CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I FEATURE FILM

1The actress is alive and well: Slaughter

2Hundred bucks for a single screening: Hardcore

3A great Sunday night show for the whole family: Thrill Kill Video

PART II MONDO FILM

4New secrets and sights: A History of Mondo Film

5See! See!! A man actually eaten alive! Mondo & the Burgeoning Death Scene

PART III DEATH FILM

6A new kind of pornographic film: The End of Snuff

7Dark porn and the video underground: Sodom

PART IV DEATH MEDIA

8Whatever happens, keep your cameras rolling! Death in the Media

9You can hear him screaming: Web of Horror

10Everyone was terrified: Propagating a Myth

11It’s a big puzzle: Ways of Seeing

APPENDIX

Manson inspired movies of the 1970s

Mondo Cane synopsis

The German Faces of Death

Animals

Gimme Shelter

Unabridged Agony

Roswell — The Footage

Ryona

Guro

Mexican Doctor

Shock Video Fakery

The Cultural Mythology of the Snuff Film

Selected Bibliography & Sources

Index

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Text

About this book

COLOUR SECTIONS

Located between pages

A Note on the Colour Sections

INTRODUCTION

Throughout the history of film, a prurient imbalance has existed between observer and observed, driving the spools in the shadowy projection box. Since the dawn of cinema, images of death and destruction have run alongside the underground trade in explicit sex. At the turn of the nineteenth century, viewing boxes, such as the Kinetoscope, were found in penny arcades and dime museums, and any other place of leisure where crowds might gather.[1] Popular testimony presents these peepshows as a form of vice, much as it would cinema that followed (and any form of popular entertainment after that). A crank of the handle provides the lone spectator with a saucy diorama, a woman dancing, perhaps. But it might also offer scenes depicting calamity or a public execution. Cecil M. Hepworth’s Explosion of a Motor Car (1900), for instance, is a blackly comic film in which the passengers of the titular vehicle are blown sky-high. A police officer assesses the damage and collects body parts when eventually they return to Earth. There is nothing comic about Execution of a Chinese Bandit (1904), however, a scene showing the actual beheading of a criminal outside Mukden, China.

There was also a vogue for period drama and the re-enactment of historic executions, with scenes of female subjects put to death among them. In Joan of Arc (1895) and The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895) we witness a grave comeuppance for two women of strength and character, perhaps indicative of attitudes toward the fledgling women’s suffrage movement at the time of their production.[2]

Both these films were made by Thomas Edison and his Edison Manufacturing Company. The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, at approximately eighteen seconds, is presented in the manner of a stage drama. The deposed monarch is brought to kneel at a chopping block in front of a small crowd (we have prime position) and her head unceremoniously lopped off with a swift blow of the executioner’s axe. The head (replaced by a facsimile) bounces to the floor, before being retrieved by the executioner and held aloft for the audience to see.

The ruthlessly entrepreneurial Edison, who has taken much credit for early cinema, produced many films of this stripe (essentially exploitation films). Like a proto-Andy Warhol, he didn’t do an awful lot of filming himself. But it was his name on the flag. The Cock Fight (1894), which depicts two gamecocks fighting, proved so popular the film prints were all but ruined — not uncommon for the time. In their place came Cock Fight no.2 (1894), effectively the same film with some elaboration: Two men goad each other and exchange bets behind the fighting birds, a white backdrop amplifying the action. ‘Blood sports, including rat baiting,’ concedes historian Charles Musser, ‘were popular early subjects for Edison’s camera.’[3]

Another popular subject was electricity. Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, worked competitively on methods of electric power distribution for many years. One result was the electric chair, created to demonstrate the potentially lethal nature of rival AC power compared to Edison’s own DC supply. A film from 1901 covers a number of Edison’s bases, The Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison. Leon Czolgosz was the assassin of US President William McKinley, shooting him twice with a pistol in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901. Czolgosz was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death, frying in the electric chair at Auburn prison the following month.

The three-minute film opens with slow panning shots of the concrete façade of the Auburn prison complex. Fabrication takes over when next we see an interior that represents the confines of the prison itself, with an actor playing the condemned man led to his death by guards. The actor is secured to the electric chair and surrounded by functionaries giving (silent) instructions. The switch is thrown, the man jerks several times and a doctor pronounces him dead.

Edison famously recorded the execution of a much larger mammal in Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), a further effort to promote his joint ventures of film and electricity. Topsy was a circus elephant that had grown tired of the life, killing three trainers and running amok. She was tried and sentenced to death. Edison, who often gave public demonstrations highlighting the ills of alternate current by killing small animals with it, now stepped in with a death apparatus that offered a greater marketing opportunity.

Electrocuting an Elephant is a film decayed with time, having the quality of a bad dream. It begins in an outdoor space with men leading the doomed animal toward the camera. Tethered, it then kicks a free foot in anger or fear. Plumes of smoke envelop the beast and finally it topples.[4] A reported crowd of 1,500 people gathered to watch Topsy drop dead that cold Sunday morning on Coney Island. Many more would soon have the chance. ‘As with the Czolgosz film,’ writes Mark Essic, ‘Electrocuting an Elephant was distributed across the country and watched by thousands of viewers eager to see the killing power of electricity.’[5] Edison had wanted to film the genuine execution of Czolgosz at Auburn, but the authorities declined. Topsy is the alternative, the next-best shot. Had his request been successfully met, Edison would undoubtedly have had a tidy package on his hands. He toured The Execution of Czolgosz as part of a series of films spanning President McKinley’s career in office, culminating with his funeral cortege to Canton, Ohio. How might footage of Czolgosz’s actual execution have impacted on such a package? its exploitation? the people drawn to it? After all, this was the hand of Thomas Edison, father of the modern age.

Jump cut to February 2015. Currently making news headlines are a series of atrocities committed in Syria and neighbouring Iraq. The murders of Western and Japanese hostages, documented on camera and shared online, are public executions for the modern age committed by a militant extremist group known as Islamic State. The latest of these films depicts lone figures in a barren desert landscape and has a queasy familiarity to it. When the film ends, the fate of the kneeling figure dressed in a prisonlike jumpsuit has come to bear with callous inevitability. The head of the victim is detached and the executioner stands gloating.

This image and its digital dissemination were inconceivable a few years ago. The film and intent are a synthesis, one-part obscene publicity junket, one-part snuff film made flesh. This book looks at how we arrived at this place. It explores images of death and violence, specifically moving images, and the human obsession with looking (and not looking) at them. Locked into this obsession is the so-called “snuff” film, a human sacrifice before the camera sold as entertainment.

Violent spectacle has been a constant in society since the days of ancient Rome, whether the gilded actualities of Edison at the turn of the last century or the more recent vogue for ‘torture porn’.[6] Camera phones and the Internet afford the spectacle limitless and effortless reach: our homes and offices, our news and entertainment, have become the Coliseum. Rules have changed. Film is no longer an exclusive domain, and the shadow of the snuff film has become a reality freely available at the click of a button. In 2012, Luka Rocco Magnotta posted videos of himself online torturing animals, which he followed with greater atrocities in a clip entitled 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick that eventually led to his conviction for murder.

Beginning with feature films, section one of Killing for Culture (FEATURE FILM) goes back to the 1970s and the release of a cheap exploitation movie. Snuff touted the idea that a genuine murder had taken place onscreen. Its distributor, Allan Shackleton, devised a publicity campaign that played on rumour and public gullibility to help create a modern urban myth. Several movies that followed Snuff expanded on its basic tenet. One of these, Cannibal Holocaust, spurred countless directors to make ‘found footage’ films, a genre defined by shakycam death frames. This section also comments on film as ritual, and closes with some Serbian feature films, where images of death are a catechism for a new generation of filmmaker.

Section two (MONDO FILM) is about documentary and shockumentary film. Gualtiero Jacopetti’s travelogue of cultural habits and customs, Mondo Cane, was the model for a curious cinematic lineage that emerged in the early sixties. The mondo film, as it became known, fudged fact and fiction while relying on greater shocks as it progressed through the decades. Themes of death and carnage took precedence in the Japan-America coproduction, Faces of Death, in the late seventies, and became the norm in subsequent video barrage tapes.

The market that Allan Shackleton anticipated with Snuff re-emerged with nascent video technology in the eighties. Companies like Vidimax and Wave exploited the freedom that video offered with raw, anything goes horror movies produced on a shoestring. Made to order custom tapes soon followed, providing a growing audience with faux snuff. Section three (DEATH FILM) details these custom tapes, their manufacture and consumption, while communities such as the online forum Necrobabes are symptomatic of shifting attitudes toward images of death.

Section four (DEATH MEDIA) details the transmission of violent images, from JFK’s assassination and the thrill of death defiers like Evel Knievel on live television, through to camera phones and beheading videos. This evolution is split between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, effectively the ages of television and the Internet. The book comes full circle with the chapter Ways of Seeing, which considers online atrocities as a mnemonic for the snuff film rumours of yesteryear and asks where such imagery will take us next. While terrorist groups kill on camera and upload their footage with intent to subjugate and create fear, in the case of Luka Magnotta and others the reasons for death on film are less clear.

1These machines were still in commercial use in some capacity through to the mid 1970s, maybe beyond. One author of this book used one at a funfair decamped in North Manchester, UK. The film here was a few seconds of vintage striptease before the money ran out.

2There is an unfortunate irony in that the suffrage movement features among the earliest factual shock scenes caught on camera. Newsreel footage shows activist Emily Davison throwing herself, for the cause, in front of the King’s horse during the Epsom Derby, June 4, 1913. She later died from her injuries.

3Charles Musser, film notes for the DVD box set, Edison: The Invention of the Movies (Kino 2005).

4Some years later another elephant was publicly executed. The place was Erwin, Tennessee, 1916. Reasons for the incident are no longer clear. Mary the elephant had supposedly killed a man (or men), but equally likely the execution was nothing more than a publicity stunt for an ailing circus. Mary was hanged and the event immortalized in a surreal photograph.

5Mark Essic, Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death.

6A popular strand of feature film overflowing with effusive depictions of sadism and cruelty.

Under the inhospitable California sun where sky meets sand there lies buried the origins of a despicable concept. Its exact location has long been erased by the desert wind. But it’s there, most everybody knows it.

August 9, 1969. Sharon Tate is murdered in her Los Angeles home. The actress wife of film director Roman Polanski, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, is stabbed repeatedly and left to die. Several of her high society friends and a teenage boy are also killed. The following night, ten miles away, two more people are murdered in their home in another appalling knife attack: Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. These are seemingly unmotivated crimes by unknown assailants, strange ritualistic killings of (some) famous people, with cryptic messages scrawled at each scene in blood and bodies defiled. Los Angeles is gripped with fear and the world picks up the vibrations. When dropout Charles Manson and members of his hippy followers, known as ‘the family’, are charged with the murders and go on trial in June 1970 the enigmatic Manson becomes the most dangerous man alive. Jesus Christ and the Devil as one.

This is the violent crash of the freak generation, the antithesis of ‘normal’ society whose evils are writ on a tide of high weirdness. Who knows what secrets might yet unfold in a crime that is terrifyingly nonsensical? Or what darker deed those without conscience are capable of? Perhaps, just perhaps, the killings in LA were filmed and the evidence buried? The media shakes its disapproving head at the madness, and considers a litany of what if and maybe.

“You will feel the pain and you will not flinch from it,” says the hippy called Satán with the piercing eyes, his voice echoing out of sync on the film soundtrack. “No,” the girl responds vacantly, her legs pinned to the ground at the ankles, the blade of the knife twisting at the flesh between her toes. Blood like strawberry cordial dribbles forth. The girl squirms in a manner detached. This is a scene from Snuff, a movie that is itself several clicks from reality.

In the world of motion pictures it is rare for an American distributor to welcome an x-rating. An x-rating generally means pornography. Many newspapers will not carry advertisements for x-rated pictures and the audience is restricted to those over seventeen years of age, effectively half the potential audience. In January 1976, the San Diego Union and Evening Tribune dropped its six-year ban against ads for x-rated movies. Others followed suit. Weeks later a movie appeared in New York City flaunting a self-imposed ‘X For Violence’.

Following rumours concerning the possible existence of ‘snuff’ films, and reports that one such film had been smuggled into the United States from South America, a poster appeared early in February 1976 outside the National Theater in the Times Square area of New York, specifically 1500 Broadway, 45th Street. It advertised a motion picture called Snuff that boasted ‘X for Violence’. The poster on display showed a bloodied, cut up image of a naked woman and bore the legend: ‘The film that could only be made in South America… where Life is CHEAP!’ It also promised ‘the bloodiest thing that ever happened in front of a camera!’[1]

Snuff had already played briefly in Philadelphia and Indianapolis, where it premiered and where local authorities forced its departure. Performances of the movie in New York City were met by pickets, who converged on 45th Street to try and dissuade filmgoers from entering the National Theater. They waved placards and chanted “Murder Is Not Amusing”. Police officers served two summonses for disorderly conduct and the fraças made the New York Times: two column inches under the header ‘50 Picket Movie House To Protest Violent Film’.

The movie was a mystery. Its drawing power lay in the implication that here on film real people were dying for the entertainment of a paying public. According to the advertising pitch, this was ‘the picture they said could NEVER be shown’. Those who crossed the National Theater picket line would have seen a movie that carried no credits and had been dubbed into English, giving credence to the South American origin. What the public would not know is that prior to its release, Snuff had been a very different entity indeed, gathering dust on a New York film distributor’s shelves.

Trade for the Monarch Releasing Corporation had been predominantly pornographic up to this point, low-budget sex comedies distributed to the theatres of America. The man behind Monarch Releasing Corporation was one Allan Shackleton. Shackleton would jump on the latest bandwagon, change the title of a picture so that it fitted his latest pitch, or cut and edit dog-eared prints to squeeze from them extra mileage with a re-release. The public was eager to believe whatever line was pitched to it and Shackleton obliged, looking for any new gimmick that elevated him from the competition. Snuff was, bluntly, a terrible movie that transcended any formal notion of good or bad. The distributor of lowly sexploitation movies threw a curve ball with Snuff. It was an act of reckless abandon, but a timely one that would translate into a stroke of marketing genius.

Snuff film: By definition the killing of a human being on camera; a human sacrifice (without the aid of special effects or other trickery) perpetrated for the medium of film for commercial gain and circulated among a jaded few as entertainment.

This chapter and this book tell the story of the origin of the snuff film legend, of how it interacts with other contemporary myths and legends, most notably those inspired by Charles Manson. Allan Shackleton fused together public fears and outrageous possibility in order to create a hit film. His was the monster that had been in hiding all along, the embodiment of a diseased world.

But Shackleton barely warrants a footnote in the annals of exploitation history. He is a sketchy character and Monarch, at best, a forgotten distributor of some otherwise forgettable movies. One must dig long and hard to unearth any information about either of them.

DEATHMASTERS

Snuff started life as Slaughter,[2] a dire exploitation film shot in 1971 by husband and wife filmmakers Michael and Roberta Findlay. The Findlays were prodigious in the field of exploitation. Whether working apart or together, they churned out films to meet current trends in the market, so cheap it was nigh impossible they could lose any money. One early production that Michael worked on (without Roberta) was Satan’s Bed (1965), starring the unknown Yoko Ono.[3] The rest is a succession of cheese and grindhouse sleaze, including roughies like Body of a Female (1964) and horror pictures like Shriek of the Mutilated (1974). Slaughter was exceptionally bad, however. It fell between the cracks. Indeed, Shackleton had almost given up on it when he got the idea to film a new ending and precipitate its release as Snuff with a scurrilous marketing campaign.

It isn’t known precisely how and when Shackleton acquired Slaughter, or when he first became acquainted with Michael and Roberta Findlay. He was certainly working with Roberta in his early years in film distribution, handling her films Rosebud (1972) and The Clamdigger’s Daughter (1974; retitled and released again as Young and Innocent). There is every possibility that Slaughter fell into his possession in the early seventies, after it had failed to secure a release anywhere else.

Slaughter was made in an attempt to exploit the Tate-LaBianca murders for which Charles Manson and his Family had recently come to trial. The Findlays were not alone in manipulating the sensational story. It seemed that every filmmaker and production company Stateside had their own Manson angle on which to hang a plot. True to their exploitation roots, some films incorporated elements of other genres, extending their market potential beyond simply an interest in Manson. In the case of the Findlays’ Slaughter, it was the biker film.

It’s important to know the place of Slaughter amid the Manson movie milieu, in order to see that it was not in itself anything particularly remote or unique. Other Manson inspired movies of the time included I Drink your Blood (1970), The Night God Screamed (1971) and The Deathmaster (1972), to name but a few. Even some existing movies that bore no direct relation to Manson were repackaged and reissued to cash-in on the case. Hippies, hippy leaders, hippy communes and hippy murder suddenly became the key ingredient of many exploitation movies. The Manson mythos also infiltrated Boris Sagal’s made for television The Movie Murderer (1970), which links a group of hippies to a spate of arson attacks. The most striking thing about this particular effort is that it is sympathetic toward the hippies, who are exonerated of all crimes in the end,[4] a stance that undoubtedly clashed with the general consensus of the television viewing public at the time. Hysteria surrounding Manson was in full flight when The Movie Murderer was broadcast; hippies would not get off so lightly in the movies that followed.[5]

Slaughter was made in Argentina over a period of four weeks on a budget of $30,000. Michael Findlay directed and Roberta handled the camera. According to Roberta, South America was chosen as a location because producer Jack Frost[6] wanted a vacation out of the United States. In South America life really was cheap: A film crew could be hired for just $60 a week. A common practice in low-budget films of this era was to work without synchronised sound. In this instance filming was undertaken without sound because the majority of players in the movie were locals and spoke no English. Audio dubbing took place later, back in the United States. According to an article in the Splatter Times,[7] the Findlays initially tried to arrange a distribution deal with Joe Solomon of Fanfare Films. When he turned it down, it was screened for Allan Shackleton of Monarch Releasing.

The plot made little sense, the acting ability was nil, the gore quota was low, there was nothing much by way of action and the story constantly floundered on a point of dead halt. Shackleton also aired disinterest in the movie. But very likely he held on to a print nonetheless. The Findlays’ movie was never theatrically released in its original form. Set in Buenos Aires, there are two plot strands: The criminal exploits of a group of hippy girls led by a male called Satán, and the wiles of a glamorous, vacationing actress called Terri London. The two paths cross and the movie ends with the ritualistic murder of Hollywood’s decadent nouveaux riches in their mansion home. In this case, Terri London, her producer boyfriend, Max Marsh, and numerous hangers-on. One of the final shots shows the heavily pregnant actress caught in flagrante delicto by Satán’s acolytes, whereupon a knife is plunged toward her unborn child. It’s a mirror on the fated final moments of Sharon Tate and guests in the Hollywood Hills on the night of August 9, 1969.

It isn’t known whether the film was conceived to run much beyond this sequence. The film in its original form hasn’t surfaced and no one remembers seeing it. One must assume it did run longer because otherwise it’s a terrible ending. But then Slaughter is so shoddy none of it looks quite finished anyway. Roberta Findlay herself has remarked that it makes no sense. (For no reason, the police department in the movie is a desk located in an open field.) In their rush to get Slaughter completed and in the can, the Findlays made no attempt to fabricate a killer cult hippy story of their own and, short of using actual names, the movie relates the Manson Family Tate slaying pretty much as it had been reported. Indeed, the FBI would regard the movie as a ‘takeoff on the Charles Manson Family’ in their investigative report some months later.[8]

When Allan Shackleton decided to cash-in on the picture, however, it wasn’t as one more Manson story. He had left it a bit late for that anyway.[9] Shackleton decided that for once maybe he could use a movie’s shortcomings to his advantage. That instead of plying the ad-line with unlikely superlatives and hyperbole, he might actually spell out to the public that here was a totally inferior work. Of course, there would need to be a good reason why the public might want to see a movie touted as inept.

Interviewed by David Nolte, Roberta Findlay says that

at that time the FBI claimed there were snuff films coming into this country. 8mm/16mm and no one to this day has ever seen one. I don’t know that they ever existed. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Shackleton was reading the paper and said ‘Hey, that’s a great idea, that’s what I’ll call the film’. And that’s what he did.[10]

Shackleton acquired Slaughter for $5,000. Former Shackleton associate Carter Stevens told the authors in interview: “I never saw the footage. I know Allan had bought the film for about $5,000 but it was so bad he just put it on the shelf and never released it. I don’t believe it was even screened at all for anyone.”[11] The movie was turned on its head. Rather than playing into the hysteria surrounding Charles Manson and the Family, Shackleton instead exploited a specific and treacherous component of that hysteria.

Scrubbing all references to the Findlays’ movie, Shackleton removed the original title and credits[12] and adopted a new title — Snuff, as in ‘snuff film’.

(There was another reason why Shackleton changed the name of the film from Slaughter to Snuff, a more practical one. The title Slaughter had already been sold by Michael Findlay to Paramount to avoid confusion with a big budget studio picture by that name. Shackleton was legally bound not to use it.[13])

The next move was to engineer additional footage (running a little under five-and-a-half minutes) and splice it onto what was left of Slaughter. For this task, Shackleton hired Simon Nuchtern, a jobbing director with a handful of not altogether remarkable movies to his name. But Nuchtern cut the trailers for many Monarch movies and was an obvious conspiratorial choice. Shackleton also brought on board Barry Glasser, a former film critic and once associate editor for the Independent Film Journal, whose role was to help with publicity on this and future Monarch releases. The input of these two men cannot be underestimated in turning the commercially redundant Slaughter into a masterclass of film exploitation. And Shackleton, hitherto a moderately successful low-budget film distributor, was ready to scratch a legend into the annals of exploitation history with a stunt comparable to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, Orson Welles’ play that convinced 1938 America that Martians were invading Earth. Now, Snuff was primed to electrify the imaginations of a new generation, same as the old generation.

ALLAN SHACKLETON AND THE MONARCH RELEASING CORPORATION

Abalding man in his mid thirties, slim, amiable and something of a health fanatic, Allan Shackleton was a research engineer and consultant to the Department of Defense at Columbia University when he moved into a career in film. He is credited with a bit part as actor in the sex comedy Flying Acquaintances (1973), but this would appear to be his only appearance in front of the camera. Shackleton’s choice of profession was film distribution, a role at which he was adept and one he enjoyed through to his death in 1979.

Shackleton was of the opinion the public was willing to buy exploitation in any shape or form. This thinking, more than any formal training, had motivated the original film exploitation pioneers of the forties and fifties, men like Kroger Babb and Dwain Esper who sidestepped censorial powers in hawking female flesh under the guise of ‘sex hygiene’ films.[14] The history of cinema, from experimental beginnings to popular art form, is punctuated by hucksterism and showmen with grandiose concepts that danced on the margin of legality. Siegmund Lubin, for instance, at the dawn of the twentieth century was carving a career in the fledging business of film, bamboozling the public into believing that his fabricated war scenes and prize fight boxing bouts were historical records of fact — or, at the very least pirated copies of much more famous films of the day. Shackleton was of a different generation to Babb and Esper and Lubin but he can be counted among their number.

We can trace Shackleton’s involvement in movie distribution to 1972, specifically Roberta Findlay’s Rosebud released in March that year, which he handled under the name Allen Shackleton Films. The company then became A.L. Shackleton Films, Inc. before the name changed again in 1973 and Shackleton plumped for Monarch Releasing Corporation.[15]

The Monarch office was located at 330 West 58th Street, a twenty-storey midtown residential apartment complex in New York on the busy intersection of Eighth and Ninth Avenue. The office was a converted apartment with a number of rooms providing a functional if indistinct working space for Shackleton and his administrative assistant Helen Goldberg, joined soon enough by publicist Barry Glasser. Exploitation movie posters adorned many of the walls and in one room stood a 16mm Steenbeck editing desk. A half block away was Central Park, where on most mornings Shackleton would go jogging.[16]

The change of name to Monarch was announced to the trade alongside the release of a new film called While the Cat’s Away (1972), a light sex comedy produced by Shackleton and directed by Chuck Vincent. It was inspired by the animated adult hit of the year, Fritz the Cat (1972). Shackleton by this point was handling some twenty-five movies in the sexploitation field with plans, he told press, to release six more by the end of 1973. Among their number was another collaboration with Chuck Vincent, Blue Summer (1973), a smutty road trip involving female hitchhikers that promised ‘Young bodies on the prowl!…THEY PAY BY THE MILE!’ Blue Summer proved a modest hit and Monarch took out a full-page ad in Boxoffice to publicize the fact. It was, the ad declared, the second highest gross in the history of the Nyack cinema in New York.[17]

This was only the beginning, boasted Monarch. Toward the end of 1975, Shackleton was looking to diversify. He was president of the New York based Great American Theater Inc., and in this capacity had acquired a cinema in Tampa, Florida. The small 345-seat Cine Theater, located in the Town’n’Country shopping centre, served a large Spanish American community. Under Shackleton’s direction, the bill alternated between English and Spanish language pictures (with subtitles). One might care to speculate that the South American produced Slaughter may have had a passive connection to the cinema, prior to its transition to Snuff.[18] Or perhaps Shackleton had designs on playing it there? This is pure conjecture. But he certainly played other Monarch movies at the Cine: Blue Summer was screened in early July 1975.[19] The Cine Theater was a family oriented establishment, Shackleton told the press, and Monarch itself was steering away from a dependence on adult oriented material, despite the formulaic success of Mrs Barrington et al. Suddenly the image for Monarch was less sex, as evidenced in the release of some rather decrepit horror pictures, Carnival of Blood (1970) and Curse of the Headless Horseman (1972). The schedule for 1976 was science fiction (Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth [1966]), human drama (Sammy Somebody [1976]) and even a rock music concert film (Get Down, Grand Funk aka Mondo Daytona [1968]).

But at the forefront of this little revolution was something Shackleton called Snuff, the ultimate in violence.

Shackleton had a sense that x-rated films had effectively reached saturation point. Many theatres were refusing to play x-rated material and Shackleton was already editing down a number of his x-rated movies to a less explicit, more widely acceptable R-rating. He experimented first with The Cheerleaders (1973), a movie originally rated X. Re-released in August 1975 with a new R-rating it topped $3m in its first month. “It’s just phenomenal,” Shackleton told Boxoffice, “and we’ve got September and October almost booked solid.”

Shackleton followed suit with cut down R-rated versions of The Young Divorcees (1972) and Mrs. Barrington (1974), another two Monarch movies that originally carried an x-rating.

On the one hand Shackleton was breathing new life into movies that had exhausted themselves on the x-rated circuit, while on the other he was all too aware that the distributor of x-rated material had little space to manoeuvre. Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat (1972) may have caused a sensation as the first sexually explicit adult movie to play regular movie theatres, but mainstream acceptance of hardcore pornography didn’t exactly follow suit, and the so-called ‘porno chic’ anticipated by liberal minded critics was dampened by strictly enforced porno laws. Smut remained a volatile business. Shackleton witnessed some of its problems early in his own career, when the relatively sedentary Flying Acquaintances — the sex comedy in which he had an acting part — was busted in 1973 with at least one theatre manager charged with obscenity as a consequence. Mainstream pictures were given little quarter when they dared to push the envelope, as evidenced when Last Tango in Paris was judged obscene in Texarkana in 1974.

This proved a sobering influence on Shackleton, encouraging him to consider stratagems outside of his usual sex movies. The most successful of these was Snuff. Not that it was known as Snuff when Shackleton acquired it, as we have seen, nor was it quick to make a buck.

GO GET THE RIPSAW

The trailer for Snuff is simple but effective. White text on a black background scrawls slowly down the screen, which is also read out loud by a solemn male voice.

WARNING: You are about to see scenes of a film said to be the most controversial in the history of motion pictures. The movie they said could never be shown…in fact, you have read the headlines across the newspapers of this country and the world, and you have heard the news…

This is the movie that could only be made in South America where life is cheap…it will shock you and astound you…it is not meant for weak hearts…or weak stomachs…Because of the highly controversial and violent nature of this movie, we are only able to show you some selected, edited scenes at this time…but the COMPLETE, UNEXPURGATED, UNEDITED, UNCENSORED version will be coming soon to this theatre… [Quick-fire scenes of a few seconds’ duration culminating in the sight of a maniacal looking man holding offal. A piercing noise accompanies.]

Ladies and Gentlemen, the bloodiest thing that ever happened in front of the camera…SNUFF

So, what had been Shackleton’s masterstroke? What was the tagged on ending for Snuff and how did it work? Footage shot by Michael and Roberta Findlay shows an attack on Terri London in the Horst bedroom. It ends with a knife attack on the pregnant woman. The film in its new Shackleton incarnation continues to run from this point for another few minutes. The ploy was to animate the viewer into believing they were privy to something exclusive, that suddenly in this new sequence they were on a side of motion pictures usually hidden from them. Shackleton presented the extra material in the form of a behind-the-scenes cutaway, implying that here revealed were the cast and crew, complete with props, spotlights and other filmmaking equipment. The footage culminates in what appears to be the murder of one of the stage-hands, a young woman who is disembowelled before the camera. With this little film-within-a-film scenario, Shackleton was able to make good on his perverse — and perversely ambiguous — promise that here was ‘the bloodiest thing that ever happened in front of the camera’.

Such was the essence of Shackleton’s promotion. Now it could be argued that if all that had gone before in the film was a badly constructed, poorly acted mess — and it was — then there was good cause for it to be. Shackleton’s campaign implied that Snuff was a demented exposé in which the usual stuff — the movie part — was simply a prop and was unfinished, in effect the modus operandi for the final act of actual murder.

As in Slaughter, Shackleton’s Snuff opens to two groovy chicks riding down a dusty highway on a motorcycle, for an appointment with their hippy leader Satán. Except now the word SNUFF appears on the screen, with the white letters changing colour to blood red and dripping away with no hint of credits. No director, no producer and, more ominous yet, no actors. No one it seems was involved in, nor prepared to claim responsibility for, the motion picture about to unfold.

It’s a safe bet that the movie from this point runs as the Findlays had intended. Stock footage of a carnival, a murder investigation, Hollywood big shots and their decadent lifestyle, and the band of hippy girls led by Satán ride inextricably toward the final massacre. Satán and his followers storm the mansion owned by Horst, son of an arms dealer and the lover of pregnant movie star Terri London. The guests are torture-murdered. In the bedroom, attacked by the hippies with a knife, Terri’s scream ushers the end of the Findlays cut and provides a segueway into the new footage. The scream resonates on the soundtrack, when a voice offscreen suddenly yells “CUT!”

The scene cuts away to reveal the new material: A studio set with actors caught in the moment. Surrounding the actors are the trappings of movie making, including one archetypal bulldozing director.

The director confides to a pretty production assistant that the last take “was dynamite. That was a gory scene and it really turned me on.” She confesses it turned her on, too.

What follows is a stupefying descent into madness, and for the tawdry movie of the last seventy-odd minutes a contrivance as daft as it is unexpected. The director, wearing a t-shirt that bears the slogan VIVA LA MUERTE (Long live death),[20] begins to lean on the girl. “Why don’t you and I go to the bed and get turned on… turn each other on, mm?”

“What about all these people watching?” she asks.

“Give ’em just a minute, they’re gonna be gone.”

Still in long shot, still in whispers, the director and girl engage in a little light petting on the prop bed. Contrary to leaving, however, the other people in the room slowly focus their attention on the couple, including the cameraman and soundman.

Point of view of the cameraman as the couple grope and fondle; the girl’s startled face as she suddenly becomes aware that the camera is on them.

“What are you doing? Are you filming this? They’re filming it!”

The girl struggles to free herself from the director’s pawing. “Don’t worry about it,” he says.

“You’re crazy!”

“Just move a little back up here —”

“You’re crazy!” Scared.

“— right back up here.”

“Let me go!”

“Shaddap!” Then to the crew he says, “Do all of you wanna get a good scene?”

Cutaway to the crew and affirmation.

“Okay… watch yourself… watch …”

“Let me up!”

“… watch…”

“Let me go! You’re crazy!”

The director calls for assistance. A member of the crew expressionlessly complies, holding the girl’s arms down on the bed, while the director reaches for a knife.

“You’re crazy. You’re not serious. You’re not really gonna do it,” the girl pleads.

“You don’t think so?”

“N-no.”

“Think I’ll kill her…”

The director slices through the girl’s blouse and across her shoulder. Blood (the colour of raspberries) oozes from the wound. She writhes and hollers.

“Scream, go on, scream!” the director demands. “That’s it, scream!”

The screaming becomes a pathetic sob.

Exasperated, he bellows, “STOP!! You want to play!?”

More sobbing.

Ranting, the director takes from his pocket a pair of pliers and shears a finger from the girl’s hand. A pool of blood soaks the bed sheet. The cameraman, somehow managing to shoot several successive and alternating POV angles with the one camera, now zooms in for a close-up on the hand (wriggling so that the audience might appreciate that this is indeed a special effect and not anything so cheap as a simple mannequin’s hand).

Cut to the girl’s face almost on the brink of unconsciousness. Overt maniacal grimaces from the director as he barks another order. “One of you guys come around and help me, will you?”

“Please… no more, no more,” the girl moans.

“Go get the ripsaw.”

“Please…”

Out comes the electric saw, its blade detaching the victim’s hand. The director then takes his knife to the girl’s stomach. A spatter of blood, coughing, followed by silence and a not-so-cunning switch of the girl’s torso for a shamelessly shapeless mock-up. The director cuts effortlessly down to prop genitalia. The thumping of a heartbeat swells on the soundtrack. When the blade reaches the crotch, the director sinks his hand into the wound. A posthumous belly fist-fuck brings forth a handful of entrails. Moaning softly, he sinks his hand back for more. Deeper this time, deeper, pulling out the heart. Orgasmic shuddering on his part. He dips his hand in once again, clawing around. Wild-eyed and yelling, the director throws this latest fortune into the air. Freeze-frame.

The frame runs to leader-tape, then blackness. A whisper punctuates the void: “Shit, shit… we ran out of film.”

Another voice whispers: “Did you get it — did you get it all?”

“Yeah, we got it all.”

“Let’s get outta here.”

The sound of breathing. Ends.[21]

Movies that reveal the mechanics behind the filmmaking process are not unique. Each era has its own. One example of a seventies movie that offers the audience a glimpse behind the scenes is Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon (1976). It is a madcap comedy set in the maverick days of early film production that stars Ryan O’Neal and Burt Reynolds. Prior to this, and prior to Shackleton’s Snuff, is the British made Inserts (1974). Written and directed by John Byrum, Inserts is another movie like Nickelodeon set within the silent film era of 1930s Hollywood — albeit relegated entirely to a single room where a washed up director, known as Boy Wonder (Richard Dreyfuss), drowns former glories in the bottle while earning a fast buck producing stag loops. Much is made of the trappings of film production, and the tools of the trade are very much in evidence throughout. Even the title itself, Inserts, is self-referential and reiterated as a kind of mantra. It’s jargon that means footage incorporated to break up a master shot. Inserts is worthy of further investigation.

The master shot of the film within this film is rendered almost obsolete when the fading actress featured in it dies. The demise of Harlene (Veronica Cartwright) by drug overdose is not shown or caught on film, but raises little dilemma in any case: Boy Wonder is of the opinion that Harlene’s corpse should be used for what remains of the sex scenes. Ultimately this doesn’t happen and the body is begrudgingly disposed of. A substitute actress (Jessica Harper) makes up the inserts, erring dangerously close to being strangled on camera by a bonkers director.

Inserts is an interesting misfire. Looking and sounding like a stage play, it is a twisted comic eulogy about filmmaking that was shot in real-time. Released by United Artists, it initially appeared in theatres under an x-rating in the US, reduced soon afterwards to NC-17. In the opinion of your authors, there is little doubt that Inserts helped inform Shackleton in shaping the end of Snuff.[22] There are many shared points of reference. Very possibly Inserts prompted him to resuscitate the Findlays’ dormant mess of a picture and release it when he did, as part and parcel of the snuff film myth that had been percolating the last few years. Unlike Insert’s impotent Boy Wonder, however, Shackleton made sure the anonymous director of his own creation would succeed in killing on camera.

MANSON IS POWER

Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry describe the case of Charles Manson and the Family as unique in the annals of mass murder.[23] No other case was quite as bizarre as this one, with numerous people conspiring to partake in ritualistic murder. Manson had dangerous philosophies relating to imminent Armageddon and an allure that attracted young dropouts, who operated guiltlessly under his command. Thus the Tate-LaBianca slayings in California in August 1969 became a rabbit hole of strange design, inhabited by misfits — whom we might consider the deadly offspring of Norman Mailer’s ‘white negro’ from a decade earlier, a generation removed in attitudes and appearance that served to undermine the very foundation of middle America.

Several books purporting to tell the true story of the crime of the century appeared shortly after the case broke. Of these, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (Dutton, 1971) is an anecdotal tracing of events by Ed Sanders, member of the rock band the Fugs. The prose is excitable and of a Beat nature. When events become strange Sanders’ tone is almost apologetic; when sinister or threatening he writes ‘OO-EE-OO’, as if a creep show Theremin was sounding off in the background. He is most flustered by a claim that the Family may have been involved in making ‘brutality’ films or, as Sanders later calls them, ‘snuff films.’ This aspect of the case was also the focus of a Sanders penned magazine article, which coincided with the publication of his book. ‘Charlie and the Devil’ in Esquire claimed to offer an inside scoop on the matter of human sacrifice and snuff films.[24]

It’s not difficult to understand how such rumours took hold. The Family lived at Spahn Ranch in California, a former movie set, no less! A number of people who came into contact with Manson and his acolytes had film connections of some sort. Indeed, Sharon Tate’s husband was internationally renowned film director Roman Polanski. Polanski wasn’t present when the massacre at his Cielo Drive home took place. One who was, however, Jay Sebring, a hairdresser and former lover of Tate, had a penchant for kinky sex and supposedly procured S/M films for parties. Other persons in this elliptical orbit include a death-defying Hollywood stuntman whose speciality was authentic hangings and neckdrags (Randy Starr, who lived alongside the hippies at Spahn Ranch, was interviewed by Rolling Stone for their Manson special report[25]), and the mysterious Lance Fairweather, a record producer of sorts, who had aspirations to make a documentary film about Manson in order to introduce the world to the man and his music. The Tate-LaBianca massacres put paid to that idea, and Fairweather, who ‘valued his anonymity as much as his life’, sold house and home and moved away.[26] Then there was underground experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger. In 1966, Anger embarked on an occult laden short film called Lucifer Rising, which starred a young musician by the name of Bobby Beausoleil. The project as it stood was never finished and Anger accused Beausoleil of stealing the film, or elements of it.[27] Meantime, Beausoleil fell under Manson’s spell, joined the Family and was convicted of the first-degree murder of Gary Hinman, ostensibly a drug related crime through which Manson inaugurated ‘Helter Skelter’, his vision of an apocalyptic race war inspired by songs of the Beatles.

When rumours of the existence of snuff films began to circulate in earnest in the mid seventies, a number of reporters played hard the Manson connection. One such reporter[28] was Dean Anthony of British men’s magazine Game, who speculated on the dark perversions afforded only by the ‘super rich’. In his article ‘Money is Power’,[29] Anthony swipes many of the less reliable witness accounts documented by Sanders and weaves them into a bloodcurdling tale of jet set depravity and excess. Thus we breathlessly leap from one passable anecdote, Manson pimping out his female followers for example, and end up swamped by monstrous accounts of hired assassins, death cults and snuff films. Snuff films are uniquely sinister, according to Anthony’s nebulous sources. They look much like regular pornography, except for the fact they culminate in ritual murder. The reason why so little is known about ‘death films’, Anthony explains, is because of fear.

The majority of investigators who worked on the Manson case shied away in horror from digging too deeply. A few were convinced that if they asked too many questions their own lives might be in danger.

Not Dean Anthony. He has no hesitation in pronouncing snuff films and their high flying clientele to be the real deal. They exist, he states categorically, alas failing to say on what basis he makes the deduction.

These non-films of Charles Manson have never been found. If they exist, posited Ed Sanders, perhaps they are buried someplace in southern California, outside the Spahn movie ranch in Santa Susana, where Manson and the Family at one time dwelled. By happy coincidence this is the same place the original Lucifer Rising was rumoured to have ended up, the film shot by Kenneth Anger and subsequently stolen, according to Anger, by Family member Bobby Beausoleil.

The expression ‘snuff’, as in snuffing someone out, was in use prior to Ed Sanders’ book, and can be traced back in popular culture to the fifties and beyond. But it took on a whole new mantle following Sanders, pertaining afresh to a murder specifically captured on film. Shackleton adopted the expression as the title of his movie. But he wasn’t the only one to appreciate the cultural ramifications inherent in the title, nor even the first.[30] However, he was the most important.

JAY AND PICKLE AT THE PREMIERE

Tellingly the movies based around Manson referenced earlier have no mention of snuff films, nor the film activity rumoured to have taken place within or around the Family. In the world of exploitation movies, it is inconceivable that such tales would have been ignored if in circulation at the time of production. The exception is The Movie Murderer. Completed before the Manson trial started, it alludes to the sorts of film people wandering through the legend, specifically filmmaker Kenneth Anger.[31] But the inference of snuff only found traction years later, at around the time Shackleton was making his campaign moves.

Rumours emerged anew in late 1974, continuing to spread into the tail end of 1975. One snuff film was reputed to have been intercepted by police on its way from South America into the United States. Monarch Releasing was pitching its ad-line ‘Filmed in South America… Where Life is CHEAP!’ at around this time… And if that appears overly convenient, well, it probably is. The matter of murder and cine contraband invariably led back to the Monarch Releasing Corporation. News reports were fuelled by the tip-offs of an anonymous Allan Shackleton, feeding the media from his West 58th Street office.

But success for Shackleton didn’t come overnight. There was no hint of it when Snuff opened in Indianapolis at the Uptown Theater on January 16, 1976.[32] The Uptown Theater was a somewhat unassuming venue for a world premiere, located in an area of town noted for its high crime rate. Publicity in anticipation of the film included spots on television and radio. The city’s two daily papers were wary, and both the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News carried ads only on the condition they contain no images and were accompanied by a disclaimer admitting that ‘This is a theatrical production. No one was harmed or injured during filming’. The ballyhoo was enough to warrant a press conference. But here Shackleton was resolute the public would have to make up its own mind whether the killing onscreen was real or not. He wouldn’t change tack until months later, when the police forced his hand, and only once did he publicly acquiesce and acknowledge Michael Findlay as director of Snuff.[33]

The movie did not premiere with any of its stars in attendance (after all, they were supposed to be dead), nor did it boast any local luminaries. Not many people attended the premiere at all. Sixteen people in total turned out for the first evening show at 6pm, as reported by underground artist and journalist Jay Lynch on assignment for Oui magazine.[34] Lynch noted that the subsequent screening at 7.30pm drew eighteen patrons and for the performance at 9.15pm there were fourteen, comprising in the main old men in raincoats and students.[35] A uniformed security guard was on hand to make sure no one below the age of eighteen was admitted.

Shackleton was perturbed by the poor turnout. Lynch finds him in the lobby of the Uptown Theater after the final show, pacing nervously and ruminating on whether to cut the comparatively steep ticket price of $7.50. (When the film plays New York, entrance is a more acceptable $4.) Shackleton asks Monarch publicist Barry Glasser: “What did we do wrong?”

One of the very few people to attend the world premiere of Snuff, Jay Lynch agreed to be interviewed for this book. He had this to say about his experience that day:

“When I got to Indianapolis, I called a local disc jockey to get the scoop on the terrain. The deejay was pretty adamant that the theatre was in such a bad neighbourhood that I shouldn’t go there alone.

“I went to the Black Student Association at the college, and they fixed me up with a bodyguard, so that if the deejay was right, I could concentrate on the premiere without having to worry about getting hassled. The bodyguard showed up. They told me his name was Skull. When I got into his car, graffiti on the dashboard said ‘PICKLE’. ‘I thought your name was Skull,’ I said, ‘so how come it says PICKLE on the dashboard?’ ‘Oh…’ the cat replies, ‘That’s my other name.’

“The theatre was only about a third filled, as I recall. There was one crazy guy in the back row whooping and hollering at the fake snuff flick part of the movie at the end. I left Pickle in the theatre and went into the office to watch Shackleton and Glasser count the receipts. I didn’t tell them I was writing an article right off. I just mentioned the name of an exhibitor I knew in Chicago who was a mutual friend. I tried to be nondescript so they wouldn’t notice I was there. I tried to be invisible. At the end I told them I was doing the article. Glasser told me his favourite movie was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. When the article came out Glasser wrote me a nice letter.”

What did Skull/Pickle make of the movie?

“He almost passed out at the final scene… I consoled him and told him it was fake, though.”

Of the poor attendance, Lynch said: “The premiere was in an out of the way ghetto type neighbourhood and the prices were higher than the regular movies shown at that theatre. So I can see why the neighbourhood guys didn’t come. And I could see why the people from other neighbourhoods didn’t come.”

Ticket price notwithstanding, Monarch stuck to their original campaign and public awareness of the movie increased. By the time Snuff left Indianapolis it was already picking up momentum. More than 300 people attended the film’s opening night at the Orpheum Theater in Wichita, Kansas, on January 30. Many of those in attendance were “laughing instead of moaning”, reported a theatre spokesman.[36] Shackleton was driving the print of the film in his car from one engagement to another on its route to New York, ballyhooing it at every turn. Having travelled from Cincinnati to St Paul, he witnessed people being turned away from the box office of the Strand Theater on the day of its St Paul premiere, February 20. Pickets and adverse press weren’t only conspiring to stop him in this instance: The theatre itself had been closed down by police the day before the scheduled screening, pending a matter of theatre licensing. The resourceful Shackleton simply packed Snuff back into his trunk and drove across the river to Minneapolis, where it played an impromptu engagement at the American Theater, fittingly an x-rated movie house, complete with ads proclaiming its ‘ban’ in St Paul.

SNUFF KILLS WOMEN — ZAP IT

The Adult Film Association of America was not happy with Snuff. Not surprising really. Formed in 1969 to protect the interests of those involved in the production, distribution and exhibition of adult motion pictures, the AFAA fought against negative representation, which included among other things child exploitation and rumours of so-called snuff films. Shackleton, hitherto a member of the AFAA, was unceremoniously kicked out of the organization because of Snuff.

Aware that it was all a gimmick and that no one was actually killed in Snuff, the AFAA nevertheless took pains to distance itself from the film. It was the sort of attention they didn’t need. President Vince Miranda, owner of the Pussycat theatre chain, announced that AFAA member theatres would not be screening it. But by and large, Snuff circumvented adult theatres anyway and played the regular houses. The AFAA unwittingly played into Shackleton’s hands when its members joined picket lines on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. “We called a press conference to say the film was a phoney,” recalled AFAA chairman David Friedman, “and that we were proud to say we would not show it.”[37] But the AFAA were not the only group protesting Snuff. Women’s groups were also up in arms.

We are opposed to the filming, distribution, and mass marketing of the film Snuff currently showing around the clock at the National Theater in New York City. The term ‘snuff’ has been used in the underground film circle to label those pornographic films depicting actual, cold-blooded murder of women. Purportedly a film of this type was produced in Buenos Aires, Argentina and in this film a real woman was murdered. It is implied in advertisements of the film currently showing that this may be the same film…

So read flyers distributed outside the National Theater in New York City.

Women and other persons of conscience will demonstrate at Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s offices to protest his refusal to recognize the clear and present danger of a film in this borough which purports to be a photographic recording of a woman’s actual torture and murder…[38]

The absurdity of a theatrical motion picture that dabbled in actual murder (of a crew member, no less) was lost on some; likewise, that such a movie, supposedly having been ‘smuggled’ into the country, should turn up in New York City and openly promote itself on Times Square and around the country. It didn’t matter because lobby groups still protested against it, media still arrived to document the protestations, and officials continued to look into the matter.

But even before its release, others were eyeing the whole deal with suspicion. Harlan Jacobson, writing in Variety,[39] made subtle reference to the providential appearance of Shackleton’s film amid the rumour of snuff films that had been circulating for several months. Rightly so. Much rumour was emanating from the Monarch office. Critic Richard Eder of the New York Times, wrote in his review of Snuff, ‘There is a patch of anti-matter on Times Square into which not only public decency disappears, but reality as well.’[40] He went on to say, ‘Everything about the film is suspect: the contents, the promotion and possibly even some of the protest that is conducted each evening outside the box office…’

But the protests outside the National Theater, which included the presence of ‘high profile’ FBI agents, didn’t stop the movie grossing over $300,000 during its first eight weeks and it certainly didn’t halt the publicity, which shifted into gears possibly beyond the expectation of even Allan Shackleton. Snuff was a rampaging publicity monster.

When Snuff arrived in Monticello, New York, members of NOW (National Organization for Women) and WAVAW (Women Against Violence Against Women) convened outside the Rialto Theater with placards inscribed ‘SNUFF KILLS WOMEN — ZAP IT’. They advised passers-by that the movie playing was one ‘depicting the dismemberment of women’.[41] An official complaint was made against Rialto owner, Richard Dames, on the grounds that Snuff ‘advertises and advocates the murder of women as sexually stimulating’. District Attorney Emanuel Gellman advised he could take no action, however, because “There is no place we can go if violence is the only complaint.” The only time he could act was if the complaint is based on pornography, he said. NOW and WAVAW returned the following night to lodge a further complaint, and this time Dames was duly charged with second-degree obscenity and ordered to appear in court.

Militant feminists made for a radical upward swing in the movie’s media profile, despite it being anonymous Shackleton tip-offs that brought it to their attention in the first place. Snuff was touted as ‘the ultimate in woman-hating’. Groups lobbied ad hoc against it, holding meetings, organizing pickets, making phone calls. Anything that might raise a fuss and help to drive Snuff away. But in their bid to quash the movie, feminists inadvertently trumpeted it across the US.

The women’s community of Denver, Colorado, organized a mass telephone campaign against a local theatre due to show Snuff, harassing the owner. Leaflets were distributed and a plea was made to Denver District Attorney Dale Tooley, who banned the movie before it played. In San Diego, feminists incited community and church groups into picketing a local movie house screening Snuff. The following night, shortly before screening, approximately forty women formed a circle in front of the theatre and chanted “Stop Snuff now!” Television news crews arrived and the incident made primetime news. The theatre manager told reporters he was getting so much publicity, Snuff would be held over for another week. (It wasn’t.)

