The Horror Geek – News, Rants and Reviews From The Horror Geek!

It’s hard to determine when, exactly, the concept of the “snuff film” (a film wherein someone is murdered on camera and the resulting material is sold for profit) entered the collective consciousness. If I had to guess, I’d go with the book The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (written by Ed Sanders of the rock group The Fugs). The book covered the Tate and LaBianca murders, but it also insinuated that Manson and his merry band of murderers may have been involved with the creation and trafficking of what Sanders referred to as “snuff” films. If it wasn’t there, it was certainly years later when Michael and Roberta Findlay’s lousy film Slaughter became an exploitation sensation thanks to producer Allen Shackleton tacking on some fake footage of a woman being murdered by the film crew after the conclusion of the last scene and renaming the movie Snuff. Either way, the concept of the snuff film has been with us for years-a popular urban legend that lives on because it’s not only gruesomely fascinating, but also feels like it could genuinely happen.

Authorities here and abroad have searched for proof of the mysterious “snuff film” over the past few decades-and besides a series of false alarms (fictional films like Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood and Cannibal Holocaust being cited as legitimate snuff movies) they’ve found nothing. Yet here we are, decades later, still talking about these ghoulish flicks-still fascinated by the concept of real murder on camera for another’s entertainment. I think that probably says something about humankind-but I don’t know if I want to dwell on what it is, exactly.

Of course, over the past 30 years, snuff cinema has been co-opted-both by the conservative right and feminists (who insist that porn and snuff are inexorably linked and that porn is the first step on the slippery slope to a snuff industry) and exploitation filmmakers who’ve churned out “mondo shockumentaries” collecting death caught on tape presented as the closest thing you can get to a snuff movie without actually finding a snuff movie. What’s happened during this tug-of-war is that the very concept of what constitutes snuff cinema has been lost. For proof of this in action, one need look no further than Paul von Stoetzel’s documentary Snuff: A Documentary About Killing on Camera.

Von Stoetzel’s film wants to examine snuff and its history-which is a noble enough goal-but the problems arise almost instantly. The crew has assembled a group of “experts” who’re either not very educated on the topic or have no real credentials to give their opinions any critical weight. One guy is listed as “Anonymous” and he’s “a cinephile and a video store owner”. How, exactly, does this make his opinion on snuff any more valid than a guy off the street? I’d be willing to give him (and the other panelists) the benefit of the doubt if they could actually define what a snuff film is, but most of them fail at even that level (by some of the definitions, any death caught on tape is essentially a snuff film-nightly news war footage, accidents, internet videos…all of it). If you can’t grasp the concept that snuff is supposedly a business enterprise designed as a for-profit venture, then you really have no business being featured in a documentary discussing snuff cinema in the first place. This would immediately disqualify roughly half the panelists.

It’s not even readily apparent that Von Stoetzel understands what a snuff film is either. The film flits about, spending more time on things that aren’t snuff (footage from Guinea Pig, Emmanuelle in America, Faces of Death, and internet videos of Americans being beheaded during the current Gulf War) than it does actually examining what is supposed to be the focal point of the film in the first place. When it does attempt to get back on track, it does so in the most sensationalistic and hokey way possible.

First, the film trots out the Dmitri Kuznetsov story that appeared back in 2000. That story posits that the Russian Kuznetsov was arrested for creating child pornography in which children were murdered on camera. The films were then sold to “collectors” in places like Italy and (reportedly) America. It’s a terrifying and fascinating story-except that it appeared in a British tabloid and essentially nowhere else. If this had actually happened, it seems highly likely that the global media would have picked up on it. That they didn’t makes the whole story feel like something straight out of a “Satanic Panic” episode of Geraldo circa 1987. The story has (like all good urban legends) taken on a life of its own (thanks to the internet)-but it remains dubious at best as a genuine example of a snuff film ring.

Then, even more conveniently, producer Mark Rosen (who helped usher Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the screen) recounts meeting with a Philipino man about acquiring an adult film. The film (naturally) turns out to be a real snuff film with the victim engaged in S&M style sex before being stabbed in the neck on camera. Rosen, it should be noted, is a producer on Snuff: A Documentary About Killing on Camera. This doesn’t make his story immediately implausible, but it certainly makes it look suspicious. If Rosen were so traumatized by what he saw (even now recounting the tale brings him to tears) then why didn’t he tell the authorities about it back then? Why are we only hearing about it now, decades later, as the closing segment on a film he’s producing?

In Snuff’s defense, I think there’s a legitimate grey area in terms of the definition of the concept. The practical definition of snuff was formed in an era when there was essentially film and television and little else. Now, with the advent of the internet, the proliferation of video cameras, and all sorts of recorders in public places, there’s probably some room for re-interpretation of what exactly constitutes snuff cinema. The problem is again that Von Stoetzel’s film fails to focus on any one aspect of the topic. It would be useful to find a practical definition agreed upon by the “experts” before dashing off into all the snuff variants. It would also have been more interesting to discuss if something like the Leonard Lake/Charles Ng tapes or footage of Eugene Anderson being beheaded by Islamic extremists constitutes snuff cinema or not. The subject matter is both broad and deep-which makes it all the more troubling that the film features only a handful of talking heads and runs for a mere hour and fifteen minutes. Why, for example, weren’t David Kerekes and David Slater (authors of Killing for Culture-the veritable bible on this topic and a book referenced in the film proper) not invited to participate? Why weren’t countless film critics who’ve written on the topic contacted and asked for an opinion? Instead of an actual discussion and examination of the ideas behind the subject of murder movies, viewers get a sensationalistic asides from people regurgitating incorrect information or worse, academics who really don’t contribute anything at all to the conversation.

Worse still is that by the time the end credits roll around we really have no idea whether to believe if snuff is real or not. Von Stoetzel never gives us his own take on the subject. Rosen clearly would have you believe it’s real (because he claims to have seen it) but most of the other guests tend to either vacillate or give no opinion at all.

Personally, I’ve gone on the record for years saying that I believe snuff to be an urban myth. People die on camera, but the idea that there’s an underground enterprise running around killing people and selling the tapes of it for profit strikes me as ludicrous. I’m certain snuff could happen-but I can’t for a second believe that snuff cinema has existed in complete secrecy for over three decades. Someone, somewhere, would spill the beans and have proof at some point. That being said, I tend to think snuff may very well become a sort of “self-fulfilling prophecy”-the mere idea of snuff could be more than enough to bring it into existence. Evil tends to be banal and not very bright-so with the concept of snuff cinema already out there in the collective consciousness, it only takes someone with a little gumption to appropriate it and make it real.

These are the kinds of issues and discussions I’d hoped to encounter in Snuff: A Documentary About Killing on Camera. Instead I got a short film filled with authorities who lacked much in the way of credibility, sensationalistic stories with no factual support to back them up, and an unfocused examination of a topic that deserved far more thought and scrutiny. Snuff isn’t a complete failure-but anyone using it to formulate their own conclusions about the existence of these films is going to wind up with an incomplete and occasionally erroneous view of the topic.

Horror Geek Rating: 2 out of 5

Tags: Cannibal Holocaust, documentary, Film Reviews, Guinea Pig, snuff movies, Snuff: A Documentary about killing on camera

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 5:56 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.