims had been found.
During the first half of the 1970s, urban legends started to allege that snuff films were being produced in South America for commercial gain, and circulated clandestinely in the United States.




= Snuff controversy (1976)

=

The idea of movies showing actual murders for profit became more widely known in 1976 with the release of the exploitation film Snuff. This low-budget horror film, loosely based on the Manson murders and originally titled Slaughter, was shot in Argentina by Michael and Roberta Findlay. The film's distribution rights were bought by Allan Shackleton, who eventually found the picture unfit for release and shelved it. Several years later, Shackleton read about snuff films being imported from South America and decided to cash in on the rumor as an attempt to recoup his investment in Slaughter.
Shackleton retitled Slaughter to Snuff and released it with a new ending that purported to depict an actual murder committed on a film set. Snuff's promotional material suggested, without stating outright, that the film featured the real murder of a woman, which amounted to false advertising. The film's slogan read: "The film that could only be made in South America... where life is CHEAP". Shackleton put out false newspaper clippings that reported a citizens group's crusading against the film, and hired people to act as protesters to picket screenings.
Shackleton's efforts succeeded in generating a media frenzy about the film: real feminist and citizens groups eventually started protesting the movie and picketing theaters. As a result, New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau investigated the picture, establishing that it was a hoax. The controversy nevertheless made the film financially profitable.




= Rumors related to serial killers and other controversies

=
In subsequent years, more urban legends emerged about snuff movies. Notably, multiple serial killers were rumored to have produced snuff films: however, no such videos were proven to exist. Henry Lee Lucas and his accomplice Otis Toole claimed to have filmed their crimes, but both men were "pathological liars" and the purported films were never found. Charles Ng and Leonard Lake videotaped their interactions with some of their future victims, but not the murders. Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris made an audio recording of their encounter with one victim, though not of her death. Likewise, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka made videos of Bernardo sexually abusing two victims, but did not film the murders. In all those cases, the recordings were not intended for public consumption and were used as evidence during the murderers' trials.
Over the years, several films were suspected of being "snuff movies", though none of these accusations turned out to be true. A similar controversy concerned the filming of the video for the 1989 song "Down in It" by Nine Inch Nails, in which Trent Reznor acted in a scene which ended with the implication that Reznor's character had fallen off a building and died. To film the scene, a camera was tied to a balloon with ropes. Minutes after filming started, the ropes snapped and the balloons and camera flew away, eventually landing on a farmer's field in Michigan. The farmer later handed it to the FBI, who began investigating whether the footage was a snuff film portraying a person committing suicide. The FBI identified Reznor and the investigation ended when it was confirmed that Reznor was alive and the footage was not related to crime.




= Internet age

=
The advent of the Internet, by allowing anyone to broadcast self-made videos to an international audience, also changed the means of production of films that may be categorized as "snuff". There have been several cases of murders being filmed by their perpetrators and later finding their way online. These include videos made by Mexican cartels or jihadist groups, at least one of the videos shot by the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs in mid-2000s Ukraine, the video shot by Luka Magnotta in 2012, the video shot by Vester Lee Flanagan II in 2015, as well as cases of livestreamed murders, including videos made by mass shooters.
Author Steve Lillebuen, who wrote a book on the Magnotta case, commented that social media had created a new trend in crime where killers who crave an audience can become "online broadcasters" by showing their crimes to the world.
Fangoria commented that Magnotta's 2012 video, which showed him mutilating the corpse of his victim, was the closest thing in existence to an actual snuff movie, especially as Magnotta had done some crude editing and used a song as a soundtrack, which amounted to minimal production values. However, it did not show the murder itself and was originally published to attract attention and not for monetary gain. The charges of which Magnotta was found guilty included "publishing obscene materials". In 2016, the owner of Bestgore.com, the website that originally hosted Magnotta's video, pleaded guilty to an obscenity charge and was sentenced to a six-month conditional sentence, half of which was served under house arrest.