In Rochester, New York, many women were discouraged to see the picket line at the Holiday Cine Theater dissipate. Doubting that mere picketing would be effective anyway, some decided a more direct confrontation was in order. This led to arrest and imprisonment for a number of Rochester WAVAW members for wilful damage of property, having spray-painted the Holiday Cine doors, chained them shut and filled the locks with glue. They had also destroyed the Snuff poster outside the theatre. In defence of the jailed women it was argued the real crime was Snuff.

In Morris Plains, North Jersey, the Eastern’s Morris Plains Drive-In was forced to close for two days when a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the projection booth during a screening of Snuff. Anonymous phone calls to the theatre and local press warned against further screenings. Bomb threats were also received by theatre owners in Orange County, leading to the movie’s cancellation.

In Baltimore, the Maryland state censor took the unprecedented step of banning Snuff for its ‘psychotic brutality’. In Minneapolis, two porn films were voluntarily withdrawn by exhibitors fearing a crackdown after police seized Snuff. In Chicago, screenings of Snuff were cancelled in the Plitt chain of theatres when the Chicago Sun-Times ran an editorial that denounced both the film and any exhibitor who would cater to such ‘perverted taste’.

Situations similar to these were recorded in Buffalo, Los Angeles, San Jose, Omaha, and cities as far afield as Toronto, Canada. In Boston, members of a Latin group were arrested for disorderly conduct outside the Gary Theater. They objected to the racial slur inherent in the movie. Snuff, they decreed, promoted the idea that lives of Latin people were cheap or worthless.[42]

While several local governments banned the movie, many others didn’t. Lieutenant David Weida of St Paul vice, attempted to put matters into perspective when he acknowledged that Snuff was “not as bloody as Jaws and it’s not as pornographic as movies they’re showing at other theatres”. The game-changer, however, was Manhattan DA, Robert M. Morgenthau, who announced in a news conference that the onscreen murder of a woman was a hoax. “It is nothing more than conventional trick photography as is evident to one who sees the movie,” he said, adding, “The actress is alive and well.” Morgenthau’s findings concluded a month-long investigation prompted by a succession of complaints and petitions. The ‘murder victim’ was located and interviewed by police. She was, Morgenthau told Boxoffice, a legitimate stage actress who “wanted to make a name for herself but not in Snuff”. However embarrassed by her performance, she was not dismembered, he added.[43] Photographs taken behind-the-scenes of Snuff showed the special effects and makeup used to fabricate her death.[44]

Allan Shackleton remained ambiguous about the true facts, because, he told Variety, “Pickets sell tickets”. He said that if the murder was real, “I’d be a fool to admit it. If it isn’t real, I’d be a fool to admit it.” In the end, though, he had no choice but to come clean and deny that a real murder had been committed. His acknowledgement didn’t deter cinema-goers or the feminist lobby. The crime in Snuff simply shifted from one of murder to pornography, or porn-violence.

Women were concerned about the possible real death of a female in the filming of Snuff, but when film distributors denied it was a ‘real’ woman who was murdered, feminists quickly moved to state that the murder of one woman was only the first of many concerns we had about ‘snuff’ films.[45]

The above statement from New Women’s Times writer Beverly LaBelle is a little confused but illustrates how the campaign against Snuff switches focus.[46] Elaborating on the matter are feminists in New York City, whose flyers read:

Whether or not the death depicted in the current film Snuff is real or simulated is not the issue.

A full-scale debate was in play proposing the outlaw or censoring of pornographic movies. It also called for the amendment of state obscenity laws to prohibit movies that showed exaggerated violence. The phenomenal success of Damiano’s Deep Throat had promised to turn attitudes toward hardcore pornography on their head, and for a while it looked like it might. Judged obscene, its exhibition continued nonetheless through the seventies. But in March 1977, when the anticipated pop porn utopia was already a fading dream, Deep Throat and the hardcore film industry suddenly faced prosecution anew. Adult star Harry Reems was among those people tried for the production and distribution of pornography; in other words, as an actor he was considered an accomplice to a crime. (His conviction was ultimately overturned.) It was an unprecedented move, one that hints at the frustration and uncertainty faced by any prosecutor in the legal pursuit of ‘obscenity’. The definition of the term is subjective. “We just went where the investigation led us,” said US Attorney Larry Parrish some years later.[47]

Deep Throat faced a temporary ban in New York, while at the same time theatres in a number of New Jersey cities were forced to close because of another movie, the ‘violent South American-made’ Snuff. The two were often cited back to back in the media. The AFAA wanted the self-styled x-rating taken from Snuff and a totally new classification adopted for violent pictures: V for Violence. This might at least help set it apart from sex films. But too late, Snuff and Deep Throat were bound by ‘guilt’; association by controversy. If not obscene by law, then Snuff for all intents and purposes was violent pornography.[48]

A CHEERFUL FILM

Allan Shackleton died in October 1979 of a heart attack. Some of those who worked closely with him have fond memories of Shackleton, describing him as a colourful man and easy to get on with. As a promoter, he may have gone on to follow in the footsteps of a film mogul such as Harvey Weinstein.[49] Others believe Snuff made Shackleton rich.[50] But the infamy appears not to have brought any lasting reward, and in 1977 Shackleton relocated Monarch to Los Angeles in search of a career boost. Had he become rich on Snuff, a millionaire according to some sources, one suspects he would have followed up on his mooted suggestion for a sequel, The Slasher. The Slasher failed to materialize. The film that did follow Snuff for Monarch was by contrast a youth oriented comedy. Shackleton sunk a lot of money into promoting this comedy — Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976) — touting it in the trades as ‘Allan Shackleton presents A CHEERFUL FILM’.

Whatever Shackleton made out of Snuff, he certainly fared better than the Findlays had with Slaughter. From all accounts, they received nothing at all. The husband and wife filmmaking team went their separate ways sometime shortly after Slaughter was completed and before Snuff was released. Roberta continued to make exploitation films and would eventually set up her own film company, Reeltime, whose output in the 1980s was porn. Michael Findlay on the other hand numbered among five people killed in May 1977, in a helicopter accident atop the Pan Am building in New York City. His next move was evidently of interest to Shackleton: Findlay was about to fly to the Cannes film festival to demonstrate an innovative 3D camera. The process, known as Super Depth, had been developed by Findlay with Stanley Borden of American Films.[51] Whether Findlay was collaborating with Shackleton at this point is unknown, but Shackleton was hedging his bets in an attempt to capitalise on the next big thing, which he believed for a time was 3D. Monarch handled a number of 3D features in 1977: Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth (a decade old by this point!) and a twenty-minute comedy short called The Wild Ride.[52]

What Shackleton did when he tagged his bogus impromptu ending onto the Findlay’s Slaughter was help give weight to a myth, and in some respects ‘validate’ that myth. The rumour of the snuff film suddenly had shape: Even if its existence was not yet proven, this is what such a film might look like. Alas, nobody who had the misfortune to sit through Snuff was actually fooled by it. Audiences reacted with laughter for the most part. ‘How does the public feel about the rip off?’ asked a rhetorical Erotica magazine.[53] ‘They love it. Today, even after it is common knowledge that Snuff is a rip off, crowds still flock to see it.’

For the protesters, too, Snuff remained a hot potato. It may have been a phoney, but a phoney that served to highlight a very plausible set of problems nonetheless. At the very least Snuff was peddling the idea of murder to a decrepit audience now jaded by the sex acts in Deep Throat. Snuff was material evidence of this tenuous fact, and what’s more it was on public display on Broadway in New York and many other places around the country. Through posters and advertisements, snuff films existed not as smoke and shadows but had become instead highly visible, the idea transmuting into a valid and present threat.

In hindsight, what of the snuff film panic projected by the media? What of the snuffers reported in magazine articles? Those films of murder described by journalists in hollow detail? “Pickets sell tickets,” said Allan Shackleton, deflating questions on the death of his actress. The component parts of the snuff film rumours resemble the tail-devouring snake of a wholly different mythology, one that births a motion picture called Snuff. The movie they said could never be shown was being shown, and it cultivated a whole new point of reference for death on film: Murder as entertainment.

1Feminist Andrea Dworkin makes reference to the advertising of Snuff. In a 1986 article, ‘Letter From a War Zone,’ she writes: ‘The marquee towered above the vast Times Square area, the word Snuff several feet high in neon, next to the title the words ‘made in South America where life is cheap’. In the ads that blanketed the subways, a woman’s body was cut in half.’ (The Andrea Dworkin Online Library.)

2Some sources credit the title as The Slaughter.

3Yoko Ono would later direct several short films with her partner John Lennon. These are experimental by nature. John and Yoko’s Rape (1969) is a good case in point, which is based around a cameraman pursuing a young female subject.

4The Movie Murderer stars Arthur Kennedy, Warren Oates and Tom Selleck, here making his feature film debut.

5See appendix: MANSON INSPIRED MOVIES OF THE 1970S.

6Most sources credit the producer as Jack Bravman. Frost and Bravman may be one and the same. Bravman is the producer of a number of movies. He also directed horror pictures: Janie (1970) features Michael and Roberta Findlay in acting roles, while his most famous effort, Zombie Nightmare (1986), stars Adam (Batman) West and rock singer Thor.

7No 4 Summer, 1984.

8See chapter six: THE INVESTIGATION OF PORNOPHILES.

9The Shackleton-produced Blue Summer (1973) appears to have acknowledged Manson two years prior to Snuff. According to one review, Chuck Vincent’s saucy road movie has a scene where the two male protagonists ‘ball a cult leader’s two chick disciples’. (Clive Davies, Spinegrinder.)

10CCVL no 2.

11Carter Stevens, emails to the authors dated March 15 and 17, 2013.

12According to IMDb, the uncredited cast comprises Margarita Amuchástegui (as Angelica), Ana Carro (Ana), Liliana Fernández Blanco (Susanna), Michael Findlay (Detective), Roberta Findlay (Carmela, voice), Alfredo Iglesias (Horst’s father), Enrique Larratelli (Satán), Mirtha Massa (Terri London), Aldo Mayo (Maximilian ‘Max’ Marsh) and Clao Villanueva (Horst Frank). IMDb also credits Horacio Fredriksson as codirector and Rick Howard for music. Mirtha Massa, who plays Terri London, is a former Miss Argentina and was crowned Miss International Beauty 1967 in California.

13Slaughter: An action adventure directed by Jack Starrett and starring Jim Brown, released in 1972.

14See chapter four: REALITIES AND ROADSHOWS.

15In pursuit of image: Allan was once Allen; was once Alan.

16This description of the Monarch office is a composite of known facts and the recollection of Simon Nuchtern and Carter Stevens in interview with the authors.

17The movies that followed were variations on similarly raunchy themes, including Mrs. Barrington (1974), another Shackleton production and another hit. ‘Her husbands get everything that’s coming to them’, ran the tagline on this one. ‘She just gives it to them a little early!’

18A version of Snuff does apparently exist in a Spanish language format. See chapter six: THE PERVERSION SERIES.

19In 1977, the Cine Theater closed its doors for good and was demolished soon afterwards. For more information check out the Cinema Treasures website, where it is listed under an alternate name, the Town’n’Country Theatre. A post by Nick DiMaggio offers some insight into the eclectic mood of the establishment, which was advertised in the local papers as being ‘For the good film lover’.

20Viva la muerte happens to be the title of a 1971 surreal western directed by Fernando Arrabal.

21This ending mimics the opening scenes of the movie, bringing Snuff full circle (a factor lost on viewers likely to have fallen asleep by this point). In the opening shots, Satàn presides over the mutilation-murder of one of his female followers, a knife gouging the victim’s toes as she willingly accepts her fate.

22On the subject of inspiration: There is a scream-cut in Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) — where a female character is shot point-blank in the mouth — cut to next scene — that may have inspired the scream transition in Snuff, which takes the viewer ‘behind the scenes’. On the subject of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: Here is another movie that sought to cash-in on the Sharon Tate massacre mid-production. Meyer’s movie (written by critic Roger Ebert) is a self-acknowledged parody of Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls (1967), which just happens to include a fledgling Sharon Tate.

23Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, The Manson Murders: An Investigation into Motive.

24November 1971.

25David Felton and David Dalton, ‘Year of the Fork, Night of the Hunter,’ Rolling Stone, June 25, 1970. Randy Starr’s business card, reproduced in Felton and Dalton’s article, shows him in a death pose hanging from a noose.

26Ibid.

27Lucifer Rising has a confusing history. The film would see completion in 1980, when surviving fragments of the original ‘lost’ version and other material shot around the time were pieced together and released under that title. (Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother [1969] is also compiled from scraps of the original Lucifer Rising.) Known for languishing over projects, there had been yet further delays when Anger had another falling out, this time with Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, whom he accused of reneging on a promised Lucifer Rising musical soundtrack. Anger eventually went back to Beausoleil, who obligingly supplied the soundtrack that now adorns the film. (Page’s music for Lucifer Rising does exist and has since been released in its own right.)

28For others, see chapter nine: THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE.

29‘Money is Power’, Game, October 1975.

30A rock band by the name of Snuff played the fifteenth anniversary bash of the Loew’s Riviera movie theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, in 1971. They played atop the marquee. Snuff may have been the same East Coast band that released an album on Elektra in the early eighties.

31The key suspects in an ongoing criminal case are a bunch of hippies, who also happen to be the stars of a new film by underground experimental filmmaker Jimmy Apache (Severn Darden). The production appears to have mystical properties, and includes a scene where smartly dressed diners in a field are attacked by the hippies — a transparent interpretation of the Beatles’ song Piggies, off the White Album, catalyst of Manson’s Helter Skelter.

32The original date had been January 14, but this was postponed.

33The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it accreditation appears in Boxoffice (September 20, 1976) in the magazine’s round-up of recent and forthcoming titles.

34Jay Lynch, ‘The Facts about the Snuff-Film Rumors: The Body Count is Still Zero,’ Oui vol 5 no 7 (July 1976).

35According to local press, screenings of Snuff at the Uptown Theater began at midday and continued through to 11pm, making a total of eight showings daily.

36‘Snuff Shown in Wichita; Violence Labeled “Fake”.’ Boxoffice, February 9, 1976.

37David Friedman, ‘A History of the AFAA,’ published in Boxoffice (March 1982). Friedman himself was no stranger to ballyhoo, working all his adult life in exploitation pictures. He is perhaps best known for inventing gore movies with H.G. Lewis. Reading between the lines of his AFAA article, one suspects Friedman wishes he’d thought of Snuff. For more on the Los Angeles protests, see chapter nine: AGES OF SEX CRIME.

38Quoted in Beverly LaBelle’s ‘Snuff — The Ultimate in Woman-Hating,’ Laura Lederer (ed.) Take Back the Night.

39December 10, 1975.

40March 7, 1976.

41The Times Herald Record, March 11, 1976.

42The racist angle had also been exploited by women’s groups, who brought it to the attention of Latin American communities in Los Angeles, if not elsewhere. See chapter nine: AGES OF SEX CRIME.

43‘Snuff Showing Snuffed By Windy City Circuit,’ Boxoffice, April 5, 1976.

44Filmmaker Simon Nuchtern recalls that behind-the-scenes photographs were pertinent to the police investigation of Snuff. “The one that I remember best is the one of the actress sitting in the special bed,” he told the authors, “disembowelled, eating a slice of pizza at lunch as she could not get out and join the rest of us for the break. That is the shot that the police took when we proved that no one had been really ‘snuffed’.” Nuchtern no longer possesses any of these photographs. He remembers “Allan Shackleton asked for all the stills for publicity and I guess we turned them all to his company”. Simon Nuchtern, email to the authors, October 14, 2012.

45Beverly LaBelle, ‘Snuff — The Ultimate in Woman-Hating,’ in Laura Lederer (ed.) Take Back the Night.

46Another of the strategies considered by feminists in 1976 was Snuff as false advertising, i.e. no one is killed. See also WAVAW, chapter nine: AGES OF SEX CRIME.

47Larry Parrish quoted in Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne’s The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry.

48Marc B. Ray’s Scream Bloody Murder had used the promise of violence and pornography as a marketing gimmick in 1973, but to little fanfare. It was, cried the poster, ‘The First Motion Picture to be Called GORE-NOGRAPHY!!!’

49Simon Nuchtern, email to the authors, October 14, 2012.

50Carter Stevens, emails to the authors, March 15 and 17, 2013.

51Findlay had recently supervised two films made in 3D Super Depth in Taiwan. Of these, Mei Chun Chang’s Dynasty (1977) was considered by Boxoffice (May 23, 1977) to be one of the biggest grossing films in the Far East for years.

52What of the cinematic climate at around the time Shackleton was musing over Slaughter and cooking up plans for Snuff? The latest in a long-line of populist pseudo documentaries, Savage Man… Savage Beast and Brutes and Savages, both 1975, were particularly harsh contributions to a genre known as mondo films. Purporting in each instance to feature actual human fatalities, caught on camera by happenstance, these two particular mondo efforts would eventually become big hitters on Times Square. Not unlike Snuff, the fatalities were fake and utilized as an unsavoury marketing tool.

53December 1976.

The young man with a distant look in his eyes holds the door to his apartment open. The birthday girl would like him to join the party downstairs. But he won’t. He closes the door, glances at the slice of cake she has left for him on the table and almost smiles. A voice yells “CUT!” The scene cuts to a studio set and reveals behind-the-scenes paraphernalia of motion picture making. Among the actors and actresses, stage-hands and archetypal boorish director is the young man from the previous scene, Mark Lester (Karlheinz Böhm), a mild mannered member of the crew.

Some fifteen years prior to Snuff, in 1960, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom was released in Britain. Most critics hated it.[1] Powell had been one of Britain’s best-loved film directors, thanks to movies like The Thief of Bagdad (1940), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and The Red Shoes (1948). But with Peeping Tom, he was ostracised almost overnight. The reviewer for the Monthly Film Bulletin (MFB) lamented that while the books of the Marquis de Sade were forbidden, this film wasn’t.[2] Powell’s career was all but over.

Peeping Tom is regarded now as a classic and ahead of its time. But it’s still a jarring experience and it isn’t difficult to see what caused such a foul reaction on its initial release. For a start it’s a very sleazy looking movie, a factor that the glorious Technicolor diffuses not a jot. Moreover, the lead is a homicidal maniac who kills women due to uncontrollable sexual wanting — and yet is portrayed sympathetically, himself a victim. On top of that, he records the deeds with a cine camera so that he may relive the experiences again in the mini-auditorium that is his apartment. Not even Hitchcock’s Psycho, that other shocker of 1960, tinkered with so amoral a concept.

There is no doubt that Mark’s violent actions provide for him sexual release. His killing tool, a knife-edged tripod, has very clear phallic connotations — nowhere more so than when he ‘auditions’ one victim at the film studio, very slowly drawing his deadly lance erect. Replaying the murder scenes offers a masturbatory rapture: By the time his home movies have reached their murderous climax, Mark has literally thrust himself from his seat to stand shuddering before the spent film.

Mark’s behaviour is attributed to his father (played by director Powell), a professor who subjected the young boy to questionable experiments, filming him tirelessly in an effort to understand scopophilia, the morbid urge to gaze. Years of torture and abuse have made Mark what he is. They drive him now to pursue his own experiments in fear, and ultimately he betters his father by managing what his father could not. “I’m afraid and I’m glad that I’m afraid!” Mark cries at the end of Peeping Tom, holding a mirror to his face as he is about to record his own death. With this, the experiment is finally over.

The movie’s cavalier and blackly humorous attitude brings to it a quality that almost puts it in line with an Ealing comedy at times. Upon its belated release in the US, amid an upsurge in controversial ‘foreign’ films, Peeping Tom was a loose cannon. Marketed simultaneously as both arthouse and exploitation, it proved the least successful of the pictures handled by importer and distributor Astor, unsure what to make of it. A theatrical campaign was modelled after Psycho, while the movie itself often played on double bills with nudist pictures, and advertising spots suggested a low-budget roughie. ‘He waited — and he watched,’ beckoned the sinister eye at the centre of Peeping Tom newspaper ads.

The notion of a murderer who is not a villain was enough to seal the fate of the film on both sides of the Atlantic. But on top of this is the aberration of the filmed kill, which would not be touched upon again for over a decade.

Peeping Tom reached US shores in a truncated form in 1962. There is no evidence to suggest that Allan Shackleton had seen or was influenced by Peeping Tom when he came up with Snuff many years later. Nevertheless, Shackleton’s film would reacquaint cinema-goers with the long dormant theme of the filmed kill, while at the same time utilize a film-within-a-film gag of its own (and ending, like Peeping Tom, on a black screen with the sound of a disembodied voice). Unlike Powell, however, Shackleton saw a whole slew of movies in his wake.

EMANUELLE IN AMERICA (1976)
D: JOE D’AMATO [ARISTIDE MASSACCESI]

Italian exploitation cinema is quite unlike any other in the world. Or rather it was in the seventies and eighties, when ‘exploitation’ could almost be considered in terms of an industry unto itself. The latest box office smash was invariably shadowed by a quick-fire Roman cash-in or an unofficial sequel. Sometimes these sequels continued to run, outpacing the movies that had inspired them, as was the case with the Black Emanuelle series.[3]

Black Emanuelle was born on the international success of a French softcore porn movie called Emmanuelle (1974). Directed by Just Jaeckin, the tale is that of the wistful Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel), who abandons her new husband for a hedonistic voyage through sexual fulfilment. It didn’t take long for Italy to embark on its own cycle of Em(m) anuelle adventures (dropping an ‘m’ from the heroine’s name to avoid an infringement of copyright). The Mediterranean deconstruction began with Albert Thomas’ Black Emanuelle (1975),[4] which starred a Eurasian beauty by the name of Laura Gemser. Her return the following year in Joe D’Amato’s Black Emanuelle Goes East (1976), brought to the Italian spin-offs the façade of continuity. D’Amato and Gemser are attached to most films in the Black Emanuelle series, which steers the hapless heroine from one sexual adventure to another in a variety of exotic locations. But D’Amato[5] railed on Emanuelle’s carnal freedom like a disapproving patriarch. In one Emanuelle film, sex is ruined by cannibals during an ill-fated expedition through untamed jungles. In another, Emanuelle faces the prospect of a lobotomy. These are Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977) and Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade (1978), respectively. But the nadir is Emanuelle in America, an entry far removed from an ‘erotic’ film in the traditional sense.

Investigative reporter Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) is on assignment in the Caribbean to infiltrate an exclusive sex club for single women. It’s all rather innocuous until she spies a couple making love beneath a film playing in their bedroom. Rather than the anticipated porno, the film shows soldiers in a dungeon raping, mutilating and murdering several women. The film is silent, poor quality and constantly jerking from scene to scene. With a concealed camera Emanuelle snaps photos of it.

Convincing her editor that here is a story worth investigating, Emanuelle travels undercover to Washington DC, where she wins the confidence of a man called the Colonel (Roger Browne). Feigning excitement at the Colonel’s porno collection, Emanuelle is soon obliged with something altogether stronger, a film similar to the one witnessed on the Caribbean island.

“Those pictures — so real! Like they were really happening!” exclaims Emanuelle. “It was all so awful… but what a turn on. It’s the raw horror that excites me.”

The Colonel spikes Emanuelle’s drink with LSD and takes her by private aircraft to a secret jungle location in South America. Here she observes the torture chamber and soldiers familiar from the films, but later wonders whether it all hasn’t been a drug-induced dream. However, the photos from the Caribbean island, once developed, affirm the dream was reality and provide Emanuelle with evidence of a snuff film.

“It has to be a first!” she tells her editor. “The scoop of the century!”

But the story is quashed following high ranking orders.

Emanuelle in America exists in a multitude of forms. Alternate scenes were shot back to back so that the film might later be edited to suit the different markets of sexploitation and horror. The result is confusion, with an array of ‘official’ cuts of varying running times. By way of an example, the print under review was a Dutch release on the Video for Pleasure label. It is a print lacking the hardcore sex scenes, as well as the more extreme violence.[6] When Emanuelle in America received a theatrical release in Britain in the latter months of 1977, its running time was down from 100 minutes to eighty-seven. As well as expunging all hardcore sex scenes, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) made sure the plot was trimmed of any allusion to snuff films. Consequently, Emanuelle’s ‘scoop of the century’ is deflated to an exposé of the Colonel’s elaborate seduction techniques.

In its uncut form, Emanuelle in America steps beyond mere exploitation. The scene where our heroine first stumbles upon the mysterious snuff footage is on a par with any grotesque in D’Amato’s extensive cinematic canon. Here is a man who would go so far as to show a foetus being ripped from the belly of its mother and devoured by a cannibal in Anthropophagous the Beast (1980). But even that has its place as honest to goodness outrage. Emanuelle in America, by contrast, puts outrage in an erotic context. It has a woman masturbating a horse for a start. Sequences that show victims being blow-torched, branded with irons, and beaten and strangled while gang-raped, play over the sounds of orgasm. It’s off the wall even by D’Amato’s prurient standards.

Later, in the Colonel’s bedroom (or Senator, as he is known in some versions), the camera-happy Emanuelle secretly takes more pictures of the elusive film. In this instance it bleeds into silent life with floggings and the impaling of women on huge wooden dildos. The footage becomes exponentially more unpleasant. But also more cinematic, as can be determined from one tightly edited sequence:

A hand in close-up reaches for a meat-hook; the camera cuts to long shot to reveal a naked woman bound with her hands behind her back; cut to close-up of the meat-hook being inserted between the woman’s legs; cut to close-up of a pulley above the woman; cut to long shot and the pulley lifting the woman off the floor. Quickly, the camera sweeps around the torture chamber to reveal the essence of other crimes and a soldier swigging heartily from a bottle.

In the sequence where the drugged Emanuelle is taken to watch the manufacture of the films, an open-ended dildo is pushed down the throat of one victim and boiling oil poured into it. Another victim has both her nipples sliced off with a knife. Throughout the carnage, in her acid stupor, the vacant Emanuelle holds the attention of the Colonel: The observer the observed. He draws her underwear down and caresses the glassy-eyed woman before raping her.

The movie’s disturbing scenes of death and violence are realized by effects artist Maurizio Trani.[7] Trani’s makeup skills and D’Amato’s recklessness prove a potent mix, convincing some commentators that the movie featured scenes of genuine snuff. David Hebditch and Nick Anning, for instance, were rattled enough to propose a connection with South American death squads. In their book Porn Gold, they considered the military footprint of places like Chile, Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala and Colombia, and what vile documentary records might exist there. For Hebditch and Anning, it all adds up.

There are strong grounds for believing that some very brief sequences of this extremely gruesome material were incorporated into a scene in one of the films in the unending Emmanuelle [sic] series, which are made in Europe. Other examples are said to have made their way to extreme right-wing groups in Italy.[8]

It’s more likely that D’Amato drew his inspiration from another Italian film, Giuseppe Ferrara’s Faccia Di Spia (1975). An altogether dull pseudo documentary about the CIA, it has one rather shocking segment that realistically depicts various torture tactics employed by the agency in developing countries.[9]

This is the sort of place Emanuelle finds herself all the time, a sexually insatiable agent provocateur debilitated by freaks and cliff hanging perils. Emanuelle in America is a merger of extremes that falls deeper than D’Amato’s usual nonsense. Emanuelle is drugged at one point and can do nothing but watch the horrors unfolding, while at the same time the Colonel’s wandering hands crawl all over her body. D’Amato gets it right. By accident or design, he succeeds in reducing snuff to the vacant orgasm of a somnambulist gaze. He seems to be telling us that the coveted ‘real thing’ is merely the dream of other people and only ever exists someplace else.

LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET (1977)
D: VICTOR JANOS [ROGER WATKINS]

For many years Last House on Dead End Street was one of the great mysteries of exploitation cinema. It appeared in the late seventies, was credited to no one remotely familiar, and released theatrically as a ‘cult classic’. So obscure is the movie that for years Last House on Dead Street remained a tantalising enigma. Few had heard of it, let alone seen it, and of those who had heard of it fewer still believed it existed. By the early 1980s, the movie was somewhat less elusive, receiving a marginal release on videocassette. Only relatively recently however did the full facts emerge.

A heartbeat pounds against a black screen. Jailbird Terry Hawkins walks into shot, a young punk who used to make stag films but couldn’t sell a damn one. “Nobody’s interested in sex anymore,” he reflects, “they’re lookin’ for something else.” So he puts a crew together and films the murder of a blind man, selling the footage to a down at heel pornographer by the name of Palmer. Palmer and his associates are amazed at how real Terry’s films look. When they try to rip Terry off, however, they discover the truth and become his next victims…

Last House on Dead End Street is a believable glimpse into an unbelievable world. Filmed on a meagre budget using complete unknowns, it features baffling imagery, slaughterhouse footage, a truly demented protagonist in Terry Hawkins and a despicable conceit played out with utter conviction. It might easily have sprung from a challenge to make as wild a movie as possible and stay within the law. Would it be anywhere quite as lurid as this?

Released theatrically in 1977 by a company called Today Productions Inc., and again in 1979, the title and advertising campaign mimicked another, more famous movie: Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972). But here any similarity ends. The director was credited as one Victor Janos. But this was evidently fiction, along with all the other credits on the movie. The film has a badly dubbed soundtrack, is overexposed and never looks altogether in focus as it bounces from one moody scene to another. The prevailing atmosphere of hopelessness and desolation pummels the viewer into seeing vile fictions as a possible truth. ‘Director Victor Janos must be one sick fucker or else he knows how to fake it really well,’ wrote Steve Puchalski in Slimetime.[10]

With the exception of Terry Hawkins and his increasingly maniacal portrait, the obviously inexperienced players quickly give up trying to act and content themselves to wander void of expression through the movie, laughing and sometimes screaming. Dumped together in the opening scenes without ceremony or introduction these characters don’t develop as one might expect of characters in a movie. But then neither does the movie. There are strange and unexplained nuances, such as the use of masks and the ritualistic way the killers swap them around. There are whispered invocations (“tell me the answer the virgin bride tell me the answer”). All of it communicates a sense that more is going on than meets the eye; that because we don’t understand what the people in this movie say and do, then surely there must be a profound reason for them saying and doing it.

The final section revolves around the torture-murder of Palmer and his double crossing associates, now the unwitting stars of Terry’s latest snuff film. It takes place in an abandoned building, suffused with surreal imagery and underpinned by a memorably psychotic Terry Hawkins. (“I’M DIRECTING THIS FUCKIN’ MOVIE!!” is one quixotic line of dialogue.) The demise of Palmer’s wife, Nancy, is suitably jarring.

Nancy is strapped down to a bed in a room equipped with a trolley carrying surgical instruments. Heartbeat. The film crew display to the terrified woman the tools they will use on her. Terry’s associate Ken first attacks Nancy’s face with a scalpel. Cameraman Bill films the scene. The result is a latticework of wounds and blood. Terry takes a hacksaw and removes one of the victim’s feet (a white sheet obscures the operation). She loses consciousness but is revived with smelling salts to scream some more. In the most chilling moment, Ken approaches with a pair of industrial shears. Nancy has fallen quite calm. Resigned to her fate, she betrays not a hint of terror — just a remote sadness. She closes her eyes as Ken cuts into the sheet.

In the previous edition of this book, the identity of the people associated with Last House on Dead Street remained unknown. While the film looked every bit to be an American production, the use of full-frontal nudity and poor dubbing gave rise to speculation and uncertainty. Demonique described the film as being ‘one of those foreign horrors that belongs in a group with Autopsy, The Tempter and the like… There is simply something “right” about Last House on Dead End Street that makes it watchable’.[11]

In 2000, Roger Watkins stepped forward to claim that Last House on Dead Street was indeed an American picture and that he had directed it and starred in it as the unsettling Terry Hawkins.[12] There was much to be sceptical about. More than two decades had passed since the release of the movie, during which time there hadn’t been so much as a peep from any of the people involved in its production. Then again why would anyone claim to have directed Last House on Dead End Street, of all things, if it wasn’t true?

One of the authors of this book, soon after the emergence of this new information, interviewed Roger Watkins for Headpress.[13] Watkins put paid to the notion the movie had been made to ride the coattails of Snuff. It had actually been completed in January 1973, he said, prior to the release of that picture.[14] The impetus behind both movies, however, was Charles Manson and the Manson Family slayings. Specifically for Watkins it was Ed Sanders’ book The Family.

“Big inspiration. Major!” said Watkins. “I got married July 2, 1972. I’m working at a TV station as a cameraman and I was reading that book and I was absolutely fascinated by it, and pretty creeped out.”

The project started life as Cuckoo Clocks of Hell. Watkins borrowed $3,000 budget money, but spent it almost entirely on amphetamine. He utilized whatever props were at hand, shot on equipment borrowed from a local college, and composed a cast of friends and acquaintances. In its original cut, now lost, the film was much more brutal. Indeed, the entire first twenty minutes were said to have taken place in a slaughterhouse. “It was just the most horrifying things you ever saw,” Watkins elaborates. “But it would have cutaways to where you would see Terry Hawkins getting arrested in a projection booth in a porn theatre. Ken was working in the slaughterhouse and that kind of tied the whole thing in… You would have all the exposition in the first twenty minutes surrounded by the slaughterhouse footage, which was great. I had this really pretentious idea that real violence, which is what the slaughterhouse footage was — when you are in the slaughterhouse, when you actually go there it becomes so abstract. Just the repetition of it and the way you follow this living beast… oh man, being turned into nothingness. I thought this is great; this will anaesthetise people to violence. That’s what I thought. It was pretentious, but that was my idea.”

Watkins lost track of his film following some distasteful business with his distributor, who would later edit and release the movie without his knowledge. First the movie was known as The Funhouse and then as Last House on Dead End Street. At the time of its rerelease in 1979, Watkins’ filmmaking career had moved into x-rated pictures. A chance encounter alerted the director to the subterfuge under his very nose,[15] and he eventually caught a screening of it on 42nd Street, where it played on the top half of a bill with Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977). “It caused a ruckus,” recalled Watkins. “People were moaning, groaning, screaming, disgusted, repelled… I’m not sure anybody liked it. I don’t think anybody liked it.”

Last House on Dead End Street was filmed in 16mm without sound, dubbed later (out of sync) and blown up to 35mm. The quality of the movie was compromised at source, a situation exasperated when it dropped from the radar following its theatrical run and for years was only available via poor dupes circulating among collectors on videocassette. Indeed, your authors’ own first taste of Last House on Dead End Street was a VHS transfer so fearsomely inferior the whole movie had become close to impenetrable, while its acquisition was an arcane saga in itself. But it served to heighten the frisson, making the product that much more desirable and indeed magical. Or dangerous. Despite its newfound accessibility on DVD, much of the power of Last House on Dead Street stems from those bad analogue bootleg tapes back in the eighties.

VÍTIMAS DE PRAZER “SNUFF” (1977) D: CLAUDIO CUNHA

There is another film about the manufacture of snuff that is even more obscure than Last House on Dead End Street. Indeed it doesn’t appear to have ever been screened outside its native Brazil. Made in 1977, Vítimas de Prazer “Snuff” (Snuff: Victims of Pleasure) tells the story of two film producers who finance a porno picture that will include the murder of an actress on camera. Michael Tracy (Hugo Bidet) is a big shot filmmaker from Los Angeles, who arrives in São Paulo with a business proposition for his old friend Bob Channing (Fernando Reski). He shows him silent black and white footage of an actress being stabbed to death in woodland and convinces Bob there is big money to be made in a snuff film. The two men assemble cast and crew, telling them it’s a sex film, keeping them in the dark about the true nature of the project. Soon enough conflicts arise. Bob falls for Glória (Lúcia Allvin), one of the actresses in the film, and gets cold feet about the plan. Ultimately, he is unable to save Glória from being shot dead on camera.

Censorship restrictions had been stifling cinema in Brazil for years when, in the 1970s, director Claudio Cunha helped revitalize the flagging industry with a series of exploitation films. These were cheesy but proved popular with the public and became synonymous with the red light area in which they were made. They sometimes featured actors and actresses associated with more respected Brazilian movies of the previous decade. Among this wave of sex comedies and musicals was the crime drama Vítimas de Prazer “Snuff”, which Cunha directed and co-wrote with Carlos Reichenbach.

If largely forgotten today, the movie received some good press on its release and was a commercial hit in Brazil, no small thanks to a campaign that played Allan Shackleton at his own game. The advertising for Vítimas de Prazer wasn’t at all ambiguous. It didn’t suggest the murder onscreen might be real, it stated categorically that it was real. A trailer has survived that shows no actual scenes from the movie itself, but rather people being asked their opinion of snuff films. Some if not all of the supposed replies are scripted. The trailer generated huge publicity for the film, which premiered at the Cine Marabá theatre in São Paulo, beneath a marquee pronouncing it to be the movie where actresses are raped and murdered for real. The headline of one city newspaper acknowledged that Vítimas de Prazer was the ‘movie that kills’.

Today, Claudio Cunha is an award winning stage actor and director in Brazil.[16] In a 2005 interview (on the arts website Cinequanon), he recalled his humble beginnings and surprise at the audiences for early screenings of Vítimas de Prazer, mistaking the queues outside the cinema as some kind of protest. There were plants in the cinema, he said, women who were hired to break down and cry at the murder scenes. Small groups also accompanied the film to different theatres to create a commotion, among them school teachers trying to supplement their lowly income on a paid picket line.

One can also see in the film some digs at the Brazilian old guard. It features strip clubs and topless nudity, and in one sequence Mike, the successful sex film producer, is interviewed by a reporter on matters of taste and cinematic trends. He gives pat answers, clearly not in the least interested in the argument.

There is little actual bloodshed in the film, outside of a bizarre dénouement that more resembles something out of a fifties EC comic. Following the death of Gloria, the duplicitous Mike tries to reassure cast and crew that everything is okay, nothing is his fault. He almost succeeds. But then expartner Bob is discovered, or rather what’s left of him after Mike mowed him down in his car: His decapitated head is still stuck in the radiator grille. (Cue closing credit song: Que Sera by Doris Day.)

Despite its apparent success, Cunha claims not to have reaped any financial reward from Vítimas de Prazer, which he blames on his own naïveté in matters of the film industry. Whatever the case, the film is somewhat forgotten now. “Nobody knows this film in Brazil,” comments novelist Marcos Fábio Katudjian, a former student of Carlos Reichenbach, Cunha’s co-writer on Vítimas de Prazer. “It is considered a B-film in a negative way.”

Asked where he thought the inspiration for the film lay, Katudjian told the authors:

“I could guess, knowing a bit about Reichenbach. He is well-known for being a lover of extreme films and knows a lot about them. He is a kind of encyclopaedia… To give you an idea of Reichenbach’s passion, he organizes every first Wednesday of the month a session in a movie theatre showing film extremes. These screenings are called ‘session of the Commodore’ — do not ask me why. In the 1970s, there was a movement in São Paulo called Boca do Lixo, which brought together filmmakers downtown, around some streets and some bars, to think and make movies. Films were cheap, confronting the audience and at the same time made for reflection. I think Vítimas de Prazer [follows] the same trend.”[17]

It is unlikely that Cunha and Reichenbach would have hit on the same idea as Shackleton at exactly the same time. More likely they were familiar with the plight of Snuff in the US through trade papers and simply copied the premise and the hype. Perhaps one of them saw the movie on a trip to New York? The snuff footage that Mike brings with him to show Bob in the opening scenes echoes the tagged on ending to Snuff (an actress is stabbed to death; the killer rants at the camera). Vítimas de Prazer also has an ingénue, a model in this instance, who plays a similar role to that of the fated actress in Snuff. It is not inconceivable that Shackleton’s film might have even played in Brazil; it certainly got so far as a screening in Japan.[18]

The unscrupulous producers in Cunha’s film pass themselves off as American, with Mike having earned his reputation with a snuff film in Los Angeles before travelling to São Paulo to enlist help in making another one. It is an interesting twist on Shackleton’s concept of South America being the place where life is cheap. Mike and Bob plot openly in English; their associates are only able to understand Spanish and remain clueless as to what’s really going on. For Cunha and Reichenbach, snuff is not rooted in the Third World, but belongs instead to a place of affluence, excess and greed, i.e. America. It is a recurring theme: Prejudice and ignorance toward South America was worse in the seventies, says Marcos Fábio Katudjian. Perpetuated in urban legend and by snuff film mythologists, this prejudice is exposed by Vítimas de Prazer “Snuff” and in the other movies discussed in this chapter.

There is one elegiac moment in Vítimas de Prazer that threatens to transcend the pedestrian quality of the work in general. A hulking mental patient is hired as the actor who shoots Gloria with a pistol, killing her on camera. He is the unwitting stooge in the producers’ game plan. But, after the deed is done, he wanders off to the riverbank to unspool the precious film and throw it into the air, a child at play.

BLUE NUDE (1977)
D: LUIGI SCATTINI

Luigi Scattini’s Blue Nude (1977) is an Italian language production set in New York. It follows Rocco Spinone (Gerardo Amato), a young man who has a series of hapless jobs and misadventures while trying to break into Hollywood as a scriptwriter. Confounding it all, his new girlfriend, a porn actress called Lilly (Susan Elliot), is murdered on camera during a sex scene.

Blue Nude occupies a recognizable place within the subculture of New York in the seventies. One gets the impression that in Rocco lives director Scattini, who is seeing New York as a city of opportunity and challenge. There are constant references to famous American-Italian actors and filmmakers. The camera traces Rocco’s steps as he wanders Times Square, beneath the marquees advertizing the movies he longs to be a part of. But before the glitz comes sleaze, with Rocco enduring humiliating jobs to pay the rent. He is a male stripper, a dog walker and a gigolo. He takes a role in a porn movie (playing a television repairman), where he falls for Lilly.

Up until the end of the movie and the moment Lilly is murdered on camera, Blue Nude is a free rolling series of monologues and observations on life. Scattini holds it together well. He appears earnest and the film is rarely dull. Prior to Blue Nude, he had directed a number of mondo films, including Sexy magico (1963), Sweden Heaven and Hell (1968) and The Satanists (1970).[19] One can see traces of those here: Blue Nude happens to be Rocco’s life, but structurally it is a series of set pieces in isolation.

Lilly’s murder is one of the more unusual deaths in the annals of snuff film cinema. She is appearing in a porn movie alongside a male actor with whom she has not worked before. She is hesitant to do rough stuff, but welcomes the extra money it brings. In the scene, Lilly plays a secretary whose boss rapes her. The couple roll and flail naked on the floor, while the film crew hover around them. The director fires instructions and despite the scene evidently getting out of hand, he won’t let anyone break. Lilly is being fucked and slowly strangled to death. When her body falls limp, the director tells the perplexed cameraman to keep filming. The death appears to be an accident; the actor certainly thinks it’s an accident. The crew are confused.

Says the cameraman: “I thought something was wrong. I wanted to stop them, but it was going so well. It was perfect.”

“Did it look good on camera?” asks the director.

“It looked good on camera,” responds the cameraman.

“Okay, everyone out!”

It is not difficult to see a reference to Shackleton’s Snuff in this coda. In fact the scene mirrors it. But there is more than a cosmetic similarity. The snuff sequences of both films were filmed in the loft studio apartment belonging to Carter Stevens. And Stevens himself plays Barry the porn director in Blue Nude.[20]

In correspondence with the authors, Carter Stevens had this to say about Blue Nude:

“I remember it very well. I was doing a lot of non-union production work for Dino De Laurentiis’ company, and through them I was contacted by Luigi [Scattini]. They were planning on doing ‘an Italian film on location in NY’. The entire crew and the lead actor were all brought over from Italy. I was hired as sort of a combination production manager/location scout/casting director (and as a lark with Luigi’s permission hired myself to play the porno director). Many of the cast were porn actors and not just in the ‘porn actors’ roles. Sue Elliot aka Susan McBain, who played the female lead, was a porn actress who I had ‘discovered’ and whose first film was the female lead in Rollerbabies for me. [There is a poster for the 1976 adult sci-fi Rollerbabies on the wall of the Blue Nude porn set.]

“The script didn’t make much sense in English. Basically the film was made for the Italian market not the American market. I’m not sure it even played in the US. The only time I saw it was at the Cannes film festival and it was dubbed in Italian with French subtitles, so I could hardly understand what was going on.”[21]

At the end of Blue Nude, as Lilly’s body is being removed from the studio, a couple of stage hands consider the matter of death on film. “Barry will make a lot of money,” says one of the men. “In South America they do a lot worse.”

HARDCORE (1978)
D: PAUL SCHRADER

The portrayal of snuff in Paul Schrader’s action-thriller Hardcore is in stark contrast to that of Last House on Dead End Street, two films meeting in 1979. One a new release, the other a re-release. Hardcore was without the viscera of Watkins’ film, but it had in its favour a substantially higher budget, star names, and the promotional clout of Columbia Pictures. It was also to have considerable impact on the cultural psyche. The story is a simple one and the snuff film aspect only occupies a little of the screen time, being a small part of the unfolding human drama. Nor is the snuff footage anything flash. On the contrary, it is rather plain and looks like it’s from an earlier, more innocent age. But the build up to it is not inconsequential, addressing preconceived notions of what a snuff film is, and the sort of world such a thing might inhabit.

Hardcore follows the plight of Jake VanDorn (George C. Scott),[22] a deeply religious man, whose life in a closeted small town in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is shattered when his teenage daughter goes missing. Somehow, suddenly, Kristen (Ilah Davis) has become embroiled in the world of sleaze and pornography, and VanDorn has no choice but to adapt to it in order to find her. Aided by a streetwise detective called Mast (Peter Boyle), the first clue is a stag reel that shows a seemingly drugged Kristen having sex with two men. Here begins a journey through the mean streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco, from sex stores to hookers and ultimately snuff films. VanDorn finds his daughter in the end, following a shoot-out with a crime boss called Ratan. She is safe (and saved) and together they head back to their quiet home in Grand Rapids.[23]

Early on in the film there is a scene where VanDorn questions Mast on the origins of the stag reel in which his daughter appears.

“I don’t know,” responds Mast. “Slow down! A film like this — 8mm film — costs $200–$300 to make, sold right out in a store, shown on peep machines. It’s impossible to track down. Nobody makes it. Nobody shows it. Nobody sees it! It’s like it doesn’t even exist.”

“What’s it called?”

“It was called ‘Slave Of Love’ when I bought it. Next time it’s sold it’ll be called something else.”

A former film critic turned screenwriter, Paul Schrader’s work prior to Hardcore included screenplays for Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1974), Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and John Flynn’s underrated Rolling Thunder (1977). He directed Blue Collar in 1977, which he co-wrote with his brother Leonard Schrader (who would in turn cowrite the hard-hitting mondo film, The Killing of America[24]). Although these films follow the pattern of personal retribution for their respective protagonists, by Schrader’s own admission Hardcore is overly simplistic. It draws on his own strictly religious upbringing in the American Midwest. It’s a product of the sexual liberation of the sixties — inasmuch as Schrader says he had no part of it, exiled by his religious upbringing and conscience. The portrayal of sex and the permissive society in Hardcore is bent out of shape by the sort of hysteria and sensationalism usually reserved for the gutter press. VanDorn barely stops for breath in the search for his daughter, catapulted from one local adult movie theatre to utter depravity, where child porn and snuff films lurk in the shadows. It is a sweeping dot-to-dot descent that Schrader says was born of an “obsession with people who lived the forbidden life”. With Hardcore he “succumbed to the sort of glorified, prurient nature of the sexual underworld”.[25]

The first half of Hardcore is somewhat more persuasive, as it follows VanDorn before he has had time to adjust to the night life of the big city. He is a painfully obtrusive presence amid the sleaze, naively firing questions at hookers and lowlives and meeting anonymity or violence at every turn. “Don’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’” is a fairly typical response to his questions. But when he receives a beating in a massage parlour, VanDorn suddenly develops a miraculous capacity for lying, cheating and playing the villains at their own game. He now applies himself to the situation effortlessly, whether portraying a porn film investor or casting agent, and even manages to land a seat at a snuff film screening.[26]

It is here, in a poky little room above a brothel filled with cigarette smoke that Hardcore plays out its defining moment. VanDorn’s insuppressible search for his daughter has brought him to the abyss. He sits among an audience of three men, scanning the room in silence while waiting for a film to unspool. At this point, he doesn’t know what the film might be. An audiocassette plays a jolly Latin American song, creating a dreamy impression of an evening that belongs someplace else, where life is cheap. A projector begins to play a film that is black and white, silent and of poor quality. The focus is a single room with a bed, on which a woman in a leather mask waits pensively in bondage gear. A man arrives, binds her feet and threatens her with a whip. Into the frame walks a second man, who executes them both. (This second man turns out to be the underworld bigwig Ratan, whom VanDorn will face in the final act.) There are no frills to the film, nothing fancy, simply the one room, one camera. VanDorn is relieved that the woman who is killed is not his daughter and when the film is over he continues his search.

The footage is jolting in its sobriety. It is the result of many hours in and around sex shops. He pays a shadowy figure $100 for a single screening. Later, arriving at the designated meeting point, he is led down twisting corridors to a room at the back where the film is played.

The snuff footage and its screening protocol have a clear precedent in the pornography of an earlier age. The stag film, or smoker,[27] were adult films manufactured from as early as 1904 through until the 1970s. They weren’t openly screened or advertised, but inhabited a grey area much different to the showboating commercial length adult features of the 1970s, which introduced sexually explicit content to movie theatres.

The film that VanDorn witnesses ticks all the boxes. It is crude, short, silent, black and white, scratched and full of glitches. It is a far cry from the razzmatazz of everything else in Hardcore and indeed everything in the neon-lit world of 1979, where screaming guitars play on the soundtrack, and slick marquees hawk peep shows and triple X motion pictures.

