Snuff film

A snuff film is a film, sometimes pornographic, that allegedly depicts actual murder, produced for entertainment purposes.

The actual existence of snuff films has been disputed. Such films have long been relegated by skeptics to the realm of urban legend and moral panic.

The first recorded use of the term snuff as a euphemism for murder was in Ed Sanders' book about the Manson Family murders, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (1971). It subsequently reappeared and became more widely known in 1976 in the context of the film Snuff.

Sometimes murderers film their crimes; the resultant movies are not considered snuff films because they are not made for the express purpose of generating a profit from distribution. An example is the video taken in 2001 by Armin Meiwes of the murder of Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes.

In recent years, snuff films have captured the imagination of pop culture. The Spanish horror movie Tesis (1996) revolves around a student discovering a library of snuff films in 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.

The Japanese Guineapig films 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 catalysts for Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki's murders of preschool girls. The most infamous Guinea Pig film is Guinea Pig: 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. The film is so realistic that the FBI, acting on a tip from actor Charlie Sheen (who saw the video at a party), investigated the film, believing it to be a real murder. In an attempt to offset further criminal investigations and ease the public mind, the producers released The Making of Guinea Pig, a film made up of behind-the-scenes footage. Likewise, Italian director Ruggero Deodato was once called before a court in order to prove that a murder 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 had an obscure article on the subject of such murder films being shown in the Boston area, Articles on the Channel 1 computer bulletin board news groups alluded to such films and claimed they were made in New York City.

A possibly credible case emerged in 2000, when an Italian police operation broke up a gang of child pornographers based in Russia who, it was claimed, were offering snuff films for sale to their clients. No such films have been found to date; it is unknown whether the "snuff film" angle to this bust was a scam by the pornographers, whose victims were unlikely ever to complain to the authorities, or a circulation-building ploy by Il Mattino, the Italian daily where the snuff charges were first reported.

The number of Internet downloads of videos depicting actual murders (e.g. the filmed decapitations of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, Kim Sun-il and the gun suicides of Ricardo Cerna and Budd Dwyer), plus the popularity of television programs and video releases showing actual or recreated deaths (i.e. Faces of Death, World's Wildest Police Videos—though the latter program usually edits out the more violent footage), reveals how large a market for genuine footage of murderous violence exists, however the context might be labelled.

External links

• The Guardian: British link to 'snuff' videos (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4070446,00.html)
• Italy charges 1,500 people in child porn inquiry (scroll to 'Necros Pedo') (http://edition.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/italy/10/28/rome.porn/index.html)
• Snopes Urban Legend Reference Pages article on 'Snuff films' (http://www.snopes2.com/horrors/madmen/snuff.htm)
• The Straight Dope: "Is there such a thing as a snuff film?" (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_258.html)
• "Snuff Said": 'Mark Kermode on Snuff films' (http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/feature.jsp?id=111046)