In fiction



Since the concept became familiar to the general public, snuff films being made for profit or entertainment have been used as a core plot element or at least mentioned in numerous works of fiction, including the 1979 films Hardcore and Bloodline, and Bret Easton Ellis's 1985 novel Less than Zero. The making or discovery of one or several snuff films is the premise of various horror, thriller or crime films, such as Last House on Dead End Street (1977), Videodrome (1983), Tesis (1996), 8mm (1999), Vacancy (2007), Snuff 102 (2007), A Serbian Film (2010), Sinister (2012), The Counselor (2013), Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023), and the episode "The Devil of Christmas" (2016) in the black comedy series Inside No. 9. The 2003 video game Manhunt sees the main character being forced to participate in a series of snuff films to guarantee his freedom. The 2005 video game Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories features a mission titled "Snuff", where the main character kills a few gangsters while unknowingly being filmed for a snuff movie by a third party, which may be a reference to Manhunt. Also, pretend snuff porn is sometimes filmed as a fetish.
Several horror films such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and August Underground (2001) have depicted "snuff movie" situations, coupled with found footage aesthetics used as a narrative device. Though some of these films have generated controversy as to their nature and content, none were, nor have officially purported to be, actual snuff movies.




= False snuff films

=



Faces of Death


The 1978 pseudo-documentary film Faces of Death, which spawned several sequels, is one of the films most commonly associated with the "snuff movie" concept, even though it was not produced by murderers nor clandestinely distributed. Purporting to be an educational film about death, it mixed footage of actual deadly accidents, suicides, autopsies, or executions, with "outright fake scenes" obtained with the help of special effects.



The Guinea Pig films


The first two films in the Japanese Guinea Pig series, Guinea Pig: Devil's Experiment and Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood (both released in 1985) are designed to look like snuff films; the video is grainy and unsteady, as if recorded by amateurs, and extensive practical and special effects are used to imitate such features as internal organs and graphic wounds. The sixth film in the series, Mermaid in a Manhole (1988), allegedly served as an inspiration for Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, who murdered several preschool girls in the late 1980s.
In 1991, actor Charlie Sheen became convinced that Flower of Flesh and Blood depicted an actual homicide and contacted the FBI. The FBI initiated an investigation but closed it after the series' producers released a "making of" film demonstrating the special effects used to simulate the murders.



Cannibal Holocaust


The Italian director Ruggero Deodato was charged after rumors that the depictions of the killing of the main actors in his film Cannibal Holocaust (1980) were real. He was able to clear himself of the charges after the actors made an appearance in court and on television.
Other than graphic gore, the film contains several scenes of sexual violence and the genuine deaths of six animals onscreen and one off screen, issues which find Cannibal Holocaust in the midst of controversy to this day. It has also been claimed that Cannibal Holocaust is banned in over 50 countries, although this has never been verified. In 2006, Entertainment Weekly magazine named Cannibal Holocaust as the 20th most controversial film of all time.



August Underground trilogy


This trilogy of horror films, which depict graphic tortures and murders, is shot as if it were amateur footage made by a serial killer and his accomplices. In 2005, director and lead actor Fred Vogel, who was traveling with copies of the first two films to attend a horror film festival in Canada, was arrested by Canadian customs pending charges of transporting obscene materials into the country. The charges were eventually dropped after Vogel had spent ten hours in custody.




See also


Ero guro
Shock site
Livestreamed crime
Hurtcore
Crush film
Splatter film
Cannibal film
Dnepropetrovsk maniacs
Martyrdom video
Mondo films
Beheading video
Ricardo López, celebrity stalker who filmed himself committing suicide
R. Budd Dwyer, politician who committed suicide during a live press conference
Murder of Jun Lin, committed by Luka Magnotta who filmed himself mutilating the victim's corpse
Peter Scully, Australian sex offender and murderer who made a film featuring the torture and rape of three children
Extreme cinema
Shot-on-video film
Analog horror




References






Further reading


David Kerekes and David Slater. Killing for Culture: From Edison to ISIS: A New History of Death on Film. London: Headpress, 2016.




External links

• Source: Snuff (film)

Snuff is a 1976 splatter film directed by Michael Findlay and Horacio Fredriksson. Originally an exploitation film loosely based on the 1969 murders committed by the Manson Family, it is most notorious for being falsely marketed as if it were an actual snuff film. The controversy about the film was deliberately manufactured to attract publicity: it prompted an investigation by the New York County District Attorney, who determined that the murder shown in the film was fake. This picture contributed to the urban legend of snuff films, although the concept did not originate with it.