Looking more closely at stag film history, we can see the legitimacy of linking snuff to it, and why its depiction in Hardcore has such resonance. The trade in erotic films is believed to have originated in France at the dawn of cinema, with the earliest known centre of commerce being South America. It was in the red light districts of Buenos Aires in early 1900 that pornographic films were shot, screened and shipped to private buyers around the world. Brothels often screened these clandestine films, while collectors, or agents, or some other shadowy emissary, were equipped to provide a stag party with film reels and a projector for an evening’s entertainment. Admittance to these meetings reflected the high costs involved in the production and maintenance of the illegal trade, making them the reserve of a select wealthy audience. According to one source, admission to a smoker in 1915 might have been as high as $20.[28] Prior to the introduction of more accessible and affordable formats, the first stag films were shot on 35mm and were on equal footing with other developing genres in terms of technique, production and invention.[29] It was thanks to the less wieldy 16mm format in the mid twenties, and more importantly 8mm a decade later, that methods of manufacture and distribution changed, as did the films themselves.

Now, the equipment required for production and viewing was available to almost anyone. The result was that films became prolific, but generally less competently made. It was all about the sex act, with fewer concessions to style, humour or invention (unless it was invention of a sexual nature). The setting might simply be a motel room, with the camera resolutely fixed on the action. This film might then resurface many times under different titles through the years, looking tatty and scratched for having been played and duplicated many times.

In their book, Dirty Movies: An Illustrated History of the Stag Film, 1915–1970, authors Al Di Lauro and Gerald Rabkin note a period of arrested aesthetic development for the stag. For most of its history, they say, the stag

has remained fixed in the formal mold of the film in its infancy, and in that restrictive one-reel form it survives today [the 1970s] in the very milieu in which the American film first emerged — the peep show.

Thus the stag is old yet timeless. In the case of Hardcore it is able to depict a contemporaneous act of murder, while at the same time being removed from it. This is because the film is not like our world; it is instead black and white and scratchy and silent. There is the implication that South America is the source of the material, courtesy of the music that plays as accompaniment. Thus the footage in Hardcore buys into the secret history of the stag film, and while not ‘real’ as such, it is complicit with the illegal and unregulated nature of genuine commerce at the dawn of cinema.[30]

For most of the movies discussed in this chapter, death on film is treated as pornography for a dark and specific market. It is underground. Allan Shackleton’s original campaign for Snuff had been brilliant and absurd in equal measures. But it planted the seed of doubt: Perhaps snuff films were a possibility? As Shackleton was oft to say, he’d be a fool to admit the murders in his film were real and he’d be a fool to admit they weren’t. Claudio Cunha on the other hand simply said they were real. The rest of the seventies added fuel to the confusion, and consequently the ‘evidence’ continued to mount. The idea became a secret transmission from a dodgy smoke-filled backroom in the company of a few degenerate men — as in Hardcore. It all added up. Thanks to the films above, the history of snuff was covert; it was one room and one camera, it was 8mm, it was videotape, it was black and white, it was colour, it was silent, it was grainy, it had bad editing, it was expensive. Above all, it was a commodity.

Common to most of these films is the depiction of snuff as a decrepit artefact, a single reel of 8mm film that is worn out through overuse. Although stag loops and smokers were still around in the seventies, their day had gone. These one and two reel features had been an important part of a male dominated world for decades, of private clubs and fraternity houses, when suddenly they were rendered obsolete. Almost overnight their specific modes of distribution and display were redundant, as well as the sense of camaraderie and initiation they had inspired among inexperienced males. In the mid seventies 8mm was archaic enough a concept to be plagiarised and inverted. If porno chic was for couples in regular movie theatres, the stag loop was, in Hardcore and its ilk, dangerous and isolated. This stigma was strong enough for Joel Schumacher to revisit and manipulate it afresh two decades later in 8MM (1999).[31] Come the new millennium, the format itself had become a metaphor for evil and death. In Scott Derrickson’s Sinister (2012), 8mm home movies that may have once belonged to a serial killer unleash devastation from beyond the grave. Here, true crime author Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) deliberates the on/off switch of his 8mm projector with fetishistic ague. Then he sits watching the films. And the films in turn watch him.

This is the VanDorn 8mm ‘principle’. Thanks to Hardcore, the format of choice for snuff filmmakers is invariably the 8mm film loop. The association is evident in all of the movies above. But in Hardcore it is boldly enforced. VanDorn pays his money and is led along twisting corridors to a makeshift screening room. Here he confronts a film projector and its awful promise. These are powerful minutes in which snuff equates to celluloid necromancy.

In later years, the videocassette, another outmoded medium, would accompany the 8mm loop in becoming a vessel of deathly countenance.

1Despite the critics’ wrath, Peeping Tom was not wholly a box office disaster. Author Kevin Heffernan regards it as a modest commercial success, ‘largely because of the highly publicized nude scene with famous pin-up model Pamela Green.’ Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953–1968.

2Review of Peeping Tom by D.R., Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1960.

3Thus we have an imitation of Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) in Enzo G. Castellari’s La Polizia Incrimina, la Legge Assolve (1973); William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) in Alberto De Martino’s The Antichrist (1974); Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976) in Alberto De Martino’s Holocaust 2000 (1977); Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) in Ovidio Assonitis’ Tentacles (1977); Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) in Antonio Margheriti’s The Last Hunter (1979); George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979); Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) in Luigi Cozzi’s Contamination (1980); Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood (1982) in Lamberto Bava’s Blastfighter (1984); Adrian Lyne’s 9½; Weeks (1986) in Joe D’Amato’s 11 Days, 11 Nights (1987). And so on.

4Although arguably it was an Italian picture that lay the foundation for Jaeckin’s movie in the first place: Cesare Canevari’s comparatively more sombre A Man for Emmanuelle (1969), starring Erika Blanc.

5Joe D’Amato (real name: Aristide Massaccesi) is perhaps the quintessence of Italian exploitation, whose work encompasses every genre from western through war to porno. He had an impossible number of pseudonyms, the most famous being D’Amato, and was known to turn out ten movies in a single year. An early career as a director of photography in the fifties brings to his work a flair for interesting camera angles. Other than that, his movies tend to be slabs of confusing tedium with the occasional flash of inspired vileness.

6An original Italian language print — also available during the first edition of this book — suffered similar trimming, but included a different edit of the snuff footage. Possibly the most complete version floating around in those early, pre-digital days came from the obscure Venezuelan video label, Telehobby International. Now it is a blu-ray from Blue Underground.

7Maurizio Trani lends his talent to several key Italian horrors of the period, including Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), The House by the Cemetery (1981) and The New York Ripper (1982).

8David Hebditch and Nick Anning, Porn Gold: Inside the Pornography Business.

9See review of Faccia Di Spia in chapter five.

10Slimetime no 17, April 1988.

11Barry Kaufman, review of Last House on Dead End Street in Demonique no 3 (undated).

12Watkins was alerted to the interest his film had generated over the years via fan posts online and responded accordingly.

13‘The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell,’ an interview with Roger Watkins by David Kerekes and Mikita Brottman. Headpress 23: Funhouse (June 2001).

14Watkins claimed later to have gone to a screening of Snuff at the behest of his distributors, who feared they might have some competition on their hands.

15Says Watkins: “I was walking down 9th Avenue when a guy comes up to me and says, ‘Holy shit, are you in that movie, cutting people up and shit?’ I said no. He said ‘It’s you, I know it’s you. Don’t you know what happened to that film?’ It turns out this guy was in charge of posters and getting the trailers out and all this other stuff. His name was Bob Warmflash, I believe… This was so bizarre to me. I’d made it in 1973, and now it’s 1979. He says, ‘These guys took it and called it The Funhouse. You would never know it was your picture. They released it south of the Mason Dixie Line. It grossed almost $4m down there. Now they’re about to cut out the title and put a new title on it. They’re going to call it Last House on Dead End Street and it’s going to be all over the world in about three weeks.’ […] Sure enough about three weeks later, I’m living in Brooklyn, and couldn’t turn on one of the independent channels without catching a trailer for Last House on Dead End Street. I couldn’t believe it.” Coda to this story: Some years later, the authors succeeded in locating Bob Warmflash, whom Watkins references in the above story. Warmflash wrote in an email: ‘I am he. I do not recall a meeting with Roger, but I did work with the distributor on the release [of Last House on Dead End Street] including creating the theatrical trailer for the film.’

16If Cunha’s own website is any indication, his forte these days is pulling a silly face next to women with few clothes.

17Marcos Fábio Katudjian, email to the authors, October 25, 2011.

18See chapter six: THE INVESTIGATION OF PORNOPHILES.

19See reviews in chapter four.

20Carter Stevens is credited under the nom de plume Mal Worob. See chapter six: CARTER STEVENS.

21Carter Stevens, email to the authors, September 29, 2012.

22Is it mere coincidence that both Hardcore and Emanuelle in America have characters with similar sounding names? Eric Van Daren and Jake VanDorn, respectively?

23Five months have passed since his daughter has gone missing. When VanDorn eventually locates Kristen, it is in a club surrounded by flakes and she is not at all pleased to see him. She is vacant, the Innocent without innocence. It is the manner of the ‘sexually insane’ (for wont of another phrase), not unlike Lynn Lowry at the climax of David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975).

24See review in chapter five.

25Kevin Jackson (ed.), Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings.

26It is a role that stocky George C. Scott carries well. Indeed, no one has quite the presence of George C. Scott when he plays angry. Several years prior to Hardcore, he directed himself in Rage (1972). It’s not at all a sympathetic role, with Scott playing a man who’s lost his son to a chemical spill and whose own days are numbered. He goes berserk, killing indiscriminately to get at the people responsible for his grief, even blasting a cat with a shotgun and blowing up a laboratory full of caged test animals.

27The term ‘smoker’ derives from the male only environment in which such films were screened. In decent society men smoked and women didn’t.

28The source is Alex de Renzy’s 1970 documentary film, A History of the Blue Movie. De Renzy’s film also shows several stags in their entirety, including A Free Ride, which is dated 1915 and believed to be the earliest stag extant.

29One early film, On the Beach aka The Goat (c.1920–26), condenses a humorous story arc into a well rounded few minutes using relatively sophisticated editing and different camera angles. It has a moral, and could even be a Mack Sennett comedy were it not for a pissing scene, a glory hole and some bestiality.

30The student might wish to look deeper. The peccadilloes of different countries were reflected in the films they produced. Britain in the 1960s, for instance, was an exponent of S/M and kink stag. France in the 1920s offered historical and quixotic themes. Catholic countries were occasionally anticlerical in their subject matter. South American stags of Mexico and Cuba during the 1930s through to the fifties, featured bestiality, humiliation and subservience of women. ‘The females, often quite young,’ state Di Lauro and Rabkin, ‘provoke sympathy for their apparent sexual victimization.’

31See chapter three: THIS IS THE POSTMODERN WORLD.

It’s an interesting thought. Directing reality. No
actors, no writers, just life and death.

The above statement is made by a character in Cover Me Babe (1970), an American feature film directed by Noel Black.[1] Robert Forster plays Tony Hall, an unlikeable student filmmaker with radical ideas. Nothing must come in the way of capturing real-life on film, and nothing to him is sacrosanct in the pursuit of this reality. “All the world is a giant movie screen,” he laments. “The greatest scene ever performed anywhere was Jack Ruby’s killing of Lee Harvey Oswald before millions of viewers on television. No actors. No writers. Just life and death.” The monologue is intercut with Oswald’s assassination.

Sharing much the same philosophy, the filmmakers depicted in Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1979) are a motley bunch who go so far as to orchestrate murder for the camera, simply to create a more sensational record of their adventures.

In New York City news circulates that a three-man, one-woman team of documentary filmmakers are missing in the jungles of South America. A rescue party is mobilized, headed by New York professor of anthropology Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman). Monroe is disturbed by the trail of mayhem and restless natives he finds, which ultimately leads to the skeletal remains of the missing filmmakers and their cans of film. Returning to the city, Monroe hears stories about the unethical methods of the lost team. Their footage reveals how they manipulated events in the jungle — and worse — for the sake of a better documentary. A television station wants the despondent Monroe to shape the material for broadcast, but even they balk at the dénouement: The brutal death of the filmmakers at the hands of cannibals.

For one half of its running time, Cannibal Holocaust is a tight-knit potboiler. Monroe is on the trail of the missing filmmakers, piecing together their story through earlier work and interviews with families and associates. We know they are dead, but the question is how did they die? Then Cannibal Holocaust effectively begins anew, running counterpoint to what has gone before. Living through the found footage, the filmmakers tell the story from their own perspective. You know we are dead, but how will we die? The ill-fated crew of Alan Yates (Carl Gabriel Yorke), Faye Daniels (Francesca Ciardi), Jack Anders (Perry Pirkanen) and Mark Tommaso (Luca Giorgio Barbareschi)[2] now become the focus of Cannibal Holocaust. Their footage, which is shaky, scratched, sometimes unfocused and occasionally without sound, commences as they are about to board the plane that will take them to South America. They fool around (subtly establishing the presence of two cameras on the expedition) and love nothing more than to turn the lens on themselves. Matters are less salubrious the deeper into the jungle they go, whereupon the team grows reckless and increasingly abhorrent.

At one point, Monroe is watching one of the team’s earlier collaborations, ‘The Last Road to Hell.’ It is a grotesque document of a developing country under dictatorial rule, in which men, women and children are wantonly murdered. Credits roll over a montage of atrocities: A line of men are gunned down by firing squad, a boy is shot point-blank by a soldier, an exodus takes place on a road littered with corpses, and a public square is awash in mutilation and death. Monroe is informed that ‘The Last Road to Hell’ is a fake and that the soldiers in it were simply paid to “do a bit of acting”. He keeps this in mind when analyzing the damned jungle expedition, which BDC-TV is preparing to broadcast under the title ‘The Green Inferno’.

Cannibal Holocaust is part of a broader cycle of popular Italian cinema, the cannibal film, instigated in 1972 by Umberto Lenzi’s Deep River Savages. Continuing through the eighties, other entries include Deodato’s own Cannibal (1976), Eaten Alive (Umberto Lenzi, 1979), Prisoner of the Cannibal God (Sergio Martino, 1979), Cannibal Apocalypse (Antonio Margheriti, 1980) and Cannibal Ferox (Umberto Lenzi, 1981).[3] The cannibal film is a rare instance of an Italian exploitation cycle not so obviously indebted to a Hollywood box office success before it. It pushes beyond limits of taste and acceptability with revolting scenes of genuine animal mutilation amid fake human entrails. The stories are adventure yarns peppered with some ideas about race and the human condition. Civilized man is invariably portrayed as an invading force, entering a strange land (the jungle) and upsetting the natural order, before having to pay the ultimate price.[4] In Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox, for instance, gruesomeness and revulsion are at a premium with a succession of diabolical torture scenes. One man has his penis hacked off and devoured before his eyes, while a female companion is suspended by hooks through her breasts.

Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust is not without its own bloody excesses (more than most in all honesty). But it remains by far the most intelligent entry in the cycle, its notoriety and influence elevating it from the cannibal genus into a broader cultural space.

The film uses found materials as its narrative thrust, a trope familiar to any reader of classic fantasy literature. In Cannibal Holocaust, the two narrative threads — one found and of the past, the other of the present — twist together in a satisfying bond. There is even room for an additional twist, courtesy of the ‘The Last Road to Hell’ segment: The authenticity of this footage is not in doubt, people are genuinely being killed in it, but it is presented differently in Cannibal Holocaust. Professor Monroe learns that the deaths seen in ‘The Last Road to Hell’ are a contrivance. Thus Deodato inverts the viewer’s perception, behaving like a confidante while in actual fact creating doubt and confusion, a state that is exacerbated as the film progresses.

Back in the jungle, the filmmakers pull a huge turtle from the river and dismember it alive. The film suffers glitches at this point. The guide on the expedition, a native called Felipe, prises the shell from the creature and digs at the exposed guts. The creature flaps about, while its head some feet away continues to croak. (The actors can barely hide their genuine revulsion at this point.) Later, a pig is shot dead because “things like this happen all the time in the jungle”. When Felipe is bitten on the foot by a snake, the filmmakers turn on him, deciding with relish that the leg must be amputated for the camera.

Events continue like this until the rape of a woman sets the bloody wheels of the final act in motion. Surrounded by the Tree People tribe, the film crew must fight for their lives but don’t for a moment stop filming. Jack is speared and dragged into the undergrowth, whereupon he is castrated and hacked in two. The camera picks out the Tree People feeding on and fighting over Jack’s intestines. “Keep rolling,” someone cries. “We’re gonna get an Oscar for this!” The lens then turns on the remaining filmmakers. Alan is felled next, calling for help. But Mark points the camera at Faye, who is raped and bludgeoned, her severed head held aloft by the natives. Even when knocked to the ground Mark keeps hold of the camera. It shows flashes of the tools that will kill him, before he turns it on himself and falls to the ground dead. The film rolls to black.

As noted in the previous chapter, the shaky, handheld cinéma vérité style insinuates verisimilitude, and the ‘Green Inferno’ segment of Cannibal Holocaust is no exception. The technical shortcomings and ‘clumsiness’ of the film-within-a-film footage, along with the physical references to the presence of a camera, is not the behaviour of a ‘real’ movie. It is markedly different to the rest of Cannibal Holocaust, which does follow movie convention. In this respect, the found footage implies ‘real’ filmmakers, and by extension ‘real’ cannibals and ‘real’ murder.

“Today people want sensationalism,” says one television executive when Monroe voices concern over the footage. “The more you rape their senses, the happier they are.”

Cannibal Holocaust proved a box office hit in most places that screened it. But it was not without controversy. The French magazine Photo (January 1981), in a piece entitled ‘Grand Guignol Cannibale’, was alarmed enough to consider it more a snuff film than a feature film. As a result, word spread that Cannibal Holocaust was ‘the one in which men were really dismembered, beheaded, castrated and mangiati vivi!’[5] and the movie became a big success. In Italy, Cannibal Holocaust was confiscated four weeks after it opened in February 1980, and declared obscene by the high court. An old law forbidding the torture of animals helped to get it banned and Deodato was forced to account for himself in court. The ruling was eventually overturned in 1983, whereupon the movie was released back into Italian theatres and Deodato returned to filmmaking.

One problem was that Deodato had been unable to present the four principal actors to the court, which fuelled speculation that they were indeed dead. As a publicity stunt, the hitherto unknown actors went into hiding at the behest of the producers on completing the film. Years later, actor Carl Yorke recalled the uneasy experience of making Cannibal Holocaust. The cast were in a jungle among genuine cannibals, following the whims of seemingly kill-crazy filmmakers. “I wasn’t sure they wouldn’t kill me,” Yorke confessed.[6]

In Britain in April 1993, Cannibal Holocaust was reported by the press as evidence of a snuff film. The announcement followed a raid undertaken by Trading Standard officers in Birmingham, where Cannibal Holocaust was confiscated as part of a haul of unclassified films on videocassette.[7] Years would pass before Cannibal Holocaust was legally available for home viewing in Britain, submitted to the BBFC in 2001 and passed 18 with almost six minutes of cuts, and again in 2011, when it was passed with far fewer cuts. A source of contention remains the ill treatment of animals, specifically the mutilation by knife of a muskrat.[8] Deodato redresses the animal cruelty in a new edit, masking some scenes with an optical glitch.[9]

Cannibal Holocaust is a movie that plays the audience well, obliterating rationale with a shared sense of abhorrence, i.e., Monroe wants the ‘Green Inferno’ film pulled; we can fully sympathize why. Animals are gutted with knives and men are gunned down in documentary style footage, which puts the movie at an elevated degree of viciousness. The audience is racing ahead, preparing to expect worse will follow, and the potency of all subsequent acts of horror is exponentially increased. Cannibal Holocaust anaesthetises rational thought: If this is real, what else might be real? It goes unnoticed that a tree branch and the ever reliable film hiccup always occur at the most opportune moment — that is, when Faye’s head is about to be lifted from her shoulders or Jack is about to have his chest split asunder by natives. At the end of the movie, after the television station gives instruction for the ‘Green Inferno’ footage to be destroyed, the viewer is informed that a projectionist was prosecuted for illegal appropriation of the material. The movie opens on a similar subterfuge. The statement in this instance accompanies a sweeping panorama of the Amazon rain forest,[10] and reads: ‘For the sake of authenticity some sequences have been retained in their entirety’. Of course this means nothing, but tips a hat toward another Italian cinematic tradition: The mondo film.

Cannibal Holocaust is something of a template for this chapter. Most of the films that follow borrow from it in some way or contain behavioural aspects that mimic it, consciously or otherwise. Deodato himself would return to the jungles of the ‘Green Inferno’ in 1985 with the otherwise unrelated Cut and Run. A television camera crew travel to the jungles of South America to discover the fate of Jim Jones disciple Colonel Horne (Richard Lynch). When he is finally tracked down, Horne gives an interview that culminates with his requested execution, which is relayed live back to the studio. Tom Dewier’s[11] Contra Conspiracy (1988) looks for a spell like it might be a television movie remake of Cannibal Holocaust (later it becomes FX and Mad Max 2), with a film crew on location in the desert caught up in a multimillion dollar narcotics transaction and then summarily slaughtered. Footage of the massacre is screened for government officials. Patrick Duncan’s 84 Charlie MoPic (1989) is set in the Vietnam War, documented through the lens of a US army cameraman (Byron Thames). Except for a few moments, everything in the movie is depicted exactly as the handheld camera sees it. It ends with an ambush, whereupon MoPic turns the camera on himself as he is struck by gunfire and tumbles to the ground dead, mimicking the fate of the protagonists in Cannibal Holocaust. On the other hand, Jonathan Hensleigh’s Welcome to the Jungle (2007) is a transparent remake of Deodato’s movie that succeeds in falling flat. A group of young people go off to New Guinea in search of a missing person and die.

The death image in cinema was changing. Snuff as a secret commercial enterprise was established with the likes of Emanuelle in America and Hardcore. These movies showed what snuff might look like, drawing a parallel with the long, almost lost history of pornography. Ground rules established, the eighties saw snuff become a shorthand for deviancy and evil, transformed into a latter-day bogeyman. By 1983, Peter Hyam need do no more than allude to it in his thriller The Star Chamber and the point was clear enough.

COUNTDOWN TO CALAMITY

“Country of origin?”

“Ah… presuming fifty-three seconds represents the period of delay, I’d say somewhere in… Malaysia?”

In his workshop, Harlan monitors a satellite broadcast for his boss, Civic-TV director Max Renn. The television screen flickers to life with the pirate image: a room in which two hooded men push a girl to a wall. She moans, sobs, the men grab a whip, pull her to one side and — the fuzzy image gives out. The broadcast has been scrambled. In need of sex and violence to boost his cable station ratings, Renn tells Harlan to put a track on it.

Not unlike Cannibal Holocaust, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1982) also has a ‘film’ running through it that is not what it seems. But whereas in Cannibal Holocaust the ‘Last Road to Hell’ and the ‘Green Inferno’ footage help create a heightened sense of reality, in Videodrome the viewer’s perception of reality is disassembled for a world of fantasy.

Videodrome opens to static, the film title rolling from side to side as if the tracking on a VCR is askew. We are introduced to Max Renn (James Woods) and he in turn to Videodrome, the broadcast Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) is monitoring in his workshop. Renn learns from his contacts that Videodrome is dangerous. What’s more, the transmissions don’t originate from the Far East as he believed, but rather from within the USA, specifically Pittsburgh. The more he sees of Videodrome the more Renn suffers from hallucinations until ultimately he is unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.

Each transmission is effectively the same. The same bare room, the same static camera angle, the same hooded figures. Only the victim is changed.

“When does the… er… plot start to unravel here?” asks Renn of Harlan.

“It just goes on like that for an hour,” replies Harlan.

“Goes on like what?”

“Goes on like that. Torture… murder… mutilation …”

“We never leave that room?… It’s absolutely brilliant. Look, there’s almost no production costs… You can’t take your eyes off it. It’s incredibly realistic. Where do they get actors that can do this?”

Renn finds the answer soon enough when his lover, Nicki (Deborah Harry), excited by a tape of the broadcast, decides to go to Pittsburgh to audition for the show. Later he is informed that Nicki is dead, that Videodrome has killed her and that it has been using her image to seduce him all along.

Videodrome is one of Cronenberg’s most compelling works. It raises some complex questions about media violence, pornography, manipulation and control — if in no particular hurry to answer them. Much the same can be said of eXistenZ (1999), which tackles the subject of videogaming. Rumour has it that Cronenberg was inspired to make Videodrome after seeing Emanuelle in America, or rather the snuff footage at the heart of that movie.[12] In interview, however, Cronenberg likens Videodrome to Sidney Lumet’s critical and commercially successful Network (1976).[13]

Both movies feature an unstable media guru. In Videodrome, Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley) spouts sub-Marshall McLuhan psychobabble like “TV is the extension of the tactile sense” and “the television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye”. Thus he convinces Renn in the film’s tail-chasing final act that he must kill himself in order to be reborn as a television set.

The progeny of O’Blivion is Howard Beale, Network’s own mad prophet of the airwaves. Played by Peter Finch, Beale is a long-standing news anchorman at UBS-TV, who vents spleen on air after he is unceremoniously dumped by the station. “Television is a goddamn amusement park!” he roars into the studio cameras, still wearing the rain-soaked overcoat he arrived in. “We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear!”

Beale denounces the lies and hypocrisies perpetuated by the media, and declares he will blow his brains out live on air in a week’s time. Bereft of desk or script, he now opens each episode of the Network News Hour with a new catchphrase: “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this any more!”

“There is a whole and entire generation right now who never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube!” he announces. “This tube is the gospel! This tube is the ultimate revelation!” The ratings climb through the roof until UBS-TV attempt to hijack Beale’s doctrine and he is murdered on air. But his death in turn becomes the basis for an episode of the Mao Tse Tung Hour, the network’s weekly show based around footage of terrorist acts.

It isn’t much of a stretch to Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (1979), or indeed Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995). In a future world unaccustomed to witnessing death, a television network creates a new programme whose subject is a person dying. ‘Death Watch — the ultimate adventure’, scream the billboards in anticipation of the show, which is touted as nothing short of a media sensation. The host is Roddy (Harvey Keitel). He is fitted with an experimental camera behind the eyes in order to get close and intimate with Katherine (Romy Schneider), diagnosed with only two months to live. “Whatever I see is on film forever,” chimes Roddy. In Strange Days, in a world on the eve of a new millennium, the buzz is the blackjack clip. These are records of experience that are available to buy on the black market. “This is not like TV only better,” says blackjack supplier Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), baiting another potential client. “This is life. It’s a piece of somebody’s life. It’s pure and uncut straight from the cerebral cortex. I mean, you’re there, you’re doing it, you’re seeing it, you’re hearing it. You’re feeling it.”

The client can become anyone, whatever the sex, and do anything. The prurient possibilities are endless. This is the sort of thing that becomes satire for Charlie Brooker in Black Mirror (2011–), a Channel 4 drama whose focus is technology, media control and consumerism. Indeed one episode of Black Mirror, ‘The Entire History of You’ (air date December 18, 2011), is set in a world where every person has the capacity to record whatever passes before their eyes. We are no longer looking toward a dystopian sci-fi future as Tavernier once did. The future in Black Mirror is more or less upon us already and it plays out like a kitchen sink drama.

There tend not to be many heroes in Black Mirror, only casual degrees of stupidity. Characters labour under the illusion of control for the most part, only to find in the end they are bumbling along like everybody else, one misstep after another. In ‘The Waldo Moment’ (February 25, 2013), a crude cartoon bear from a satirical television show is granted a political platform and becomes the voice of the people. Waldo’s animator, Jamie (Daniel Rigby), is a failed comic in meltdown. Every vitriolic outburst is manna to the producers, however, whose eyes are only ever on ratings. ‘White Bear’ (February 18, 2013) deals with the idea of justice as entertainment. A woman (Lenora Crichlow) wakes up with amnesia. All around her are passive observers, recording her every move on their mobile phones. It’s very sinister and she’s scared. She has no idea what’s going on and is railroaded into a series of conflicts before, finally, all is revealed. It’s a charade. The woman is revealed to be a convicted child killer, whose punishment is to suffer every day a blank in a theme park where the public has a whale of a time recording her anguish. She wakes up with amnesia…

In Network, Beale’s vitriolic outbursts are a highlight, his engaging monologues funny and poignant. At the opening of the picture, when Beale learns he has been fired, he drunkenly confides to a friend his plans to kill himself.

“You’ll get a hell of a rating,” retorts Max Schumacher (William Holden). “We could make a series out of it. Suicide of the Week. Hell, why limit ourselves? Execution of the Week…”

“Terrorist of the week,” slurs Beale.

“I love it! Suicides. Executions. Mad bombers. Mafia hitmen. Automobile smash-ups. The Death Hour. A great Sunday night show for the whole family! We’ll wipe fuckin’ Disney right off the air.”

Although it doesn’t appear in the movie, Sam Hedrin’s novelization of Network (based on an original screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky) makes reference to Chris Chubbuck, a television talk show host who committed suicide on air in 1974.[14] In the book, Beale tells Schumacher, “I’m going to blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the seven o’clock news, like that girl in Florida a couple of months ago.”[15]

For a while, filmmakers seemed intent on playing devil’s advocate on matters of justice, politics and entertainment, and a collective catharsis in the guise of extreme sport. In the not too distant future of Norman Jewison’s Rollerball (1975), wars have been replaced by a gladiatorial spectacle on television, pacifying the masses with an international blood and carnage league game. This idea resurfaced again in Mark Pirro’s comedy drama Deathrow Gameshow (1987), Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000) and again more recently in a succession of movies more interested in spectacle than introspection. See for example Andy Hurst’s Are You Scared (2006), Scott Wiper’s The Condemned (2007), Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s Gamer (2009) and Scott Mann’s The Tournament (2009). The latter is deserving of further attention for its lugubrious backdrop, a town in northeast England where CCTV is particularly prevalent. Thus Middlesbrough proves the unlikely setting for a cash prize face-off between international assassins.[16]

Much soul searching and tugging of heart strings are the order of Live! From Death Row (1991) and Witness To The Execution (1993). The former, directed by Patrick Duncan, puts a television crew on Death Row for an exclusive transmission. The Live! news team have secured an interview with serial killer Lawrence Dvorak (Bruce Davison). But disgruntled cameraman Joel (Jason Tomlins) believes the show is now a circus and a slip in ratings the fault of Alana Powers (Joanna Cassidy), desensitized to the horrors on which she reports.

Powers informs viewers that the broadcast will feature the condemned Dvorak’s final hours, before then cutting to a commercial break. “Maybe that’ll keep their sweaty little hands off the remote control,” she mutters. The tables are turned when a hostage situation ensues. The network keeps the broadcast on air. “Tonight someone will die,” Dvorak explains to camera, demanding that Powers interview everyone on Death Row in turn. One con, a Vietnam veteran, informs the viewers that the US government taught him how to kill, “but they never untaught me.”

Made for television, Live! From Death Row is high on melodrama and obliged to string a succession of ethical issues from the assembled stereotypes. Kenny is a frightened con who can’t stand it any more, Lockart a black man who thinks it’s a racist thing, and Sheehan the guard who doesn’t appear to have an opinion either way. Joel puts down his camera and refuses to film a suicide, while Powers ultimately sees the error of her exploitative reporting ways.

In Tommy Lee Wallace’s Witness To The Execution (1993), network executives debate whether they ought to go so far as to televise a live execution from Death Row. “Who wouldn’t watch it?” argues Jessica Turner (Sean Young), the new head of programming at Tycom Entertainment. She gets the go-ahead and makes a shortlist of Death Row possibilities, eliminating subjects on the pretext that they’re either “too ethnic” or have “too many victims”. Personally she doesn’t want a serial killer and opts for Dennis (Tim Daly), who she believes has star potential. With the fee going to his immediate kin, Dennis agrees to sell the rights to his death. The network plays teaser trailers in anticipation of the big day: ‘COUNTDOWN TO JUSTICE. Your right to see. Your right to know. Your right to be there.’

One half of the movie is shrewd and blackly humorous: How many people are on Death Row awaiting execution and will there be enough to last a series? How much of a cut will the prison governor expect to receive? Might the terminally ill be inspired to kill in order to better provide for their family? The latter half deals more with Jessica Turner’s increasing belief that the condemned man is innocent, whereupon Witness To The Execution plays for thrills. Nevertheless, the ending is spectacularly downbeat for a television movie (albeit one that echoes Kill Me If You Can [1977]). In a race against time, Turner is unable to save Dennis and he fries in the electric chair.

Witness To The Execution opens on a blurb that roots the story in the future. But it is a future that looks uncannily like the here and now. Both Witness To The Execution and Live! From Death Row are about news entertainment media, with little fictional pretence. Indeed, reality was threatening to usurp them. In the real world, talk show host Phil Donahue was about to advocate the televising of Death Row executions, as was Judge Anthony Calabrese Jr.[17] Such ideas had been around before. There had been talk of local stations carrying the execution by firing squad of murderer Gary Gilmore in Utah in 1977.

Live! From Death Row evokes the finger-waving indignation of Geraldo Rivera and his ilk. The movie bears a resemblance to Rivera’s ‘Murder: Live From Death Row’, a two-hour special that aired across America in April 1988. Here, Rivera addressed “America’s epidemic of murder” by confronting convicted killers and the families of their victims, and taking the cameras into prisons throughout the country. The show also included a much publicized interview with the enigmatic ratings winner Charles Manson. (The show was a huge success.) Rivera’s opening spiel is a masterclass in ballyhoo that neither of the movies above could seriously have hoped to better. Rivera says breathlessly:

There are killers on the loose. Travelling from town to town. State to state. Stalking their victims. Kidnapping. Raping. Then murdering them. [Clip of Joseph Kallinger, promising he’ll try to murder everyone on planet Earth if ever released from prison.] Joseph Kallinger. A brutal serial killer. We’ll be seeing more of him tonight, too. We’ll be going live to America’s Death Rows. In Alabama, just steps away from the electric chair they call Yellow Momma…

There are also killers on the loose in Jonas Åkerlund’s Horsemen (2008). Their victims die in a variety of complex and protracted ways, with cryptic references to the Biblical prophecy of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. What’s more, the murders are being videotaped. Linking the crimes is a website called We Are The Nothing, a community of young people striking out against those who have hurt or wronged them. Our dispossessed siblings are the Horsemen, deduces Detective Aidan Breslin (Dennis Quaid), and they are growing stronger in number…

Horsemen is a bit of everything, which isn’t altogether surprising from Platinum Dunes, a production company specializing in horror movie remakes. It refurbishes David Fincher’s clever serial killer story Se7en (1995) and adds to it a bunch of other cinematic references. For some reason, Detective Breslin treats the Biblical prophecy as irrefutable fact and so does everyone else around him. The leader of We Are The Nothing is a sinister girl called Kristin (Ziyi Zhang), who murders her mother for turning a blind eye to domestic abuse. She keeps footage of the murder in order to qualify herself as a force of evil, or so it appears in an otherwise dizzy storyline.

Disaffected youth are better served by Antonio Campos’ Afterschool (2008). Set in Bryton Academy, a private school in north America, Robert (Ezra Miller) is a withdrawn student, smart enough to realize that the world into which he doesn’t fit stinks anyway. After he unwittingly captures on film the deaths of two popular students at the school (twin girls; they stumble into shot having ingested a narcotic cut with rat poison), Robert is assigned to make a memorial video with classmate Amy (Addison Timlin). He takes over the project, with the result more a reflection of his own troubled psyche than the vacuous memorial the school was expecting. The pressures to conform make Robert less certain of his place and even more angry.

Afterschool doesn’t offer any easy choices for the viewer. When Robert is encouraged to open up to the school counsellor, his confidence is betrayed and comes back to haunt him. Robert’s interests are considered unhealthy. He has told the counsellor he likes to watch edgy porn online and random clips, such as those depicting cute babies, funny animals or something violent. It’s the sort of thing one might expect to find on YouTube or any number of streaming video sites. A selection of this type of material opens the movie: A cat banging the keys of a piano, a fight, the hanging of Saddam Hussein. “Little clips of things that seem real,” Robert calls them. In other words, the world outside is a deception. Headmaster Mr Burke (Michael Stuhlbarg) considers the student a disappointment and the memorial video he’s been working on the worst thing he’s ever seen. “You didn’t even have music!” he moans. Robert paints people earnestly, including Burke, seen composing a sympathetic face for his interview and requesting a second take.

The video Robert makes is fragile, a deeply personal and somewhat voyeuristic consideration of the two dead students and their place in his worldview. Everyone in the school is grieving but it’s a façade because nobody really knew the girls — this is the point Robert is making. The chosen replacement for Robert’s video is, of course, a saccharine abomination whose sentiment is entirely meaningless.

Afterschool is framed like the amateur video clips Robert sees online. Awkward static shots tend to focus anywhere but on the persons talking, or a panning shot will go in search of some indeterminate point of reference. In the opening shots of the movie, it is a little while before we actually get to see anybody’s face, notably Robert, who just happens to be turning away all the time. Everything is happening on the margins, which imparts an impression that something is missing or we are missing something. The one exception comes when Robert observes a young female teacher with the pinhead precision of the porn gaze, looking up her skirt and down her blouse with clean perfect symmetry. Later, his first sexual fumbling with fellow student Amy is curtailed after he adopts techniques from an abusive porn clip and tries to strangle her.

There are the makings of revolution in Bryton Academy. In a different era this might have resulted with the massacre from high of Lindsay Anderson’s allegorical If.… (1968), or indeed its much later real life counterpart at Columbine. But here there are no guns blazing yet. It’s a silent rage, with Robert screaming into pillows and smashing himself with his fist. On his webcam he films his own face while masturbating to porn, freezing the playback at the most unflattering moment. The intensity it captures is far removed from the placid mask he wears in life. Only through film can he identify the ugliness and rage lurking beneath the surface.

Afterschool has some of the trappings of a mystery thriller. Robert discovers an anonymous film that reveals that someone else was present when the two students died. The clip appears to have been shot on a mobile phone from a balcony. The idea that Robert, the observer, is also being observed is redolent of Hitchcock and De Palma, but here the idea is a false flag. There is no resolution to the mystery. Toward the end of the movie, following a fist fight he has with another boy, Robert becomes the unwitting subject of a camera phone video shot by a schoolmate. Robert seeks reality. It is captured for all time in a spontaneous moment, becoming yet one more disposal clip posted online — a primordial blood lust reduced to a series of clunky pixels observed anonymously by people just like him.

DEFINING THE BAD GUYS

The recently deceased inhabitants of Potter’s Bluff are being brought back to life with voodoo. For no discernible reason, these zombies then film several murders that take place in the small coastal community. Gary Sherman’s Dead and Buried (1981) was one of the more innocuous titles to find its way onto Britain’s ‘video nasties’ list in the eighties. It was also considered a snuff film by some.[18] In George A. Romero’s Creepshow (1982), Leslie Nielsen exacts revenge on his cheating wife and her lover by burying them up to their necks on a beach and filming them as they drown beneath the incoming tide. They happen to return as zombies. Alas, there are no zombies in John Frankenheimer’s 52 Pick-Up (1986), more’s the pity. Here, wealthy businessman Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider) falls victim to an increasingly desperate blackmail gang. At one point he is shown footage of the murder of a nude dancer, a crime the gang threatens to pin on him if the cash isn’t forthcoming. “It’s a kinda low-budget production,” Mitchell is forewarned of the film. In the silent black and white footage, the terrified victim is tied to a chair and shot dead.

Despite a screenplay co-written by Elmore Leonard, based on his own novel, 52 Pick-Up is not a good movie. But neither is it really about snuff. Like Dead and Buried and Creepshow before it, it is an example of how the idea of snuff had filtered deep enough into public awareness to render detailed elaboration unnecessary. By the mid eighties, the public had seen or heard about movies like Snuff and Hardcore, so too the media protestations surrounding the idea of snuff films (detailed elsewhere in this book). In 52 Pick-Up, celluloid death simply adds a little extra frisson to an otherwise unrelated storyline. It is used simply as a means to better define the bad guys. Other examples are Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap (1988) and Joseph Merhi’s L.A. Vice (1989). In the latter a ransom gang send the police a videocassette showing a hostage being burned alive. In the former, an overwrought supernatural thriller from Japan, the recipient of the videotape is a late-night television host desperate for ratings. The tape in this instance shows the torture and mutilation of an unknown woman, and contains directions to the crime scene — the trap of the title. Otherwise the footage is entirely inconsequential.[19]

Constantino Magnatta’s rarely seen The Darkside (1987) is a transparent remodel of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), ripping from it situations, sequences, characters and elements of dialogue and soundtrack. Tony Russo (Tony Galati) is the cabby in psychological turmoil after crossing paths with a young woman being chased in the night. She jumps into his cab, only to take off again after concealing a videotape in the vehicle, the contents of which compel Tony to do the right thing. Armed with a revolver, he goes to rescue the woman (threatened at one point with sodomy for his trouble). The Darkside isn’t particularly good, although picking out the references to Scorsese is some kind of entertainment. The evil in this instance is not child prostitution, as in Taxi Driver, but snuff films.[20]

Marek Kanievska’s Less Than Zero (1987) has a considerably higher budget. Based on the novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis,[21] the tale of Beverly Hills rich kids and the miserable lives they lead is handled deferentially by Kanievska. The principal characters are Julian (Robert Downey Jr), who has a drug habit that drags him into debt and prostitution; Clay (Andrew McCarthy), who wants to help but doesn’t know how; and Blair (Jami Gertz), whose purpose is even less quantifiable.

Clay and Blair are gliding through another obnoxious party in search of their spaced-out buddy, when suddenly they recoil from a bank of television screens and whatever is playing on them. The sequence makes no sense and there is no reference to the incident later on. What exactly inspires our ‘heroes’ to react in such a way? We can hazard a guess, but the answer is in Ellis’ novel, where a snuff film screened at a beach house party is observed by Clay, throwing him deeper into disparity.

Snuff is the pointless addenda to Jan Eliasberg’s Past Midnight (1991), a whodunit whose damning evidence consists of a roll of silent, Super 8 film. Parole officer Laura Mathews (Natasha Richardson) suspects that Ben Jordan (Rutger Hauer), recently released from prison, might be innocent after all. Indeed he is. The film that supposedly shows him stabbing his pregnant wife to death was actually shot by someone else. Red herrings abound. But the twist in the tale borders on the criminal. The killer is revealed to be Tod (or Ted? Toady?), a story-nobody from way back with a psychotic aversion to pregnant women and a library of his victims on film. “I’m not a sex maniac,” he says, having cornered Laura. “I’m not some Son of Sam asshole, I don’t hear voices… It’s not like I have to k-k-kill someone every week.”

When compared to child snuff filmmakers, mafia stooge Joey Gazelle (Paul Walker) is not such a bad guy after all. That is to say he may be a lot of things, but evil is not one of them. This is the educated opinion of Joey’s wife, Teresa (Vera Farmiga). Written and directed by Wayne Kramer,[22] Running Scared (2005) is a movie about a little boy called Oleg (Cameron Bright) on the run from various factions of the criminal underworld and police. Incriminating evidence in Oleg’s possession forces him from one demented situation to another, each occupied by an aggregation of stereotyped characters: Gangsters, pimps, junkies, a hooker with a heart of gold, and even a married couple involved in making kiddie snuff. Dez and Edele (Bruce Altman and Elizabeth Mitchell) live in an apartment that resembles a small-scale Disneyland, full of colourful things. They are the epitome of fun, coming across as the rictus grin hosts of a demented children’s television show. But the video camera and plastic sheet flooring are a giveaway to the streetwise Oleg, who manages to call the only person he can trust, Teresa Gazelle. She arrives packing heat just in time to save him. (He tumbles out of a closet half dead with a plastic bag over his head.) Among the fancy dress clothes and other childish paraphernalia, Teresa unearths torture implements, unused body bags and a bank of CD size jewel cases bearing a first name on each. She doesn’t hesitate to blow Dez and Edele away, and later uses the encounter to re-evaluate her felonious husband. Running Scared progresses much as an adult fairytale (the end credit animation suggests Lemony Snicket with drugs and guns), where the witch of old has transmogrified into snuff filmmakers. In their kitsch cotton candy sanctuary, Dez and Edele give the movie its most unsettling passage.

The enemy is not so obvious in Gut (2012), a powerful independent movie that defies convention. Buddies since school with a love of horror movies, the adult lives of Tom and Dan (Jason Vail and Nicholas Wilder) are considerably less impassioned and slowly drifting apart. “You’re supposed to be my friend,” bemoans Dan on hearing that Tom is planning to relocate to another town. They don’t share time together like they used to, beyond the office lunch break. Dan desperately clings to the old friendship, while Tom seems equally determined to escape it. Things change with the arrival of a mystery film. The film shows a tightly framed female torso, accompanied by the sound of sobbing. A knife slits the belly open, then a gloved hand penetrates the wound. “Do you think it’s real?” asks Dan of his friend. “It feels real, doesn’t it?”

He confides the source of the film is unknown, that it simply arrived at his mail drop after he had visited “some underground video site”. A second DVD turns up shortly afterwards. Much the same as the first, it too gives nothing away. But in a third film the victim is Sally (Angie Bullaro), a waitress Dan has recently started dating.

Tom wants Dan to dump the films, but equally he is captivated by them. Their savage image haunts and excites him. Dreams of the torso and the bloody incision help reignite his sex life.

Gut utilizes plenty of breathing space and leaves much that is open to interpretation. In this respect Gut defines a very different sort of bad guy. By the end of the movie, any thoughts on who or what might constitute the guilty party are moot. Who made the films? Who murdered Sally? It doesn’t matter. The journey is paramount, with Gut being as much a eulogy to fading friendship as it is a murder mystery. Writer-director Elias admits to being a fan of David Cronenberg, particularly Videodrome, but says that much of his inspiration came “from close friendships I’ve had over many years and a preoccupation with the horror genre that’s lasted equally as long”.[23]

Snuff may appear to bring the two men together again, but it’s merely in the guise of shared experience. Here we have the world of Dan and Tom, buddies on a settee watching a secret and perhaps even hiding secrets from one another. The snuff footage is deliberately underplayed. It shows very little beyond bare fragments: A clinical overhead shot of a female torso being sliced open with a knife and the wound then fist fucked. It is the antithesis of what we have come to expect of snuff, otherwise choppy and chaotic. The victims’ faces remain out of frame for the most part. What’s more, we witness nothing but the most perfunctory of terrified reaction shots on the faces of the victims, which is surely a violation of the snuff tenet. Instead, the reactions all belong to Tom and Dan.

“It’s more about how the characters react to what they’re seeing in Gut,” says Elias, “not what they’re seeing necessarily, extreme as it may be.” The conservative use of snuff is to ensure “that the violence portrayed in these scenes had an underlying allure and sexuality to it. The way Dario Argento can make death look almost beautiful and sensuous in a film like Suspiria was something I hoped to achieve as well, because if it was too gory or grotesque I think it would have been difficult for a mainstream audience to understand or relate to why the central characters are so drawn to the videos.”

Susan Sontag has noted that in the violent scenes of classical religious art every prurient taste is accounted for. ‘No moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties,’ she wrote on the matter. ‘Just the provocation: can you look at this?’[24] And that just about sums it up for Gut, a hypnotic piece of cinema that deals with concepts relating to observation and consumption. “It’s ultimately about the addictive and voyeuristic nature of human beings,” comments Elias, and “their constant insatiable need for more, regardless of what it even is that they’re consuming”. Film may be a passive medium, but it’s also one of many doors, some fraught with danger, as in Gut, where spiritual decline becomes literal destruction.

GOOD, BAD AND DIABOLIC TECHNOLOGY

Sam Peckinpah’s The Osterman Weekend (1983) has a fetishistic eye for technology and the recorded image. The movie opens with a murder, courtesy of a video playback observed by government agents. “Nasty piece of film,” comments one, thus establishing the tone and objective of what is to follow. Investigative news reporter John Tanner (Rutger Hauer) is recruited by the CIA to infiltrate a spy network, whose members comprise a number of Tanner’s friends and associates. He throws a weekend party at his house, which has been equipped for the occasion by the CIA with state of the art surveillance equipment. Observing and manipulating events from afar is agent Lawrence Fassett (John Hurt), who communicates with Tanner via a television hookup. In the end the guests are killed under Fassett’s command. It transpires that no spy ring existed. The whole thing has been an elaborate charade by Fassett for his own personal interests.

The state of the art equipment in Osterman Weekend sometimes fails. At one point, Fassett is unable to break the television link to Tanner; when other people walk into the room he quickly improvises a weather forecast. It is the movie’s one humorous scene. More often than not, Fassett sits with glass of wine in hand and comfortably manages his console of closed circuit monitors. His actions here result in another twist of the proverbial knife in the Tanner household, ramping up the tension to boiling point over the course of the weekend. A television set may suddenly pop into life with an inflammatory bit of footage aimed at the guests, or Tanner may be directed to snippets of conversation happening elsewhere in the house, rarely in his favour. Everyone is but a pawn in a game.

The Osterman Weekend is a movie that suffered a notoriously troubled production, whose source material (a novel by Robert Ludlum) was considered by Peckinpah to be confusing. It isn’t clear why Tanner should be a target for Fassett’s wrath, when his actual problem turns out to be the CIA itself, responsible for the murder of his wife. Footage of her death opens and closes the movie. But Fassett intimates a dislike for Tanner’s job in television, a medium he considers hypocritical and manipulative. The irony isn’t lost on the government agent, having taken perverse satisfaction in lording it over the Tanner household and pulling its strings from his personal television studio in the woods.[25] He concludes the movie with a monologue about “prime killing time” and likens his own work for the government to that of a “snuff soap opera”.

A different tack was taken by Video Murders (1988). Directed by Jim McCullough Sr.,[26] the story here concerns a troubled mommy’s boy called David (Eric Brown), who strangles women in front of a video camera for his later delectation (while eating Chinese takeout). It’s all rather dull, with any semblance of character buried beneath interminable chase scenes. The suggestion is that technology, specifically video equipment, is the crux of David’s psychosis and things would be a whole lot better for him without it. (Fassett in The Osterman Weekend is similarly afflicted.) When David isn’t killing for the camera, or watching the playback, or engaged in one of the chase sequences, he records delusional video messages for his sick mother.

More obscure and certainly no better is Run If You Can! (1987), directed by Virginia Lively Stone.[27] A young woman espies several rogue broadcasts on television and believes they depict murder. Housesitting alone in Beverly Hills, Kim (Yvette Nipar) catches the footage in the early hours during the late show. The fleeting images show a man having sex with a series of women, before strangling them and disposing of their bodies in plastic sheets. The modus operandi fits that of an elusive killer in the area. Kim contacts police lieutenant Malvani (Martin Landau), who is heading the investigation. It turns out that her satellite dish is picking up a pre-record of the murders by chance. There follows much talk of freak transmissions and VCRs (which, frankly, wouldn’t be out of place in an epsiode of the fifties’ television show, Captain Video and His Video Rangers), and Malvani laments at one point that “the video hit the fan”.

In each of the above movies, technology is the root of the problem, or the catalyst that creates the problem. It ties in with moral panics and society’s general distrust of populist entertainment, be it the penny gaffs of the 1800s, horror and crime comics of the 1950s, the Beatles in the 1960s, or more recently hip-hop, videogaming and camera phones. In Britain in the eighties, video and the home entertainment explosion delivered the ‘video nasties’ panic. Typically, it was aligned with the corruption of youth, the imminent collapse of moral values, criminal activity and worse. These fears have never truly been laid to rest, and indeed can be found throughout the history of cinema itself.

This thinking is an extension of the awe and panic that greeted the dawn of cinema itself, with the new medium nothing short of a magical experience to the public’s virgin eye. One spectator was Maxim Gorky, astonished and unsettled by a Lumière programme screened at a fair in Russia in July 1896. His newspaper review, entitled ‘Last Night I was in the Kingdom of the Shadows’, recollected a celluloid street scene thus:

Before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours — the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.

It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only shadows. Curses and ghosts, the evil spirits that have cast entire cities into eternal sleep, come to mind and you feel as though Merlin’s vicious trick is being enacted before you. As though he had bewitched the entire street, he compressed its many-storied buildings from rooftops to foundations to yard-like size.[28]

Such reaction might now seem archaic. But the draw of film remains as powerful as ever, with filmmakers merely recycling the shadow-life observed by Gorky in ever more sophisticated ways. Sometimes the inspiration is transparent. Deserving of attention is Giuliano Montaldo’s Circuito chiuso (Closed Circuit, 1978). It starts out much like any Italian crime thriller, with a murder and an assortment of suspicious characters. Then in its closing minutes it takes on a different mantle. The story is centred on a cinema where a mysterious murder occurs during the screening of a film. The incident, in which a member of the audience is shot dead in his seat, coincides with a climactic gunfight in the western playing onscreen.[29] Police keep everyone inside the theatre, believing the killer is still present, and organize a reconstruction during which the film is played once again. But another person occupying the fated seat is shot dead. There are suspects galore, with everyone seeming to hide a secret. One man, a sociologist (Aurore Clement), has a theory that something beyond the realm of flesh and blood is happening. A second reconstruction proves him right. The film this time deviates from the script when the latest stooge in the doomed seat tries to flee. The barrel of the gunfighter’s pistol onscreen follows him and fires. But of course! The killer was in plain view all along — he, or rather it, is the film! The sociologist, a “lunatic” according to police, surmises that mankind is constantly killing itself with the things it creates and identifies with. The images on the cinema screen are real. They are a mirror and the mirror can be broken. “What do you see of your reality now the image has disappeared?” asks the sociologist. “Why don’t you want to admit that images, like imagination, can be more powerful than reality?”

Circuito chiuso is a mischievous movie in that the genre trappings of the giallo are its most convincing red herring. All the tropes of crime and mystery fiction are present. There are habitual criminals in the theatre who hint at a big score on the outside, there are cheating lovers, a nervous guy loitering in the toilets, and even posters for (genuine) gialli displayed in the foyer. It is all misdirection, for Circuito chiuso is really about the power of film itself. “Stop the film!” someone cries on discovering the first murder. Later on, when it is hunting the final designated victim, the film refuses to be stopped.

‘It is terrifying to see,’ observed Gorky of the prototypal moving image over a century ago. ‘Curses and ghosts, the evil spirits that have cast entire cities into eternal sleep.’ It can be no coincidence that the cursed film within Circuito chiuso is a western and its most disturbing sequence — the actor firing directly at the audience — mimics one found in The Great Train Robbery (1903), considered the earliest known narrative film.

With a nod and a wink these sorts of ideas come to the fore from time to time in cinema. Bigas Luna’s horror-thriller Anguish (1987), also has fantasy impacting on reality in a movie theatre. In William Malone’s House on Haunted Hill (1999), the camera lens creates a doorway to past events. John Carpenter’s contribution to the Masters of Horror television series, Cigarette Burns (2006), deals with a feature film believed lost that has the power to kill if screened. Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) is an example of a movie that celebrates the death image without ever having to show it. Set within a sound studio in 1970s Italy, a violent horror movie is the fictitious work under construction that slowly sends sound engineer Gilderoy (Toby Jones) mad.

These movies reflect society’s underlying fear of technology, with film at once a magical and corrupting influence. Recently we have seen Japanese horror cinema — or J-Horror — equip a whole subgenre with techno-anxiety, where gadgetry combines with folklore to create something altogether dire and unwholesome. In J-Horror, technology is a folkloric element in itself. Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998), for instance, uses this ‘technolore’ to subvert the concept of the snuff film, making the actual viewers of a cursed videotape its victims. Takashi Shimizu’s The Shock Labyrinth (2009) functions as a haunted house story only because a camcorder finds its way into a closed fairground attraction. Technology begats ghosts.

Video in the eighties provided the aspiring filmmaker with a whole new arsenal. Much the same would happen with the Internet two decades later as emergent technologies opened avenues for production and distribution that were inconceivable a few years earlier. Video made films accessible to everyone, in terms of getting them made and seen once they had been made. The movies below are indicative of the shot-on-video format.

The sleeve art for Gary P. Cohen’s Video Violence… When Renting is not Enough (1987) features a bloody hand poised with a videotape in the mouth of a VCR. Its initial video release carried a seal of approval from the Church of the SubGenius, a spoof religious group, and also boasted that distributor Camp Video had released more movies by low-budget auteur Ray Dennis Steckler than anyone else in the world. These are inverted accolades, alerting those in the know to the sort of quality on offer. Nevertheless, Video Violence succeeds in being a creepy little movie. Steve (Art Neill) is new to Frenchtown and lands a job running a video rental store. The unfriendly locals crave only gory horror movies and occasional smut. (“Ya got that chainsaw movie?”) But Steve soon discovers their dark secret in a series of unmarked videocassettes depicting torture and murder. The victims on the tapes are transients and any person planning to leave Frenchtown.

There is no real explanation why the inhabitants behave like homicidal lunatics or why death is an essential staple of their viewing diet, other than simply liking it and liking to trade snuff movies. Steve sums it up succinctly with a diagnosis that Frenchtown is a “town of unfriendly people who all have VCRs”. It ends badly, of course, with Steve lured into a trap laid by the killers. Soon after this the store falls under new management and its stock shifts solely to snuff tapes, each labelled with the name of a victim. Among their number are Steve and his wife Rachel.

Video Violence was successful enough to warrant a follow-up, one that reunited the Frenchtown hicks on a cable access snuff show. Cohen’s Video Violence 2 The Exploitation! (1988) also suffers from a lack of budget, but is more adventurous than the previous instalment. It deserves a comparison with H.G. Lewis’ The Wizard of Gore (1970) — as much for its cod existentialism as any thematic similarity — and plays more for laughs. That said, however, the idea of death as light entertainment on television seems less outrageous these days.

Another micro-budget effort from the dawn of the video age is Robert Pritchard’s Thrill Kill Video Club (1991). The story follows four bored serial killers who band together to form the Thrill Kill Video Club. Dissatisfied with their latest murder victim, whose ignoble death is caught on videotape and later analyzed and dismissed as pathetic, the team decide to hold auditions for a better class of subject. A motley bunch roll up. Critic Steve Puchalski in his review for Shock Cinema regards them as ‘the absolute WORST line-up of two-bit artistes that you’ve ever WANTED to see savagely killed, including pathetic comedians, dog acts, spoon players, performance artists, political orators, and the most hilarious interpretation of Delilah I’ve ever seen!’[30] The tables are turned when one of the auditionees turns out to be a rival killer, who murders the Thrill Kill team and takes over their club.

Director Pritchard is the founder of Surf Reality, an open mic comedy and theatre space that was situated in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Following small acting parts in Troma films in the eighties, notably The Toxic Avenger (1984) and Class of Nuke ’Em High (1986), Pritchard began videotaping the downtown performance scene, teaming up with Matt Mitler in 1990 to create improvised feature-length videos. These films were produced extraordinarily quickly, using a small cast of experienced improv actors. Dick And Jane Drop Acid And Die (1991) and Thrill Kill Video Club are examples of Surf Reality films shot in this manner. Favourable reviews in the pages of Film Threat and Playboy brought high exposure and a flurry of mail order video sales.

Prichard says of Thrill Kill Video Club:

“The budget was about $3,000. There was no script. I wrote a scenario and a story outline that was broken down into scenes. The actors improvised ninety-eight per cent of the dialogue, the other two per cent I wrote in as camera/edit cues. We shot for the cut, and principle photography was completed in one day. Editing required two days.”[31]

Thrill Kill Video Club is a loose, fun film but perhaps the most notable thing about it is the appearance of British actor Sylvester McCoy. (He auditions as a spoon player.) Despite a background in improvisation, McCoy was by this time already familiar to millions as the titular star of the BBCTV series Doctor Who.

In Holyhead in North Wales, a young filmmaker by the name of Brian Davies had also got himself a video camera. Shock Ending (1987) centres on Colin (Paul Roberts), a man with an insatiable appetite for horror movies, who goes off the rails and kills his nagging wife when she rips up his beloved film posters. Unbeknownst to anyone, the incident is captured on video equipment activated during the scuffle and ends up being screened at a house party by Colin’s mortified neighbours.

Shock Ending was among several horror shorts that Davies wrote, produced and directed through the eighties, whose cast and crew comprised of friends and family. Under the moniker Videas, Davies sold and distributed the films by mail order on the back of advertisements in the fan press (and through the one and only copy of the Videas fanzine). According to the VideasFilms website, Davies got his first video camera in 1983. His debut effort, Cursed Woods (1983), was ‘produced with domestic analogue video equipment which pre-dated camcorders’ and ‘very crudely “crash-edited” on a basic VHS video recorder’. Other films include The Vacancy (1985),[32] The Exhumation (1986) and Last Day at the Beach (1990), which, at forty-two minutes, was for years the Videas magnum opus.[33] The amateur cast delivers its stilted dialogue in good spirit and the film exudes an atmosphere of odd charm, an attribute not uncommon to early shot-on-video production.

If video was the perfect medium for the fledgling filmmaker, videocassette itself was the perfect commodity, an all-rounder that was conveniently suited to production, distribution and for collecting. As much as technology engendered the filmmaker, the videocassette gave rise to a new type of audience. Films no longer needed the formal environment of a cinema. The videocassette lent itself to a more personalized experience, a wholly private one if required, much as 16mm and 8mm loops before it.

Hollywood’s answer to all of this came in the form of Bill Fishman’s Tapeheads (1988), an unforgivably trill celebration of the new medium (which boils down to making music videos and uplinking them to satellite for transmission). But the celebration was short-lived and attitudes toward the videocassette were generally cognisant of a downside.

“Today is the age of video violence,” concede the camera toting killers in Gary Cohen’s Video Violence. The snuff obsessed townsfolk here argue they are not insane, “just ahead of our time.” In the aforementioned Run If You Can! the sex killer of Beverly Hills is in cahoots with a television satellite dish engineer whose sideline is videocassettes and murder. The relationship is not elaborated on, nor resolved, and nothing makes much sense anyhow, suffice to say that technology is somehow key. Certainly Lieutenant Malvani, who prattles on about home entertainment, lays the blame firmly at that door.

John McNaughton’s Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer (1989) is a film about a murderer who gets away with it in the end.[34] Henry (Michael Rooker) is travelling west and leaving a trail of bodies behind him. On the one hand he is courteous with what seems a strong moral code, on the other he thinks nothing of cruising for a potential victim and snapping a neck or two. In Chicago, he introduces his slow-witted buddy and roommate Otis (Tom Towles) to the ways of the serial killer.

Henry and Otis get their hands on a camcorder, which they promptly put into service. Cut to the point of view of the camcorder in the front room of a house someplace. Otis is seen struggling with a screaming woman, while on the floor lies a bound and gagged man. Henry’s foot swings into shot and kicks the man. Otis laughs his dumb laugh. A door opens and a teenage boy appears. The camera goes down to the floor and, from a half-cocked angle where everything is happening on its side, Henry runs into shot, grabs the boy and breaks his neck. He then pulls out a knife and kills the bound man. Otis laughs again and calls for Henry to watch as he twists the woman’s neck and breaks it. Henry returns to the camera and swings it back into the air. He focuses on Otis who is orchestrating the dead woman’s arms for a wave at the camera. When he starts pawing her crotch, Henry announces it’s time they left.

This sequence, we soon realize, is a recording that is playing on Otis and Henry’s new (stolen) television set. As the recording comes to its end, Otis fumbles at the remote and begins to replay the tape in slow motion.

Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer was slapped with the dreaded x-rating by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). In Britain, after much deliberation by the BBFC, it was passed 18 with cuts for theatrical release in 1991, with further cuts in 1993 for release on video. One bone of contention appears to have been the film’s deadpan approach to its subject, which is a far cry from the serial killer as enigmatic anti-hero soon to be evidenced in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). On top of this is the snuff footage.

There is something unsettling about the camcorder episode that cuts far deeper than the home invasion itself and our witnessing the destruction of a family unit. If Henry refuses to stop and put its finger on the impulse that drives these men, it is because their actions are the product of some unquantifiable abstraction. At one point in the film, Otis asks “Whut’s gonna happen when they find them bodies?” to which Henry replies, “Nuthin’.” These are men content to sit half-bored and half-bewildered in front of their own image on a television screen. When Otis explains he’s rewinding the video to watch it again, not even Henry can figure it out. Actor Tom Towles told Fatal Visions magazine that “That bit goes back to the basic tenet that less is more. We just had to sit there and watch the tape.”[35]

An opening blurb states that Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer is a work of fiction. Nevertheless it does have similarities with the real-life Henry Lee Lucas and his associate Ottis Toole, both sentenced to life imprisonment for murder (and both dying in prison from natural causes). McNaughton has since admitted Lucas was his inspiration. But the film has always been perceived as one based upon Lucas anyway — if not necessarily his life, then the popular conception of Henry Lee Lucas as a drifter and prolific killer, who eluded detection for many years.[36] Lucas confessed to 360 murders (the number going as high as 3,000) and in his own words is “the world’s most worst mass murderer”.

In an interview conducted in prison by Greg Geisler, Lucas claimed not to have seen McNaughton’s movie.

GREG GEISLER: What did you hear?

HENRY LEE LUCAS: That it portrays a serial killer, which I know I’m not, and the people involved… I don’t think people should be out there seeing that kind of trash. As far as I’m concerned.

GEISLER: There’s (another) scene where Henry is videotaping ‘Ottis’ killing someone.

LUCAS: I don’t know anything about that.

GEISLER: It’s just made up?

LUCAS: They tried to make it up on confessions that I gave them, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing in that film showing anything I ever did.[37]

Ian Gilchrist, working for various video companies in the nineties, recalls in an article a meeting with BBFC director James Ferman.[38] The meeting concerned the video release of Henry. Cuts had already secured a theatrical release for the movie in Britain. But Ferman had gone on record to say how Henry was unlikely to be made available for home viewing. He was willing to reconsider his stance, however, following a consultation with experts in the field of psychology. The home invasion camcorder sequence was particularly troublesome for Ferman and his team of experts. Further cuts seemed inevitable. However, Gilchrist in his article was not expecting to be confronted with a re-edit. He writes of the meeting:

Mr Ferman cued up the scene on his monitor and we sat back to watch. Although it was many years ago, I am sure I was unable to completely hide my shock at what I saw; the power of the scene had been greatly diminished as part of the shot of the two killers on the couch had been inserted much earlier in the scene, thus alerting the viewer that he was watching a video playback. I remained speechless […] I felt then, and still do, that it was a betrayal of the director and the weakening of a pivotal moment in the film.

The re-edit denotes that Ferman’s worry lay not in the depiction of the crime itself, but in making the viewer as voyeur complicit in it. Ignoring for now Ferman’s arrogance in the matter — that is to say a classification body acting as film director — this new cut served to establish very clearly who is watching what and when. A decade would pass before Ferman’s ‘re-imagining’ of McNaughton’s movie was put to rights. In 2003, all previous cuts on Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer were waived by the BBFC and the video edit restored to its original state.

FOUND FOOTAGE

A small number of hard-hitting crime dramas from around the world converged on British cinemas in the opening months of 1993, said to be indicative of a new direction for onscreen violence. From France and the USA respectively, Bertrand Tavernier’s L.627 (1992) and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) represented the efforts of one veteran director and another a rising star. Man Bites Dog (1992) on the other hand, from Belgium, was a collaborative effort by students Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde. The film follows Ben (Benoît Poelvoorde), a remorseless professional killer who murders people almost every day. More than that, it follows him through the lens of a film crew who are making a documentary.

It opens with Ben choking a woman to death on a train. In the next shot, he sits at the edge of a river, explaining how best to weight the body down before dumping it.

His manner in front of the camera at this point is wooden and awkward. Ballast for children and midgets, he says, is not the same as that required for the average adult. Ben makes it sound like a mathematical formula and that he is ahead of the game. But when he throws the body into the water it bobs to the surface. Other victims follow, including a postman (“I like to start the month with a postman,” confesses Ben, later seen walking around in a postman’s uniform) and an old woman whom Ben simply frightens to death. Typical for a documentary, interviews with kin help colour the subject. Mother and grandparents are oblivious to Ben’s true vocation and engage in warm anecdotes (in actuality, they are the actor’s real kin who have no reason to doubt they are partaking in a genuine documentary about their son).

Ben is crass, hates everybody and thinks himself erudite while waffling interminably on most any subject. He is also boorish and at times funny. In one scene, walking through an apartment complex, he comments on the aesthetics of the architecture and the colour of the brickwork. “Blood is the colour of violence,” he observes. “And red wine.”

It isn’t long before the film crew become as much a subject for the film as Ben himself. Their faces appear with increasing regularity as Ben calls on them for help. In one instance, Ben refuses to stuff the body of a black night watchman into the trunk of a car for fear of “green monkeys… and AIDS”. He also hands them his gun so they may shoot dead a rival documentary team making a film about a rival serial killer. When the novelty of being tailed by filmmakers wears off, Ben’s manner changes as does the tone of the movie. Ben accepts a challenge inadvertently put to him by the crew, breaking into a house in one of the richer suburbs of the city and systematically slaughtering the family he finds there. He suffocates one little boy with a pillow, informing us that children are always bad business.

Man Bites Dog won festival prizes at Cannes, Toronto and Sitges in Spain, but was banned and removed from competition in Tokyo. Filmed in black and white and shot on 16mm over a period of two years, Man Bites Dog was conceived as a laugh, according to the filmmakers. The original title — C’est Arrivee Pres De Chez Vous (Coming to your neighbourhood soon) — is perhaps a better indication of the movie’s sensibilities. Codirector Bonzel has said that the intention was to “make the audience laugh, then have them think about what they’ve just laughed at. The whole point is to say to the viewer— Look, how can you accept this?”[39] Unlike Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer, BBFC head James Ferman was clearly impressed with Man Bites Dog (as often he was with foreign language films and subtitles) and the movie was passed uncut by the Board. Ferman believed that it had a clear moral sensibility and ultimately condemns what it portrays. By contrast, the audience for Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer had free rein to make of things what they wanted. This was the stumbling block for Ferman and indeed the MPAA, who had slapped Henry with an x-rating in the US.

Man Bites Dog is indebted to the television true crime shows finding favour with the public, notably America’s Most Wanted (1988–2008) and Cops (1989–). It is shot entirely in the handheld vérité style of Cops, a progeny of the ‘reality’ format,[40] which generates a sense of immediacy and draws the viewer in. It is also common currency in so-called found footage films (discussed later) and the genre known as ‘mockumentary’ — fake documentaries that are slyly humorous or satirical, such as Tim Robbins’ Bob Roberts (1992) and Larry Charles’ Borat Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). One early mockumentary was David Holzman’s Diary (1967), by Jim McBride and L. M. Kit Carson,[41] followed closely by Woody Allen’s made for television pastiche of the Nixon administration, Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971). The format was still fresh when This Is Spinal Tap (1984) came along a decade later, the defining mockumentary. Man Bites Dog can be considered a mockumentary. Other filmmakers took note.

Julian Richards’ The Last Horror Movie (2003) and Thomas C. Dunn’s The Perfect Witness (2007) are particularly noteworthy additions to a canon of films where killers are tailed by filmmakers. The former is a darkly comic British production that centres upon Max Parry (Kevin Howarth), a wedding photographer who moonlights as a serial killer with cameraman in tow. Parry addresses the viewer directly, accompanying many of his gruesome kills with acerbic remarks about viewer culpability. The movie is presented in the guise of a videocassette on loan from a video rental library, a horror film Parry has taped over with his snuff murders. Hence the title: The Last Horror Movie — this could be the last horror movie we ever see, warns Parry, because he may have followed us home from the rental library. Unfortunately, the gimmick is deflated by the fact the videocassette was already an outdated medium by this point in time. Thus the threat comes over as a pratfall, and Max Parry himself a prat.

There isn’t much levity in The Perfect Witness. When he stumbles upon a murder taking place in a back alley, filmmaker Mick (Wes Bentley) decides to do what no one else has done before: Tail the killer for the purpose of a documentary. He locates Jimmy (Mark Borkowski) and blackmails him into complying with his scheme. From the age of six, Jimmy was reading Blake and torturing animals. Now he is a serial killer who collects the eyes of his victims as trophies. But things don’t quite go according to plan for Mick, who is dragged ever deeper into Jimmy’s world. He is berated for refusing to film a murder, which Jimmy tells him could have been avoided anyway but for Mick’s presence. Although the concept of killer with filmmaker is by now pretty much a cliché, The Perfect Witness does take some interesting detours. Mike’s role slowly turns around: His moral code is clearly no different to that of his subject, whom he murders in the end.

Among the other titles we can add to this list of killers-tailed-by-filmmakers are John Russo’s Midnight 2: Sex, Death and Videotape (1993), Scott Ryan’s The Magician (2005) and Chris Power and Nathan Hynes’ Long Pigs (2007) (described by one IMDb reviewer as ‘a phenomenal display of practical effects’). Russo’s Midnight 2 is interesting in that it belongs to an age still very much enamoured with the technology available to it. The serial killer in Midnight 2 uses a video camera as a prop to lure his victims in, before recording their deaths and stacking his videotape kills in the basement. The subterfuge is akin to that of Ted Bundy, the real-life killer who placed his arm in a sling in order to bait his designated victims and win their confidence. Everyone falls for the camera, says the psychotic Abraham (Matthew Jason Walsh), the killer in this instance.

Man Bites Dog heralds a dynamic shift in the way many movies would come to look and behave, which is to say more like works of fact than fiction. As noted above, the mockumentary format wasn’t exactly new, but in Man Bites Dog it was perfectly timed. Dogme 95 was just around the corner, with its bold manifesto conceived by Danish directors who sought to redress film and filmmaking, and no doubt have a little fun while they were at it. Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg positioned themselves at the forefront of the movement with their respective 1998 works, The Idiots and Festen. They demanded the concept of the filmmaker as artist be dropped.

The films of Dogme 95 and found footage in general owe a dood deal to Italian neorealism, which preferred location shooting to studio work, and the spontaneity one might associate with documentary and newsreels. In Dogme 95, the filmmaker was obliged to follow the oligarchies of a rule book that dictated, among other things, the camera must be handheld and shooting was only to be done on location, with whatever props happened to be on hand. Special lighting and post sync sound were frowned upon. Everything had to look real, in other words.

The consummate manifestation of this philosophy came soon after. Although not part of Dogme 95 or its doctrine, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez created in The Blair Witch Project (1999) a work that adhered to all the rules nonetheless. It helped pave the way for tireless variants of what is commonly known as the found footage film, which has become something of a paradigm for modern horror cinema. The Blair Witch Project opens with a statement:

In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary.

A year later their footage was found.

What follows is a visual record supposedly created by the filmmakers themselves, on a trip to explore a particularly unsavoury local legend. The group slowly unravels under the progressive onslaught of unknown forces, and the outcome — predetermined in the film’s opening blurb — isn’t good for any of them. The Blair Witch Project is deceptively simple. Its premise is a retread of ground covered in Cannibal Holocaust. But here there are no cannibals, no acts of gratuitous horror. It starts much the same, in a room with one of the team cheerily outlining a plan to camera and generating a sense of comradeship with the viewer. Soon enough, the team is on its way. But, alone and removed from the trappings of civilization, things slowly turn. Now the handheld camera, the natural locations, sounds and props, conspire to create a creeping unease (which, in this case, is more in keeping with the atmospheric scares of Val Lewton than the full on horror of Ruggero Deodato).

From the outset, The Blair Witch Project reveals that it has nothing up its sleeves. It presents us with the crew and its equipment, and that is all there is to it. There is nothing and no one else to fall back on when the inevitable shit hits the fan. If a little effervescent and giddy, these are people very much like you or I. This is their trip and it is also our trip. They become lost. We become lost. One of the most enduring images of the movie is the close-up face of Heather Donahue (played by Heather Donahue; the three leads play under their real names), having turned the camera upon herself to make a tearful apology for all that has gone wrong on the expedition. The shot is badly framed and raw, like most things in the movie. “I’m so scared,” she confides to us. Another enduring image is the running shot, accompanied by screams of terror. The final frames of the film descend into a jumbled mass of panic and an ambiguous horror, a fleeting humanoid shape that kills the camera. There is no trickery, no special effects, no sleight of hand. It is all here for us to see, exactly as it happened.

Do we ever find the Blair Witch? We don’t know. Here is a movie that adheres to the idea that the instant is more important than the whole, and that truth is paramount. This effectively is the grounding for all found footage films.

Once again technology steers cinematic trends, and the playing area is equal for both lowly independents and major studios. After all, one shaky deconstructed image looks pretty much like the next, regardless of budget. These are movies that offer a sense of real world authenticity through a primitive gaze. Found footage cinema is a dominant element of ‘new’ horror, where the story is related via camcorder or any variety of recording devices, such as CCTV, news bulletins, webcam, etc. The ending is often a foregone conclusion, because the footage is generally all that remains of the people in the film. Blair Witch was at the crossroads, a savvy independent success story (thanks to a strong online marketing strategy that put the myth before the movie). But the signs for found footage were already present. Hisayasu Satô’s Abnormal: Ugly Abuse (1988) had featured an investigation into a found videotape that contains the assault and murder of a woman by an unknown assailant. Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler’s The Last Broadcast (1998) was another ill-fated group in pursuit of another local myth, this time the Jersey Devil, while Dominic Anciano and Ray Burdis’ underrated Final Cut (1998) sought to apply the Cannibal Holocaust frame to a comedy drama.[42]

Everybody carries a camera in Kim Jin Won’s sparse and rather depressing Korean effort, The Butcher (2007). Thanks to custom camera-mounted headgear, we witness the methodical production of a snuff film from the point of view of both protagonists and victims. The director, a man called Kim, has artistic aspirations. He also has an international market to consider and needs to spice up production with exciting new things. A novel twist on the snuff film, these multiple headcams offer a sort of ping-pong reality in which we happen to see far more of the crew, deliberating this and that with the intended victims, than we do actual body horror. (The closing stretch of the movie tries to make up for this fact.) Thus, during one protracted segment, the squealing pig-face man is addressing us directly, letting rip with chainsaw and other tools.

A few years later, it was entirely possible to invert convention for an absurdist found footage nightmare. The legend in Yellowbrickroad (2010) pertains to a town in New England whose folk went missing in 1940, with the requisite doomed filmmakers on a trail to discover why. The mystery is hard to quantify, but ostensibly the very space the group inhabits becomes the enemy, i.e. the movie of which they are a part; their footage. “The land is like liquid,” one character cries when real world logic fails. Yellowbrickroad directors Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton run with the idea that videography is every bit as important as plot, and take found footage to its (il)logical conclusion. Five days away from civilization, the group begin to hear a distant music through the trees, like a scratchy old record, which in turn becomes the discordant audio for the movie they are in. Their progress stalls and before long they are unable to turn back, becoming in a sense trapped in the film and talking in the cliché of bad movie characters. “There’s been a terrible tragedy,” someone observes flatly as a friend’s leg is torn off, as if it was a scene in an Andy Milligan movie.[43]

A more recent found footage effort is Megan is Missing (2011), which addresses general concerns over Internet technology and child predators. In the modern world these are the real ‘cannibals’, to borrow Deodato’s oft quoted rhetoric at the end of Cannibal Holocaust. Writer-director Michael Goi[44] has created a grim tale that revolves around two schoolgirl friends being seduced by a cyber predator and murdered, told after the fact through various media. The protracted images of rape and abuse that close the movie have alienated many viewers, while also earning plaudits as some sort of unflinching truth for all parents to acknowledge.[45] Whatever the case, it is a prurient exercise that revels in what it seeks to condemn.

Found footage is an expansive catalogue with fresh additions appearing weekly it seems. Cloverfield (2008), The Troll Hunter (2010), The Tunnel (2011), World of the Dead The Zombie Diaries (2011), 100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012), are some inventive examples that cross genres. They include rampaging monsters, urban exploration, the walking dead and spectral serial killers. In Amateur Porn Star Killer (2007) and Lucky Bastard (2014), video murder is combined with gonzo porn. Other found footage entries are successful and flexible enough to warrant a franchise of their own. In terms of longevity and sequels, the zombie contagium [Rec] (2007) and the domestic haunting of Paranormal Activity (2007) are probably ahead. Meanwhile, V/H/S (2012) revives the old horror standby the ‘portmanteau film’, applying the jerky found footage treatment to tales of ghosts, ghouls and killers. The result has its moments but is otherwise predictable. The episode ‘Tuesday the 17th’ has a charcater being chased through woods by digital interference. “Why can’t I film you?!” she cries at the shape.

All of these movies have a link with death and the death image, which can be seen as an engagement with the idea of cinema being a magical force. It is certainly no coincidence that many found footage films deal specifically with supernatural themes,[46] just as it is no surprise that snuff appears regularly in found footage.

Among the filmmakers interviewed in S&MAN (2006), low-budget horror director Bill Zebub observes that footage of genuine death seems “boring”. Make-believe cinema death by comparison is exciting and dramatic. In found footage we have elements of both these worlds. “Seeing that handheld shaky camera,” Bill Zebub remarks, “it’s almost dehumanizing.”[47]

J. T. Petty’s S&MAN is an odd bird. It starts out ostensibly as a documentary on a peeping tom, before morphing into a rather interesting dissection of the voyeuristic gaze and the idea of snuff. Petty is our guide, visiting the Chiller fan convention in New Jersey, and giving us film clips and interviews. Among the featured experts are Carol Clover and forensic psychiatrist Dr Richard B Krueger. Actress Debbie D talks about fans and being a scream queen, while Bill Zebub, Fred Vogel and Eric Rost deliberate on their position as filmmakers. Despite the legitimacy of these talking head elements and its documental set up, S&MAN is really a found footage film at heart. The whole thing is a fabrication built around Eric Rost, filmmaker, himself a fictitious entity. We slowly get to see more of him and his work, appearing eventually as if Rost has hijacked the documentary and it has become just about him. In fact it’s the other way around. The documentary is camouflage for Rost and the tale of obsessive filmmaker. He seems laughably deluded at first but soon exhibits darker traits, coming to fit the pattern of the dangerous deviant being discussed by the film’s experts. (It’s not likely any one of these experts is actually aware of Rost or the hand that Petty is playing.) Rost is presented as the creator of a series of films called S&MAN (‘sandman’), each volume focused on an unwitting female whom Rost has stalked and secretly filmed. ‘S&MAN Episode 11’ is fairly typical of the series. Excerpts from it show a female subject, Carlina, walking down the street and going about her business. ‘CARLINA’S JOB’ states one title card, before we are privy to covert scenes of her at work. ‘CARLINA LOSES HER KEYS’ states another. During his interviews, Rost is evasive but doesn’t consider any of this at all inappropriate or wrong. “I don’t peep inside their house — all the time,” he tells Petty. Later we see Rost abduct Carlina, dump her in the woods and leave her for dead. “It’s not snuff. But you know, it looks close to it. It’s like a stalker movie,” qualifies the filmmaker. After an episode in which a victim is strangled, Rost confides that he has received more requests for stranglings.

It is patently obvious that Rost is indeed making snuff films. The threat of another one propels the story to its inevitable conclusion. The two worlds, Petty’s S&MAN and Rost’s S&MAN, spin in a wonderfully eccentric orbit before colliding in the requisite nihilistic found footage finale.

Stepping back a few years: Two films appeared in 2001 that were diametrically opposed to one another on almost every level, but entirely germane in that they arrived at the same time to address issues concerning camcorders, murder and the media. One was a multimillion dollar Hollywood production with world class actors, the other had next to zero budget and featured complete unknowns.

John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes (2001) and Fred Vogel’s August Underground (2001) may be regarded as proto found footage — we’ll discuss their respective qualifications in a moment — and deserving of particular attention. Both feature a killer intent on pursuing a particularly abject interpretation of the American dream, each with a camera-wielding accomplice documenting the fact on video. In 15 Minutes, two East European criminals chase a debt to New York, but decide instead to make a snuff film and sell it to television. Here the criminal underclass conspires with technology, media hypocrisy and a flawed justice system in order to make easy money. “I love America,” says one character early on, “no one’s responsible for what they do.” In August Underground the camera affords a serial killer in Northeast America an extra dimension of creative pleasure. There is no financial incentive in this case, but the sentiment is the same as above. “You’re going to love this,” are the first words the killer says, introducing the camera to a bound, beaten and sobbing naked young female.

Understandably, the reception and legacy of these two movies differs. It’s fair to say that 15 Minutes has received little if any recognition, dropping quickly out of mind following a generally hostile reception on its release. Its low-budget counterpart on the other hand has benefited from the slow burn of cult credibility, and, good or bad, is held up as some kind of benchmark in the realistic portrayal of simulated snuff. Nevertheless, 15 Minutes looks very different to contemporary Hollywood and is deserving of a place in the found footage canon. A missing link if you will.

Emil Slovak (Karel Roden) arrives in New York to collect money owing to him. His travelling companion and criminal associate is Oleg Razgul (Oleg Taktarov), a movie fanatic who associates America with Frank Capra westerns. A trail of death and destruction follows them, which the lumpen Razgul doggedly records on a stolen camcorder. At first Slovak protests, but changes his tune after a few minutes watching daytime television and the media circus of a society with twisted values. Slovak sees that crime pays in the eyes of the American media, if played correctly. Hatching a plan, he targets much loved celebrity cop Eddie Flemming (Robert DeNiro) and murders him on camera. He brokers a deal with a television network for $1 million and sells the exclusive broadcast rights to the footage, before entering a plea of insanity and hiring a lawyer to bail him out. The plan fails when unassuming sidekick Razgul is denied rightful credit on the film and turns on Slovak, giving away incriminating footage free of charge.[48]

Roger Ebert provided a rare instance of critical empathy toward 15 Minutes. He likened it to ‘a real movie, rough edges and all, and not another link from the sausage factory’. He said it showed what would happen when video technology came within reach of the Jerry Springer Show mindset. ‘A couple of the early reviews,’ he conceded,

have called it implausible. They doubt that real killers would sell their footage to TV and then watch it in a Planet Hollywood, hoping to be spotted and arrested. See, that’s the funny thing. I think there are people who would.[49]

While 15 Minutes adheres to a traditional narrative and movie structure, whole chunks of it are framed within Razgul’s inexpensive handheld camera. Sometimes this frame is rendered indecipherable, as in the sequence where Razgul shoots over his shoulder while running from the cops. Other times the image is distorted by one of the optical effects built into the camera. The murder scenes, of which there are several, are all shot from Razgul’s harsh low-fi digital perspective. The contrast between these scenes and the rest of the movie, shot traditionally on 35mm, are jarring in their intensity. There is a grim desperation to them, looking unlike other Hollywood action movies of the era. The protracted murder of Flemming stands out in particular, a nasty death made all the nastier without the spit and polish we have come to expect of a big screen production.

Without the least hesitation, Flemming’s murder footage is screened by news show host Robert Hawkins (Kelsey Grammer), whose tagline is “Hard to believe? Watch”. Integrity for Hawkins is an explosive pitch and better ratings. But he’s hardly the bad guy. Image and media are everything and few characters in 15 Minutes are ignorant to the fact. Snuff is not directed at an exclusive market comprising a few select misfits with very deep pockets; the audience is a whole nation addicted to, as Slovak puts it, “crybaby talk shows”.

Determines Razgul at one point: “Tragedy. Every great film must have one.” He records himself saying this while watching Flemming’s funeral on a television set. The moment perfectly distils the essence of the movie.

Fred Vogel’s August Underground is framed entirely within the shaky handheld parameters of a cheap off-the-shelf camera. Neither the subject, a ‘serial killer’, nor the cameraman are formally identified (played by Fred Vogel and Allen Peters under assumed names). The latter is also unseen, but his presence is felt and heard offering opinion and ‘direction’ throughout. The nucleus of the film is the killer’s basement, into which a succession of victims — male and female — are placed to be humiliated, tortured and killed. Outside of this, the couple travel around creating havoc, while having themselves a good time.

August Underground is not a work that can or necessarily should be liked. It is a deliberately antagonistic film (the word ‘movie’ doesn’t seem appropriate) that portrays a seriously unhinged partnership. Its look and attitude is that of the sort of anonymous video clip posted online wherein bored young men do stupid and objectionable things, often fortified with alcohol. The first image in August Underground is of a beer bottle being discarded and broken. The tone is set. Cited by list makers as one of the most disturbing films of all time, few people are likely to come to August Underground thinking that it is anything other than a work of fiction. No one is actually killed in it. Nevertheless, the volatile imagery and situations nudge the viewer uncomfortably close to the ‘real’. There is little by way of acting among the cast of utter nobodies. For the most part, they are not called to do anything but be themselves, behaving as they well might in front of a camera, awkward and self-conscious. The exception is Vogel as the killer. But even he is occasionally prey to a situation beyond his control. One such sequence shows Vogel and Peters being ejected from a live music gig after a fight breaks out. In the ruckus, heartfelt blows make contact and Vogel ends up nursing a bloody nose in the car park. Later, the two protagonists party with hookers, all evidently as wasted on coke as they claim to be. “C’mere, cameraman and make a movie,” one of the hookers slurs, her face close to the lens. The moment is a truism. Dismembering a corpse in another scene, we see Vogel throw up (for real?), joking with his cameraman that he doesn’t have the stomach for certain foods. The division between real and make-believe, acting and not acting, is blurred. The humiliation of the victims, half naked and covered in filth, is conveyed with similarly alarming conviction. It’s quite feasible that their anguish and suffering is genuine, given that Vogel is screaming directly into their ears. We don’t doubt he means what he says about ugliness and dying, this vitriol evidently dredged from a deep pit of personal darkness.

Convincing makeup and special effects are not beyond the reach of any filmmaker with the sniff of a budget (not that many would care to show a woman shit herself in fear). But August Underground looks every inch to have cost zilch to produce; the idea that its budget could stretch to a six-pack of beer seems totally absurd. Only during the director’s commentary track on the 2004 DVD — a special ‘snuff edition’, no less — do we discover just how clever the filmmakers have been. Everything is special effects.

From the press release (undated; sic throughout):

Imagine walking down the street and finding an unmarked VHS tape. Curiosity peaked you take it home and pop it in. What starts off as two young men screwing around with a video camera quickly transforms into an ultra-realistic torture sequence where the unidentified psychopaths tape their exploits as they torment, and violate a woman tied to a chair. The sodomy of your morals continues throughout the entirety of the footage, while subtly revealing the killer’s shattered pasts via the interaction with their victims and each other. The most shockingly realistic portrait of a serial killer’s existence is, Fred Vogel’s August Underground.

In 2001, Fred Vogel was a special effects artist in Pittsburgh, PA, and teaching sculpture in school. He had a passion for horror movies with aspirations to direct something of his own, far removed from the schlock independent horrors being turned out at the time. An elaborate zombie movie was clearly out of the question. But a movie about a serial killer, informed by the low-budget aesthetic of Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer and Man Bites Dog, seemed perfectly achievable. He set to work writing a story with Allen Peters, whose love was for art house, and managed to find unexpected inspiration at school. “I researched everything I could on the subject [of serial killers],” Vogel explained to the authors.[50] “While I was teaching, some of my students would write to real serial killers hoping for some kind of response. I didn’t know how I felt about that, but I knew it wasn’t cool to look at these guys as heroes. I too was fascinated by serial killers, but not to the point where I would want to communicate with them.”

Another inspiration was 20/20, notably an “episode where kids would videotape themselves shooting paintballs at people and vandalizing homes”, recalls Vogel. “This was some scary shit, I thought to myself. Now, how can I use all of this to make something new?”

Vogel went into the project hoping to make the most disturbing movie he possibly could. August Underground (August being the month in which it shot) is not your typical serial killer movie. In fact it appears less to be about a serial killer than it is a window on the aforementioned frat boy mentality. In the culture of the micro-celebrity, something as mundane as, say, a visit to a tattoo parlour is legitimate currency for mass entertainment. Vogel gets a tattoo in August Underground. This vignette is much the same as the abuse, torture and murder scenes in that they are presented uniformly as one, without fanfare or ceremony.[51]

August Underground proved a double edged sword for Vogel. He lost his teaching job because of it. But once its notoriety spread (following an article in Rue Morgue magazine), he embarked on a career defined by his “sick little movie”.

“I wanted to show all the stuff that mainstream films never show you, the disturbing shit,” he says in reflection. “It was made to look authentic, like watching a snuff film.”

In 2002, Vogel established Toe Tag Pictures with an old college friend and special effects artist, Jerami Cruise. One of the first Toe Tag projects was a music video for Necrophagia, a band that was familiar with August Underground and wanted a “sick video” in the same vein. This spawned a full length feature called August Underground’s Mordum (2003), which inspired creative differences and a change in the Toe Tag personnel. Then came August Underground’s Penance (2007) and, more recently, Murder Collection (2009).

Murder Collection offers a thematic departure (one that deals more specifically with social media and the Internet[52]), otherwise these are films that provide a fragmented chronology on the life of Vogel’s anonymous serial killer. The character’s circle of friends and associates may change, as do of course the victims, but the films don’t have a formal progression and there is no recognizable sense of closure by the end of it all. The ubiquitous camera simply documents the lost lives that pass before its impartial gaze. In Mordum and Penance, the killer has a girlfriend who also shares in the bloodlust. A third party comes and goes over the course of the films. Supposedly the girl’s incestuous brother, this individual is central to Mordum, but absent from Penance. Even by the low standards of the company he keeps, this is one degenerate freak. He fucks the corpse of a child in a bathtub at one point, howling with demented glee as his sister records the whole thing on film. The number of levels on which this sequence is ‘wrong’ is enough to warrant a chapter in itself. But Mordum is pitched like this throughout, a metamphetamine rush that opens with screams and continues almost unabated until in the end a screen of empty static unceremoniously calls a halt on everything. It’s an overloaded ride and wholly exhausting because of it. The impact of some shock scenes is negated by their own stalwart longevity. But that might well be the point. The third film, Penance, returns some light and shade to the mix. Tender moments include riding quad bikes together and firing off a shotgun. These are intercut with our killer couple throttling a child and Vogel yelling, “I wanna see the life go!”

Vogel defines Toe Tag Pictures as being a group of “like-minded” individuals, which is a fairly accurate summation given the intensity that each person brings to the table. There is the sense that in these scenes of arbitrary edits and low definition the viewer is witnessing personalities in genuine meltdown, which brings us again to a blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction. It happens a lot in Mordum, which includes images of self harm throughout. For Penance, we learn through DVD extras that work was undertaken over several days without break or sleep. No surprise then that the last stretch involving the killer and his girlfriend is akin to Burton and Taylor in a more perverted Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, draining bodies instead of booze. At the end of Penance, Vogel pans the camera across two more victims lying dead in his crusty basement: A foetus still attached to its mother by its umbilical cord snaking through a gaping stomach wound. Slumped nearby, Vogel’s girlfriend (in the film and in real life) is wailing uncontrollably. “I wanna die!” she screams, and we have no reason to believe she doesn’t mean it.

Vogel confirms the self harm in Mordum is real. “I think filming this movie definitely helped her get those demons out,” he says of actress/girlfriend Christie Whiles. Whiles corroborates the statement. “I don’t watch Mordum anymore,” she says. “We lived through it and it was exactly like it was in the movie. Pretty much. It was rough.”[53]

Toe Tag may be approaching film production on a communal level, as the primal screamers of a toxic generation. Theirs is the culture of shock when shock has been rendered impotent. Indeed, Penance was released only months before the Dnipropetrovsk Maniacs came to light, two teenage boys whose video of a thrill kill murder was leaked to the Internet and went viral. Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes showed us how rogue elements might conceivably be driven to snuff in the first place. By accident or design, Toe Tag quantifies the cultural mindset that births such demons.

THIS IS THE POSTMODERN WORLD

“They have made snuff films here and sold them all over the world.” “Snuff. Is that what I think it is?”[54]

An American film unit is in Moscow making a slasher movie. When a crew member witnesses the production of a snuff film after studio hours, involving a woman being stabbed to death, a dastardly game of cat and mouse ensues. This is Anthony Waller’s Mute Witness (1994), from which the quote above is taken. The Russian mafia are at the centre of an international trade in pornography, prostitution and snuff films. The witness of the title, a special makeup artist called Billy (Marina Sudina), who happens to be mute, provides the police with the leverage required to expose the gang and shadowy boss the Reaper (Alec Guinness, credited only as ‘Mystery Guest Star’).[55] The Reaper’s house of cards is threatened when a disk containing his international client basis goes missing.

In the mid nineties a handful of movies appeared that returned to the traditional motifs of snuff as criminal activity for commercial gain. These were retroactive forays with a postmodern twist, delivering the concept with a nudge and a wink to a knowing audience. The nadir was David R. Ellis’ Shark Night 3D (2011), where enterprising rednecks put tourists among sharks loaded with video cameras for aquatic snuff films. But among the first reboots was Mute Witness, which has a sobering premise yet at times plays like a quirky comedy of a decade past. It was followed by the altogether less frivolous Tesis (1995), The Brave (1997) and 8MM (1999). Later on, when the Internet emerged, snuff was served afresh in movies like Live Feed (2006), Untraceable (2008) and Are You Scared 2 (2009).

Tesis was a European production. Director Alejandro Amenábar was at the forefront of a new Spanish cinema that helped rejuvenate the domestic market and reach a wider international audience with cool, cult appeal movies. Much as his contemporaries — Bigas Luna, Alex de la Iglesias, Pedro Almodóvar — Amenábar approached exploitation with a reflexive attitude. Tesis follows Ángela (Ana Torrent), a student in Madrid writing a thesis on audiovisual violence who discovers a snuff film racket operating in her university. Students are the victims, with matters confounded by the usual parade of shady characters. Tesis signposts the work of Argento, Fulci, Deodato et al (even featuring a Cannibal Holocaust t-shirt), while allowing for deeper readings. The movie won critical acclaim, including several Goyas, the Spanish equivalent of the Oscar. Dolores Tierney called it brilliant and complex.[56]

Very different were the two productions from Hollywood of around the same time. The Brave and 8MM had box office clout in the shape of their respective stars. The former, a gentle character study for Johnny Depp, includes a guest appearance by Marlon Brando. The latter is a derivative action adventure starring Nicolas Cage.

Based on a novel by mystery writer Gregory McDonald,[57] The Brave sees Depp playing Raphael, a down at heel American Indian caught in a no-hope shanty town existence. The town itself, built around a municipal tip, is due for demolition. Raphael strikes a deal to be victim in a snuff film, thereby providing an exit strategy for his family. The more pain he can withstand, the more money his family will receive. The larger part of The Brave is spent in anticipation of the designated day when he must die, with Raphael enjoying his family, who are clueless to his pact. Brando is the wheelchair-bound McCarthy, the snuff producer who appears only once to provide Kafkaesque exposition. There is nothing shown of the horror that Raphael endures. In the end, he simply gets on a bus and travels to his destiny. The audience is left to imagine what must follow.

The Brave was a pet project for Depp. As well as appearing in the movie, he directed it and co-wrote the screenplay, and from all accounts was proud of the result. It flopped at the box office, however, which is a shame as The Brave is an intelligent and considered work. Snuff here is just a job. Indeed, Raphael appears to be applying for a job at the start of the movie and talks money as anyone in a job interview might. The Brave is an arresting story at odds with Depp’s generally affable onscreen persona. Its lukewarm reception indicates that the public is content for the actor to stick with whimsy in the future.

Joel Schumacher’s 8MM is a retread of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore.[58] It features Nicolas Cage as Tom Welles, a private detective hired to find out whether the murder of a girl in an 8mm reel of film is authentic or not. The road to enlightenment, of course, is fraught with danger and Welles’ own life is put at stake. On the whole, 8MM is a cynical effort to buy into and build upon the snuff myth. There is desperate conjecture as to why an outmoded format — the 8mm film reel — would have a place in the modern world. But that’s not the least of it. Little has changed in the twenty years since Hardcore (Cage even appears to be transmogrifying into George C. Scott at times). The mystery film in 8MM exists only as a single, one of a kind reel, procured for the princely sum of $1m.

What 8MM succeeds in doing is to lend additional weight to the nebulous world of the snuff film. Here we see the monster that commits the foul deed; the man who tortures, mutilates and ultimately kills his victim on camera. He (perhaps ‘it’) is a lumbering brute adept with knives and tools, the masked pawn of those who call the shots behind the camera. He becomes the quantifiable presence that is the snuff film killing machine. Indeed, in 8MM, this individual is called Machine.