Plot



Actress Terry London (played by Mirta Massa) and her producer, Max Marsh, visit an unnamed country in South America. A female biker cult led by a man named Satán () stalks and eventually murders the pregnant London and her circle of friends.
In the film's last minutes, the action is interrupted as the camera pulls out to show the crew shooting the scene: the director is then seen flirting with a female crew member. They start kissing, with the crew filming them. The director suddenly assaults the woman, and proceeds to torture, kill and disembowel her as the crew assists him and keeps filming. The film then ends with the camera running out of stock.




Cast


Margarita Amuchástegui as Angelica
Ana Carro as Ana
Liliana Fernández Blanco as Susanna
Roberta Findlay as Carmela (voice)
Alfredo Iglesias as Horst's father
Enrique Larratelli as Satán
Mirta Massa as Terry London
Aldo Mayo as Max Marsh
Clao Villanueva as Horst Frank
Michael Findlay as Detective
Brian Cary as film director (additional footage)
Tina Austin as script girl (additional footage)




Production


The film started out as a low-budget exploitation film titled Slaughter  made by the husband-and-wife filmmaking team of Michael and Roberta Findlay. Filmed in Argentina in 1971 on a budget of $30,000, it depicted the actions of a Manson-esque murder cult, and was shot mainly without sound due to most of the actors speaking little or no English. The film's financier, Jack Bravman, took an out-of-court settlement from American International Pictures to allow it to use the title Slaughter for its Blaxploitation film starring Jim Brown. Some sources state that the Findlays' film received an extremely limited theatrical release, while others indicate it was never screened theatrically at all under its original title.
In any event, independent low-budget distributor and producer Allan Shackleton, who specialized in sexploitation movies, bought the distribution rights for the film. In 1975, after reading a newspaper article on the rumor of snuff films produced in South America, Shackleton saw an opportunity to cash in on the urban legend by adding a new ending to Slaughter. Shackleton began to advertise the film in December 1975 through press releases. When Michael Findlay realized that it was his own film being promoted under the new title Snuff, he tried to renegotiate the contract with the distributor, but eventually failed to secure more money from Shackleton. The filmmaker hired to shoot the additional footage was Simon Nuchtern, who directed a new ending in vérité style, in which a woman is brutally murdered and dismembered by a film crew, supposedly the crew of Slaughter.
The new footage, shot over one day in Carter Stevens's adult film studio, was spliced onto the end of Slaughter with an abrupt cut suggesting that the footage was unplanned. This subtle, yet impactful cut only further supported viewers thoughts that the murder being depicted was truly “authentic.” However, no one seemed to notice that the cast and scenery in Nuchtern's ending had no resemblance or similarities with those appearing in Findlay's original footage. The publicity material implied that the film featured an actual murder, without stating it outright: Snuff was released with the tagline "The film that could only be made in South America... where Life is CHEAP!" To further increase the air of mystery surrounding the films production, Shackleton decided to remove all other credits from the film.




Controversy


As a publicity stunt, Shackleton reportedly hired fake protesters to picket movie theaters showing the film. According to his associate Carter Stevens, Shackleton was surprised when the arrival of some genuine protesters also started picketing the theaters. Shackleton's efforts succeeded in generating a media frenzy around the film, with media commentators and citizen groups condemning the film without having actually seen it. Although the film was exposed as a hoax in Variety shortly after its release, it became popular in New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Boston.
The Adult Film Association of America (AFAA), of which Shackleton was a member, took pains to avoid any association with Snuff, as the snuff movies urban legend included rumors that the sex industry was involved in those films. The AFAA expelled Shackleton, then later announced that affiliated adult movie theaters would not show the picture (which was being shown in mainstream theaters and not in adult ones), and called a press conference to insist that the film was a hoax.
Rumors persisted that the film showed a real-life murder. Throughout Snuff's theatrical run, Shackleton remained purportedly ambiguous about the nature of the film. When interviewed by Variety, he stated: "[If the murder is real], I'd be a fool to admit it. If it isn't real, I'd be a fool to admit it.”
Prompted by "complaints and petitions from well-known writers, including Eric Bentley and Susan Brownmiller, and legislators,” New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau conducted a month-long investigation into the circumstances surrounding the film's production. Morgenthau ultimately dismissed the supposedly "real" murder as "nothing more than conventional trick photography—as is evident to anyone who sees the movie.” Morgenthau reassured the public that the actress apparently being dismembered and killed in the ending of the film was "alive and well.” Although the public was reassured that the actress was in fact unharmed, the initial allegation urged the police to trace her. He also found no basis for criminal prosecution related to pornography statutes, or to consumer fraud laws in regard to the film's advertising. However, Morgenthau stated that he had been "concerned about the fact that this kind of a film might incite or encourage people to commit violence against women.”