Machine becomes a kind of shorthand definition for the snuff film from this point forward, an imposing presence with a trolley full of ugly utensils that forecast what must come next. He has the gait of bestial male, an ogre in the fairytale tradition, whose favoured apparel is leather gear and chest hair. In terms of film lineage he evokes the sinister Nazi torture doctor with a toolkit in Marathon Man (1976), played by Laurence Olivier. Latterly he is the pink gimp of Borja Crespo’s Snuff 2000 (2002) and the rather mundane everymen sadists of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005). In 8MM’s Machine we have elements of them all. Partway through the movie, Welles asks the mother of the dead girl for permission to kill those involved with the snuff film racket. “I want to punish them for what they did,” he determines. Welles trots off on his vengeful crusade, felling the bad guys. But he discovers in the final act that Machine is perhaps less of a monster than he thought. He still lives at home with his mum and dotes on the old dear. Not at all the picture Welles was expecting.[59]

The persona of the Machine Man (as we will call his type) can be found in a music video for death metal band Cattle Decapitation. The five-minute video for the track Forced Gender Reassignment[60] shows the Machine Man archetype torturing and raping a young male and female. This is retribution for their rampant hatemongering in the guise of Christianity at the beginning of the video, where they are shown waving ‘God Hates Fags’ placards. In explicit detail, their sex organs are mutilated and removed with razors and power tools. This extends to x-ray type scenes of the man’s internal organs being churned up as he is reamed with a drill. (Other scenes, such as the removal of a tampon, are equally ignoble.) The perpetrator, in his bondage mask and leather-strapped barrel chest, makes the victims denounce God. The association between rock music, such as metal in all its guises, and horror film iconography is not a new one. But Cattle Decapitation probably take it about as far as it can go in terms of music video excess.

It’s worth noting that here the Machine Man has tapped a vein outside of movies (although clearly informed by them) whose consumer demographic, by and large, is the young adult male. A generation of music fans are nodding approval and claiming allegiance with the Machine Man as a freak on their own team.[61]

The Machine Man returns in both Bruno Mattei’s Snuff Trap (2003) and Ryan Nicholson’s Live Feed (2006). The latter takes place in China (for reasons that border on the xenophobic), in a porno theatre that accommodates a Triad kingpin. The giant executioner under his employ wears a leather mask and apron and kills off a group of American tourists on camera, which provides the requisite live thrills onscreen in the auditorium. The whole thing is cheaply shot, with nudity, gore and blockhead characters. “Why is there a drain in the middle of the room?” bellows one of them. “The door won’t open!” screams another. And so it goes. On the other hand, Mattei’s Snuff Trap is set in Europe and follows the 8MM pattern fairly closely. The Machine Man here takes centre stage for a film cartel otherwise hidden from view. His assault and murder of terrified women is all we see of the mooted Hades Productions and its work.

Snuff Trap centres on Michelle (Carla Dujany Solaro), the wife of a prominent public figure, zipping through Europe in search of her missing daughter. It turns out that the teenage Lauren (Federica Garuti) has been snatched by a gang making heavy BDSM films, with a sideline in snuff. Posing as a buyer, Michelle falls into an elaborate trap and ends up alongside Lauren in front of the snuff lens. (But is saved at the last moment.)

Director Mattei is a familiar name in Italian exploitation, having worked in multiple genres under a variety of pseudonyms. These days he shoots ultra cheap, returning most recently for Zombies: The Beginning (2007).[62] Snuff Trap was written and directed by Mattei as Pierre le Blanc, who takes very few liberties with the material that inspired him. In other words, it is a remodel of 8MM in the unashamedly brazen manner of Italian knock offs. As Welles had done in 8MM, Michelle finds an ally who introduces her to underground porno markets that supply most anything. The ally here is Jean Luis (Gabriel Gori), who regards the inhabitants of this seedy twilight as “the porno zombies”. They have twisted tastes “as far beyond hardcore porn as you can imagine”. A supposed snuff tape that Michelle procures for $1,500 turns out to be fiction. Nonetheless, it puts her on the right track.

Moving on, director Nimród Antal takes an unashamedly referential approach to horror cinema in the perfectly formed Vacancy (2007). Think of Norman Bates spying on Marion Crane in her motel room in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) — Vacancy takes that scene and runs with it. Confined almost exclusively to an isolated motel, the game of cat and mouse that follows the arrival of young guests will not come as a surprise. But the masterstroke is in the understatement. David and Amy (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) are stranded when their car breaks down. Mason the motel desk manager (Frank Whaley) is an odd sort. The room he gives the couple is rigged with hidden cameras that feed VCR equipment in his office. David and Amy are forewarned of the danger by a videocassette inadvertently left behind, which reveals murders having taken place in the room they presently occupy.

The bad guys in Vacancy are part of a cottage industry that manufactures snuff films, with the motel their centre of operation. This is studio, duplication plant and distribution centre all in one. A truck driver arriving at the motel isn’t the saviour David and Amy are hoping for; instead he turns out to be another interloper, whose job is to collect the latest batch of tapes and feed the supply chain; a snuff film delivery man barely able to meet demand. Taken as a homage to Hitchcock, Whaley’s performance as Mason is far more tuned to Norman Bates than the 1998 scene for scene Psycho remake by Gus Van Sant.[63]

An unwarranted back story came in the form of Eric Bross’ Vacancy 2: The First Cut (2009). Lacking the wit and energy of its predecessor, here we see the origins of motel snuff and discover how snuff came to replace an exhausted motel sideline of voyeur porn.

Whatever you suspect goes on behind your child’s door, you probably didn’t see your number two bedroom as the scene of savage violence, images of sexuality about as unpleasant as unpleasant gets. And even, potentially, the branch office for a computer porn ring. Of course, there’s another side to the computer […] a side that’s positive educational, fun.

Much as video before it, the information superhighway opened new and exciting methods of creativity and distribution. But this was perceived in some quarters as a negative force and not to be trusted, as per the Channel 4 consumer reports programme Check Out 93, aired in the early nineties, and presenter Mike Embley’s introductory preamble quoted above. The computer already had bad footing, thanks to early depictions in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). Cyber worlds fared little better, courtesy TRON (1982) and The Lawnmower Man (1992). By extension, the Internet was downright malignant, as evidenced in the four-part British television drama Killer Net (aired 1998), fuelling technofear with alien terminology relating to system upgrades and online communication. Similarly, William Malone’s Feardotcom (2002) and Hideo Nakata’s Chatroom (2010) both present a bizarre anti-world from which not everybody was liable to return. In the former, people are dying within minutes of logging onto a website called Fear. “We’d better get these computers checked out,” determines shrewd detective Stephen Dorff. In Chatroom, online friendships seem wonderful when compared to the collective dour reality of the so-called Chelsea Teens. But the façade crumbles when one of their number turns out to be a mimetic Charles Manson, dysfunctional on the outside and intent on turning the whole trip bad.

Snuff was prime fodder for exploitation in cyberspace. Chatroom spells it out with its Suicide Room, steering the weak and susceptible toward a webcam death. With the Internet we have the perfect mask, affording anonymity for twisted individuals whose crimes are without frontiers or reprisal. The protagonist of Gregory Hoblit’s Untraceable (2008) is indeed untraceable, killing people live online with impunity with the aid of firewalls and encryption whose like the FBI have never seen.

Tweaking the idea of the gladiatorial spectacle and the vogue for torture porn (indebted to the Saw franchise), several movies have given death games a web presence. John Lands’ Are You Scared 2 (2009) is simply a reboot of Are You Scared (2006), transposing reality television to a reality webcast. The game, in which hapless participants face almost insurmountable odds, is streamed live to over a million people. “It’s one of the biggest underground websites in the world,” someone chimes. “It’s bigger than porn.”

Marc Evans’ My Little Eye (2002) is an earlier incarnation, offering a greater indictment of reality media that takes an open swing at shows like Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! Labouring under twenty-four hour surveillance, a group of contestants doggedly weather several months in a house together in order to win a substantial cash prize. Tensions run high. Sneaky intervention from the unseen hosts fuels further mistrust, leading ultimately to death and murder. It transpires that the feed from the house is being delivered to a secret website as an elaborate snuff package. The sinister dial up tone at the start of the movie clues us in.

The eponymous website of Yohei Fujita’s Death Tube (2010) is only operational for a few days each year, whereupon it streams a game show in which failure means certain death for the unwitting contestants. Not a particularly remarkable movie, Death Tube is focused on the mechanics of the game itself, leaving well alone the critique suggested by the irascible title. This is a shame. It is no coincidence that the Death Tube masthead closely resembles that of the YouTube masthead, while the show’s mascot — a cartoon bear — is similar to that of ‘pedobear’, a derogatory or mocking meme used on anonymous online forums. But in this respect, the parade of messages that appear onscreen throughout the game is entirely apt. These are supposedly posted by the anonymous Death Tube viewers. A player fatality warrants ‘LOL’, while anyone who might succeed in a task and make it through to the next stage alive is perceived as ‘boring’.

There is an interesting unspoken bias in the fictional worlds of deadly reality media, in that pay-per-view and cable give participants a more earnest ride than those shows streamed online. Games broadcast on television channels, as per The Condemned and Paul W. S. Anderson’s Death Race (2008), are more aligned with sports and require physical brawn to succeed: Invariably the best man or woman wins in the end. The Internet based conflicts on the other hand are masterminded by evil genii, for whom mental prowess is tantamount. Here, mean spiritedness and subterfuge ensnares even the most diligent player.

MAD AND UNSCRUPULOUS ARTISTS

Snuff came next in the wholly unexpected form of two Serbian language movies. The Life and Death of a Porno Gang (2009) and A Serbian Film (2010) are driven by mad artist characters. Different in their respective approach, these movies share a common metaphor that posits snuff as the void in society, the dead seeds of art and integrity collapsing into a black orbit. There is no right or wrong here, no war, no peace, no government, no return, only commodity. In one film, an edgy performance troupe extends its repertoire with snuff filmmaking when all else fails. In the other, a porn star is lured out of retirement by the lucrative proposition of a cynical filmmaker with dangerous ideas.

The more notorious of the pair is Srðan Spasojević’s A Serbian Film. Before its world premiere on June 11, 2010, part of the Cinema City festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, rumours were already circulating that condemned it. Film prints were destroyed by film labs because of the content. Even the otherwise unassuming title, A Serbian Film, took on a decidedly threatening cadence. The warnings for once were justified. The nature of this extreme and shocking movie has resulted in outright ban in many places around the world, while its release in a complete form is curtailed most everywhere else. As of writing, it remains unavailable on DVD in its homeland, following a poorly received theatrical run.

At the core of the movie is Miloš (Srðan Todorović), a former porn star with a big reputation. His legendary sexual prowess brings Miloš to the attention of Vukmir (Sergej Trifunović), a flamboyant and sinister film buff with an ambiguous history in psychology, children’s television and a connection to the state. He makes porn films, but these are an unknown quantity and remain unseen by the general public. Miloš is intrigued and desperate, so signs a contract for an indeterminate role in a new Vukmir project. But after shooting two scenes, he wants out. The scenes deal with the abuse and rape of a mother in the presence of her young daughter. Vukmir attempts to dissuade Miloš from leaving. The whole country is one big kindergarten, he berates the actor, and illustrates his point with a concept he calls ‘newborn porn’. Vukmir plays for him footage that shows a woman giving birth. The room in the film is decrepit and the unlikely midwife is a large naked (machine) man, who slaps the infant into life and then immediately starts fucking it. It is a new genre, roars Vukmir with demented pride as a sickened Miloš staggers off home.

This sequence, which comes about halfway through the movie, is disturbing to say the least. In a catalogue of inflammatory scenes that pull no punches, this one overshadows all. What is an audience supposed to make of it? Run away in a funk like Miloš, gauging from responses online. There are several snuff scenes in the movie. A woman is fucked to death in the throat, her teeth having been removed with pliers; elsewhere a woman is decapitated by her rapist and a man is lobotomized by an erect penis stabbed through the eye socket. However, the foremost criticism levelled at A Serbian Film relates to its portrayal of minors in a sexual context, and the newborn porn sequence specifically. The first shot of the movie is the sexual awakening of Miloš’ infant son (having innocently stumbled upon one of dad’s porn videos, he watches awestruck). But when Miloš enters a building signposted ORPHANAGE on his first day of work for Vukmir, all bets are off. This movie isn’t going to behave itself, the sign might as well read.

The filmmakers have set out to be deliberately transgressive, in a way so many filmmakers have set out before. The eyeball slicing in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) springs to mind, as does Nick Zedd wiping his arse on a picture of Jesus in the short Thrust in Me (1985). These films occupy a different critical space, but their intent to shock is uniform. We can argue that the newborn porn episode shouldn’t have been given cinematic shape; it is a fictional grotesque that oversteps common sensibility. But so it is with transgressive ideas. Allegory is demanded of such shocking images. That’s how critics validate them. In the case of A Serbian Film, we have allegory in abundance. The movie is a metaphor for the political, moral and psychological downfall of Serbia and the world at large, according to first time director Spasojević.[64] But does it ring true?

The BBFC acknowledged the director’s intent and passed A Serbian Film as 18 with cuts totalling 4m11s. (The video print lost an extra one second.) These cuts constitute one of the most severe censorial beatings from the Board in recent memory. But at the same time the Board has operated in the face of adversity and gone to some lengths to pass the movie at all.[65] Gone are elements of sexual violence and any element seen to endorse sexual violence, of which there are many. So, too, any image of a child in the context of adult sexual activity. In the BBFC approved cut, the baby rape scene takes place entirely offscreen, leaving only the the baby’s cry, its implication, and the reaction of Miloš and Vukmir. Whether this is ostensibly more tolerable than the uncut version, where we can see that the baby is clearly a prosthetic dummy, is debatable. The Board made a point to stress that no scene in the movie was in clear breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978, and no real baby was harmed.[66]

Following his introduction to newborn porn, the disgusted Miloš realizes upon leaving Vukmir that he has been drugged. A Serbian Film enters its final straight, a hall of horrors in which a battered Miloš awakes and slowly pieces together the lost events of the night before. Through mini-DV cassettes discovered in Vukmir’s empty house, he sees how a powerful narcotic had turned him into a voracious sex zombie, performing vile obscenities under Vukmir’s direction. He watches himself decapitate one bound woman with a machete, fucking the headless corpse until he is forcibly dragged off. In more footage, Vukmir finds Miloš in an alleyway, beaten up for masturbating like an idiot savant at a passing woman. The video footage eventually leads Miloš to a warehouse and evidence of the final outrage. Blood and bodies are scattered about the place. A camera on a tripod reveals the last piece of the puzzle, and triggers events that lead Miloš and his family to the desperate finale.

A Serbian Film appeared without precedent, or so it seemed, from a country not known for its film industry. But in truth it is a part of a loose cultural cortege that seeks to address a troubled place in the world. With the collapse of the Yugoslav federation in the late 1980s, political upheaval in Serbia gave rise to ethnic war, escalating atrocities between Serb and Albanian forces, and genocide. Graphic images of death and dismemberment as propaganda were a regular staple on state television. In an interview with Rue Morgue magazine, Spasojević said that he and co-writer Aleksandar Radivojević intended the movie to quantify their feelings and world-view without compromise. Their idea was to personify evil with, tellingly, a Chuck Norris style action-revenge drama. “Serbia participated in a few civil wars… and was devastated by NATO bombings for three months,” Spasojević notes in the interview. “Do you expect that such events would not leave any consequences?”[67]

With the furore surrounding it not yet settled, Spasojević’s movie was followed to the West by news of another outrageous production, another uncompromising Serbian film. Mladena Ðorðević’s The Life and Death of a Porno Gang (2009) rode the coattails of A Serbian Film, but in reality predates it. Things in this movie also end badly for all concerned. But on the whole it is a more palatable effort with some semblance of humanity lurking within it. Taking the form of a video diary, we see disillusioned film student Marko (Mihajlo Z Jovanović) fall into a career directing porn. It is a staid industry but has scope for more relevant work, he believes, and soon enough Marko establishes a porno theatre, where performance marries local history and lore through the eyes of sexual outsiders. This is the Porno Gang, which Marko takes on the road to play a succession of hostile villages before coming to the attention of a man called Franc (Srboljub Milin). A war journalist from Germany, Franc has found a lucrative niche exploiting the conflicts in the Balkans, filming atrocities for rich clients abroad. But now the war is over he seeks new avenues. Appealing to Marko’s temperament as a cutting edge artist, and providing a much needed cash injection, Franc enlists the Porno Gang as itinerant snuff filmmakers.

One snuff victim is a deranged young man with suicidal tendencies, who cuts himself open with a knife for the camera. A member of the gang, unable to stand it, jumps in with an iron bar and brings the spectacle to a ferocious end. “It was hard in the beginning,” reflects Marko on his new found role as snuff filmmaker. Soon enough, his attitude has mellowed somewhat. “Awesome!” he says of a chainsaw beheading. Another victim is a family man with a terminal illness. In a ruined building, dressed in combat fatigues and surrounded by the Porno Gang, this victim solemnly relates his history as a sniper during the war. A member of the gang dances flirtatiously around him, like one of the prostitutes of the man’s former life, before she picks up a large mallet and smashes his brains out with it.

The gang is akin to the acid minstrels of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters had John Waters been at the wheel. Interviews to camera present a likeable bunch of misfits who comprise sex workers, heroin addicts, leather boys and beauticians. Before the snuff sideline changes matters for the worse, the entourage has a relatively carefree life, finding unity in performance. Their shows deal with personal and cultural identity, taking place in open fields in front of an audience of peasant locals, who lap up the raunchy aspects and any agricultural references. Invariably, however, these same peasants chase the gang away in the end for being a corrupting element. One new Porno Gang recruit nervously relates onstage how he is a transvestite and lived a life of fear and secrets on his father’s farm, where his only companion was the family goat. The audience jeers and ridicules him, but is dumbstruck when he then gets on his knees and begins to fellate a horse. There are a number of unexpected and hard-hitting images such as this in the movie. Tellingly, the laughs and jeers of the audience appear genuine — as does the horse cock in this instance.

Life is exciting for the Porno Gang and their adventures are not without humour. The whole thing rings with cult and exploitation movie influence, which makes it a comparatively less edgy work than A Serbian Film. It is no coincidence that the idea of a travelling shock company resembles that of Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions, as featured in Waters’ Multiple Maniacs (1970).

As with A Serbian Film, it isn’t hard to unpick the allegory in The Life and Death of a Porno Gang. People it seems will always find ways to exploit misery for their own advantage. Thus we have the mysterious procurer and untrustworthy foreigner Franc. In his journalistic capacity, Franc had followed the Mujahideen into Bosnia and sold his gruesome film record to wealthy contacts in Europe and America. He may even have helped orchestrate some of the atrocities. “The Balkans are convenient for that sort of thing,” he laughs, presenting Marko with an example of what passes for entertainment with his clients overseas. The film clip features military garbed men chopping the head off a prisoner with a machete and then kicking the head among themselves like a football. When Marko accepts the mantle of snuff filmmaker, the supply of victims comes through Franc, each a willing participant with a good reason to die. We are to believe these people are all victims anyway. The state has failed them (like it does the American Indians in The Brave). But death can have benefits when played into the right hands. In Franc, the sick and desperate do at least have an option and a possible endowment for family and kin.

Most everyone is a tragic case. One old farmer wants money to help treat a daughter, who is disfigured by uranium dropped on the area by the military. The Porno Gang’s snuff pantomime in this instance takes place before a select live audience of overseas clients, brought in by Franc. But the event is compromised and everyone runs away anticipating a police raid, which leaves the job undone and the despairing old farmer begging for someone to kill him. Ultimately, however, this new life destroys the Porno Gang. Its members split and one by one are murdered or commit suicide. In the final scene, Marko’s artistic dreams are washed up and he believes he’s wasted his life pursuing them.

With The Life and Death of a Porno Gang and A Serbian Film, it seemed for a cinematic flicker as if a new form of grindhouse had been birthed, a type of confessional steeped in the misery of recent history. Perhaps all horror movies in Serbia were like this? Few in the West could know any different. The catalogue of Serbian horror movies is slim, however. The first recognized genre entry is the 1973 Leptirica (The She-Butterfly), followed by made for television efforts — often on a supernatural theme — through to the present, when a new breed of filmmaker took over.

Films are a product of a society and its culture. Consciously or otherwise they quantify the fears, anxieties and mindset of the times in which they are made. Exploitation films are particularly adept at this. Al Capone and organized crime gave rise to the gangster film in 1930s America; in the fifties, the shadow of the bomb sparked sci-fi nightmares of giant insects and colossal men; while in the sixties, the Vietnam War and civil unrest drew blood in the first gore films. So it is with A Serbian Film, Porno Gang and now Maja Milos’ Clip (2012). Critic Dejan Ognjanović recognizes these films as products of a collective angry imagination. These directors were formed by a daily bombardment of images of genuine conflict and physical abuse in their teenage years, which they translate into a bleak post-Milosevic landscape of eroded moral values and sexually explicit imagery. ‘Sentiments of injustice and abandonment,’ writes Ognjanović, ‘and motifs of orphans or absent parents, scar not just A Serbian Film but an entire wave of recent movies from the country.’[68] As atrocity exhibition, A Serbian Film makes a lot of sense.

Asked about the social and cultural impact of this work on his native Serbia, Ognjanović had this to say to the authors:

“The Life and Death of a Porno Gang is grudgingly accepted in most circles, while A Serbian Film remains an ugly duckling, despised and hated by the majority of the ‘regular audience’, mostly respected by younger critics and loathed by the elder. Unlike Gang, A Serbian Film does not have a regular Serbian DVD edition, nor is it likely to happen soon… When the film started playing in two Belgrade cinemas, it was also shown after 10pm or around midnight [an uncommon trait] to generally poor attendance — the bootleg version had been available for download for two or three months already and everyone who cared for it (mostly due to sensationalist articles in the media) had already seen it in their home. Other than a couple of festival screenings, it was not distributed nor otherwise shown in other Serbian cities.”[69]

But why this horror wave and why now? For a broader insight into the collective mindset, one might look to another maligned cinematic form. Before The Life and Death of a Porno Gang, director Mladena Ðorðević made a documentary on the subject of the Serbian porn industry. Made in Serbia (2005) is a personal and oftentimes touching account of the unassuming talent behind this marginal business. In it one can see the ideas and sentiment that would inform Ðorðević’s later work of grotesque fiction — not to mention Spasojević’s A Serbian Film, whose title is almost identical to that of Made in Serbia and embodies the same sense of national catharsis.

Porn films in Serbia (and formerly Yugoslavia) have not travelled very far since the clumsy first efforts of the late eighties.[70] They remain creatively and technically stilted. Serbian porn is evidently uncomfortable playing matters straight and opts instead for the puerile or broadly comic, with jokes told or staged during sex scenes. Consequently, porn consumers tend to favour more competent and more serious overseas product. One disgruntled commentator in Ðorðević’s documentary offers a plot summary of the last Serbian porn film he bothered to watch: It revolved around the star who was a fly, summarily landing on a pillow a few times and being swatted away. Our man didn’t much care for it. The excerpts offered in the documentary are a little more conservative, showing rather ordinary couples with middle aged spreads picking flowers and fornicating in fields, or hanging out the washing without any knickers on. Simeon is one male performer who is a builder by day and has the nickname the ‘Porno Peasant’. (A colleague says he is a better actor than he is a builder.) ErŽika is the homely mother of several children, who does porn when the family needs money for winter firewood.

There seems not to be the usual tragedies relating to the porn trade in Made in Serbia; no tales of depression, drug dependence or abuse. Neither does the documentary make much reference to politics.[71] It is a tender portrait of identity in decline, out of sorts with the visceral representation of Porno Gang and A Serbian Film. By and large the Serbian porn industry is populated by perfectly ordinary folk, with regular things to do in their lives. This observation translates as a eulogy in Porno Gang. It is easy to interpret Marko of that movie as a fictionalized version of the younger real-life Ðorðević, sharing grand plans to operate outside the box. Much like Marko, Ðorðević is an idealist at the start of his documentary, reacting against the dull formulaic homespun porn in the belief that he can make it relevant. In the end both men are disillusioned and change their minds; traditional values are indeed best.[72]

If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.

This remark, attributed to celebrated war photographer Robert Capa, is paraphrased in a number of feature films. The photojournalist in Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986) literally throws himself into the line of gunfire with his camera clicking, because he believes the one truly great shot is worth dying for.

Capa was among the first wave of US troops to land on Omaha beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He helped overcome his terror with a phrase picked up during the Spanish Civil War: “Es una cosa muy seria.” (This is a very serious business.) Perhaps the ‘great shot’ is the sign of truly great art — selfless and absolute. Or perhaps it is a wholly futile act, the death of the artist drawing respect and admiration over the quality of the work itself. Capa appears to have had it both ways. He became a celebrity in his own right during his lifetime. The pictures for which he risked his life on Omaha beach were almost all entirely ruined by a bungle at the processing lab in London. His most famous work on the other hand, which captures the moment a Spanish loyalist soldier is felled by gunfire during the Civil War in 1936, is criticized by some as a staged reconstruction for the camera.

Capa died while recording the conflict between the French and the Viet Minh in Indochina in 1954, stepping on a land mine.[73] The manner of his death has a noble inevitability about it, and Capa’s influence was to reach beyond photography to create a more dynamic caricature of the traditional news guy — hitherto portrayed in movies as a drab nuisance with notebook and pencil in hand. The combat photographer as hero was the theme of Man with a Camera, a US television series that aired between 1958–60. Charles Bronson, in an early acting role, plays freelance photographer Mike Kovac, snapping the sort of picture on his New York beat that no one else will. He isn’t afraid to throw a punch or solve a crime each week, either. Man with a Camera played up the dashing, intrepid, risk-taking persona that had evolved around Capa.[74] As did comic books. Camera Comics (US Camera Publications, 1944–46) ran stories with characters less concerned with depth of field than they were going toe-to-toe for America. On one cover, ‘George Ferguson, newspaper cameraman,’ his press pass safely tucked into his hat, slugs a Chinese underworld figure. On another cover, ‘Linda Lens, woman photographer’ knocks a German soldier for six with a swing of her camera. But this image was relatively fleeting, and the perception of the photojournalist took on less flattering and occasionally bizarre traits. In Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974–75), one of television’s few other riffs on the theme, Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) is a camera clicking journalist surrounded by literal monsters. The story Kolchak is pursuing each week is never quite the exposé he intends it to be, because the evidence — his photographic record — is invariably destroyed. This leaves him prone to humiliation and ridicule, a far cry from Mike Kovac.

Back to movies. Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) tells the story of a young actress driven to a prescient death by an overbearing director. Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch) is coaxed out of self-imposed retirement to make a picture about Lylah Clare, a thirties film star who died under vague circumstances twenty years ago. In the lead role is Elsa Brinkmann (Kim Novak), an ingénue who moves into the decadent Zarkan household and soon becomes dominated by the personality of the dead actress. Zarkan falls into a volatile relationship with Elsa, as he did with Lylah. For the final scene of the movie, he goads Elsa into falling to her death from a trapeze before the cameras.

Based on a television drama of the same name,[75] Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare is a cynical portrayal of Hollywood. “Did she love me? Did she hate me? What’s the difference?” laments Zarkon to Elsa, whom he confuses with Lylah (and at one point berates her for having the grace of “a spastic Catherine the Great”). Later, seeking to rewrite Lylah’s sordid death, he switches the reality of a squalid fall from atop a staircase to a ridiculously resplendent mishap under a circus big top. Elsa plummets from the trapeze onto the sawdust for real, the direct consequence of professional and personal demands Zarkan makes of her. “Just keep your cameras rolling,” he barks at his crew, panning across to the dying actress now surrounded by sad-faced clowns. The critics hail the picture a masterpiece.

Zarkan is given to pursuing his obsession by any means necessary. Carl Denham was of much the same disposition in King Kong (1933). For the filmmaker who captures the giant ape and brings him to New York, death and glory are not an option; Denham is driven by ambition and greed, and isn’t going to die for anybody, let alone his art. But there are those who seek to document death itself: The mad artist, in no uncertain terms. The personification of snuff filmmaker as mad artist is Chris Neville (Eric Bogosian) in Larry Cohen’s Special Effects (1984). Neville is a big shot Hollywood movie director forced to reconsider his work after a humiliating disaster at the box office. Everyone in town is laughing at him, even the hookers and wannabes. “You’re losin’ it!” taunts Andrea (Zoe Tamarlis), who discovers Neville’s penchant for secretly filming his sexual conquests. In a rage Neville strangles the girl and frames her husband for the murder, which inspires the intimate and edgy film project he so desperately craves. Neville manipulates the people around him, documenting their behaviour as the murder case unfolds. But when the snuff reel that features Andrea’s murder is inadvertently destroyed, Neville loses his key scene and is forced to locate another unwitting starlet for a reshoot.

Larry Cohen cut his teeth in television, creating The Invaders (1967–68) and writing episodes of famous shows like The Fugitive (1963–67) and Columbo (1971–2003). His directorial efforts often focus on the fantastic, It’s Alive (1974), Q (1982) and The Stuff (1985) being examples of this sort of Cohen film. Every bit as provocative if less fantastical are films like Dial Rat (1972) and Special Effects, the latter a personal favourite for Cohen. In interview, the director said the film was a reaction to biopics about certain dead actresses, such as Dorothy Stratton and Frances Farmer, celebrated not for being great artists, but for having led tragic lives. “Their whole claim to fame is that they went insane or got murdered,” Cohen told Shock Xpress. “You get to the point where anybody who gets murdered is worth making a film about… We live in a world where insanity and murder qualify you to be the subject of a major motion picture.”[76]

Special Effects shares a strong affinity with Noel Black’s Cover Me Babe, mentioned at the start of this chapter. The principal characters of both films consider themselves great filmmakers and are fascinated with the televised death of Lee Harvey Oswald. In Special Effects, Neville is at home watching the familiar news footage of Oswald’s assassination when Andrea calls.

“What makes it real?” Neville tests the girl.

“Because I know it happened,” Andrea replies.

“Would you know if you hadn’t seen it on the news?”

“Nobody could fake that.”

“What makes it different?” Neville presses. “What if there’s no difference: real death/make-believe death?”

A similar dilemma was the twist in the tail for ‘Death and the Lady’, an episode of the designer cop show Miami Vice (air date October 16, 1987). Crockett and Tibbs (Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas) investigate an extrovert filmmaker who they believe has had a woman killed on camera. The director is evasive. The two cops eventually trace the woman in the film and find her very much alive. But comes the punchline, a snuff bluff: She turns out to be a double and the actual subject is indeed dead, victim to “bloodless, brutal exploitation”.

Jörg Buttgereit’s Der Todesking (1990) is a portmanteau loosely based on seven suicides. On Monday, a man arrives home from work, gets into the bath and takes an overdose of pills. On Tuesday, another man watching a horror film shoots his wife, which in turn is an episode playing on a television set in a room where a body hangs from a noose. On Wednesday, a troubled girl finds herself next to a troubled man on a park bench. He shoots himself with the gun she offers. And so on, each day a different suicide. The Saturday episode is of consequence here. A projector plays several reels of Super 8 film. The first of these are test reels, cutting then to a young woman posing in front of a mirror, wearing a camera harnessed to her shoulder and holding a gun. The camera takes us to a crowded concert hall where a band is playing onstage. This film is silent. The pistol is lifted into shot and fired at the band and then into the audience, killing several people. Someone else pulls a gun and fires on the camerawoman-assassin, whereupon the episode ends.

Buttgereit is the director of Nekromantik (1987) and Nekromantik 2 (1991), grisly low-budget movies that feature love triangles between young necrophiles and their decomposing lovers. Der Todesking was Buttgereit’s second full length feature. Of the Saturday segment above, he said in interview:

This episode is based on several true crime incidents. Like Charles Whitman climbing on top of a building, shooting all these students and being aware of the fact that he can’t get away with it because he’s trapped himself on the roof. It’s a kind of suicide. She’s committing suicide as opposed to just killing other people. She wants to be sure that people know about it. She wants to be recognized.[77]

In The Art of Dying (1991), the directorial debut of Wings Hauser, wannabe actors and actresses are murdered in Tinseltown by a crackpot film director. Francis (Gary Werntz) is restaging classic cinema death scenes for a feature-length snuff movie. One young Hollywood hopeful is murdered in the manner of the Russian roulette sequence from The Deer Hunter. The actor sits at a table, wearing a bandanna and holding a revolver. Dissatisfied with the boy’s performance, Francis calls for another take and the scene begins again. The boy puts the gun to his head and delivers his lines. But it’s still not right. An assistant slaps the boy across the face, leaving him incensed and seething. Camera rolling, the boy jams the gun into his mouth and… blows his brains out. “That’s the way it should have been shot originally!” Francis is jubilant, having captured the boy’s death in stark black and white. Other movies that inspire Francis are Psycho, The Godfather and Joan of Arc. For Brian De Palma’s Scarface, he dices two people with a chainsaw.[78]

The media calls them the ‘Road Warriors’. But the filmmaking troupe of Killer Flick (1998) simply want to make a movie. Working out of motel rooms and diners, they create carnage and commit murder for a script no one is able to agree on. In one sequence, the filmmakers — Rome (Zen Todd), One Eye (Christian Leffler), Max (Emmett Grennan), Buzz (Creighton Howard) and Tess (Kathleen Walsh) — hold up a security truck and take the guards hostage in the street. They push a script under the nose of one and tell him to read the part of Guard #1. It isn’t very good, so they shoot him. Guard #2 is much better. The crew travel to Hollywood and meet their hero, exploitation veteran Virgil Morgan (Fred Dennis), who they force to appear in the movie at gunpoint.

Killer Flick is frivolous. But it’s also inventive and pre-empts John Waters’ more entertaining Cecil B. DeMented (2000), another movie about rogue filmmakers who kidnap their star and commit acts of violence for the sake of cinema. The film jumps from colour to black and white at random (occasionally during the same sequence), with the crew referring to their lives and the lives of those around them in terms of film and soundtrack. “We need a story,” someone says early on. “Not just random acts of violence.” They agree to let a black man ride with them because his presence will increase the audience demographic. When his behaviour is very much against type they let him go again. Tess on the other hand stays on board. She criticizes the screenplay for its inherent sexism, later flashing and jiggling her breasts in order to distract cops in the midst of a shoot-out. In the final scene, pursued by a gun-toting Virgil Morgan in the role of Sheriff, the Road Warriors fire off rounds while deliberating on a title for their movie.

Sean Tretta’s The Great American Snuff Movie (2003) follows William Allen Grone (Mike Marsh), a serial killer and amateur filmmaker with a monotone voice and a passion for the raw purity of Super 8. Along with an accomplice, the bucktooth Roy (Ryan Hutman), Grone kidnaps two young women with the intention of making a snuff film. Official records state that such things as snuff films don’t exist, Grone volunteers at one point, feeding a belief that he is doing something special. When one of the girls is killed prematurely, Grone foregoes his ‘original vision’ and adopts a new plan of action: “An execution. A single moment so powerful and pure that it does not need to be challenged.” The resultant footage, silent, in colour and scratched, shows a bullet to the head of the victim. He calls it “the great American snuff film”.

Panned as a badly acted, low-budget misfire, Tretta does at least bring credibility to the character of Grone. He is a serial killer with a totally flat personality, boring in fact. He obsesses over minutiae, such as the van in which the victims are carried. If it wasn’t for this van, Grone deliberates, there would probably be no killings. Flashback to how the van was acquired. He also walks us through his Super 8 developing process.[79]

Accessing snuff filmmakers as mad and unscrupulous artists, William Allen Grone stands apart in that he is dull. The resurgence of snuff in the late nineties engendered a specific type of postmodern madness that was brash and flash, so much so, in fact, it’s a miracle these gauche individuals evade attention for as long as they do. Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare) in 8MM, for instance, is described by one character as “the Jim Jarmusch of S&M”. His ego more resembles Salvador Dalì’s. Another S&M filmmaker moonlighting in snuff is the elusive Dr Hades (Anita Auer) of Snuff Trap. She too believes her work is great art. To reach her office, clients must pass through a room where a looped voice announces they have arrived in the antechamber of Dr Hades.[80]

The central madcap character in Bernard Rose’s Snuff aka Snuff-Movie (2005)[81] is a reclusive Hollywood film director, whose beautiful wife and friends were killed in the sixties by hippies. Nowadays, Boris Arkardin (Jeroen Krabbé) is obsessed with making a different type of picture that will marry past and present, real and make-believe. The methodology is not entirely clear, although it includes elements of demonic worship, reality television, the Internet and snuff. (Plus an appearance by documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield as himself.) Despite star presence in the shape of Jeroen Krabbé (credited here as Jason Krabbé), Snuff is a low-budget affair and stylistically removed from director Rose’s other work, which includes Candyman (1992) and Mr Nice (2010). Rose himself considers it to be “the Dr Strangelove of snuff movies”, which suggests he’s not wholly serious about it.[82] Frankly it’s a bit of a mess and comes over as a naughty riff on the tragedy that ties Roman Polanski to Charles Manson. Arkardin, channelling Polanksi, was supposedly aware his loved ones would be slaughtered on that fateful day and perhaps in cahoots with the hippies who did it. What’s more, the murders were captured on film (which brings into play some of the ideas pertaining to Manson-snuff[83]). In his new cinematic venture, however, complete unknowns working without a script are filmed in secret at Arkadian’s mansion home. The film is a ritual through which the barmy director is determined to “make the past live again, if only for a brief moment”. More deaths are required for the plan to work, along with the resurrection of the homicidal hippies (who wear an x on their foreheads and behave like vampires). Everything that takes place in the house is streamed to a website called Snuff Movie. The resultant movie will never be granted a commercial release. But Arkadian boasts that it won’t need to; it will be all over the Internet. The conspiracy theory buried in Rose’s Snuff might have proven difficult to voice outside a picture less mad. Unfortunately, that’s all it has going for it.

Flawed but more entertaining is Skeleton Crew (2008), a Finnish production directed by Tero Molin and Tommi Lepola with a supernatural bent. A film crew on location in an abandoned mental institution are shooting a low-budget horror movie when a sealed screening room is discovered. It contains film equipment and 8mm film reels showing a series of torture-murders that took place on the premises. Everyone is horrified, except for director Steve (Steve Porter), who falls under the spell of the films. Frustrated by the fictions of his own production, Steve is soon killing off cast and crew and filming their deaths on a cine camera he has found.

Skeleton Crew grinds a variety of horror film motifs through the snuff myth. It displays everything from urban exploration and spirits of the dead through to surreal film-within-a-film twists. Director Steve is regarded as an asshole by his crew and soon enough is killing them off with gleeful abandon, having become obsessed with the real image of horror. At first he supplants a film prop with a genuine power drill in order to capture the blood and terror that results when an actress receives an impromptu lobotomy. Later on, he kills without pretence.

The secret chamber with a cabinet full of snuff reels is the movie at its most satisfying. Scenes of Steve watching the snuff footage with the ghosts of victims — or perhaps murderers — literally peering over his shoulder are an overstatement, but otherwise an interesting projection of the power of the snuff myth. The worn out silent 8mm footage shows a succession of victims bound to a metal chair. They are in turn bludgeoned, set on fire and attacked with hammer and nails by a doctor in a mask and his assistant, a nurse in a fetishistic white uniform. In the end the power of the image has become so great that Steve is able to use it to corrupt the very law of physics, while laughing maniacally, of course. When the final girl kills herself in order to rob Steve’s murder movie of its dénouement, he simply brings her back to life and fulfils his ambition anyway.

The concept of the mad artist extends to other mad occupations. For example, in Lamberto Bava’s The Torturer (2005) it is a mad film producer, in Mariano Peralta’s Snuff 102 (2007) it is a mad film critic, and in Joe Stauffer’s Pieces of Talent (2012) it is something in the shape of David Long (credited as ‘himself’), who creates aggressive mechanical sculptures and murders people on film for fun. After he is inexplicably befriended by Charlotte (Kristi Ray), a hostess in a titty bar, David’s world-view changes somewhat. He continues to murder people on camera, but the operation is with a new found sense of purpose. “It really is all about you now, not them,” David explains to the mortified Charlotte in the big reveal. The killing of Charlotte’s alcoholic mother (Barbara Weetman) becomes David’s pièce de résistance. With this he has liberated Charlotte and selflessly sends her on her way to find a new life. It is a moment of clarity in an otherwise lumbering and unlikely story.

The Torturer on the other hand is as straight as a die. It opens with the graphic mutilation of a bound woman — hook into a breast, blowtorch on thigh — and concludes much the same way. “You can’t believe how many people go crazy watching snuff movies,” offers the beneficent if deranged Hector (Emilio De Marchi). “They love it!”

Lamberto Bava, son of respected cinematographer Mario Bava, is no stranger to horror and exploitation. Macabre (1980), A Blade in the Dark (1985) and Demons (1985) are some of his better known works. The Torturer is not among them, being a pitiful excuse for a giallo. Alex Sherba (Simone Corrente) is a troubled director whose unorthodox manner and films are an embarrassment to producer-stepfather Hector. “Fifteen minutes of media coverage doesn’t make you an artist,” yells the self-styled mentor, having caught Alex auditioning a semi-nude acolyte with the help of a Stanley knife. The Torturer telegraphs the identity of the killer in these opening scenes, rendering the constant subterfuge redundant. Scenes showing the abuse of aspiring young actresses are scattered randomly throughout and delivered with perverted élan. A flogging with a cat’o’nine tails seems to last forever. Of course the guileless Hector is committing and filming these acts (having traded the patent black leather gloves traditionally associated with giallo for their disposable latex equivalent, which a film handler might use). Hector shows his true nature in the end, a master of the theatre of death. “Not even in your wildest flights of fantasy could you match this,” he goads while drowning Alex’s girlfiend. “And it’s real, Alex. Real! Not fake!”

The Torturer is a picture of restraint next to Mariano Peralta’s Snuff 102. This Argentine production follows three women, who have nothing in common but for the fact they end up victim to a snuff filmmaker. Each is identified only by a number scrawled onto a mini-DV tape. We learn that victim 102 is a journalist, who was interviewing a film critic on the subject of snuff films when she was abducted. She discovered her subject’s predilection for such material in a secret stash of incriminating photographs.

In a visual sense, Snuff 102 harks back to the Cinema of Transgression, the independent post punk film scene out of New York and its cast of non actors. Here the similarity ends, however, and director Peralta lacks the gallows humour of Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Casandra Stark, et al. Snuff 102 is brutal and guileless, with scenes going so far as to show one pregnant victim being stomped on until she aborts. Genuine atrocity clips taken from the Internet also appear arbitrarily. These include animal slaughter and some heavy BDSM, in which a woman has her breasts nailed to a table. Her (real) screams are used to flavour the (fictitious) snuff episodes, slowed down to a drone on the soundtrack. It’s a movie that plays out with sad inevitability, despite the erratic nature of its parts. Still, the slowed down drone is a nice touch.

BEHIND THE WILD EYE

And so we arrive at the final straight, where feature films cross to another cinematic form, and the fictionalized death image swells to something altogether more cruel. Case in point: The spurious filmmaker at the heart of Paolo Cavara’s The Wild Eye (1967) is the totem of a specific trend taking place in sixties’ cinema: The mondo film. Philippe Leroy plays Paolo, a filmmaker forever conniving for the sake of a good shot. He travels the world with a small film crew in search of arresting sights and situations. On one expedition, he convinces a group of tourists in his care that they are stuck in the desert without water and on the edge of death — simply so that he might film their reactions. In Singapore he has old men viciously beaten for the sake of capturing the scene on camera, while in Saigon he attempts to find and pay for a Buddhist monk willing to martyr himself. In Saigon he is also complicit in the execution of a Viet Cong soldier, rearranging the firing squad to better suit the light and framing of the shot. When he hears from informants that a busy local bar has been targeted for bombing, Paolo insists on filming inside it. He is ecstatic when the bomb goes off and orders Valentino (Gabriele Tinti), his cameraman, to capture close-ups of the carnage and dead bodies. One unexpected casualty is Paolo’s lover, Barbara (Delia Boccardo). He appears genuinely moved, but doesn’t miss the opportunity to capture his grief on film as he locates her corpse among the rubble. This marks the end of the movie.

It is no coincidence that the central character in The Wild Eye is blessed with Paolo Cavara’s own first name. The director-screenwriter was clearly close to the project, having known firsthand the life it portrays. Much like his namesake, Cavara travelled the world shooting material for the new vogue in documentary called the mondo film. He co-directed the seminal Mondo Cane with Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi in 1962, and was himself director of a number of its imitations.

The mondo film, or shockumentary, was a type of travelogue that purported to show the world in all its raw, sexy, exciting glory. It was not without subterfuge and instances of outright fabrication. Many sequences in The Wild Eye behave exactly like those found in mondo films, and the unscrupulous Paolo’s orchestration of events is telling in this respect. It is not difficult to consider Cavara as some kind of mondo whistle-blower.

An aged sultan with several wives isn’t much of a story, so Paolo reduces the lamentable subject to a sultan forced to eat butterflies for nourishment. Barbara isn’t impressed and says she feels sorry for the old man. Paolo chides her for being “much too attached to reality”. His role as filmmaker, by contrast, is very important. “You see a degraded, humiliated man and you don’t realize that through him I represent the decline of the audience.”

An antecedent of both The Wild Eye and Mondo Cane is the oddball The Savage Eye (1959). Directed by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick, this is effectively a documentary that does its utmost to masquerade as fictional drama. The narrative follows Barbara Baxley as the contemplative Judith McGuire, a divorcée newly arrived in Los Angeles. Her journey is merely a hook for a series of fly-on-the-wall observational pieces, focusing on the hustle and bustle of everyday life in the big city. It’s an episodic potpourri. There are real scenes of people greeting one another at an airport, police tending to automobile accidents, men transfixed by a burlesque dancer, the infirm being blessed in church, derelicts crawling along the street, couples who kiss and cuddle, and so on. Sometimes Judith appears as part of the vignette, wandering at a distance. But more often she is absent. Sometimes the people being observed are aware of the camera, others are clearly oblivious to it.

There is no real linear progression to The Savage Eye and no dialogue as such, only Judith’s uneasy deliberation on the human condition. These are thoughts she shares with an invisible muse (the voice of Gary Merrill), introduced in the film as perhaps ghost, Judith’s double or maybe even her conscience. In the end, driving down a freeway, Judith is involved in an accident and experiences a near death experience. She recovers in hospital and volunteers a suitably abstract digression on the meaning of it all. “Was it sin or ceremony?” she wonders. But then, “who falls upwards into a sin of blood?”

The sentiment might well be a meditation on the film itself, conveying some of the unusual flavour of a unique if largely forgotten cinematic effort. For the car crash, shots of the actress are spliced between voyeuristic glimpses of random drivers on the freeway and bedridden patients on the hospital ward. One assumes the idea was to bring to the film the illusion of structure, but the result is akin to something Frederick Wiseman and Doris Wishman might have cooked up together in an alternate film universe — being singularly prosaic and exploitative.

We have in The Savage Eye the harbinger of Mondo Cane. Both films offer an intimate look at other lives, beautifully framed and shot. But the similarities go deeper, with scenes in the two films mirroring one another. Among them a barroom full of drunks spilling onto the street, and a visit to a pet cemetery. The counterpoint and juxtaposition used to excellent effect in Mondo Cane is already in place in The Savage Eye. One instance of this: The revelry of a long Saturday night is followed by a drab carwash on Sunday and a visit to church. The laconic narrator (Judith’s ghost) reminds us that “On the morning of the sixth day, the stars declined and the sun rose. And out of a handful of fire and dust, garbage and alcohol, God created Man.” Elsewhere, Judith ponders a bunch of drag queens mugging for the camera and asks, “False tassel or false testicle?”

This is the savage eye of the film’s title. It is the kind of lyrical cynicism adopted by Jacopetti for his scathing monologue in Mondo Cane. A former journalist and news cameraman, Jacopetti took a dismissive and accusatory glance at whatever crawled across the screen in Mondo Cane. This attitude was to become a foundation stone for mondo cinema in general.

The sixties had given birth to a new breed of investigate reporter, the mondo filmmaker, who went off around the world in search of content while primed to put the boot in. The competition was stiff, and so each trip had to bag something bigger and more dynamic than what had gone before. If we read Cavara’s The Wild Eye as a case of mondo whistle-blowing, Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust brings us full circle to what is effectively an anti-mondo film. It uses favoured mondo composer Riz Ortolani for the musical score, and even shares some footage with mondo films.[84] We see the fictional crew of Cannibal Holocaust as corrupt and they die horribly for their filmmaking sins. They are also portrayed as American; whereas their real life duplicitous mondo counterparts were Italian. Deodato castigates the mondo filmmakers. But at the same time hesitates to identify those directly responsible, i.e. his countrymen. This is put to rights in the next chapter.

1Cover Me Babe — filmed under the title Run, Shadow, Run — proved a problem picture for the studio. Twentieth Century Fox were of the opinion that it fell too closely in line with a spate of adult-oriented pictures, from which the old guard were hoping to distance themselves.

2These credits are absent from the film itself. They were unearthed many years later.

3Not forgetting Jesus Franco’s (and to some extent Franco Prosperi’s) trilogy Cannibals (1979), Cannibal Terror (1979) and The Devil Hunter (1980); Giuseppe Maria Scotese’s Cannibali Domani (1983) and Roy Garrett’s Amazonia (1986). There are also some peculiar hybrids: Aristide Massaccesi’s Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977), Franco Martinelli’s Zombie Holocaust (1980), Anthony Dawson’s Cannibal Apocalypse (1980) and Joe D’Amato’s Anthropophagous the Beast (1980).

4In his essay ‘“I Wonder Who the Real Cannibals Are”: Latin America and Colonialism in European Exploitation Cinema,’ Andrew Syder talks about Cannibal Holocaust in terms of a critique of Italian colonialism, building upon ‘colonial dimensions of adventure fiction’. Deodato himself, on the other hand, speaking in the documentary The Long Road Back from Hell (2011), has said that his target in Cannibal Holocaust was primarily the Italian media and the cultural and political bias that favours northern Italy over the south. With this in mind, much of Italian exploitation in general is open to fresh appraisal.

5Jean-Paul Lacmant, Fantasy Film Memory no 1.

6Interview with Carl Yorke in The Long Road Back from Hell (2011).

7See chapter nine: NEO-TOKYO IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE.

8In keeping with BBFC attitudes toward animals in film and concordance with the Human Rights Act 1998, the orchestrated suffering and death of any vertebrate is a potential problem, which is why the muskrat scene is still missing from the British print. On the other hand, the execution of the turtle and pig in the film are a quick, clean kill and therefore pose less of a problem.

9The edit released by Shameless is also said to contain an additional ten seconds of the ‘Last Road to Hell’ segment, hitherto unseen.

10With almost every sequence of carnage and horror, Riz Ortolani’s anthemic musical soundtrack shifts from a series of sombre synth blips straight into the rather joyous and uplifting main theme.

11Tom Dewier is better known as a Hollywood stunt man.

12Erik Sulev writes in European Trash Cinema (vol 2 no 10) that the Ontario Censor Board utilized the snuff footage from Emanuelle in America as part of a public display meant to justify the Board’s existence, and it was on a walk-through tour that Cronenberg first saw the footage.

13Cronenberg interview in Cinéfantastique vol 12 no 2/3, cited in Julian Petley’s article ‘V.D. O’Nasty’ (Wayne Drew [ed.], BFI Dossier 21: David Cronenberg). Elsewhere, we hear that the screen treatment of Videodrome was titled Network of Blood. Tim Lucas, ‘The Image of Virus’ in Piers Handling (ed.), The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg. No critic has sought to complete a thematic triptych with Network, Videodrome and Brian De Palma’s horror musical Phantom of the Paradise (1974), another movie of the same era where violence — specifically death and murder — is touted as television entertainment. It ends with a blood orgy that is broadcast live. Look also to the Nigel Kneale penned BBC drama The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) for live on-air killings as a ratings boost.

14See chapter eight: BLOOD AND GUTS AND IN LIVING COLOUR.

15Chaim Bianco and Steven Saylor’s quirky The Pope of Utah (1993) would also feature a live on air suicide shooting. In this instance the subject is a televangelist who is victim of a blackmail plot.

16Then again, maybe The Tournament is a joke and we missed it? After all, Robert Carlyle is here playing a Catholic priest…

17Judge Calabrese made the request in November 1994, having passed sentence on one Tyson Dixon in a particularly brutal murder case. ‘The surprise came,’ wrote Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times (December 9, 1994), ‘when the judge proposed that the execution be televised, and that it be accessible to other media as well.’ Donahue on the other hand had accepted a request made by David Lawson that his execution for murder should be videotaped and broadcast. The authorities refused to allow it. Lawson was put to death in North Carolina’s gas chamber in June 1994. An opponent of the death penalty, Donahue maintained that the public had the right to see executions and decide whether capital punishment is right or wrong. (Buddy Van Horn’s The Dead Pool [1988], the fifth and silliest of the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movies, has a scene where a man demands his suicide by fire is televised.)

18In the early eighties, ‘the first video shop in Burnley town centre was informing its customers that Dead and Buried was a genuine snuff film.’ Letter to the authors, quoted in David Kerekes and David Slater’s See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy.

19Evil Dead Trap is a fever dream inspired in part by Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977). Marginally more interesting is the follow-up Evil Dead Trap 2 Hideki (1992). It bears little resemblance to the original story, except for another central character who works as a television presenter, and another confusing finale involving monstrous rebirth. The director, Izô Hashimoto, was responsible for Lucy Sky Diamond (1990), a short film mistaken by some as part of the Guinea Pig series. See chapter seven: THE GUINEA PIG SERIES.

20A review of the film on the Canuxploitation! website closes with the recommendation that ‘The Dark Side is worth a look. That is, if you can ever find it — this film is so obscure, you have a better chance of finding a snuff film under the seat of a cab.’

21See also chapter nine: SNUFF LITERATURE.

22Not the former MC5 guitarist.

23All quotes credited to Elias come from an email interview with the authors, dated March 11, 2013.

24Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.

25In this respect, MFB likened Osterman Weekend to a video game, having ‘the look of a world reduced to an easily consumable flow of video images’. The Osterman Weekend, review by Richard Combs. Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1983.

26The man also responsible for the poorly received Mountaintop Motel Massacre (1986).

27Better known, if known at all, for directing The Treasure of Jamaica Reef aka Evil in the Deep (1975).

28Quoted in Colin Harding and Simon Popple’s In the Kingdom of the Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema.

29The western playing is Giulio Petroni’s E per tetto un cielo di stelle (1968), which is identified in the end credits.

30Steve Puchalski review of Thrill Kill Video Club in Shock Cinema no 4 (1992).

31Letter from Robert Pritchard to the authors, not dated. But circa 1992/93.

32According to the Videas website, The Vacancy was shot almost entirely at the Liptons supermarket in Holyhead, which is now a branch of the Co-operative Bank. A lovely if uninteresting fact.

33This distinction is now held by Method (2011), the first Videas film in twenty years, a comic stalk and slash set among a touring theatre company.

34According to IMDb trivia, a distressed man confronted McNaughton following a festival screening in 1989. He reprimanded the director for making a movie about a murderer who gets away in the end, without punishment or any moral resolution. “You can’t do that,” he told McNaughton.

35Interview with Tom Towles by Michael Helms, ‘The Real Ottis versus the Fake Otis.’ Fatal Visions no 12 (April/May 1992).

36Pre-dating McNaughton, Mark Blair’s Confessions of a Serial Killer (1985) is another movie inspired by Lucas and his murder buddy association with O’Toole. Here, the killers take Polaroids of their victims.

37‘So, You Killed Your Mother? An interview with the REAL Henry,’ by Greg Geisler. Film Threat Video Guide no 1 (Winter 1991).

38Ian Gilchrist, ‘Adventures with the Censor: The BBFC and Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer,’ heyuguys. co.uk.

39Quotes from the filmmakers are taken from the Man Bites Dog UK press release.

40Cops itself is indebted to a much earlier, award winning documentary film, The Police Tapes (1976). Directed by Alan and Susan Raymond for television, and filmed in a completely handheld vérité style, The Police Tapes focuses upon officers working the beat of the 44th Precinct in South Bronx. The grittiness of the film, situations therein and the lives it portrays makes Cops appear utterly sanitized by comparison. On another note, Tim Ritter’s Dirty Cop No Donut (1998) is a lampoon of Cops. A cameraman rides with police officer Gus Kimball (Joel D. Wynkoop) over the course of an evening. Abusing his power, Kimball procures sex from a prostitute, castrates a known felon at gunpoint and confiscates narcotics for his own use. The most entertaining scenes place Kimball in a real world environment. In a convenience store he refuses to pay for snacks because he is the law. The end credits inform the viewer that the whole thing has been a charade and Kimball is not a cop at all, but a psychiatric patient.

41It purports to show the rigmarole of daily life for one young man on New York’s Upper West Side, obsessed with film and women.

42Directors Anciano and Burdis had taken much the same approach to their BBCTV comedy series Operation Good Guys (1997–2000), a television mockumentary. The fly-on-the wall illusion is ruined by the addition of a laughter track later in the series.

43Graham Reznick’s I Can See You (2008) plays around with logic in much the same way. It isn’t a found footage movie, but has a similar vibe to Yellowbrickroad nonetheless.

44Megan is Missing is a bit of a departure for Goi, a cinematographer on some popular American television shows.

45The children’s charity, KlaasKids Foundation, have been particularly supportive in this respect. Their testimonial appears on Meganismissing.com.

46Supernatural tinged found footage films are plentiful, but some examples are Daniel Stamm’s The Last Exorcism (2010), Charles Torrens’ Apartment 143 (2011) and Scott Derrickson’s Sinister (2012). On the other hand, demonic possession is a found footage subgenre unto itself.

47Minutes later, Bill Zebub is shown too drunk to be able to direct a scene in one of his own movies.

48An extension of Karel Roden’s twitchy psychopath Slovak can be found in Running Scared (2005), where he plays another East European criminal, this time a fanatical John Wayne fan who has a tattoo of the Duke on his back. He laments the loss of a childhood 8mm film projector and doesn’t much care for westerns shown on television because Wayne often dies. “I want my 8mm back because on that one the Duke lives.”

49Roger Ebert, review of 15 Minutes dated March 9, 2001, on his website. Ebert’s prophecy would be fulfilled over a decade later with the case of Luka Magnotta. See chapter ten: ONE LUNATIC ONE ICEPICK AND THE LIVES OF LUKA MAGNOTTA.

50Fred Vogel, email to the authors, June 17, 2008.

51Harmony Korine appears to have been influenced much the same as Vogel. It’s difficult not to draw a comparison between Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009) and Vogel’s own earlier film. Another episodic, non-narrative effort, Trash Humpers follows a small group of cackling miscreants in old person masks filming themselves behaving badly. Amy Taubin for Film Comment called it ‘a Dadaist delight’ and likened it to the work of Jack Smith. The press kit for Trash Humpers echoes the one for August Underground (sic throughout): ‘This movie is more like An Artifact, its Like something found somewhere and unearthed AN OLD VHS TAPE that was in some Attick OR Buried in some Ditch.’

52To be discussed later. See chapter eleven: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT.

53Fred Vogel and Christie Whiles speaking in the film S&MAN.

54Dialogue exchange in Anthony Waller’s Mute Witness (1994).

55The most jarring element of this exploitation potboiler is the realization that Sir Alec Guinness is in it. He doesn’t do a lot, beyond speaking a handful of menacing lines from the back seat of a car. From all accounts, the retired Guinness shot his scenes some years prior to the actual production of Mute Witness, as a favour to the young director. He had no idea he was in it until he read a review in a trade paper.

56Dolores Tierney, ‘The Appeal of the Real in Snuff: Tesis (Thesis),’ in Axes to Grind: Re-Imagining the Horrific in Visual Media and Culture, Spectator Special Issue Fall (2002).

57Gregory McDonald is best known for having created the Fletch series of novels, which inspired the successful movies starring Chevy Chase.

58See review in chapter two.

59At home, in his bedroom, Machine listens to his record collection. During a cat and mouse sequence, it is one of Machine’s records, locked in its run-out groove, that furnishes the film with its most subtle and chilling moment. But Machine’s musical taste is interesting in itself. He listens to industrial, which in Hollywood evidently equates to a person of an unreliable or unstable disposition. A case in point is the serial rapist in Lamont Johnson’s Lipstick (1976), a composer by day whose electronic compositions are used in court, and indeed the movie, against him.

60From the Cattle Decapitation 2012 album, Monolith of Inhumanity. The video is promoted as ‘The Most NSFW Music Video Ever’.

61The director of Forced Gender Reassignment is Mitch Massie. Self-proclaimed one-man production house, Massie also directed an explicit snuff themed music video for the track Welcome To The Gryndhouse by Reverend Fang Gory featuring Red 13.

62Mattei shot Zombies: The Beginning as Vincent Dawn, the pseudonym under which he made Zombie Creeping Flesh back in the eighties. Zombie Creeping Flesh had the distinction of being a ‘video nasty’ in Britain and is favoured by horror film fans of the era.

63One of the extras on the DVD release of Vacancy is ‘Mason’s Video Picks: Extended Snuff Films.’ This is a collection of the snuff footage glimpsed in the movie, back to back in its entirety. Without the context of a narrative (but with plenty of static and picture roll), this material gives an indication of just how attitudes have changed at the BBFC since Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer.

64Director’s statement, A Serbian Film UK website.

65The BBFC hadn’t bothered to do likewise with Nick Palumbo’s Murder-Set-Pieces (2004), banned outright in February 2008. As with A Serbian Film, this too contains graphic scenes of torture and murder, sometimes with minors in proximity to the crimes and on occasion victims themselves. As the title suggests there is no story as such, but a series of bloody murder scenes. At one point, the no-name lead (Sven Garrett), a homicidal Neo-Nazi who photographs his female victims, is seen in an adult video store. He tells the clerk he is “looking for a snuff film called the Nutbag”, which is a sly nod to Palumbo’s pedestrian directorial debut from 2000. Palumbo is evidently a horror fan boy at heart. But this self-mythologizing swung no favour with the BBFC. The Board deduced that cuts wouldn’t suffice and to pass the movie would prove unacceptable to the public. Unlike A Serbian Film, Murder-Set-Pieces happens to be an English language production with no subtitles, echoing the sort of hypocritical thinking that favoured Man Bites Dog over Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer some years earlier.

66Alas, this didn’t prevent a police raid on a UK branch of Blockbuster following a customer complaint. According to a report posted on the Register website dated January 26, 2011, a copy of A Serbian Film was removed from Blockbuster Northampton after a member of the public said it contained child abuse. It was returned once police were satisfied that the copy was legitimate and had been passed by the BBFC. Nevertheless, this single complaint resulted in an immediate ban of the movie by Blockbuster stores nationwide, prior to the collapse of the Blockbuster chain.

67Dejan Ognjanović, ‘The Art of Atrocity: A Serbian Film,’ article and interview with Srðan Spasojević, Rue Morgue no 106.

68Ibid.

69Dejan Ognjanović, emails to the authors, March 26 and 28, 2013.

70A film called Vesna (c.1989) advertises itself as the first Serbian entry into porn.

71The only caveat in this respect is made in passing by two of the performers. During an excited conversation, Dino calls himself a Yugoslav as opposed to a Serb, and quickly corrects himself. Elsewhere in the documentary, Simeon states outright that he loves Serbia but not Yugoslavia.

72One influencing factor on Ðorðević is clearly producer Slobodan Stankovic, who is just as likely to film a rock concert or a political speech as he is porn. He appears throughout Made in Serbia. Anticipating the theme of Ðorðević’s Porno Gang, one Stanković shoot is called Porno Guerilla, which tells the story of a porno gang that travels the country to fight prudishness wherever they find it. Furthermore, an excerpt from an earlier Stanković film shows the sexual adventures of a group of people travelling around in a van. At the conclusion of the documentary, Stankovic is employed by Ðorðević to shoot a porn film in which he performs with a former girlfriend. There is nothing flash or radical about it. Ðorðević admits that his desire to make a high standard porno, like the foreign imports, has diminished and he has fallen in love with domestic porn. “I didn’t want to escape the domestic aesthetics,” he confesses. “I wanted to use and deepen it.”

73This conflict alone is said to have cost the lives of 135 photographers.

74The character of Kovac is also indebted to Arthur Fellig aka Weegee, a New York photojournalist of the 1940s and fifties noted for his gritty work. Weegee listened in on police and emergency radio frequencies for potential source material, much as Kovac is seen doing in Man with a Camera.

75The television version of The Legend of Lylah Clare was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (air date May 19, 1963) and is now considered lost.

76‘Larry Cohen: Stuff ’n’ Nonsense.’ Interview by Kim Newman, Shock Xpress no 5 (Aug–Sept 1986).

77Interview in David Kerekes’ Sex Murder Art: The Films of Jörg Buttgereit.

78As had been the case with the original British release of De Palma’s movie, the chainsaw sequence in The Art of Dying was summarily trimmed by the BBFC.

79The Great American Snuff Movie also falls into the category of found footage-fake documentary. It is presented as a reconstruction of events based on Grone’s journals and cites a fictitious book as source material: ‘Murder on Film: The Crimes of William Allen Grone’ by Iowa Nixon. An opening statement relates Grone’s conviction in 1998 of thirteen felony counts of rape, torture and murder. The snuff footage that concludes the movie is watermarked ‘Property of MCPD’ and is said to have been among others seized in a raid on Grone’s property.

80The material that plays on monitors in the antechamber includes a head and shoulders clip of a woman having her brains blown out by a revolver. It’s a fabricated sequence, but one that now circulates online void of context as ‘the real thing’.

81Both titles appear on the print: Snuff at the beginning of the movie and Snuff-Movie at the end.

82Bernard Rose quoted in The Dark Side of Porn: Does Snuff Exist? (2006).

83See chapter one: MANSON IS POWER; chapter nine: THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE.

84Material that features in ‘The Last Road to Hell’ segment can be seen in a number of mondo films prior to and following Cannibal Holocaust.

In the film a nude man is playing ball with an alsatian dog. Commentary informs the viewer that lonely, desperate Vietnam veterans, unable to find solace and compassion back in civilized American society, turn to their pets for companionship. The man drops to his hands and knees and the dog mounts him.

In another film, a doctor in a Singapore operating room struggles to be heard over the noisy whirr of the camera. Claims of pioneering sex change methods are followed with a live demonstration. The scrotum of the patient is sliced open and the penis and testicles amputated. The remaining tissue is moulded into a semi-functional vaginal slit. Incisions in the armpits allow the brutal production of chest cavities and the insertion of silicon breasts.

“With the advent of modern transportation,” says a pasty faced narrator in yet another film, “new killing machines have been developed.” The hypothesis is illustrated with footage of a dead woman retrieved from beneath the truck that crushed her. Further evidence is the aftermath of a jetliner crash over San Diego, and many people mangled beyond recognition.

The three episodes above are scenes taken from mondo films. Respectively, Love (1985, Italy), which shows the strange ways of love in today’s world; Shocking Asia (1980, Germany/Hong Kong), the less frequented annals of the world’s largest continent; and Faces of Death (1979, Japan), the study of man’s greatest fear: Death.

Mondo films — or ‘shockumentaries’ as they later came to be known — are sensationalist travelogues of feature length in which ‘bizarre’ cultural behaviour from around the world is exposed. Or so we are to believe. A typical mondo production is a medley of the exotic, the erotic and the undeniably repellent, professing without question to be genuine and spontaneous. But here fact runs second to exploitative elements and the real purpose of mondo is to shock, titillate and entertain.

Mondo cinema begins with Mondo Cane (1962), an Italian film produced and directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and assistants Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi. Pronounced mondo car-nay (dog world), the film draws on the adage of it being a dog’s life in order to make a statement on the human condition, courtesy audacious and loosely comparable set pieces. Thus a sequence showing American women trying to lose weight in a Vic Tanny gym is followed by the concept of beauty on the island of Tabar in the Bismarck archipelago, which equates to stuffing caged women with tapioca until they are fat. A sequence on devotion to the legend of Rudolph Valentino in Italy is followed by polyandry in New Guinea.[1] Continuity in Mondo Cane is a luscious musical score and the commentary of an invisible narrator, in turn excited and dismissive of what unfolds onscreen.

The formula proved a hit. Imitations were inevitable and Mondo Cane became the blueprint for a genre, providing the name, shape and narrative ingress for generations of filmmakers the world over. Every subsequent production is emulative of Mondo Cane in some way. And yet mondo itself is retroactive, as we shall see. Compilations of ineffectual nightclub acts that predate Mondo Cane are fundamentally mondo films. So too the many filmed explorations of the continent of Africa and the ‘white coaters’ that played to even earlier generations. Perhaps, too, Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau’s The Sky Above — The Mud Below (1961), which sees ‘space age’ man in unchartered territories of New Guinea. And The Forgotten Village (1941), where the isolated community of Santiago in Mexico is hostile to modern ways, if dependent on them to survive. But it wasn’t until Mondo Cane in 1962 that the genre acquired its epithet and the industry of mondo arrived in earnest.

ASPECTS OF MONDO

The definition of film documentary is a problematic one. Even the British Film Institute isn’t altogether comfortable with the terminology or its application, as evidenced in a 2014 critics’ poll that invited voters to determine their own boundaries as to what constitutes documentary.[2] The term itself — documentary — derives from filmmaker and critic John Grierson who coined it when describing Robert Flaherty’s Moana, a 1926 film showing life for a Polynesian youth and his family. Grierson regarded documentary as ‘a creative treatment of actuality,’ at the same time aware of the practical limitations of its use. Others have suggested that all film, whatever it is, can be interpreted as a documentary of sorts. In 1948, however, the World Union of Documentary Filmmakers were inclined to offer the following parameters:

All methods of recording on celluloid any aspect of reality interpreted either by factual shooting or by sincere and justifiable reconstruction, so to appeal either to reason or emotion, for the purpose of stimulating the desire for, and widening the human knowledge and understanding, and of truthfully posing problems and their solutions in the spheres of economics, culture and human relations.[3]

Although Mondo Cane fulfils some of these criteria, it falls short on others, while also having designs of its own. Italy did not have a cultural place for the documentary film prior to Mondo Cane, by director Jacopetti’s own admission, explaining perhaps why mondo avoids documentary convention. But this notion itself is problematic, as we shall see later. Jacopetti has admitted that he deliberately set out to engage the viewer in Mondo Cane using narrative and composition, and steering clear of the vérité approach. ‘I was using the world as a stage, the crowds as extras, real life characters as actors,’ he says in a 1966 essay on the matter. In other words, the film is an expression of its own truth. ‘For me, a documentary is a film to be narrated exactly like a conventional film, and as such, it must rely on a director’s strong personality and profound preliminary preparation.’[4]

This conflicts somewhat with the purist ideal of the non-interventionist point and shoot school; of letting the subject matter speak for itself, as does Frederick Wiseman, often considered one of the greatest living documentary filmmakers. But Wiseman has called his own work ‘reality fiction’.[5] Newsreels, as we shall see, had much the same problem, confounding critics who sought to quantify them one way or the other. Here was news, but news distilled with fictionalized elements, such as re-enactments and in some cases pre enactments. The newsreel was a beast unto itself, decreed filmmaker Paul Rotha when he coined the phrase ‘newsreel tradition’.

One pioneering filmmaker with a newsreel background is the Soviet Dziga Vertov, said to be the father of the cinéma-vérité style. His most profound work, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), can almost be considered a Jacopetti übertext. Here a young filmmaker travels through a city recording facets of life with his film camera: People at home, at work, on the move. The filmmaker is as much a part of the landscape as the subjects observed, insofar as he presents a unique stylized vision (choppy, experimental vignettes), while at once a part of the narrative itself. It is impossible to view the film without being bombarded by the fact that it is a film. The camera, Vertov proposed, is to ‘explain in a new way a world unknown to you’.[6]

In all of the above we have Mondo Cane. Something of a grab bag that defies convention. More accurate would be to isolate mondo and consider it in the same way one might consider the word ‘truth,’ which — to paraphrase Mark Twain — is not obliged to stick to possibilities. If mondo is a documentary, then it is mondo documentary.

In mondo, an opinionated narrator acts as tour guide, making bold and outrageous claims, often without qualification. The film will manipulate or manufacture scenes for the sake of dramatic thrust, which are presented amid the vagaries of historical and factual significance. Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) is a synthesis of these ideas, whereby the filmmakers posit themselves as historians and wind back the clocks to slavery in the American south. Mondo also carries plenty of warnings, verbally and/or in script form. Films will open with a slow scrawl relating to the footage we are about to see, its exotic and shocking nature, and the risks the filmmakers took in obtaining it. This is a legacy that dates back to the first acknowledged documentary film, Nanook of the North (1921), which was prefaced by word of the perils faced in the Arctic when making the film and the loss through starvation of its star, Nanook, after it was finished. In mondo the courage of the filmmaker is brought to the fore, usually accompanied by a remark about the world and its people, dismissing or applauding them. In the days of the carny and early film exploitation, all of this would have been the bally and ‘square up’. It works as confession and atonement. Mondo Cane promised its audience ‘a hundred incredible worlds where the camera has never gone before!’

An underlying motif of mondo is misinformation. Mondo may seem informative but the information it imparts cannot necessarily be trusted. And indeed shouldn’t. Increasingly, mondo filmmakers boasted about the lengths they had gone to procure their footage, as if this was authentication in itself. Footage that has supposedly been shot in a clandestine manner from a distance, offering a covert glimpse into a hidden world, is usually nothing of the sort. Following a few establishing shots through a window, the charade is more or less forgotten anyway. This happens in Mondo Balordo (1964). So “not to disturb the intimacy of the little Jamaican family”, whose three husbands live with one wife, we witness their life with a peek through the curtains. Moments later, we have close-up scenes clearly filmed within the very room under observation. Similarly, a covert ambience is established in Witchcraft ’70 (1970) with the statement that

In some instances permission was granted to us to photograph witches performing their demonic rites. Others were less permissive and therefore it was necessary to steal our way into their black settings in an attempt to observe Satan’s unspeakable and sometimes erotic rites.

The narrator in Prostitution Pornography USA (1971) confides that film of call girls turning tricks was mostly “shot through two-way mirrors, and with hidden microphones we were able to record the actual encounters as they happened”. This clandestine promise spices up the material, as well as validates or attempts to validate the altogether bogus. Such methods are deployed throughout Arthur Davis’ unintentionally hilarious contribution to the genre, Brutes and Savages (1975). “By now, we were getting used to filming without permission,” a dismissive Davis volunteers later in the film.

The foremost criticism of mondo is that the filmmakers aren’t necessarily documenting extemporaneous events as they claim, but are manipulating them or making them happen outright. This might be fairly innocuous, like the artist Yves Klein in Mondo Cane using nude women as paintbrushes, or it might be stomach turning, like the animal sacrifices of Savage Zone (1984). While there is no denying that Klein is a bona fide painter and that, in the latter example, live goats are fed to sharks, the anatomy of these sequences and many like them is open to debate. Is this how it happened? Why is it happening? Would it have happened this way if the film crew had not been present?

According to Days of Fury (1979), animals are dying on the savanna because of the dwindling water supply. This is illustrated with a fallen elephant, clearly victim of a gunshot wound and not dehydration. Usually the narration is travelling at such breakneck speed the viewer is barely able to assimilate what is happening. “A world without souls would not be a world — it would be a pile of trash,” says the narrator of Shocking Asia (1980). An episode may be gone and a film over before statements like that register with the audience; they are not so much insightful as they are gobbledygook.

For many people celluloid is the truth. Mondo films do not announce themselves as a subversion of this ideal, but present instead dubious statements of fact in an irrefutable manner. ‘We didn’t make the world,’ proclaimed the advertising for Weird, Wicked World (1964), ‘we just photographed it!’ A dubitable voice-over can have much the same effect on a scene, persuading viewers that they are witnessing something very different to what is actually taking place. A good example is the courtroom sequence in Africa Addio (1966), where the voices of the magistrates are overdubbed and pass a far more severe sentence on comparatively innocuous crimes — life imprisonment, in fact.

This opens up another issue, that of translation. A good number of mondo films are of Italian origin. Their commentary track is often written and presented in Italian, but translated and presented anew for foreign markets. The Italian narration on Mondo Cane, for instance, was provided by Stefano Sibaldi; in English the narrator goes uncredited and it is different again in other territories. Translation is not an exact science and cultural reference points may be lost and facts either dropped or changed from one language to another.

It would be interesting to try to analyze mondo in terms of voice-over alone. (Not here, though.) Some famous names have been associated with the English speaking variants, exerting no uncertain control on the films in the manner of their delivery. Orson Welles, Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, James Mason, Peter Ustinov, George Kennedy, William Conrad and Jayne Mansfield have each lent their talents to mondo. In some cases — Welles, Price, Mansfield — it proved a visual presence as well as vocal, which has reaped understandably different rewards. The voice-over favourites, however, are Edmund Purdom and George Sanders. Individually they supplied narration to a number of mondo films of the sixties. Purdom was a British character actor who had success in Hollywood before desperation drove him to Italy and roles in costume melodrama, horror films and voice-over work in half a dozen mondo films. Sanders lent himself to fewer mondo films, but his career trajectory is much like that of Purdom.

Both men have become something of a quintessential design for mondo. Unseen but wholly definable nonetheless. Sanders in particular is suited to the overarching mondo style, with a laconic delivery that is almost as contemptuous of the script as it is the nonsense being projected onscreen. “Do not sink other peoples’ battleships without first declaring war,” he says of the Japanese people in Ecco (1965) in a segment about karate. Compare this to Karloff, whose delivery is all rather jolly in the altogether asinine Mondo Balordo (1964). “It’s really a crazy world!” he chuckles.

Voice-over notwithstanding, a number of mondo films underwent a more fundamental remodel in some markets. A case in point is Luigi Scattini’s Angeli bianchi… angeli neri (1969), which became Witchcraft ’70 in the US with new scenes and a re-edit by Lee Frost.[7] This practice became terminal in the late 1980s, with shockumentaries assembled wholesale from other available sources. Then the barrage tape appeared and redefined the concept of copyright altogether in a cut and paste free for all.

As well as adhering to its visual and narrative style, imitators of Mondo Cane attempted to emulate the musical composite of the original, by way of a similarly grandiloquent orchestral score and/or pop ballad refrain in search of a hit record. Composers on Mondo Cane were Nino Oliviero and Riz Ortolani. If the films that followed didn’t echo them implicitly, they were hiring Ortolani himself. He is responsible for the soundtrack of a good number of mondo films, including Women of the World (1963), Ecco (1965), Africa Addio (1966), Mal d’Africa (1967) and Brutes and Savages (1975). The theme song that featured on Mondo Cane (More by Oliviero and Ortolani) was nominated for Best Song Oscar 1963 and became a worldwide chart topper. The successors of Cane tried for a similar smash. The frighteningly terrible Mah Nà Mah Nà, a song returned to public consciousness by The Muppet Show, is of mondo origin (Sweden Heaven and Hell, 1968). The inclusion of a saccharine ballad became mandatory in the mondo canon, almost as necessary as the narration. “Why, don’t ask me why / Why there is a sky” in Addio Ultimo Uomo (1978) is typical of the lyric one might expect. Sometimes a few bars of this uplifting piece would curtail a particularly unpleasant scene. Often, as the sun sets on the horizon, it brought the film to a close. Even in the more aggressive mondo cinema of later years, the nauseating ballad was a tradition that refused to die. More than two decades after Mondo Cane, The Shocks II (1986) concluded its litany of real horrors with an acoustic singsong, promising “we have the gift of love within our hands”.

Animals are slaughtered with sickening regularity in mondo cinema, whether for food, fur, ritual or fun. Of all the film crews travelling the world making mondo films, it seems rather convenient that almost every one of them should arrive in time for a tribal feast or the massacre of a herd of elephants. One might wonder how the rhino came to be trapped in a water hole in Disney’s The Living Desert (1953), or the goat dragging itself dehydrated and half dead through Addio Ultimo Uomo, or the turtle in much the same predicament in Mondo Cane, which suffers the added indignity of being somehow upside down.

Which brings us back to outright contrivance. In Macabro (1965), execution by python and Russian roulette played with moving trains are without factual basis. So too the hippies in Britain who feed their children hash before bedtime, which is what Naked Cities (1971) tells us. Sometimes scenes are a staged re-enactment, with the subterfuge concealed in a confusing proclamation of intent, or relegated to the closing credits, or not mentioned at all. Brutes and Savages decrees at the outset that ‘All scenes whether actual or simulated represent actual truth’. Think about that for a moment; the cinema audience at the time would not have had that privilege.

Of particular merit in this appropriation of ‘simulated actual truth’ is Savage Man… Savage Beast. In the first of two key scenes, a man is attacked and killed by lions — fabricated footage as we shall later see, said to have been used in a lawsuit. Footage of another man being hunted and killed by mercenaries is floated with unnecessary incidentals pertaining to film processing speeds.

On occasion the filmmakers would be brought to task on such matters. When the German film magazine Splatting Image raised the issue of reconstruction in reference to America Exposed: The Motion Picture (1991), an extraordinarily late addition to the genre, the film’s director penned a personal response. True, said Romano Vanderbes, some scenes were manufactured for the film. But these scenes, he said, were based on actual news reports. In his defence Vanderbes supplied several news clippings he had used as source material.[8] Incidentally, the pressbook for America Exposed looks and reads like an edition of the Weekly World News, the tabloid newspaper composed largely of fantastical and untrue stories.

VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY

As noted, Gualtiero Jacopetti makes the point that the documentary film has no cultural place in the cinema of Italy. By implication we can take this to mean that Mondo Cane has no precedent. This is partly true; it defined a genre. But in its native Italy there are many documentary subjects before it that date back to the early 1900s. Indeed, the Italian government passed a law to encourage documentary film work with a financial incentive for their creation and a legal obligation on exhibitors to screen them. The law ran from 1947 until 1962, coincidentally the year in which Mondo Cane was released.

Jacopetti himself had been involved with other films that are retroactively mondo. As co-writer and as writer he contributed to veteran Alessandro Blasetti’s European Nights (1959) and Luigi Vanzi’s World By Night (1961). The former shows various cabaret acts as they appear on the international stage. There is usually a preamble about the artistes and their audience, which also works as a linking device between segments. Ostensibly the same can be said of World By Night. However, the ‘acts’ here are less exotic, and the composition of the film itself is the focal point, with a succession of stylistic and narrative counterpoints indicative of Jacopetti’s work on Mondo Cane. The film opens on drab London streets and observes the reserved Englishman going about his daily business. Saucy magazines displayed in a shop window offer a distraction for the passers-by, and before we know it we are in a theatre where dancing girls are giving high kicks under spot lights. A later sequence shows the Salvation Army outside a club where teenagers dance to rock’n’roll music. This sort of thing is said to be happening in cities all over the world, from Buenos Aires to Blackpool.

These two films — European Nights and World By Night — can be considered a dry run for Mondo Cane. Certainly, World By Night exercises some of the laconic wit of that film, and while there are no shocks yet to speak of, it is a mondo spectacle clearly taking shape. But to understand mondo it is necessary to go back further than this. These films didn’t simply appear in a vacuum, as Jacopetti implied. They were crafted like a nitrate monster from bits and pieces of cine culture. European Nights and World By Night are but the late experimental stages. Elements of mondo can be found in a multitude of primitive guises. From the phantasmagorias of the magic lantern shows in the late 1700s, in fact, through the broadsheets or catchpenny prints of the 1800s and the history of moving images thereafter.

There is evidence of mondo in a curious strain of short film that begins in Italy in the 1940s. These are records of the folklore, tradition and religious devotion of the impoverished communities of the Italian south. Among the first are Il miracolo di San Gennaro (1948) and Superstizioni (1949).

Directed by Luciano Emmer, Il miracolo di San Gennaro is an observational piece concerning a miracle in the city of Naples and the devout who come to witness it. The liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro is said to be a good omen and there is much anticipation as the priest holds the reliquary aloft.[9] Superstizioni, directed by the young Michelangelo Antonioni, is a digest of superstitious customs and their meaning. Relatively innocuous in the big city that starts the film, these customs become riddled with purpose when traced to the peasant heart of the Mezzogiorno — the Italian south. Their origins are often brutal when played out for ‘real’ in this setting. Superstizioni is exquisitely composed, utilizes an invisible narrator and has a bold musical score. Mondo in nine minutes.

There are other films of this type. At little over ten minutes, Cecila Mangini’s Stendalì (suonano ancora) (1960) is a powerful dramatization of funeral rites in a village in southern Apulia. Scripted by Pier Paolo Pasolini and narrated as a poem by the actress Lilla Brignone, the film begins with a death knell and continues with old peasants in mourning. They sing a sorrowful refrain for the deceased, a young man (an actor) in a casket in the middle of a room. The timbre of the song matches the quickening pace of the film. A priest arrives and the coffin is taken away. The film’s subtitle, suonano ancora (‘still sound’), is apt in terms of transcendent strangeness and that of other such titles. Gian Franco Mingozzi’s La Taranta (1962) focuses on the Salentine peninsula where a strange malady is said to derive from the bite of a tarantula, while Luigi di Gianni’s Il Male di San Donato (1965) is about a village’s devotion to San Donato, the patron saint of epileptics and the mentally ill.[10]

These films — for which we don’t believe a formal name exists — are peppered across the Italian cinema timeline, before and after Jacopetti. They all contain scenes of a type found in Italian mondo films. Their division with mondo comes with the somewhat dismissive presentation of that genre, by and large at odds with the respectful tone of the short subjects. The narrative and catechism are otherwise the same.[11]

TOPICALS

The public at the turn of the twentieth century were becoming accustomed to the novelty of the moving image and not a little complacent with short subject ‘realities’ and ‘actualities’, films so called because they depicted real people going about their real lives. The first film ever shown in public was a study in 1888 of traffic crossing a bridge in the north of England, recorded on a single lens camera by French inventor Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince.[12] Beyond this, people leaving their place of work was a fairly common actuality, and notable personages shaking hands was another. So the medium developed and filmmakers became more creative to meet the demand for news and excitement.

Films and news subjects produced during wartime are commonly self servicing. They may provide a morale boost, or they may harbour a more overtly sinister purpose. Two notorious but very different films that promote Nazi ideology are Triumph of the Will (1935) and The Eternal Jew (1940). One offers the German people of WWII a glorious vision of a perfect future, the other a tortured glimpse at what must be crushed in order to attain it.

Such films were not the exclusive domain of the Nazis, and many countries cauterized their world-view in this way. The Allied forces were certainly not averse to propaganda. The sentiment of Frank Capra’s Your Job in Germany (1945) falls somewhere between the two films above. Produced by the US Army Pictorial Service and scripted by Theodor Geisel, the man who was Dr Suess, the film deals with postwar Germany and serves as a warning to American troops stationed there. If Germany appears beaten, intones the narrator, it is people who write history and the German people are not to be trusted. None of them. “War… Phoney peace,” he says on repeat, dismissing a whole race with the approbation of the Nazis before him. Some of these films would make top billing on the roadshow circuit, such as Ben Mindenburg’s anti-Japanese The Scorched Earth (1944) with its battlefield scenes.

Sometimes scenes would be fabricated. The annal of WWII propaganda is awash with them. Desert Victory (1943) is an award winning documentary that commemorates Rommel’s defeat by the Allies in the battle of El Alamein. While much of the footage is authentic, shots of the British army in battle, advancing across the inhospitable North African desert at night, are reconstructions said to have been filmed on the back lot of Pinewood Studios. Soviet produced propaganda depicting victory at Stalingrad is also at odds with the actuality of the event. Having cut off the German troops in what was the biggest land battle of WWII, jubilant divisions of the Red Army are shown running toward each other on snow-covered fields in Eisenstein-style magnificence. In reality, the setting was fogbound and the link up motorized.

The civilian populace of Japan was as alarmed by the attack on Pearl Harbor as America and the world. Suddenly their country was at war. But footage purporting to show the attack went some way in helping to assuage the shock and guilt. In joyous allegiance to the Emperor, the film shows Japanese fighter planes effortlessly blowing US ships out of the water in a whirl of debris. The decimation is actually one of elaborate model work, with actors portraying pilots leaning out of cockpits and crying victorious. (In this sense the film anticipates the postwar city stomping antics of Godzilla and his hero-villain monster pals.)

Before WWII, during the Spanish-American and Anglo-Boer wars, filmmakers were forced to recreate scenes or fabricate them outright for fundamental reasons. In the fledging days of cinematography, equipment was cumbersome and not suited for the prevarications of field work. ‘Even when intrepid cameramen like William Paley (for Thomas Edison in Cuba) and Joe Rosenthal (for Urban in South Africa) travelled to the front line,’ observes Ian Christie, ‘their results, although popular, were often less impressive.’[13] It was far easier to create material on the home front, which usually meant for the Victorian public the sight of troops marching, boarding ships and then sailing away. Sometimes returning. Almost anything else was a reconstruction or fabrication. The elaborate Attack on a China Mission (1901), for instance, was fought entirely in the garden of filmmaker James Williamson, in the south coast seaside town of Hove.

The conflict between Britain, its empire, and the Boer Republics in South Africa (1899–1902), was a war accompanied by the exciting new medium of the moving image. For the first time in history, fervid newspaper accounts of a major news story had a visual complement. Alas, while some material was filmed in South Africa amid the action of battle and its aftermath, there wasn’t much of it. Notable examples of faked British news films of this era can be found in contemporaneous distributor catalogues, quoted at length by Rachel Low and Roger Manvell in The History of the British Film.[14] ‘Reflections of Incidents of the Boer War’ is said to have been a series of films created by R. W. Paul and ‘arranged with the supervision of an experienced military officer from the front’. Among these films, Bombardment of Mafeking (1899) showed British soldiers around a campfire, reacting with ‘amusement’ to several shells exploding near them. Nurses on the Battlefield (1899) on the other hand replicated the gruesome aftermath of battle, with doctors and nurses tending to the wounded and dead.

Sometimes the experts got it wrong. Colonel A. C. Bromhead, describing his involvement in the Gaumont Company’s Signing of the Peace at Vereeniging in 1902 (date not known), realized too late that not every esteemed personage depicted in the film had actually been in attendance at Vereeniging. “We included Lord Roberts and only found out afterwards that he had not been there,” said Bromhead in 1936.[15] For the history books, the treaty signalled the end of the Boer War.

NEWSREELS AND CINEMAGAZINES

The arena of war encouraged the art and development of film. The short-subject news films noted above became in turn the episodic components of the newsreel. Programmes of approximately five minutes’ duration, newsreels contained a number of standalone reports on a variety of topical but otherwise unrelated matters. A title card would introduce each sequence, followed by uniformly excitable commentary and bombastic musical score.

Production was quick. Cameramen were in operation around the world supplying the raw footage for the various production companies — of which there were many. Even comparatively small countries like Hungary and Ireland had their own newsreel services. In 1927, with the advent of sound, a number of major players came to the fore, notably Pathé, Universal Newsreel, Hearst Metrotone News, Fox Movietone, Paramount News and The March of Time.

Fakery and re-enactments were commonplace in the newsreel. In his memoirs, cameraman Ronnie Noble speaks of his newsreel job at Universal as something akin to a storyteller.[16] He recalls that camaraderie existed between studios during WWII, but postwar the competition was great and cameramen often resorting to ‘pinching’ the best footage by duplicitous means. An actor might masquerade as a famous subject for the sake of padding or continuity, writes Raymond Fielding in The March of Time, or a salient event ‘anticipated’ by filmmakers when time was particularly tight. Many reasons lay behind the subterfuge. ‘Even when authentic newsreel material was available,’ states Fielding, ‘impersonation was sometimes preferred by the film’s editors in the interest of dramatic effectiveness.’

Newsreels didn’t necessarily go in for the gruesome. But it didn’t hurt to have a reminder of it from time to time. Newsreels played in cinemas in deference to the main feature, being part of a programme that included cartoons and other short items. There was on occasion a hot topic that promoted the newsreel to top billing. The fate of the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde was one such news story.

The news-film in this instance shows the police ambush and its aftermath that took place on a back road in Louisiana in May 1934, along which the fugitives travelled and were gunned down. The footage of the death car appears genuine enough. It features the bullet riddled vehicle, an array of weapons, and the slumped body of Bonnie Parker visible in the front seat. Clyde Barrow is dead beside her. The prelude to the ambush is almost certainly a reconstruction, and supposedly shows Bonnie and Clyde driving into shot as the posse readies itself. This is unlikely for any number of reasons, not least because a news cameraman wasn’t actually present at the time of the ambush: The bloody aftermath showing the death car was filmed by a member of the posse itself.

Familiar footage of the calamitous Le Mans 24 motor race of 1955 reveals a discrepancy: The crash that sprays the crowd with debris is reverse printed in the film — so comments Stuart Robertson, one eagle-eyed visitor to the British Pathé website. The billboards at the track are the giveaway. One begins to wonder whether this is a mere production error, or a deliberate contrivance. Likely the latter. The cars we see earlier in the race are filmed moving from right to left. Someone evidently decided the path of destruction should flow the same way, for reasons of continuity or maybe aesthetics, and not the direction as originally shot.

Sometimes, however, the contrivance had little to do with continuity and aestheticism and more to do with pulling a fast one, as in the case of Anatole Deibler, outwardly a simple potted biography produced for March of Time. Deibler was the reclusive heir to a noted family of executioners in France, who, in 1936 (when the film was made) had notched up hundreds of deaths for the state using the guillotine for the most part. But the lot of the executioner is a solitary one and Deibler is shown in the film ambling through the streets of Paris alone and pathetic, fearing that he might go mad like his father.

The subject is suitably prosaic and could easily fit any number of mondo films. Another familiar mondo trait is ‘dramatic reconstruction’. Only the briefest of shots of Deibler in the March of Time footage are genuine, courtesy of a hidden camera with a telephoto lens. (Deibler is seen at the window of a house.) The rest of the material features an actor in makeup in New York, pretending to be Deibler.[17]

It is not surprising that some people should describe mondo as a feature-length variant of the newsreel. Indeed, Jacopetti himself was a reporter and Antonio Climati a news cameraman before working together on Mondo Cane. Staying with Italian filmmakers, Romano Vanderbes was probably not ignorant of the celebratory 1930s RKO newsreel This is America when he embarked on his own This is America in the seventies, mondo films lampooning the people and values of the USA.

One should also take stock of the cinemagazine, or magazine film, which is frequently overlooked in favour of the newsreel. The cinemagazine came in the same format and often played alongside the newsreel. Its tone was lighter, its emphasis on culture.[18] But there is a crossover, little surprise given that the same company might produce both newsreels and cinemagazines. Deibler fearing he might be going insane while walking through Paris hardly seems like news. Nevertheless he is sandwiched in the March of Time (episode eight) between items on the National Defence and the League of Nations. We see at once that ‘serious’ news in this case is lumped with something altogether sensationalist. Geographically these particular pieces — Deibler, National Defence, League of Nations — represent Paris, USA and Geneva. Thus the commonality between newsreel and mondo can be extended: Both provide a scattershot panorama of the world, and both use faked material, an invisible narrator and bold musical score. A further consideration is that of presentation and spectatorship. Screening the world in the raw is a familiar refrain of the mondo ad campaign. Indeed, it is oftentimes a mantra: See! See! See! Newsreels, like mondo films, were presented theatrically on the back of advertisements, marquee displays and posters, and share the trappings of display and exploitation.

But we can also perceive a difference. The newsreel was occasionally more conservative in what it showed. It exhibited a degree of restraint and self censorship, no doubt because it was reaching a more general audience. The Bonnie and Clyde footage made by a member of Ted Hinton’s ambush posse, for instance, neglects to show a close-up of Clyde Barrow’s dead face peering from his seat. (The scene has been removed for newsreel exhibition.) Going back further, to February 1912, British Pathé was present when inventor Franz Reichelt fell to his death from the Eiffel Tower. Reichelt intended to demonstrate a new parachute of his own design. In the film, he is seen preparing for the leap and standing with no uncertain trepidation at the precipice before him. He jumps. A second camera follows the descent at ground level, with the pitiful Reichelt free falling all the way.[19] According to British Pathé, ‘Death Jump — Eiffel Tower’ was considered too distressing and shelved at the time of its production. Now it can be seen in its entirety on the British Pathé website, with Franz Reichelt relegated to a place among the top ten tragedies caught on film.

The newsreel formula barely changed during a cumulative sixty years of operation. Pathé managed to make it through to the late 1960s, but they were an anachronism and many newsreel companies had collapsed before this. The onslaught of television certainly didn’t help. Another factor was rather more insidious and not a little ironic. The events of WWII rekindled purpose for the newsreel when it was slipping. But the war also robbed the newsreel of creative spirit: The global tapestry in wartime was not lacking drama or excitement and required little by way of further embellishment. So, tired stock footage came to replace invention and news films stagnated.

The antidote was the mondo film. It arrived as the last of the newsreels unspooled forever, ramping up the sense of wonderment lost to postwar truth and cynicism.

REALITIES AND ROADSHOWS

The first newsreel was Will Barker’s optimistic London Day by Day in 1906, ultimately abandoned because of Britain’s inclement weather. The daily rigmarole was from all accounts arduous and production nonstop. A more leisurely sort of news venture was to follow for Barker, with an expedition to Africa that was released in serial form in 1907 as Cape to Cairo. Foremost a commercial traveller, Barker entered film as an amateur and made his name in it. He was equal parts pioneer and maverick, not averse to filming across a variety of genres. For Barker this meant topical news items and extravagant costume dramas, where, posits The Encyclopedia of British Film, ‘art played a secondary role to size and splendour.’[20]

The pioneers of early cinema were defined by a simple equation: You had the equipment and you made films. The trailblazer spirit created cinema, but not necessarily filmmakers. Will Barker was among the exceptions. As was Robert J. Flaherty, whose films, like so many others, parried factuality with art and artifice. These are the cogs turning the feature-length documentary films at the cusp of the sound era onward.

Flaherty professed to have had no motion picture experience when he began to film his exploration of the Arctic in 1913. By his own admission the results were not good. Nevertheless, Flaherty was convinced enough to return years later and make Nanook of the North (1921), a film record of Eskimos in their natural habitat, being Nanook (the Bear) and his little band of followers. It starts with a map and continues with vignettes of a life, its narrative provided by intertitles. The Eskimos make a fire, prepare a kayak for a journey, visit the white man’s trading post, and so on. Flaherty followed Nanook with Moana (1926), set on a Somoan island. Promoted as a ‘true picture romance of the South Seas’, this took a small group of a different indigenous people and showed them going about their daily business.

Flaherty is acknowledged as having brought form to what we consider today the documentary film. But the veracity of these films is open to question. They are not without staged scenes, and Flaherty as a presence impacted upon the subject he sought to document. Moana had studio backing and is more transparent than Nanook in this respect. Its native setting is an idyll that lacks the frozen hardships of Flaherty’s previous effort. So he created a fictional drama within authentic constraints, resurrecting ancient customs whose meaning he chose to ignore in any case.

Nonetheless, Flaherty’s anthropological fantasies inspired other expeditions to visit remote regions of the world, with cameramen far more intrepid if even less credible in tow. A ten-part adventure serial called King of Kongo (1929), set in the Congo and starring a pre-Frankenstein Boris Karloff, may have helped to inflame the public’s love affair with the dark continent. Combining studio sets with jungle stock footage and a ‘giant gorilla’, this exotic drama with a police and thieves storyline proved a modest hit. The following year Ingagi (1930) appeared. This, too, was set in the Congo. Unlike King of Kongo, however, it wasn’t presented as fiction but purported to be a record of fact, documenting a British led expedition in search of a gorilla-worshipping tribe deep in the jungle. Along the way they encounter virgin sacrifice and the hint of interspecies sex. Contrary to the marketing, everything in the film was bogus. Leading the expedition was the fictitious Sir Hubert Winstead, while the film’s feared giant gorilla was Charlie Gemora in costume, Hollywood’s foremost ape man. Buxom native women (in actuality from Los Angeles) and an assortment of scrawny animals were added to the mix for an ‘amazing fake’, as the press of the day described Ingagi.