Release






= Theatrical release

=
Upon its release at the National Theatre in New York City with a $4 ticket price, Snuff grossed $66,456 in its first week. In New York, it outgrossed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for three consecutive weeks.
During its theatrical run, feminist groups kept protesting Snuff, which influenced city officials in Santa Clara, Philadelphia and St Paul to force theaters to stop showing the film. Twenty women protested the film's return engagement in Rochester, New York at the Holiday Ciné: four of those protesters were arrested after breaking the poster frame to destroy the film's poster. A theater owner in Monticello was prosecuted on obscenity charges. In most places, however, the protests failed to stop the theaters from showing the movie.




= Home media

=
In the United Kingdom, the film was released on VHS by Astra Video in 1982, coinciding with the start of the video nasty controversy. The cover blurb read "The original legendary atrocity shot and banned in New York" and claimed that "The actors and actresses who dedicated their lives to making this film were never seen or heard from again". The cover also credited "T. Amazzo" (a play on the Italian phrase "Ti ammazzo", meaning "I kill you") as director. The Sunday Times published an outraged article about the film, which Astra Video eventually pulled from distribution once it had benefited from the publicity.
The film was released on DVD by Blue Underground on July 29, 2003. Blue Underground later released the film on DVD Special edition and for the first time on Blu-ray on October 22, 2013. It was last released by Cheezy Flicks on March 13, 2018.




Critical reception


Snuff was panned by critics at the time of its original release, both for the disingenuous publicity surrounding it and for its overall quality. Richard Eder of the New York Times described it as "a horrendously written, photographed, acted, directed and dubbed bit of verdigris showing a group of devil-girls massacring people." Also in the New York Times, John Leonard reported that Marcus Welby, M.D. could have improved on the film's special effects and that the final "murder" was less "obnoxious" than a similar scene from Flesh for Frankenstein.
Later reviews were equally negative. Joel Harley from HorrorNews.net wrote in his review of the film, "Were it not for that ending and the furore surrounding it, Snuff would surely have been forgotten a long time ago. Beyond the infamy, it's a stultifyingly average film." Bill Gibron from PopMatters gave the film 3/10 stars, writing, "Unlike modern gorefests which strive for autopsy like realism in all facets of the F/X, Snuff is cheap and cheesy. While it[s] legend lives on, its realities end any speculation or scandal for that matter. No one really dies onscreen during the last few minutes of this movie. Your sense of gullibility, on the other hand..." Adam Tyner from DVD Talk called the film "basically unwatchable in its original form". Tyner criticized the film's unnecessarily dragged out scenes, lack of tension, and dubbed dialogue, which he called "sleepy, flat, lifeless, and howlingly inept all around, never even making an attempt to match any frantically flapping lips".




Notes






References






Further reading


Kerekes, David & Slater, David (1994). Killing For Culture. Creation Books. ISBN 1-871592-20-8
Johnson, Eithne & Schaefer, Eric. "Soft Core/Hard Gore: Snuff as a Crisis in Meaning," in Journal of Film and Video, University of Illinois Press, (Volume 45, Numbers 2–3, Summer-Fall, 1993): pages 40–59.




External links


Snuff at AllMovie
Snuff at IMDb
Snuff at Rotten Tomatoes
Snuff Boxing: Revisiting the Snuff Coda (The University of British Columbia's Film Journal) - showing the mutilation scene at the end of the film

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