Sideshows and dime museums had been profiting from such fakery for decades by this point, exploiting the public’s enduring fascination for the mystery and intrigue of far flung races. P. T. Barnum, America’s greatest showman, took matters a step further when he procured the genuine articles for a live exhibition. In 1860, he opened his much vaunted Ethnological Congress of Savage and Barbarous Tribes, a human menagerie comprising ‘specimens’ of the uncivilized peoples of the world. The assemblage resembled a veritable Noah’s Ark, and, according to Barnum’s programme notes, was intended to appeal ‘directly to the intelligence of the public and educated of all classes’. Alas this also meant ridicule and laughter…

The world may have moved on by the time Ingagi arrived, but hardly so one could have noticed. The same targets were still sport. Problems arose when it became evident that the film was not the factual testament so claimed. Ingagi’s subterfuge rankled the American Society of Mammalogists, who lamented the presence of animals in the film not indigenous to the wilds of Africa. Perhaps more importantly it rankled the Hays Office, who banned it for a time. Needless to say, the publicity turned Ingagi into a profitable sensation in the US and abroad, paving the way for more expeditions, more jungles and more gorillas.

A further addition to the oeuvre of jungle exploration was Africa Speaks! (1930). The producers heralded it as ‘the strangest adventure ever filmed’. But it must already have seemed somewhat familiar ground. The film opens (as they all do) with a map of the target area (in this case a silhouette of Africa) and the promise of a strange land full of danger and savagery. For the most part we are witness to animals in their native equatorial habitat, and an unassuming travelogue with corny commentary. This is cut with scenes of the cameraman and his companion, who are at times clearly schlepping their equipment around some place other than Africa.

There is the traditionally gauche preamble on the primitivism of the natives, as well as the requisite parade of fabricated scenes. Salt is scarce in the jungle, and at one point the filmmakers stop a passing native and use it as a bribe. The team want him to lead the way to a pygmy village. The native is happy to oblige and burrows his face in the salt as if his very life depended on it.

Africa Speaks! was based on the book of the same name by Paul L. Hoefler, who photographed the film and is described in the credits as explorer-naturalist. One can consider this a euphemism for big game hunter, and soon enough the film arrives at the inevitable big game slaughter. The crew are forced to open fire on a pack of lions, which we are to believe has attacked and killed a native. This follows a rather unconvincing assault on the crew’s own truck, during which the lions are said to have torn off a tyre. The gun play is real enough, though, with the filmmakers unloading their pistols into the ‘man-eaters’ as if enacting a scene from a Tom Mix western.

Gow (1931) was a jaunt across the islands of the South Seas with explorer Edward Salisbury,[21] very much appalled and disgusted by what he found there as a white man. In the murk of stock footage and fictional scenes, Salisbury and his supposed team of scientists are witness to tribes of pygmies, headhunters, cannibals, and much dancing. Voodo (1933) tells of Faustin Wirkus, a former overseer on La Gonave, near Haiti, returning to the island to film the practice of voodoo. From what little documentation exists of this film, much of what transpires is authentic, including scenes of animal slaughter. But not, it would appear, the climactic daring-do rescue of a sacrificial virgin by Wirkus himself.

Harry Schenck takes to the Malayan Peninsula in Beyond Bengal (1933) that same year. He’s on a hunt to film wildlife, so he claims at the start. He also claims that the elephant train, provided by His Highness the Sultan of Perak, is fifty strong. It clearly isn’t. As the entourage with its doting servants meander through “one of the most forbidding jungles in the world”, any animal that so much as looks at the camera is promptly destroyed by rifle fire, a spear or club. Leopards and tigers are first to go, in a lengthy sequence that is nothing less than a big game bloodbath. (“It was going for the Captain!”) Then fall elephants, crocodiles and even the seladang, a nervous wild cattle that Schenck determines is capable of great cunning.

When one of the team becomes sick with jungle fever — Miss Baldwin, “an important person in the scientific world” — Schenck is on a fast track back to civilization and medical attention. A river shortcut puts everyone at risk, however, and the latter part of Beyond Bengal is preoccupied with navigating deadly crocodile infested waters. The result is an aquatic barrage of carefully constructed slaughter — part fact, part fiction, but not without real peril. The small mammals that manage to fall into the paths of the crocodiles, the so-called villains of the film, really do suffer. As do the crocodiles themselves, on the tips of spears wielded by the fearless and somewhat foolhardy natives acting under Schenck’s instruction. Most everything else is a charade.

We can clearly see in these films the exploitation grounding for the later mondo pictures. The promotion of the forbidden, of inherent danger and the clandestine is present. So, too, the pitch, which presents the filmmakers as an intrepid and noble force, duty bound to dig out this material for our enlightenment.

Toward the end of Beyond Bengal, Harry Schenck is pictured without his pith helmet. “We had started out carefree and indifferent,” he says of his jungle adventure. “We returned somewhat drawn and grey around the temples.” This is the result, he proudly determines, of fighting off wild animals and disease and everything else nature had cared to throw at him and his team. “The picture hunter,” he concludes, “home from Hell.”

In Gow, viewers are informed of the risk to life in making the film, that it was shot not in a studio but on location among primitive tribes in the jungle. Furthermore, some shots were not possible without the use of a telephoto lens “because closer contact would have meant instant death”. However, as historian Eric Schaefer observes, ‘there is no evidence that telephoto lenses were used, and the tribespeople the narration claims to be among the most dangerous are photographed in close-up.’[22]

Interest in the continent continued into the fifties, with a good many jungle adventure films surfacing on the roadshow circuit. In the United States, films that didn’t meet with the strict Hollywood Production Code’s Seal of Approval could often be found on the roadshow, shamelessly promoted by colourful raconteurs with wild west acumen. William Beaudine’s Mom and Dad (1945) was one of the most notorious attractions, playing for many years with a sensational ‘birth of a baby’ sequence. But the jungle was always good business. In his autobiography, A Youth in Babylon, David F. Friedman recounts that one such film, Karamoja (1954), was part of an alarming roadshow double bill. A study of the lifestyle of one tribe in Africa, Karamoja had scenes of cattle slaughter, blood drinking, body modification and nudity. Promoter Kroger Babb, the self-professed most fearless showman in America, played it together with Highway to Hell, a film compiled of Nazi death camp footage. Friedman paraphrases Babb when he describes Highway to Hell as ‘twenty-five minutes of the piles of corpses, the ovens filled with human ashes, the starved survivors, the hangings of the war criminals after the Nuremberg trials…’[23]

Some of the roadshow pseudo documentaries were comprised of recycled scenes from earlier films. Forbidden Adventure (1936) is one such example. The film pondered whether the missing link had been found, which was portrayed in the advertisements as a gorilla manhandling a topless woman. But sequences were lifted wholesale without licence from Ingagi, and possibly other films. The result was a legal war that did very little to dampen the cavalier roadshow spirit or indeed further screenings.[24]

Jacaré (1942) starts out as a regular fictional drama whose backdrop is the big city. In his apartment office, we are introduced to Frank Buck, noted explorer and big game hunter. He is unable to accompany his friend Mike on a pending expedition and so pens a referral for his protégé, Jim (“a zoologist, not a killer”). Minutes later, the film has become a trek through the Amazon jungle in the company of Jim and Mike (James M. Dannaldson and Miguel Rojinsky), replete with voice-over commentary provided by Buck.

The producers claim that Jacaré is the first motion picture made in the great Brazilian jungle of the dark Amazon. This has only the fleeting romanticism of truth to it, given the unlikely rainforest depicted. But Buck plays along. The parade of Amazonian animals (among them the raccoon) is subject to observations that are, at once, asinine and spurious. Buck sounds to be making it all up on the spot, providing a full and unnecessary exposition of what is taking place before our eyes. “It’s a remarkable thing, but watermelon and corn on the cob are two kinds of food everybody eats the same way. Including monkeys.” And so on. It is entirely credible that Buck’s commentary was recorded during a first run-through of the film. But it hardly matters; the thing plays without any inkling of purpose anyway.

The same big snake is encountered at multiple locations, presented in Buck’s diverting southern drawl as alternately a boa constrictor, anaconda and python. The “serpent” attacks Jim at one point and is said to nearly finish him off. Travelling up river in their small boat, the two explorers behave like children at a zoo who are confronting animals for the first time. They stand about watching things a lot, occasionally glancing off-camera, anticipating the end of the take. After a week, under Mike’s tutelage, we are informed that Jim has accumulated “a sizeable collection of small animals”. Their purpose is ill-defined, although we eventually learn that the animals will be put in a zoo.

With much the same mystery, the imminent appearance of “Jacaré” looms over the final act of the film. Hitherto unidentified as man or beast, the fearsome Jacaré is said to inhabit territory into which neither python nor jaguar will venture. It is located across the “death infested waters of the Amazon”, in actuality a shallow stream dribbling through a flat and open plain. The appearance of some rather docile alligators languishing on a riverbank elicits first-class hyperbole from Buck, giving the audience its hit of the grave and taboo. “This is Jacaré’s land,” he begins solemnly.

And there, lying in the mud and slime of the riverbank, is Jacaré. His common name is caiman. Brazilians who call him Jacaré know his real name is Murderer. Jacaré’s strength is almost unbelievable. And his hungry jaws devour any living thing they can reach. Look at that death’s head — horrible. But fascinating. You’re wondering what ancient nightmare of nature the idea of this beast was born. There must be a reason for every form of life. But no one has yet discovered a satisfactory reason for Jacaré. He’s something out of Earth’s dim dawn, like something long before mankind was given a soul. There they lie dreaming dreams of death and destruction.

Buck goes on like this for some time, no heed of scientific fact or objectivity. In the end, Jim and Mike sail away with their catch of Jacaré, “the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper.” But first, of course, the obligatory man in water scene and the human vs alligator wrestling match. This, we are told, is to the death.

Frank Buck was something of a celebrity equatorial adventurer. His first big screen outing was the Malay set Bring ’Em Back Alive (1932), while his last was a cameo in Africa Screams (1949), a comedy vehicle for Abbott and Costello. Its title a pun on Africa Speaks!, Africa Screams can be viewed as a parody of the pseudo documentary. With natives in tow, Buck wades through the foliage of a studio jungle set in search of a fabled beast. Ponders the shrewd Lou Costello: “Mr Buck, is there really such an animal as orangutan gargantua?” Africa Screams plays for laughs, but it isn’t any less credible than the supposed legit explorations mentioned here.

Zoological credibility notwithstanding, Jacaré did at least move away from the exploitation of primitive peoples. The condescending anthropologic comparisons of different societies is minimal here, while attitudes elsewhere generally remained retarded. Jacques Dupont’s Congolaise aka Savage Africa (1950), is said to have started out as a serious attempt to document the different tribes of Equatorial Africa, sanctioned by the French government and various offices, including the Museum of Man. Three years in the making — or maybe fourteen months, both time frames are volunteered — the film opens on a sober enough note, with canoes at dusk on the mighty Ogowe river and indigenous song over the credits. Usually the music of these films infuses the pounding of tribal drums with a big band sound. But the serious initiative is soon lost in the film that follows. The tone of the commentary is at odds with what plays before us, which, for the most part, is a positive ethnographic record of a disappearing world. At times it is reduced to a barbed racist drawl. The breasts of “blushing” native women bounce up and down a lot. Bristling with sarcasm, the narrator later reminds us in his strange syncopated manner that this “is why records such as these are… important. How people live; what makes them… tick”.

There is some confusion in the final act over what constitutes a fertility dance. The sole participants are the hunters of an isolated village upstream, who dance because they must slay a “bloodthirsty” gorilla believed to be “responsible for the deaths of at least seven adults and an unknown number of children”. Not much fertility going on at all. The outcome of the hunt is the mighty corpse of the slain “outlaw” gorilla, which appears authentic. The hunt itself, however, almost certainly isn’t. It is a re-enactment peppered with dramatic reaction shots of the hunters, armed with nets, spears and blunderbuss. The audience is not privy to what the hunters see, but is informed there are “sixty gorillas up in the trees”.[25]

The impact of western civilization on simple farming countries results in a trend of violence. So posits Mau Mau (1954), a film by Elwood G. Price about “the spark that may light the fuse” in Africa. The mau mau are a guerilla organization that rejects British rule. The film portrays the mau mau and indeed the black man with a sort of begrudging sympathy, recognizing the upheaval that is fuelling civil unrest in Africa, while also equating it with a bizarre and pagan lifestyle. The narrator is wistful that one day, hopefully, guns may be put aside. Until then, when a black servant enters the dining room, there must be a gun to cover his every move.

Thus the character of primitive culture and primitive man pervaded, even in Mau Mau and Congolaise, which otherwise appear to have begun life with serious intent. Typically, the publicity for these films scream a promise of nakedness and savagery. The poster art for Mau Mau, for instance, warned of ‘barbaric people practicing black magic!’ and ‘weird, mysterious love rites performed by sex-mad slaves!’ Back in 1930, the narrator for Africa Speaks! gave a little condescending chuckle whenever he talked about the lifestyle of the natives. That chuckle echoed on, and continued to do so through to mondo in the sixties.

The treatment of animals was another lamentable trait that carried over to mondo. The aforementioned Jacaré is a rare instance of a film presenting the safari as comparatively benign, being ultimately the appropriation of animals for a zoo. Generally, a camera in the jungle signified death. “The modern expedition has no use for cages or guns,” the narrator for Congolaise was at pains to clarify; it needs instead only “three things: Cameras, recording equipment and luck”. This didn’t prevent the inevitable slaughter, however. Indeed, the explorer-hunter in these films is merely biding time before the next chase, the air meanwhile filled with rudimentary and misleading preambles on vague concerns. Many films were marketed as having a fatal payoff. Often this meant a dead animal, but occasionally it was man. The publicity pack for Savage Africa, for instance, is awash in art that depicts native folk under attack from gorillas, pounced upon by lions, manhandled by rampaging elephants, and tossed by rhino.

Eventually the fifties brought fun and playfulness to the pseudo documentary in the form of Walt Disney. A short subject called Seal Island (1948) heralded the Walt Disney True-Life Adventure series. It is about the seal colony on the Pribilof Islands of Alaska. The snippet on the Disney channel website shows a seal cub trapped on a rocky precipice, a fall imminent unless mother can find the cub. “Ah, at last. Rescued in the nick of time.” The Academy Award winning Seal Island was followed by full length True-Life Adventures. Although the series continues to this day on a variety of cash cow subjects, the films during the fifties were thematically attuned to the less salubrious efforts of the roadshow circuit. That is to say that Disney’s The Living Desert (1953), The Vanishing Prairie (1954) and The African Lion (1955) are gentrified versions of the sorts of picture we have already discussed. Described by Disney as ‘an action-filled, fast-paced yet very educational look at life on the plains of Kenya and Tanganyika’, The African Lion is supposedly unlike most wildlife documentaries. On the contrary, it sounds very much like other wildlife documentaries, an entertainment composed of ‘frequent graphic displays of an often savage and “survival-of-the-fittest” environment’.[26]

Narration on these documentaries was provided by Disney regular, Winston Hibler. Through Hibler, we have the Disney propensity for presenting animals as human avatars, much as if they were the real-life counterparts of Mickey Mouse, Bambi, et al. Quite often, staged incidents are passed off as actual animal behaviour, while at times the films incorporate distressing and questionable ‘natural’ occurrences, much as mondo would do years later. A rhino trapped in the mud of a waterhole, for instance, is seen in The Living Desert systematically pounding its head on the ground in frustration and panic. The dilemma becomes a spectacle for the environ and its animal inhabitants, who come to assess the rhino’s plight as might characters in some interspecies soap opera. (Or indeed a Disney cartoon.) None can help and, Hibler informs us, “the rhino must face its strange destiny, deserted by nature herself.”

The zenith of the wildlife documentary as entertainment comes not with Disney, but Jamie Uys’ Beautiful People (1974). The deserts of southwest Africa are turned into an ‘easy, anthropomorphic comedy’, to quote MFB.[27] In its most famous and contentious sequence, animals in the Kovango basin are said to be getting drunk on rotten fruit. They stagger off home, falling about all over the place, and wake the following morning nursing hangovers. The film incorporates a glib commentary, as well as a lush score that the reviewer for the Decent Films Guide website considers reminiscent of Disney’s Fantasia (1940). A closing sequence is downbeat in the way of many mondo films.

Still, the public loved Beautiful People, and still do if comments posted on IMDb are anything to go by. ‘This is one of the best documentary film [sic] I have ever seen,’ writes ifikree. ‘The best animal documentary you will ever watch. Funny and exciting,’ determines guruB. Robert Flor is alone in dismissing it. ‘This movie might have worked in the 1950’s [sic] for young children,’ he notes, positing Uys in the trite old tradition of the pseudo documentary adventure. ‘Ridiculous footage with exaggerated music, embarrassingly stupid sound effects and a condescending informationless “father knows best” monologue kill it.’[28]

LAND WITHOUT BREAD

The jungle was the primary fodder for proto mondo filmmakers of the sound era. But there are exceptions to the big game trek, among them Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread (1932) and Harry J. Revier and Roland C. Price’s The Lash of the Penitentes (1936), travel adventures of a different kind discussed at length below.

The Lash of the Penitentes is a fictional drama built around authentic documentary footage of the Penitent Brothers cult operating in the isolated mountain villages near Taos, New Mexico. The footage was shot by cinematographer Price and shows the secret procession that occurs each Good Friday, when flagellants turn flesh raw amid cries and music. In the end, one of their number (described in the film as “the white robed chosen one”) is bound to a cross and left there for forty-five minutes. The ceremony is a secret that is closely guarded by armed lookouts.

When Price made his film, it was believed that a Penitent interloper — a reporter by the name of Taylor — had been murdered, and another filmmaker was said to have been shot and wounded for getting too close to the cult. Price sold his footage to Revier, who created The Lash of the Penitentes around it, being the story of an investigative reporter and supposedly based on the incidents surrounding Taylor’s death. The background information cited above and currently circulating about this picture derives from George E. Turner and Michael H. Price’s authoritative book Forgotten Horrors: Early Talkie Chillers from Poverty Row. This is not to say stories of a murdered reporter and wounded filmmaker are true. We don’t know. Price’s footage is remarkable and genuinely creepy. But, tellingly, it doesn’t look at all to have been shot with any resistance from its subjects, nor in secret. An occasionally garbled voice-over provides a narrative that is part history lesson and part exposé. Pitiable “self made martyrs” are seen whipping themselves and one another into a frenzy, taking pause to drag large wooden crosses up a steep mountain pass. Other footage of less sinister countenance depicts a folk dance (shot in close-up).

The film conveys the illicit ‘wrongness’ of some exploitation movies of the same period. Erle C. Kenton’s maligned Island of Lost Souls (1932) and Dwain Esper’s bonkers Maniac (1934), for instance, are two productions that similarly appear to exist ‘out of time’. Indeed, the trailer for The Lash of the Penitentes concludes on close-up scenes of a topless woman bound and screaming, outrageous for the day. In contrast to the usual Hollywood pietism when touching themes of religion, it is hardly surprising that Price and Revier’s work should have fallen into relative obscurity. It was relegated to the roadshow circuit after failing to meet approval with the Hays Office, even with extensive cuts, and here it played in cinema twilight. Much the same happened with another Revier picture, Child Bride (1942).[29] Penitentes ends bizarrely with the sudden image of a burning cross and a booming call to action that bears no relation to what has gone before. “Wake up, America!” the proclamation demands. “Here in our own country we can see the very heart of Africa pounding against the ribs of the Rockies.”

A mountain community is also the focus of Buñuel’s Land Without Bread. Beautifully shot, this self-proclaimed study of ‘human geography’ is a considerably more sober exploration without the attraction of Penitents. It is a Spanish production and isn’t known to have played the roadshow circuit. The abject poverty and simpleminded life of the Hurdanos people, inhabiting perhaps then the poorest region of Spain, is hardly in question. But the journey the filmmakers take through it, and their descriptions of it, are less credible. Early on, the film encounters a lonely monastery whose inhabitants, we are told, are all dead but one. “Toads, adders, lizards are the friar’s only companions,” the narrator says. If there is a friar amid the ruined walls and creeping vegetation we certainly don’t get to see him.

The film arrives at the first of the lamentable tribes. No one sings in this village, we are informed, and bread is a relatively recent phenomenon. A child with a slice of bread is likely to have it taken away by a half starved parent. In the next village there is only the sound of coughing because nearly everyone is sick. Upon finding an altogether healthy looking little girl on a deserted road, the commentary deduces that she has been here alone on the road for three days, suffering from an inflamed throat and tonsils. Two days later, we are told, she is dead.

“Goat meat is eaten only when this happens,” we are told as a mountain goat crashes to its death from a precipice. The fall comes at the end of a short discourse on the value of goat’s milk in the community. Are we to accept that the animal just happens to have fallen in front of the camera while navigating its own natural habitat? A second camera captures the descent from the very spot on which the goat supposedly loses its footing, tracking the animal down to the rocky enclave below.[30] A donkey fares equally badly when it disturbs the bees of a hive and slowly succumbs to the insects’ stings over the course of an hour, during which time no one considers freeing the animal from its tether.

Only death breaks the monotony for the people of Las Hurdes. In the film’s most solemn shock scene we are presented with a dead infant, bedecked in funerary garb. The tragedy galvanizes the village. The tiny corpse (or what appears a tiny corpse) is then carried across brush and river to the nearest cemetery, said to be miles away.

Land Without Bread is a catalogue of woes and conflicting assertions. Buñuel, its director, is recognized as a unique film voice, whose collaborative efforts with Salvador Dalì birthed cinematic surrealism. Buñuel was making a political statement with this film, aimed at the Spanish government. Orphaned children are starving and without shoes, yet they must take lessons in a new school and learn trigonometry. Given the comic nightmare of Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1929) before it, we should probably interpret Land Without Bread as ‘mischievous’ propaganda.

The trend of modern man visiting his primitive past is reversed in Herbert Kline and Alexander Hammid’s The Forgotten Village (1941), a feature length look at a pueblo and the lives of its people, removed from the rest of the world. It’s a simple place, bleached by unremitting heat and steadfast ways. A baby suckles a breast, a child matador fights a small bull (that is killed), and a festa takes place. These are not actors, even if at times they appear to be acting under direction. Soundtrack music plays through the entirety of the film, underlining Burgess Meredith’s pitiable exposition (from a script by John Stein-beck). “Paco was sick… they tried to cheer him up.” Thus the main theme is established. The people of Santiago have faith only in the old ways and their wise elders. But the old ways are failing them. Paco eventually dies. “Gone straight to Heaven in his new hat,” says Meredith in his impassive, slightly creepy manner.

With more children falling ill, the school teacher attempts to introduce the concept of modern medicines. But the villagers reject medicine as modern foolishness. In a wonderfully prosaic scene, a fraças takes place and the teacher’s cine projector is destroyed. The villagers are incensed by a short film about science, and so knock the projector to the ground, smashing it underfoot. However, tradition is proving ineffectual in curing the sick and so one young man makes the epic journey to the city to find a doctor. The city is a strange and terrible place for him, we are told.

The Forgotten Village and the two films discussed before it contain elements that would inspire mondo. Between them we have the juxtaposition of old and new, strange customs, an invisible narrator and the notion of filmmaker as cine-bandit — a marauding, unwanted presence.

MONDO SEX

Primitive love. The smile of a newborn eve. The innocence of a virgin world that could be paradise on Earth. I’ve travelled most of the world without finding it.

So lamented Jayne Mansfield. In exploitation films one jungle is effectively every jungle, and primitive love, like primitive culture, is really only a thin abstraction of repressed western ideas. The curious Primitive Love (1964) is a case in point. A mondo film buried beneath broad comedy, it would make an interesting anthropological study in itself. American sex goddess Mansfield[31] is back from a trip round the world studying rites of courtship and sex. Man may have progressed in other fields over the centuries, but in love he remains primitive. Consolidating this basic tenet, she screens footage from her trip and gives a running commentary, espied all the while by two lecherous perverts. They fantasize that the semi-naked Mansfield is re-enacting the scenes unfolding onscreen. It’s all rather silly, but at the same time illuminates exactly what the earlier jungle explorations were up to — white hunter, black breasts — if such a thing needed spelling out.

Mondo films are all about the promise of something that an audience otherwise couldn’t or shouldn’t see. Another example: Among the various nightclub acts of the proto mondo film European Nights (1959), magician Channing Pollock performs a trick, making a playing card vanish in a seamless sleight of hand. Utilizing a trick of its own, the film then replays the scene again in slow motion. The sequence appears altogether incongruous. But to borrow a visual metaphor from 2001: A Space Odyssey, let us leap from one slow motion mondo moment to another, and allow us this whimsy: The vanishing playing card morphs suddenly into Savage Africa (1982), specifically the sight of the human penis bouncing rhythmically up and down at half speed, courtesy of some well-endowed tribespeople of Africa. Spanning two decades of mondo, this is what Pollock in slow motion intimates. The mondo masquerade is laid bare and the ceremony revealed to be in fact a spectacle.

The trailer for Luigi Scattini’s Sweden Heaven and Hell (1968) tells Americans exactly what it is they are missing. “This is Sweden,” the trailer begins, “land of enchantment, land of freedom.” A musical cascade accompanies the proclamation. The narrator tells the audience that here in Sweden

you are about to see things you just don’t see at home. In America, you don’t see beautiful girls bouncing boldly out of the sauna into the snow. In America, you don’t see public pornography shops where erotic books are displayed. For both sexes. With government approval. In America, you won’t see metermaids who wear uniforms by day and nothing by night. You won’t see any of these. But you can and you will when you see Sweden Heaven and Hell.

To most filmmakers and film producers, mondo was but another fallow gold market awaiting cultivation. They saw in it an opportunity for exploitation and took it, much as they would any other cinematic trend: Science fiction, horror, bikers, nudie cuties, roughies, and so on. Mondo developed a specific focus as the films began to adhere to themes like teenagers, hippies, witchcraft, Africa, and Scandinavia, contrary to the scattershot approach of earlier mondo productions. This isn’t to say the earlier, globe trotting explorations that defined Mondo Cane, Taboos of the World, Macabro, et al, were suddenly producing fewer dividends, or had disappeared altogether. Rather, it was a matter of economics. Many producers were without the fiscal resources available to those filmmakers before them, and therefore disinclined to travel.

While Italy was going around the world plucking all sorts of fruit, the filmmakers of other countries were generally more reserved. England tended to produce mondo films only about London (The London Nobody Knows, Primitive London), France about Paris or prostitution (Secret Paris, Paris in the Raw), and America about Americans (Mondo Hollywood, Mondo Daytona). Spain, Brazil and Australia were content with domestic affairs, too.

Filmmaker Larry Buchanan provided an interesting proto contribution to the mondo genre. Naughty Dallas (1958/64), the film in question, is outwardly that of many other productions on America’s exploitation circuit. Its story is a flabby excuse to show various wannabe showgirls going through their stage acts. The setting here so happens to be the Carousel Club in Dallas, owned by Jack Ruby, among the first strip clubs to introduce an amateur strip night. Ruby would, of course, become famous for a very different reason.[32]

Buchanan was earning a reputation as a filmmaker whose modest work could turn a tidy profit. (Critics consider his films ‘bad’ in a fun way.) Following the sizzle of his previous effort, a movie called The Naked Witch (1957), Buchanan recalls having no trouble in finding investors. ‘The night people of Dallas emerged from under the rocks,’ he recalls in his autobiography, their source of money a mystery. ‘The word was out that Dallas had a professional filmmaker who had turned an $8,000 investment to $80,000 in less than a month in the marketplace. That, to slouch into lazy cliché, was the bottom line.’[33]

It is no surprise that sex would be a popular theme. The film industry was grounded in its promise, and thanks to the nightclubs and burlesque of Naughty Dallas, European Nights and World By Night, so was mondo. Sex was hope and promise on a shapely leg, a flirtation that continued through the sixties with Mondo Infame (1963), Mondo Topless (1966), Mondo Freudo (1966), Mondo Bizarro (1966) and others. In these particular films the proclamations and intent are bold, but all the same they remain an exaggeration of the actual flesh they dared display. This changed in due course.

Erich F. Bender’s Helga (1967) was a dramatized documentary made under the auspices of the German Ministry of Health. It pertained to educate people in matters of sex with vox pop interviews, elementary lessons in biology, and micro-photography of an embryo and foetus. Much like a roadshow picture, it incorporated authentic scenes into a fictional narrative, concluding, as did Mom and Dad in 1945, with the birth of a baby reel. Many such dramatized and educational sex documentaries followed. From Germany: Intim-Report (1967),[34] The Wonder of Love (1967), Sexual Partnership (1968) Female Sexuality (1968) and Michael and Helga (1968). From Britain: Love In Our Time (1968), The Wife Swappers (1969), Love Variations (1969) and Anatomy of Love (1969). From Italy: Naked England (1969), The Queer… The Erotic (1969) and Sexual Inadequacies aka Labyrinth of Sex (1969).

From France, Jean-Claude Roy’s[35] Secret French Prostitution Report (1969) is fairly typical in that it brought together rather bogus-looking police, social workers and hookers to air their views on the oldest profession in the world. Contrived set pieces have the veneer of a legitimate inquiry, broken down into subjects such as ‘Adolescent Prostitution’ and ‘Rehabilitation’. All are a fabrication, however, with the exception of the final part of the film — ‘White Slavery’. A commentary informs the viewer that white slavery is in decline today. But alas, women remain only too susceptible when faced with better job prospects. To demonstrate the point, young women are seen falling prey to coercive methods on hidden camera. The women have responded to a newspaper ad and believe they are being interviewed for a film role. A chain-smoking man (the plant) asks each of the applicants in turn whether they are willing to work abroad. They are. Are they shy? They’re not. Could they show him their breasts? They can. And so on. One of the girls is persuaded to take off her skirt when the interviewer points out she is safe, a desk stands between them. Few of the women question the open-contract placed before them.[36]

In October 1969, Torgny Wickman’s Language of Love was seized by American customs as obscene. From Sweden and ‘not about sex… but a film about being together’, Language of Love created a furore on both sides of the Atlantic with its markedly more explicit form of sexual instruction. In Britain, it was initially refused a certificate. But the BBFC acquiesced and granted it an X. The film centres on four academics on a sofa, whose conversation prompts a series of vignettes that deal with issues of poor communication and intolerance in a relationship, among other matters. Studiously they advocate that sex is a glorious thing for everybody to enjoy, which comes over as unintentionally humorous today (if not a little creepy). Take for instance ‘Disparaging the Man’s Virility’, illustrated by a dinner party tête-à-tête. “That’ll be one of our tractors going by,” comments our host. “We have one single tractor, darling,” the wife retorts flatly in front of all the guests. Wickman later directed More About the Language of Love (1970) and Kärlekens XYZ aka Love 3 (1971).

Following the release of commercial hardcore features such as Deep Throat (1972) and Behind the Green Door (1972), filmmakers began to drop the masquerade of presenting sex within an educational context. Added to this, the Screen Actors Guild relaxed the rule against its members appearing in hardcore movies in 1974, which meant they no longer had to keep such appearances anonymous. Hardcore pornography had broken out of seedy porn dens and was earning a sort of legitimacy among respectable cinema-goers, making the pretence for instruction redundant.

The short period before all of this happened, however, the interim between ‘sex education’ (Language of Love) and pornography (Deep Throat), is host to many curious hybrids of fact, fiction and fucking. A hands-on experiment toward liberalisation and profit, in other words. Filmmakers in the US in particular were pushing the envelope as far as they possibly could within the censorial constraint of the time. This meant nudity in the guise of a documentary with occasional flashes of genitalia and sex performed under laboratory conditions. Often these documentaries were presented by a doctor, or rather an actor in a white lab coat behaving like a doctor, giving advice much as the roadshow pictures had done. These films became known as white coaters.

The unspoken agenda of the American white coaters was to move the camera as close as humanly possible to the female genitals. In Prostitution Pornography USA (1971), the subjects are call girls and often they are shaving their pubes during interview. While not sexually explicit to begin with, these films soon became a showcase for penetrative sex. If a distinction exists between the European white coater and their American counterpart, deviancy would appear to be it. The Italians, for instance, seemed inclined toward tales of sexual abhorrence, with case studies that might otherwise belong in a giallo movie.

Among the first of the American white coaters was Matt Cimber’s Man & Wife: An Educational Film for Married Adults (1969). As the title suggests, it’s a fairly straightforward, very plausible sounding study. Hereafter, filmmakers applied their imaginations and most any topic became a practical consideration for the white coater, with increasingly forthright illustrations on some altogether ambitious subject matter. Pat Rocco’s Sex and the Single Gay (1970) includes scenes of men making love, an interview with a man discussing his pending sex change operation (who runs through the woods dressed as a woman) and a card game in which the clothing disappears from each player resulting in a group orgy. Evidently a mondo fan, Rocco even composed the Sex and the Single Gay theme song (Changes) and directed Mondo Rocco (1970) the same year, a compilation of short gay films and female impersonators.

Another film from Matt Cimber is Africanus Sexualis (Black Is Beautiful) (1970). Here we have the sex lore of Africa, both primitive and modern, via the shaky testimonials of a supposed expert on such matters. The film was generally well received by audiences in predominant black communities, which makes it an interesting stepping stone between mondo and the blaxploitation movies beginning to appear. Blaxploitation movies for the most part vaunted black power ideals. Cimber would go on to direct several blaxploitation movies through the seventies.[37] Compare this attitude and the warm reception of Africanus Sexualis (Black Is Beautiful) to that of the early mondo pictures, which generally approached Africa with a haughty tone of imperialism. A classic case in point is Witchdoctor in Tails (1966), a mondo comparing Africa then and now, whose very title appears to effect a mocking dismissal. Compare it indeed to Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971), a car crash composite that was mondo racism and blaxploitation rolled into one.

The white-bread riposte was Together (1971), a highly publicized if genteel observation of middle America’s sex life that remains uncharacteristic of the white coaters in general. Also uncharacteristic is the fact that it comes from Sean Cunningham, future producer of Last House on the Left, a movie attacking middle American values. By and large, the favoured subjects for sexual elucidation in the pseudo documentaries were pornography, prostitution and deviancy, or combinations thereof. A triptych is manifest in the following films: Pornography in New York (1970), Prostitution Pornography USA (1971), Animal Lover (1971). Here’s a brief run through of each.

Milton Vikkers and Betsy Moss’ Pornography in New York sees one Ron Delaney leading a crack team of reporters in search of the “porno explosion” in New York City, “where it’s happening today”. The fuzz guitar score is a bonus, but the constant throbbing psychedelic montages and heavy reverb vocals that spell out the title of the movie with numbing frequency are antiquated even by late sixties standards. So, too, the hip-speak. “Everyone’s been talkin’ that sex is a scene. To me, America’s obscene and should be rated X,” is one typical example. Perhaps the filmmakers are every bit as hip to the scene as Delaney looks. That is to say, not at all. In his pinstriped suit and tie, Delaney walks into a store selling S/M paraphernalia and thrusts his microphone at a member of staff. “Hi,” he says. “I’m looking for something… special.”

Alvin Tokunow’s Prostitution Pornography USA aka Porno USA appears to be precisely what Ron Delaney was looking for. A hidden camera shows us some of the things prostitutes (played by actresses) get up to with their oddball clients. “We’re going to examine the different professional categories,” the narrator says, which leads inexorably to “two lesbian house prostitutes, their surroundings and their customers”. Apart from a few minutes of vox pop interviews, almost everything here is a fabrication. There is plenty of female nudity, but no sight yet of a penis or explicit sex.[38]

… Unlike Alex de Renzy’s Animal Lover, which created a shockwave following its limited and short-lived run of West Coast porn cinemas. De Renzy acquired Animal Lover in Denmark,[39] a short film starring a local girl, Bodil Joensen, who had an uncommon fondness for sex with animals. De Renzy returned with the film to the US and padded it out with a lecture from an incompetent and frankly bizarre expert/host, plus interviews of equally dubious merit. The few critics that bothered with Animal Lover have been repulsed and awestruck in equal measure, awarding it the epithet of the most grim and offensive exploitation film ever made. Clips of Joensen in action would find their way into a number of other white coaters over time.

The abolition of censorship in Denmark in 1968 provided another opportunity for exploitation. The result was a flurry of film documentaries ostensibly focused on the countries of Scandinavia, home to the new porno capital of the world. Some explicit content was slipped through to the American audience under this guise. But it wasn’t much fun and generally came after a lengthy history lesson, or was processed like a laboratory specimen complete with syphilitic slideshow and numerous warnings on matters of contraception. Americans may have been edging toward a pornographic salvation of their own, but these films of liberated Scandinavia were a double edged sword and for the moment simply confounded their frustration.

Wide-Open Copenhagen ’70, Fact: Copenhagen Sex-Report (1971) and Report from Stockholm’s Sex Swamp (1973) are examples of the films that took to the streets like a rally cry to arms. Perhaps the first filmmaker to tackle the new sexual permissiveness abroad was John Lamb, who, under the pseudonym M. C. Von Hellen, directed Sexual Freedom in Denmark in 1970. It’s a grab bag of mondo cliché. Some of it comes from Denmark, by way of a reporter with a microphone asking questions (while flicking through porno mags). Most of it doesn’t, but is placed instead in anonymous rooms where schematic diagrams show the sex organs and on a white table naked couples procreate like lab rats. Sometimes an animated globe turns in space. “Dark ages of ignorance prevailed,” says the narrator of life before porn, preaching to the choir.

While Danish people believed in pornography, authority figures in America did not. Sexual Freedom in Denmark was busted for obscenity following a thirty-two-week run at The Cameo on 8th Street. However, as scholar Jack Stevenson observes,

prosecuting these films was getting more difficult by the minute. At the trial [of Sexual Freedom in Denmark] defense lawyers screened other contemporary erotic movies that had recently been found not obscene and the court dismissed the complaint against it, ruling that it was protected by the First and Fourteenth amendments. The decision had immense importance, establishing a workable precedent and clearing the way for the release of other pornographic films.[40]

Soon enough there was no place for education in films about fucking. Thanks to the relaxation of attitudes toward pornography, there was no longer any need. There were some late arrivals. Renato Polselli’s Rivelazioni di uno psichiatra sul mondo perverso del sesso (1973), for instance, and John Lamb’s Sex Freaks (1974), both of which fused perversion with pedagogy and x-rated material. But otherwise the era of the white coater had effectively passed swiftly with little adieu. As Arthur Lenning puts it, viewers now ‘would have to live without the benefit of the learned voices and derive the educational message from the bouncing images alone’.[41]

So, where next? In order to ‘outshock’ like no other mondo before, it had become necessary to give the audience the vicarious thrill of sweatier, kinkier, more deviant sex. But it needed bigger jolts, too. Viscera was in. As mondo progressed through years of political change, escalating violence and sexual liberation, so the availability and display of shock footage increased. Sometimes obviously faked. Sometimes disturbingly real.

MONDO VIOLENCE

Mondo films provided a sly means to display nudity and sex in days prior to the legalization of pornography. Brutality and violence were the other staple ingredients, adding to the unrepentant infringement of taboos that had drawn the mondo audience. In this respect, the dark continent offered rich pickings, and attitudes barely changed since the days of Mau Mau (1954) or indeed Gow (1931), when ‘primitive’ cultures were presented in a rush of garish hyperbole and dubious intent. “Africa, land of great beauty. Africa is also a land of great brutality; a continent of desperation,” thus the dichotomy is established that fuels Kwaheri — Vanishing Africa (1964), and the glut of mondos that followed, including Africa Addio (1966), Africa Ama (1971) and Guinea Ama (1974).

Africa for the mondo filmmaker offered majesty, but rather more importantly it also offered unadulterated scarification practices, wholesale circumcision, vaginal dilation, animal sacrifice, funerary rites and tribal murder. These are common to most productions that exploited the antediluvian cultures, often with a racist attitude. Mondo Cane, for instance, refused to expose any Caucasian nudity. It was suggested, but never displayed; only the naked flesh of the Afro-Caribbean provided the titillation. Moreover, when the mondo film ventured into full-frontal mutilation and murder, as per Africa Addio a decade later, the dark-skinned races remained the focus and victims of the camera’s exacting eye.

By the late seventies Africa was finished as a mondo draw, and soon enough came a discernible shift with the segregation of sex and violence. Sex was waning anyway for reasons already noted. But the arrival of a film called Faces of Death ensured that the paths of sex and violence would rarely cross in mondo again. With a few exceptions, these two elements — once integral — would stand apart. Claudio Racca’s Love and the death-obsessed The Shocks, are two films from 1985 that provide a good example of this sequestration.

The last hurrah was sounding for mondo. What was left of sex was viewed with a snarl of distrust and air of despondency. David Adnopaz’s Mondo Sexualis USA (1985) is one example that features a tired retread of familiar ground. An interview with Screw editor Al Goldstein is something of a highlight, which isn’t saying much. By the time Antonio D’Agostino’s Noi E L’Amore: Comportamento Sessuale Deviante (1986) had arrived, hope had effectively vacated the building. Known somewhat affectionately in English as ‘Mutant Sexual Behaviour’, Noi E L’Amore is based on the principal works of Sigmund Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis De Sade. From behind a desk, a young doctor conducts us through case studies that illustrate a number of sexual anomalies, which are intercut with interviews. In one sequence a wealthy woman becomes aroused by her manservant licking envelopes. In another, a client pays a prostitute and begs the woman — who is laughing hysterically — to urinate over him. A lonely spinster in her underwear watches horses mate from her window and encourages her pet dog to lap at her vagina. A woman resting on a park bench has one of her red shoes stolen by a shoe fetishist. A woman arrives home to catch her husband trying on her underwear. A woman arrives home to catch her husband in bed with another man. These are all fabricated set pieces, until a warning flashes on the screen and grainy film of sex change surgery commences.

For a while it seemed mondo could not tire of the sex change. By this point in the eighties, the image of a scalpel slicing and mutilating genitalia had been a familiar sight to the audience for these films for almost a decade. It might have been longer but for the vagary of fate, as we shall see. As well as appearing in Mondo Sexualis USA and Noi E L’Amore, the unflinching sex change procedural had surfaced in Shocking Asia, Love, Naked and Cruel and Mondo Cane Oggi. No doubt others, too. On the other hand, Claudio Racca’s Tomboy — Sesso: Inferno e Paradiso (1977) and her better known American cousin, Doris Wishman’s Let Me Die a Woman (1978), are mondo films implicitly devoted to the subject of sex change, with the bloody traumatised organs a sort of grotesque money shot.

Sometime in the early sixties, Stanley Long got wind of a pending sex change and was all set to film it for London in the Raw (1964), on which he worked as cinematographer. When the patient had a sudden change of heart and withdrew his consent, Long defaulted to filming a hair transplant operation. Long boasts that he wanted to be the first filmmaker ever to document the sex change procedure, having read an article about it in a newspaper. ‘My opportunity to become Britain’s most notorious documentary filmmaker had passed,’ Long recalls in his autobiography. However, the cranial alternative proves stomach-turning enough, with the surgeon cutting out wedges of bloody scalp as if coring an apple. ‘It was grim,’ considers Long, ‘but I was confident that I was creating a groundbreaking piece of cinema.’[42]

It is interesting to consider that here, gore — any gore — was an acceptable substitute for the sex change. In images of gender reassignment we have perhaps the ultimate deviation and the absolute vision of sex and violence. The sex change becomes a sort of mondo event horizon as the genre itself spins inextricably out of shape.

As early as 1965, narrator George Sanders was wise to the idea of dwindling mondo resources, and perhaps the audience had seen it all. Narrator for Gianni Proia’s Ecco (1965), he addressed the dilemma in a precredit rhetoric — and promptly dismissed it, as of course he must.

The globe has spun around many times before the probing eye of the motion picture camera. So many times in fact that you may wonder if there’s anything left to discover. But to the persistently curious the world continually reveals new secrets and sights.

Mondo godfather himself, Gualtiero Jacopetti, had grown disillusioned and in 1966 was of the opinion that mondo was dead. The beauty was gone from the form, he believed, and ‘the “ugly” documentary is now understood by almost everybody’.[43] We can assume Roberto Montero’s Mondo Balordo (1964) numbered among the ugly. This altogether trite and familiar effort takes a dig at Jacopetti. Intones the commentary, “the old saying ‘it’s a dog’s life’ is losing its bite.”

The attitude of the times was changing. The mondo films of the late sixties reflected this change by moving away from their presentation of a world that, while a little bizarre, was still fun and wonderful. The teen mondo pictures, all the rage in the mid sixties, morphed next into a fad for witchcraft, and after that the cautionary sex lessons of the white coaters. And death. The three-day Woodstock festival at Yasgur’s farm in August 1969 may have been the promise of a new dawn, but the idyll was already tainted. In Los Angeles, the Manson Family were out doing the devil’s work. While in California, in December that same year, a fatal stabbing (caught on film) overshadowed a free concert by the Rolling Stones. The decade abruptly shut down on a note more of despair and horror than of peace and love. A film like Mondo Hollywood helps make clear why. Filmed over a two-year period and released in 1967, Mondo Hollywood has built up quite a reputation, not least for a ban in France and its inclusion of individuals later to find no uncertain fame and notoriety. Particularly noteworthy in this respect are hairdresser Jay Sebring and Bobby Beausoleil, who appear in different segments of the film having what looks like a good time going about their respective business (Sebring is creating a hairpiece for a balding man). There is nothing outwardly extraordinary among the new age freaks and drug gurus featured in the film. But in hindsight the goofy exterior of its interminable parade masks a culture in crisis. A culture in search of culture. Mondo Hollywood looks like an accident waiting to happen. Sebring and Beausoleil are two of the poor devils who get in the way and end up sliding down the Manson helter skelter, one dead and the other in prison for murder.

The crisis continued in the seventies with the Watergate scandal, which did for straight society what Manson had done for the hippies.[44] The overarching sense of hopelessness and betrayal that hangs over the decade is manifest in its pop culture. Newsstand racks contained books of gnostic science about black holes and the end of the universe, while on the big screen was death and the anticipation of death.

In seventies cinema we are faced with dystopias, a pervading sense of personal and societal displacement. Paul Schrader covered such ground in Taxi Driver and Hardcore.[45] It is also evident in John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on your Grave (1978) takes the sense of displacement literally and switches the urban setting for a rural one. These are worlds of excess and promiscuity, of civilization in decline, destined to fall.

Another cinematic trend is the blockbuster disaster movie. Here calamity might befall groups of people in isolation, as in Airport (1970), The Towering Inferno (1974) and Avalanche (1978). Or, it might threaten the whole of life itself, as in The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Plague (1978) and Meteor (1979).

The nihilistic overture sometimes makes it hard to differentiate one genus from the other. Catastrophe 1999 aka The Last Days of Planet Earth (1974) is a disaster movie where nature and science conspire in a series of calamitous events that signal the end of days. The Late Great Planet Earth (1976) on the other hand is a mondo film that deals in much the same idea, visualizing the final destruction of all mankind. The former is based on prophesies by Nostradamus; the latter Hal Lindsey, modern-day evangelist.

We see the first death mondo in Thierry Zéno’s Des Morts aka Of the Dead (1972), which is to say a mondo film devoted exclusively to dying, death and postmortems. Although a sincere study that doesn’t appear immediately influential, there are several similar minded films through the rest of the decade. These culminate with the game-changing Faces of Death (1979).

Compared to Of the Dead, which is thoughtful and moving, Faces of Death is a Loony Tunes cartoon. Nevertheless, it succeeded in capturing the zeitgeist in the same way that Jacopetti had done over a decade past with Mondo Cane — and which Giuseppe Ferrara had failed to do presently with Faccia Di Spia (1975), a mondo that is explicit in its distrust of government. Mondo would not be quite the same again.

“Prepare yourself for a journey,” warns the gangling pathologist Dr Frances B. Gröss (actor Michael Carr). “A journey into a world where each new step may give you a better understanding of your own reality.” So begins Faces of Death, directed by Conan Le Cilaire aka John Alan Schwartz. Animal slaughter, animals attack, police shoot-out, state sanctioned executions, traffic accidents, beheading in the Middle East — while some of the fatalities are authentic, others are about as likely as Gröss successfully passing himself off as a legitimate doctor (a hallway and kitchen are his surgery and laboratory). Among the fabrications are a game warden being devoured by an alligator in Florida, a flesh-eating cult in San Francisco, and death row executions by electric chair and gas chamber.

According to its original publicity, Faces of Death

has been in production for the past three years. Camera crews have spanned the globe capturing the most grotesque and bizarre experiences which answer the unasked questions we’ve always had about death. Whether fighting strange tropical diseases or dealing with America’s illegal death cults, our cinemagraphic experts have placed themselves in dangerous conditions in order to bring to the screen the ultimate exposé on death. Since death occurs at any time, our various camera units around the world maintained a twenty-four hour active schedule. As a result, Faces of Death contains some of the most graphic footage ever recorded on film.

For years, Faces of Death was a mystery. Most all the names associated with its production are pseudonyms. Quoting from the original press notes, the young and dynamic Conan Le Cilaire is said to have ‘directed adventure stories from diving to scalling [sic] mountains. He is a man with a great love of celluloid. The intensity of Faces of Death will no doubt place him in a league all his own amongst his associates in the film world’.[46] In recent years some of the mystery surrounding the film has been lifted. A Hollywood screenwriter by the name of John Alan Schwartz stepped forward and owned up to being the elusive Conan Le Cilaire. (A pseudonym derivative of Robert E Howard’s series of Conan novels, he said, of which he was particularly fond.)[47]

Although it presents itself as an American production, Faces of Death was a Japanese idea from Japanese financiers Shochiku Films. Its worldwide distribution was handled by a company called Telecas Japan. The film proved a phenomenal success in Northeast Asia: In Japan it allegedly outgrossed Star Wars, while in Hong Kong it was among the top twenty grossers of all time. However, in the US it was a slow burner. The American premiere took place in Los Angeles in 1980, followed by a general theatrical release that met lacklustre box office returns — despite heavy promotion for weeks in advance of its release. Critics did not like the film much either. Things changed for Faces of Death in America when it was released on video, and rental figures quickly established it as one of the top video hits in the country.

As Mondo Cane had initiated the mondo genre, Faces of Death galvanized filmmakers into pursuing a new direction, one that was going to choke its audience on viscera not vice. Images of death had been popping up in mondo since the genre’s inauguration in the sixties. They were just one more element in the courtship of taboo and controversy, albeit in the form of animal slaughter for the most part. The self immolation of a Buddhist monk in Mondo Cane 2 (1963) was later revealed to be a clever re-enactment. But in Africa Addio (1966) there was no artificial surrogate; the sight of corpses and of men dying was very real.

Human mortality became a persuasive selling point for some films. Brutes and Savages and Savage Man…Savage Beast both advertised themselves on the back of scenes of death caught on camera, being respectively a man eaten by a crocodile and a man torn apart by lions.[48]

Schwartz has said that his inspiration for Faces of Death was Walon Green’s The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971). A fake documentary played perfectly straight, here scientist Dr Nils Hellstrom (Lawrence Pressman) has a theory about insects and how they are going to take over the world. Schwartz was impressed enough to create Dr Gröss in Hellstrom’s likeness.

There are other pseudo investigations of this period that have an even tighter bond with Schwartz’s film. James L. Conway’s Beyond and Back (1978) uses archive footage and staged near death experiences to promote its Christian agenda and the idea that an afterlife exists. Our host is a man in a fog enshrouded graveyard, who is not unlike Gröss. But the standout is Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler’s Death: The Ultimate Mystery (1975), a comparatively gore free effort that prefigures Faces of Death on almost every level. Perhaps it was this film that brought Japanese financiers to Schwartz in the first place? Perhaps they wanted a bloodbath in its image?

As in Faces of Death, the film is a voyage of self-discovery for its host. Whereas for Gröss it is “a compulsion to understand”, in Death: The Ultimate Mystery Cameron Mitchell can only “wonder what it’s all about”. Both hosts are motivated by forces beyond their understanding. Gröss is plagued by the recurring dream of a funeral; for Mitchell it is an out of body experience where he is witness to his own funeral. Their cinematic plight commences in each case with the mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico. “They’re the beginning of a new life,” Mitchell deduces of the petrified figures. “I had a feeling,” considers Gröss, “that each one had a different story to tell about their own death.”

MONDO EVERYWHERE

Mondo became in the nineties something of a catch-all term for anything factual in all aspects of cinema, which is curious if one considers the rather capricious manner in which the mondo film has handled ‘fact’ over the years. A liberal interpretation of mondo would not only encompass nudist films and public information films, but also stretch to the ‘non-fake’ attributes of feature films. In this respect there is a mondo element to René Cardona’s Night of the Bloody Apes (1968), a horror yarn about a homicidal human gorilla that so happens to include authentic footage of open heart surgery, as does George Schenck’s Superbeast (1972).[49] In Manuel Caño’s El Pantano de los Cuervos (Swamp of the Ravens) (1974) a real corpse is autopsied while the actors look on. Genuine human anomalies were incorporated into Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and Jack Cardiff’s The Mutations (1974), as well as the ‘Doors of Hell’ sequence that terminates Michael Winner’s The Sentinel (1977). James Goldstone’s Winning (1969) stars Paul Newman as a racing car driver and includes stock footage of a seventeen vehicle smash at the Indianapolis 500 racetrack. David Durston’s Stigma (1972) uses slides of disfigured syphilis victims in the manner a roadshow picture might once have done. Roger Corman’s Carnosaur (1992) has a credit sequence showing battery hens on a conveyor belt having their heads ripped off. Two decades earlier a similar sequence caused an uproar when it appeared in Arnold L. Miller’s Primitive London (1965). An ox is ritually slaughtered in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), repeated again, with its real life inspiration, in Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness (1991). Chi Chang’s Calamity of Snakes (1983) is but one Asian horror movie that utilizes animal mutilation and death in lieu of special effects — in this case thousands of snakes are burned alive and killed for a story about a haunted high-rise. The credit sequence in Uwe Boll’s serial killer themed horror film Seed (2007) depicts stock footage laboratory animal abuse, while genuine human corpses are props in both Javier Aguirre’s The Hunchback of the Morgue (1972) and T. F. Mou’s Man Behind the Sun (1987), so it is believed. Lech Kowalski’s Story of a Junkie (1985), on the other hand, is a movie about real people using their real names, reenacting scenes they have actually experienced. And the list goes on.

Perhaps the original connotations of ‘mondo’ were obscured somewhat by films unrelated to the genre but in name. Joseph P. Mawra’s Mondo oscenitá (1966), for instance, is a collection of racy clips from sleazy films of the period. Its title sounds like it might be Italian (the film is in fact a US production), while the trailer suggests thrills of a suitably mondo kind. “The story of everything that should not be real,” promises the narrator. Mondo Trasho (1969) is an early John Waters movie that opens to the sight of a hooded man hacking heads off chickens, but again is not a mondo film. Similarly, Jack Hill’s Mondo Keyhole (1966) and Carl Andersen’s experimental Mondo Weirdo: A Trip to Paranoia Paradise (1989) are movies unrelated to the genre.

These films may not be mondo, but as their titles infer they have an imitative kinship with mondo, a recognition of it. A cut version of Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972) was released on video in Germany under the title Mondo Brutale with box art fashioned after a mondo film. Jacopetti and Prosperi’s Mondo Candido (1975), often erroneously cited as a mondo film, brought together one last time the godfathers of mondo for something that wasn’t a documentary but sounded like it ought to be one. Rhino Video’s Mondo Lugosi (1987) is a compilation of archive materials pertaining to the eponymous horror movie star, while Mondo Cunt (year unknown) is a porn film whose box art features the legendary Ron Jeremy. (Whether he’s actually in the film is another matter.) Beyond that nothing is known of this particular effort, which might be labouring under a retitle in any case. Whatever else it is, Mondo Cunt is an acknowledgement of mondo cinema.

The Italian cannibal movies of the previous chapter are also a symptom of the mondo film, continuing a tradition of casual racism and animal slaughter in pursuit of box office. Bruno Mattei (as Vincent Dawn) managed to touch most bases with Zombie Creeping Flesh (1981), a film set in Papua New Guinea, where a toxic leak at a research facility brings the dead back to life as flesheaters. Lengthy sequences representing native life around the doomed facility are taken from a mondo film, Akira Ide’s Guinea Ama (1974). Mattei pulled the same trick for Cannibal Holocaust The Beginning (2004), which unashamedly recycles much of this footage once again (for a riff on Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust). It is claimed Mattei bought this footage. He certainly got his money’s worth.[50]

DECLINE

What of mondo after Faces of Death? Mondo began a slow decline in the eighties, which saw fewer Italian productions (the mondo backbone), and terminated almost altogether in the nineties. We have seen in this chapter the many aspects of mondo and its punitive progress on cinema’s timeline. The trajectory of its descent is only marginally less bumpy.

Critics rarely considered mondo in a favourable light. It quickly became an acronym for the cheap and unpleasant, as per MFB dismissing one amateur anthropological study as likely to appeal only to Mondo Cane enthusiasts.[51] In a commercial sense, mondo’s lot greatly diminished in the late sixties, when Mondo Cane appeared on American television in cut form.[52] The entrepreneurial distributor Jerry Gross wasn’t phased. He simply promoted it afresh for cinemas in 1970 as a bigger, stronger, more inhumane product, one half of a double bill that screamed DOUBLE SCHOCKER SHOCK![53]

In the 1980s, video technology gave rise to television newshounds, and the availability of disaster and violence footage increased exponentially. Thus the mondo compendia became a parade of cheap fatalities. Carnage and human suffering were now the order and it seemed a video camera was on hand the moment anything ever went wrong: A failing parachute at an air show, a public suicide, a kill spree. The pitiful sight of human suffering and despair, travesty and folly, was the norm for the new shockumentary.

These shockumentaries were not created for theatrical presentation. The public arena was no longer an option in the late eighties, for a number of reasons, and whatever was left of mondo was relegated straight to video. This did mean that some existing films got their second wind with the exciting medium. A case in point was Embassy’s re-release of Catastrophe (1978) aka The End, whose cautionary video box blurb seems now wholly pertinent to a burgeoning shock mondo generation. “You’re about to watch disaster happen…in the comfort of your living room!” Alas, the film itself was out of step with its compatriots, being a comparatively bloodless offering. Directed by Larry Savadove and narrated by William (Cannon) Conrad, Catastrophe features archive footage of the Hindenberg, the 1973 Indianapolis 500, and so on, with vox pop interviews that exhibit sensitivity altogether lacking in the later death films.

A slew of films began to appear on the video shelves of America and Japan. These were the dominant markets for graphic images of death and perhaps the only markets that would tolerate it. For the most part these films represent a chronic slide in quality. The Death Scenes series from Nick Bougas, which commenced in 1989, has something of the bona fide mondo spirit about it and proves something of an exception. But many multifarious death compilations were but a cheap and unpleasant cash-in: Faces of Torture (1988), Death in Focus (1989), Inhumanities (1989), Inhumanities 2 Modern Atrocities (1989),[54] Drugs: A River of No Return (1989), The Horrors of War (1992), Horrors of War 2 (1994), Shocking Menu (199?) and World of Death (1994) are to name but a handful. The films themselves tended to disappear as suddenly as they arrived, which was often without fanfare. Some received hardly any distribution, while others found their audience and on occasion ran for several volumes, as in the case of Traces of Death and The Many Faces of Death. (The linguistic allegiance to Faces of Death evidently doing no harm.) Other producers were less scrupulous, releasing films that purported to expand upon existing, more famous titles. In this respect we have ‘new’ editions of not only Faces of Death, but also Mondo Cane, True Gore and Shocking Asia.

One IMDb review offers an insight into the disingenuous mindset of the video shock compiler, specifically in relation to Death Faces (1988) aka Death Faces IV aka Beyond Reality aka Dying: Last Seconds of Life.[55] ‘It sucks under any title,’ writes Zbigniew_ Krycsiwiki, moaning he was conned into seeing the thing not once but twice. And, when the film finished, ‘there was an old unidentifiable western at the end of the tape. They couldn’t even afford blank tape they had to record over some old western?’

The content across the shock videos is effectively interchangeable and downright repetitive, sourced from what might as well be a communal pot of film clips. Some films made sport of their content, offering tasteless asides. Others maintained the charade of providing a kind of public service. Faces of War (1999), for instance, prefaces its selection of archive materials with two proclamations.

VIEWER WARNING!
If the brutal depiction of actual death upsets you, please DO NOT watch this film
producer’s note:
What you are about to see is real the most shocking scenes of war. The purpose of this film is to expose the senseless violence of war. We are on the verge of a nuclear era. If we do nothing to change, there will be nothing left to change. STOP THE VIOLENCE

Japan became dominant players in the creation of shockumentaries. They always had a place in the genre, making mondo films on the heels of Mondo Cane.[56] But generally the profile was slight, with few Japanese mondo films showing up in the West. Or in some cases deliberately obscured, as in Faces of Death and Sheldon Renan’s The Killing of America (1981), which are American films under Japanese interests. In the nineties, a complete turnabout occurred when the shockumentary market became saturated with Japanese lensed atrocities. Shot at scenes of crime and accident, this material constituted a seemingly unending parade of vile imagery and for a time the market stagnated.

The early nineties saw a return to the spirit of the white coater when Britain pushed for sexual liberalization, much as America had done two decades earlier. The Lovers’ Guide (1991), Kama Sutra: The Art of Making Love (1994) and Self Loving (1992) are examples of sexually explicit videos being granted certificates, whose content would not otherwise have been passed by the BBFC if submitted as porn. A disclaimer preceding the opening credits of these films claimed they were made to promote learning and understanding. But as we have already seen, any assertion of education rather than exploitation tended to be mendacious. The floodgates were open. Soon afterwards, Police Stop! (1994) and Executions (1995) appeared on the shelves and in the news.[57] Police Stop! brought the reality video to a mainstream audience. Executions on the other hand pretty much did for the shockumentary what the sex education titles had done for hardcore porn in Britain. That is to say, graphic footage of a different kind was passed by the BBFC on the pretext of edification and not exploitation. The film ostensibly argues against capital punishment with statistics and some truly sickening footage, showing rough justice in its various forms around the world.

Similar scenes, or perhaps the same scenes, wouldn’t necessarily get through the BBFC again. Executions II in 2005, for instance, was cut of material that had been floating around in various guises elsewhere for years. Terrorists Killers and Middle-East Wackos (2004) was rejected outright. As was Hooligans in 2002. ‘Hooliganism is an entirely valid subject for critical documentary treatment,’ cautioned the BBFC,

and in that context illustrative news footage has a legitimate function. That, however, is not what is on offer here. Hooligans presents a series of violent and antisocial acts in an exciting and exhilarating manner.

If the BBFC was not taken with the phenomenon of ‘reality footage’ films, as they have come to be known, no one was yet preventing their manufacture and sale in the USA. Presently there has been a return for the shockumentary in this guise, concentrating not so much on death but a general vogue for gutsy, spontaneous material — reality, if you will. Assembled from a variety of media, which includes mobile phone and security footage, these compilations promise macho street fights, sexy cat fights and assorted street mayhem under cankerous titles like Road Rage (2006) and Ghetto Fights 6 (2010). They emerge from ambiguous sources, having been compiled by people under assumed names (if named at all), much as the shock videos a decade before them. In terms of content, this is precisely the sort of material one might otherwise see for nothing if trawling the Internet long enough. Which, these days, isn’t much of a trawl at all.

For the most part only oil paintings, fine prints and sumptuously illustrated books produced by a highly skilled and esteemed élite for a small and powerful group of well-educated and worldly people have survived to attract our attention.[58]

So says Thomas Gretton about art history, specifically the forgotten heritage of broadsides and chapbooks. This was populist entertainment in the nineteenth century, which often meant reports of murder, disaster and executions, illustrated with some abandon. A woodcut showing a corpse with a cut throat, for instance, might serve to illustrate a shooting. In any case these catchpenny prints were muscled out of the history books. We could say the same about mondo films. This particular facet of cinema, as broad as it is, has not been favourably received by film critics and historians. In fact it is largely ignored, even in books devoted to Italian film history and documentary in general. This position has shifted somewhat of late, no small thanks to new blood in academic research.

Until very recently only the small press was inclined to review and discuss mondo films. An extended article by Charles Kilgore and Michael Weldon in Psychotronic Video magazine in 1989/1990 offered the first serious overview of the genre.[59] Now there are books devoted to mondo films, two at least, while a retrospective of Gualtiero Jacopetti’s work was held in Bradford in 2003.[60] In 2007, the much maligned faux documentary about slavery Goodbye Uncle Tom received only its second UK screening. It was presented at the BFI Southbank as part of a black history season, and in this context debated as an important piece of work. Colin Prescod of the Institute of Race Relations said that the film’s hitherto ban was down to critics being part of a culture that’s “hugely in denial” of the horrors depicted.

The place of mondo, whenever acknowledged by the mainstream, is usually as passing fad or an ugly forebear of reality television. Not unduly, critic Danny Peary wrote of Mondo Cane in 1987 that this ‘once notorious film has lost all its sensationalist value in the ensuing years’.[61] But such sweeping generalizations seem outmoded or wrong and appear to miss the point. More recently, Pooch on Sexgoremutants, a horror movie website, called Mondo Cane ‘truly sickening’ and one of the most ‘unrelentingly distressing films I’ve ever watched’.

Films like Mondo Cane and Faces of Death were peddled like dirty little secrets, with little hint of any cultural significance beyond that. Now they seem wholly prophetic, like a window on mankind’s present head space. Think less in terms of what we see in mondo today, and more the reasons how and why we chose to look in the first place. While many critics were clucking their disapproval, turning their backs and gazing instead upon the important art on the wall, the world suddenly arrived at an age of mondo 24/7. Mass entertainment and news media have fused into a single pulse of stimulation, through which episodic factoids and lifestyle choices are delivered in the manner of a snide afterthought.[62]

Are mondo films therefore dead? Mondo tends not to exist as it used to. In beautiful, circuitous irony, these films of old — well, the 1960s and 1970s — appear like butterflies emerging on a far more innocent day. It is hardly any wonder that the term ‘mondo’ is appropriated by experimental filmmakers and in ‘outsider art’. Mondo Art (2013) showcases cutting edge artists operating across the USA and Mexico, with sequences depicting nudist colony body painting, assault rifle painting and spit painting at a Palm Beach salon. Writer/director Stephen A. Maier acknowledges Mondo Cane and Mondo Cane 2 as his influence. ‘When [those films] came out in the 1980s on VHS,’ says Maier, ‘I was mesmerized by the real and staged scenes that were shot around the world. I love the class and sophistication of the look and sound that was the early 1960s. Italian filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Gualtiero Jacopetti were great influences during my time in film school in Manhattan.’[63]

Already on the path to art enlightenment was Harvey Keith’s Mondo New York (1988). Here Lydia Lunch introduces a city proud of its “outcasts, misfits, rejects, losers, pervert lunatics, gangsters, pranksters and outlaws. Neurotic, psychotic maniacs, brainiacs, hippies, yippies, yuppies, junkies, flunkies, monkeys”. Elsewhere we have Ricardo Fratelli’s Mondo Ford (2000), a short playful film that jokingly purports to have been made in 1965 before a ban by the Italian government. It namechecks Mondo Cane, uses its theme music, and leaps madly from the JFK assassination to a conspiracy involving Gerald Ford, UFOs and Sasquatch. The sepia tone print is very scratched and the Italian voice-over often makes things up.

More serious is a short film by James Wagstaff. Mondo Nagasaki (2008) is a thesis film that incorporates archive materials and various spoken word texts for a bleak ode to the atomic bomb. Much of the film plays in slow motion and has a discordant musical soundtrack, which adds to the dreamy quality. Quoted in the film are the words of William Laurence, a reporter observing the mushroom cloud rising from Nagasaki, likening it to a new species being born right before our eyes. Later we come to the first footage shot at ground zero by Akira Iwasaki, which documents pain and suffering so profound that Iwasaki’s film was confiscated and buried for years by the Pentagon. Bodies that were caught in the blast are shown mutating weeks after the fact. Radiation poisoning is not yet recognized, and so the strange affliction is referred to by doctors simply as ‘Disease X’. Mondo Nagasaki concludes with Robert Oppenheimer’s famous rhetorical comment on the atomic bomb, clumsily delivered here by a child: “Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

1See appendix two: mondo cane synopsis.

2‘Tall Truths’ by Nick Bradshaw, introduction to the critics’ poll of documentary films, Sight & Sound, September 2014.

3John Grierson and the World Union of Documentary Filmmakers quoted in Richard Meran Barsam’s Nonfiction Film: A Critical History.

4‘Considerations on the documentary film’ by Gualtiero Jacopetti. Mark Goodall (ed.), Sweet & Savage.

5Thomas R. Atkins (ed.), Frederick Wiseman.

6Dziga Vertov on Man with a Movie Camera. Quote appears in Judith Wechsler, ‘The Filming of Art,’ Daedalus (vol 114 no 4) (Fall 1985).

7Angeli bianchi… angeli neri, in all its different versions, contains footage of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Ray Laurent’s Satanis (1970), was a feature-length documentary on LaVey’s church. Excerpts of Satanis are used in The Occult Experience (1985) and ‘Satanism and Witchcraft,’ volume two of the Fangoria Video Magazine Series, Scream Greats (1986).

8This information was given to the authors by Graf Haufen in the early 1990s, publisher of Splatting Image.

9Noted for his art films, this same year Emmer made Romantici a Venezia (1948), a love poem to a city scripted and narrated by Jean Cocteau.

10Luigi di Gianni was a great exponent of films of this type. As well as Il Male di San Donato, he directed among others, Magia Lucana (1958), L’annunziata (1962) and Montevergine (1971).

11It is worth considering these Italian films in light of the short subject films being produced elsewhere in Europe and America, possibly elsewhere in Italy even. The Italian antecedents to mondo are a very different anthropology to, say, British government funded films that show sobering modes of public transportation and workers at work. Superstizioni is visionary in comparison to Night Mail (1939), produced by the GPO Film Unit, and represents a different time, place and mindset, one of awe and wonder. We can find the odd exception outside Italy: A British short by David Gladwell and Derrick Knight called The Great Steam Fair (1964) is as much about ‘feeling’ as it is the subject at hand — a traditional fairground taking place at Shottesbrooke Park, Berkshire. Gladwell’s Requiem for a Village (1975) is a longer film that defies convention. It has a documentary quality, weaving a fictional narrative through a real village and real villagers in Suffolk.

12Le Prince followed Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge with the films Man Walking Around the Corner, Accordion Player and Roundhay Garden Scene (all 1888). These are not necessarily formal titles; many prints of this era do not carry titles or credits.

13Ian Christie. The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World.

14Rachel Low and Roger Manvell. The History of the British Film.

15Ibid.

16Ronnie Noble, Shoot First! Assignments of a Newsreel Camera-Man.

17The Deibler news story and subterfuge is recounted with photographs in Raymond Fielding’s book, The March of Time 1935–1951. However, the book gets Anatole Deibler’s name wrong, referring to him throughout as Pierre.

18Little has been written on the subject of the cinemagazine, and so it is somewhat forgotten as an entity in its own right. This critical indifference is lamented in a useful if — ironically — anonymous PDF floating around the Internet: A History of the British Cinemagazine.

19The body of Franz Reichelt is carried away amid a buzz of activity. To add insult to injury, the final shot of the film shows a group of men measuring the impact damage to the ground caused by the failed inventor.

20Brian McFarlane, The Encyclopedia of British Film.

21These films tended not to credit a director as such, but instead the explorer and/or photographer.

22Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”

23Taken from David F. Friedman’s autobiography, A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King.

24Dwain Esper, who owned Ingagi, filed a suit for $200,000 damages against Sonney Amusement Enterprises, Inc. and his version of the same picture, Forbidden Adventure. But this action itself is embroiled in the tit-for-tat animosity that prevailed among some operators on the roadshow circuit. Prior to Esper, a suit had been filed against Ingagi for its appropriation of material without consent from an even earlier picture. It is hardly a surprise that Ingagi exists under a bewildering array of titles.

25Congolaise is another film using scenes from other jungle efforts, in this case Africa Speaks! The man-eating lion sequence of Africa Speaks! is recut here to tell much the same story, but with a different set of characters, while the death of a native boy still calls for vengeful retribution from the hunters of the tribe.

26The Disney website.

27Margaret Ford, Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1975.

28As well as a worldwide theatrical release, Beautiful People was also shown in schools across South Africa. Might this have applied elsewhere, in other countries, with some of the other films noted above?

29Child Bride would be viewed with great suspicion today. It is ostensibly a morality play on the subject of child marriage, set in a remote and uneducated American mountain community that goes unnamed. Because of the bias in numbers between sexes, it is accepted practice that an adult male might take a female child as a bride. Only an educated personage (a schoolteacher) sees the inherent problem and presses for reform amid general opposition. A sanctimonious statement of intent opens the film: ‘If our story will help to abolish Child Marriage, it will have served its purpose.’ But the film isn’t actually about the problem at hand; it is a drama-adventure about a conniving and corrupt individual called Jake (Warner Richmond), who commits murder in order to procure the undeveloped object of his desire. This backwoods Humbert Humbert espies Jennie (Shirley Mills) skinny dipping one day, a lengthy sequence that serves a purely prurient purpose. Later he marries her. But, seconds from the conjugal bed, he is shot dead by someone closer to Jennie’s own age, a friend and sweetheart. Child Bride was made a few years after The Lash of the Penitentes, but these two Revier films both feature robed and hooded figures trailing across similar mountainous terrain in the dark.

30A goat would perish under much the same circumstances in Werner Herzog’s movie, Aguirre the Wrath of God (1972).

31While the career arc of the blonde bombshell was well past its prime in the 1960s, one would hardly know it from the crowds Jayne Mansfield generated in Italy. The mondo The Wild Weird Wonderful Italians (1966) shows scenes of a crushing mob as the actress steps from her vehicle to attend a function.

32In order to get the gig, Buchanan was obliged to film material of Ruby in the club, which involved Ruby introducing some of the girls, banging the drum kit of the house band and then working the room. But Buchanan regarded the material as ridiculous, and Ruby himself highly obnoxious, so he cut it. The footage is now considered lost. The suggestion that this lost footage shows Lee Harvey Oswald in the Carousel Club audience is refuted by Buchanan.

33Larry Buchanan, It Came From Hunger! Most sources credit Naughty Dallas aka A Stripper is Born as a 1964 production. Buchanan states in his book that it is 1958. Possibly it’s both. Possibly the film was made and initially released in the fifties, and Jack Ruby’s assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald precipitated a rerelease. But even this hypothesis raises a problem: The Carousel Club’s amateur stripper night on which the film is focused doesn’t appear to have been operating in the fifties. According to the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President Kennedy, to which Ruby is inextricably tied, Ruby only started to actively seek a permit for amateur strippers in about 1961. (Inexperienced girls got paid less.) Buchanan may be getting a little muddled about the amateur strippers angle, which isn’t inconceivable. Or maybe Ruby was hiring off the record? ‘Jack Ruby’s pockets and the trunk of his car served as his bank,’ states the Warren Commission, throwing light on Ruby’s approach to business. Whatever the case, Oswald was shot dead by Ruby on November 24, 1963, so Buchanan could not have filmed Ruby and his Carousel Club later than this date.

34Following Intim-Report, many more ‘investigative’ titles were produced in Germany that featured sometimes humorous sexcapades with interchangeable storylines. One might liken the phenomenon to that of a Teutonic Carry On. Housewives, husbands, schoolgirls and the inhabitants of East Frisia are the subjects of, respectively, Hausfrauen-Report (1971), Ehemänner-Report (1971), Schlüsselloch-Report (1973) and Der Ostfriesen-Report (1973).

35Director Jean-Claude Roy also made many pornographic films under the alias Patrick Aubin.

36This segment of Secret French Prostitution Report became the basis of Harry Hurwitz’s Auditions (1978), a fake US documentary about casting a porn movie.

37Among the blaxploitation movies of Matt Cimber are The Black 6 (1973), The Candy Tangerine Man (1975) and Lady Cocoa (1975). He played with a different theme for his documentary, Sex and Astrology (1970).

38Director Alvin Tokunow appears uncredited in Prostitution Pornography USA as the guy holding the mic asking the questions. He gets embarrassed when a fat lady pours him a scotch using her breasts instead of hands. He is better known as a sound guy, having worked in this capacity on Gimme Shelter (1970), and later many Hollywood movies as Susumu Tokunow. His only other directorial effort is a roughie called Bang Bang (1971), the trailer for which is used in Prostitution Pornography USA.

39Jack Stevenson suggests that the core film is a 1970 production directed by one Freddy Hansen. Very possibly Hansen and his crew were not considered pornographers in Denmark, a country generally without the stigma porn had elsewhere. See Stevenson’s Fleshpot: Cinema’s Sexual Myth Makers & Taboo Breakers.

40Jack Stevenson. Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s.

41Arthur Lenning, Sexuality in the Movies.

42Stanley Long with Simon Sheridan. X-Rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker.

43‘Considerations on the documentary film’ by Gualtiero Jacopetti. Mark Goodall (ed.), Sweet & Savage.

44The movies that Manson inspired can be found in the appendix.

45See chapter two: HARDCORE.

46Among the other fictitious names and accreditations, Dr Frances B. Gröss is a former county coroner compiling a biography of his experiences of death; writer Alan Black is an ideas man who has doubled as a ‘film doctor’ for numerous movies; composer Gene Kauer is a musical prodigy, now recording with some of the masters of the musical world; cinematographer Michael Golden is best known for his dramatic handheld camera techniques often used under situations of great danger where he risked his own life; executive producer William B. James is particularly enthused about the project because it will expose the masses to a reality they have never experienced. And so on. None of it true.

47John Alan Schwartz, telephone interview with the authors, April 24, 2012.

48For more, see reviews of both Brutes and Savages and Savage Man…Savage Beast in chapter five.

49Superbeast is worthy of extra attention (because we like it so much). Shot in the Philippines, the movie is a riff on horror classics, Island of Lost Souls and The Most Dangerous Game (both 1932). Following its theatrical release in the early seventies, Superbeast was for many years unavailable in any official capacity, outside of a a bootleg missing the autopsy footage. The full uncut version was shown on British terrestrial television — August 1978 on BBC2 of all places — as part of a late-night horror double bill season.

50Bruno Mattei says of Zombie Creeping Flesh: “The movie was made in Spain and as there aren’t any jungles there (laughs), we bought footage from a Japanese documentary.” (European Trash Cinema, vol 5 no 2.) Mattei utilized the Guinea Ama material often. As well as flavouring his feature films with it, several sequences found their way into his mondo effort, Libidomania (1978). Guinea Ama was distributed in the US on videocassette in the late eighties, appearing (as Mondo Canibilis) on a list of mail order titles from the Macabre Video Underground under investigation by the FBI. See chapter six: THE PERVERSION SERIES.

51The documentary, described as having crude photography and editing and garish colour in MFB (January 1966), is Dr and Mrs William B. Treutle’s Karamoja (1954).

52The newsreels had suffered similar indignity when television robbed them of their purpose.

53This entrepreneurial spirit would prevail among shock videos in later years, where the threat was again television, specifically reality television and the anything goes cable access mentality. ‘What you can’t see on TV!’ promised Paramedics (1997). ‘Too hot for Jerry Springer!’ boasted Shock-X-Treme vol. 4: Real Fights, Round 1 (1999). Cutting to the chase, Banned from Television (1998) simply spelled it out in the title.

54Of Inhumanities 2 Modern Atrocities, Vox writes in Slimetime (no 24), ‘Lots of shots of animals eating each other (what an inhumanity that is!)… If you see this at your local video store, don’t waste your money — the director certainly didn’t.’

55In the years between Le Cilaire’s Faces of Death III and Faces of Death IV, the enterprising Deluxe Movies Video jumped in with Death Faces IV (1988). Packaged to look exactly like a bona fide entry into the F.O.D. series, it contained tired and worn, poorly dubbed, badly edited, fifth generation copy of Nazi concentration camp footage, sporting accidents, the execution of Chinese dope peddlers and New Guinea scarification footage. Greg Goodsell says of it all (in Subhuman), ‘The sorriest sack of shit available to the home video market imaginable. You take it back to the shop in a huff. Then again, who’s gonna be sympathetic to somebody who feels cheated for not seeing people getting offed?’

56Japan instigated its own mondo industry following the success of Mondo Cane. Initially, home-grown mondo product consisted almost entirely of striptease, cabaret and girls. One of the earliest forays, Keizo Ohno’s Nippon No Yoru (1962) was an imitation of Blasetti’s European Nights and established a formula from which few Japanese films deviated for the next ten years, with fewer still making it to foreign screens. Two exceptions that did play the West are Tetsuji Takechi’s Women… Oh, Women! (1963) and the follow-up by Taijiro Tamura, It’s a Woman’s World (1964). (Tamura is the novelist who wrote Gate of Flesh, adapted for the screen several times.) Sadao Nakajima’s Nippon 69 — Sekkusu Ryõki Chitai (1969) promised sex clubs, blue movie shoots, masochistic men submitting to a dominatrix, and sauna girls. Sadao Nakajima investigated similar sordidness in each of Kyõi No Dokyumento: Nippon Yokujõ Monogatari (1971), Sekkusu Dokyumento: Seitõsaku No Sekai (1971), Sekkusu Dokyumento: Erosu No Joõ (1973) and Poruno No Joõ: Nippon Sex Ryokõ (1973). Hisako Tsukuba directed The Sex Life: Hey Baby in 1971. ‘My favourite part of Women… Oh, Women!,’ says critic Clive Davies in an email to the authors, ‘is the female beer drinking contest with a flute and bongo player providing live accompaniment.’

57Others too. The Serial Killers (1995), labouring under the promise of ‘unbelievable true horror,’ featured interviews with incarcerated sexual psychopaths, among them Arthur Shawcross and Harvey Carignan. The Serial Killers raised concerns of a loophole in the Video Recordings Act 1984 that allowed sensational films to be released without passing through the BBFC, on the slim provision they were educational and therefore exempt from classification.

58Thomas Gretton. Murders and Moralities: English Catchpenny Prints 1800–1860.

59Psychotropic Video no 3 (Summer 1989) and no 4 (Winter 1990).

60Bradford Film Festival, March 14–29, 2003, the National Museum of Photography & Television. Mondo programmer, and champion of Jacopetti’s work in general, was Dr Mark Goodall.

61Danny Peary. Guide for the Film Fanatic.

62One remarkable stopgap between mondo and reality television is the CBS television series Faces of Culture. Comprising of twenty-six parts, Faces of Culture (sounding a bit like Faces of Death) aired in 1983. It promised the viewer an amazing journey from hidden lands to ‘pressure cookers’ like New York, plus ‘the wonders and customs, the secret rites and magic of that exotic, curious and adventurous creature — man’.

63Stephen A. Maier, email to the authors, June 22, 2015.

The human death toll in mondo films began in 1963 with the suicide by fire of a buddhist priest. This occurred in Mondo Cane 2. It was fake. Savage Man… Savage Beast in 1975 included footage of a man being eaten alive by lions in a safari park, and similar stock of mercenaries hunting and butchering South American Indians. Addio Ultimo Uomo in 1978 offered close-up mutilation, castration and murder. Other films gave death a different slant. In This is America Part 2 and Executions it was the result of capital punishment.

Hardcore unpleasantness was increasingly the norm in mondo, and more was required in time. The birth of a baby scene, for example, overly familiar in pseudo documentaries since the forties, becomes in 1970s’ mondo the less familiar breached birth scene. Similarly, human autopsy procedurals in the 1980s switches from adult subjects to infant.

Death and its threat were essential to any mondo production. Whether the footage was fake or real wasn’t altogether a concern for the paying public. The films traded the violence as genuine and audiences accepted it as such. As noted in the previous chapter, filmmakers fudged the subterfuge as best they could. These scenes, when not real, looked real. Human slaughter was re-enacted with alarming verisimilitude. Photography was deliberately grainy, the camera deliberately unsteady and the characters deliberately nondescript. An ambiguous message might precede such a scene, asserting that the material was re-shot, but based on real and available footage. These notices were likely a legal safety-valve for the producers, as much as an attempt to create a sense of the forbidden.

A legitimate market existed for onscreen death, and killing for culture became for mondo a profitable business. As each subsequent film attempted to out-gross its predecessor — fiscally and visually — the world of mondo was effectively edging toward snuff cinema. In these meticulously vivid simulations, there existed the axiom of snuff: Commercial death.

Many of the films discussed in this chapter are of Italian origin and represent a ‘golden age’ for mondo cinema. From the early sixties through to the eighties, filmmakers like Jacopetti and Prosperi, Climati and Morra, and the Castiglioni brothers, adhered to a nascent mondo ideal. Theirs was a savage eye on the world at large — even if at times that eye was not to be trusted! With consummate skill and comparatively high production values, these filmmakers were creating a cinematic experience, their films destined for theatrical presentation. As the eighties wore on the emphasis changed. The focus became myopic, being either sex or death. A Japanese influence brought an onslaught of pathological imagery with the likes of Faces of Death and The Killing of America. These were Japanese productions that looked American. By contrast, The Shocks was a long-running Japanese series that was only ever seen and released in Japan.

In the nineties, things changed again. There was no film crew to speak of anymore. Traces of Death, Faces of Gore and countless others like them were produced solely for the home entertainment market without a hope of theatrical release. Production was bottom-barrel with a DIY aesthetic. Content derived from television news stingers, or was cribbed from other productions without credit or concession to issues of copyright. The result of these clips together was mordant unpleasantness lasting sixty minutes or so. Until recently, this is where mondo stood. We’ll come to what’s left of it later. Here for now is a mondo timeline, with emphasis on key works in the exposition of death.

1962: If the mondo genre itself is often maligned and ignored, it’s somewhat fitting that so little is known of its biological father. A former journalist, Gualtiero Jacopetti supposedly achieved something akin to notoriety for his caustic commentary as editor for a company making newsreels. Following a brief stint as a supporting actor,[1] he went on to pen the narration for two films that anticipate his own Mondo Cane. These are Alessandro Blasetti’s European Nights (1959; on which Jacopetti worked with Ennio De Concini) and Luigi Vanzi’s World By Night (1961). The syrupy view of the world offered in these films, by way of nightspots and club acts, sat uncomfortably with Jacopetti. Or helped to inspire him, whichever way you want to look at it. Enlisting the assistance of Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi, he embarked on a transcontinental trip of his own, a kind of latter-day Robert Ripley hunting for things esoteric. Jacopetti was able to convince producer Angelo Rizzoli to finance the project and Mondo Cane was born.

MONDO CANE (1962)
P: GUALTIERO JACOPETTI. ASSOC. P: PAOLO CAVARA & FRANCO PROSPERI

All the scenes that you are about to see are real and were shot as they were taking place. If sometimes they seem cruel it is only because cruelty abounds on this planet. And anyway, the duty of the reporter is not to make the truth seem sweeter but to show things how they really are.

So claimed Gualtiero Jacopetti in the opening of Mondo Cane. The statement proved to be wildly erroneous. Jacopetti, along with associates Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi, were not afraid to bend their own rules. ‘Showing things how they really are’ was a dictum that Mondo Cane and most subsequent mondo productions would disregard.

The credit sequence, by way of example, shows a stray dog being led toward an animal pound. The dogs inside are excited and leap at the wire-mesh fence. The tethered mongrel is pushed through the gate where it is pursued by the pack as they greet and examine the new arrival. This canine welcome is contradicted by the soundtrack. As the stray enters the pound, the aggressive barking intensifies only to be drowned out by a high-pitched yelp. The impression is that the newcomer is being attacked and torn apart. This aural assault obscures what the viewer is actually seeing and changes the relatively harmless situation into a cruel and savage event. Starting as it means to go on, contrivance and duplicity to varying degrees becomes a staple of mondo over the years.

Successive sequences consist of a Valentino lookalike convention, contrived mating games in New Guinea, and US sailors ogling a boat full of bikini-clad models (though the narrator insists they are bare-breasted). At this point the first shock edit is employed. As the camera zooms in on the breasts of one woman, the scene abruptly cuts to the equally close image of a New Guinea native as she suckles a piglet. The narrator, his voice suddenly solemn, informs us that the woman has lost her child at birth and tribal law requires her adoption of an animal. Apparently, we are in a land where “there’s not much difference between the life of a child and that of a pig”. This is immediately followed by the customary clubbing to death of a herd of pigs by the men — or “barbarians” — from the same tribe, who supposedly “have eaten human flesh”.

A more humane attitude toward animals is displayed in a Pasadena pet cemetery, where mourners weep over their lost pets (and unconcerned dogs urinate on little tombstones). This devotion toward domestic pets is countered by switching to a Thai marketplace where caged dogs are summarily butchered, cooked and devoured. Cattle breeders in Japan massage their animals to tenderize the meat, feeding them beer to increase their weight and value. In Tabar, selected native girls are secured in cages and fed tapioca roots to fatten them before marriage to the tribal chief. This scene again offers nothing but an opportunity to focus on breasts. In subsequent scenes, snakes are skinned alive in Thailand and worshipped in Italy. This juxtaposition of image and counter-image — dubious though some of them are — isn’t to be bettered in any succeeding mondo production.[2]

Contrivance lies at the heart of the ‘radioactive archipelago’ sequence, contaminated by atomic bomb tests. Habitating creatures have supposedly mutated into confused versions of their former selves. The birds favour capture rather than leave their underground homes, and the fish crawl from the sea and climb trees. After a turtle lays its eggs, instead of returning to the sea it crawls further inland. The narrator explains that contamination has destroyed its sense of direction. When the creature is confronted by a fledgling seabird and waves its flippers in an attempt to move it from its path, the narrator says the perplexed animal mistakenly believes it has reached the sea and is swimming. In a final shot, the turtle has been inverted and is close to death. All this looks ridiculous nowadays, but was no doubt effective at a time when radiation and its consequences were still largely a mystery.

Cane’s most startling footage featured single stroke decapitation of a tethered bull by Gurkhas. These graphic scenes were followed by counter spectacles of the Portuguese ‘run of the bull’ in which bulls are allowed the freedom of the streets — albeit a temporary liberty. A bull thunders along, trampling and goring anyone foolish enough to get in its path. The film speed is increased to lend the attacks a more devastating impact, but succeeds only in an unintentional comic appearance.

Its original shock value arguably tempered by today’s standards, contemporaneous reports provide a very different picture of Mondo Cane and its impact on the first audiences. ‘The makers of this catalogue of horrors claim that none of the material has been seen before,’ bemoaned the critic for the Monthly Film Bulletin (January 1963). ‘This is not surprising as many of the incidents are (one hopes) scarcely everyday occurrences.’

Nevertheless, Mondo Cane avoided the taboo of human death. That particular cultural kill was but one year away, to be incorporated in a sequel. Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi had tested audience reaction to real life violence in their first production; with Mondo Cane 2 they would take the transitional step from animal atrocity to human death.

1963: Mondo Cane is released theatrically around the world. It is not without controversy, while in Britain it is also for a time without a BBFC certificate. It is eventually passed with cuts.[3] There follows a mondo explosion. In no particular order: Giuseppe Maria Scotese directs Le Citta Proibite. Mino Loy excels with not one but four compilations of striptease acts: Notti E Donne Proibite, Novanta Notti In Giro Per Il Mondo, Supersexy ’64 and Veneri Proibite. Loy then teams up with Luigi Scattini for Sexy magico, which ascertains similarities between the mysterious sex rites of primitive peoples and modern-day striptease as performed by the likes of Tartara Wong and Black Eva in Paris. Roberto Montero, who revelled in the Orient By Night the previous year, produces in 1963 Mondo Infame. Romolo Marcellini’s Taboos of the World hires Vincent Price as narrator and professes to ‘out-mondo them all’ with ritual finger amputation, a look at tattooing in Japan (occasionally so extensive as to prove fatal), suicide in Stockholm and leprosy. A cut version of the same movie without Price’s narration is released as Taboos Around the World. From Japan comes Tetsuji Takechi’s Women… Oh, Women!

Russ Meyer is supposedly upset by the mondo film, or rather what he considers the ‘anti-American sentiment’ of Mondo Cane.[4] This is hardly a revelation coming from Meyer, the square jaw big breast raconteur. His response is a mondo film of his own, a female-fixated journey through Europe called Europe in the Raw! It isn’t much of a stretch from his pioneering nudie cuties a few years earlier (The Immoral Mr. Teas, 1959; Eve and the Handyman, 1961). Much of it was filmed under the pretext of a vacation for Meyer and his wife. Footage shot in secret attempts to salvage the rather dull travelogue, with Meyer concealing his 16mm camera in a case for a visit to a red light district, before being chased away. (The clandestine element is therefore genuine for a change.) But Meyer wasn’t happy and, following a brief theatrical run, withdraws Europe in the Raw! He recycles some of it later in Mondo Topless (1966), a film convergent on breasts and the women who own them. It is a film that convinces biographer Jimmy McDonough that Meyer is ‘mad’.

Gianni Proia makes a concerted effort to push forward through taste and decency with Il mondo di notte 3. It proves a combination of Proia’s own World by Night No 2 (1962) and new footage. The film is given a makeover for the US market when released under the title Ecco in 1965, following a re-edit by Robert Lee Frost and a new script by Bob Cresse. The film opens with a drinking song in Berlin and members of a secret duelling society promising blood. The sequence is geared toward the inevitable outcome, and doesn’t disappoint with a crimson rivulet on the face of the losing opponent. Ecco has its fair share of fluff pieces (the Brazilian football hero whose fans are intoxicated with joy; a muscleman show for the housewives of Reno, Nevada), but it marks a clear move into edgier territory. In Paris, France, Evon Evah demonstrates mind over matter by skewering his body. The commentary explains the trajectory of each potentially deadly needle, one through the neck and another the abdomen, penetrating close to the liver. Members of the shocked audience are invited to pull out the needles. Evah’s ordeal may be without pain, as noted, but it is not without blood. Still in Paris, the last bloody performance of the Grand Guignol theatre takes place before a crowd altogether mesmerized by the sight of a woman’s arm being sawn off.[5] In Lapland, we witness reindeer herding. Hundreds of reindeer descending a mountain is a beautiful sight and the filmmakers make a pleasing visual analogy with a waterfall. The scenes that follow are not so beautiful. Castrating the reindeer makes for better cattle, we are told, which is a function performed (as tradition dictates) by women using their teeth. Cue the sight of one young lady nuzzling the genitalia of a prone animal. The sequence ends with another tradition. After the ice of winter, the vital energies of the young herders are said to “explode”. They have castrated reindeer, now they partner up and race into the woods hand in hand.

Lee Frost and Bob Cresse, who adapted Ecco for the American market, did much for the profile of mondo outside Italy. Frost was a mainstay of exploitation cinema, a director, producer, actor, a jack of all trades, who worked together with Cresse on several films through the sixties. The partnership culminated with the unforgettable (unforgivable?) Love Camp 7 (1969), a ‘roughie’ that anticipated the Naziploitation ouevre of Ilsa movies and equally tasteless Italian cash-ins. But before this, their collaborative efforts yielded several mondo pictures, adapting both existing works, per Ecco, and generating new ones. A Frost-Cresse collaboration released in 1963 called Hollywood’s World of Flesh, is alongside Russ Meyer’s Europe in the Raw the first foray into mondo for America. Also like Meyer’s film, it is mostly an excuse to show flesh onscreen. Frost and Cresse were great exponents of the ‘hidden camera’ gimmick, and their own mondo films are full of references to clandestine filming. A later effort of theirs, Mondo Freudo (1966), is even promoted as such. Said to feature the gimmicky super camera, able to shoot virtually anything anywhere, Mondo Freudo nonetheless defies the odds and ends up a succession of scenes of nudity. As well as his own entries into the genre with Cresse, Frost shot additional footage for several European pseudo documentaries, including, it is claimed, Sexy Proibitissimo (1964) and London in the Raw (1964).

Jacopetti and Prosperi were themselves not adverse to a quick cash-in and, in 1963, returned with two ‘new’ mondo productions. Both Mondo Cane 2 and Women of the World are largely fashioned from Mondo Cane out-takes, and Jacopetti would go to some pains in time to distance himself from them.

MONDO CANE 2 (1963)
D: GUALTIERO JACOPETTI & FRANCO PROSPERI

Following its predecessor in a mirror-like fashion, the title sequence of Mondo Cane 2 focused on the plight of the humble dog. In this instance, the animals are caged individually. The sound again has been modified in the studio. The dogs are evidently barking but the noise emitted is nothing but a wheezy croak. To confirm there is no fault with the soundtrack the rap of the cameraman’s feet on the floor of the pound is perfectly audible. Many dogs have a bloody bandage round their neck, the filmmakers insisting their vocal cords have been surgically removed to prevent them from howling during experiments in vivisection. This is corroborated by a shot of an unconscious German Shepherd undergoing an operation. Oddly though, the surgery is conducted in the dog’s abdomen — a good half-metre from its vocal cords.

So the two Italians opened their documentary with more dubious footage, in this case a dig at the British, and the BBFC, who, in 1962, had refused the original Mondo Cane a certificate.[6] A title card states that the location is London, September 4, 1963. But in actual fact, one of the dogs in the pound is wearing identification that suggests it is actually Rome. The narrator, suitably patronizing in tone, volunteers that the BBFC might like to cut this offensive sequence like the British surgeon has cut the vocal cords of the animals in order to shut them up.

Despite the rather glib opening, the sequel to Mondo Cane required material that would go beyond the gruelling Gurkha rituals of the former film. Political events round the world offered that opportunity.

Midway through the picture, a sequence shot in Saigon breaches the taboo of human sacrifice on film. What takes place is the ritual suicide of a Buddhist monk (although technically, what occurs is murder, as a second party is involved). The man sits lotus-like in a public space. A fellow priest douses him with petrol, places the canister on the ground, bows, then backs away pouring a trail of flammable liquid to a safe distance. The event is witnessed by a crowd of Buddhists and citizens holding banners. They are behind a wall of uniformed police officers, barring a clear view. An assistant crouches by a vehicle, ignites the trail of liquid, and a ball of flame engulfs the priest. The brotherhood genuflect and the police turn to stand to attention. The burning man then topples, one leg giving a final spasmodic jerk. The protest is over. The camera pans across the blackened, still blazing remains.

This form of martyrdom was regularly reported in the Far East, so the sequence is credible in this respect. (Such events had been filmed before, but not processed as entertainment.) The question is whether the event as it appears in Mondo Cane 2 is real or staged. On June 11, 1963, Thích Quang Duc killed himself in protest against the government’s unjust treatment of Buddhists. President Diem, who headed the Catholic regime, had instructed soldiers to fire on protesting Buddhists, resulting in nine fatalities the week previous to Duc’s immolation. Photographers captured Duc’s suicide, and three days later the pictures appeared in the world press. Are we seeing Duc in this footage, as implied?

Because horrifying protests of this type were aimed at the government, the police presence in the footage is somewhat conspicuous: Such a protest would be prevented as opposed accomodated by law enforcement. Also, the martyr would select a high profile area to conduct the ritual for maximum exposure. Here it occurs on an Esso petrol station forecourt, no less. But most indicative of a staged event is the break in filming.

The sequence commences with the squatted priest being doused with liquid (this is edited out of some versions). At this point it is evidently a real man. As the accomplice backs away, forming the trail-fuse, the crowd is pushed back by police. The jostling causes authentic-looking camera wobble, and the view is obscured by the robes of a priest backing into the lens. However, when the picture returns, the vantage point is different. Moreover, the martyr has changed in appearance with his robes a much darker tone. During the break in filming either the priest has been further doused or a substitution has occurred. With ignition imminent it is unlikely the cameraman would stop filming for a less advantageous position, several metres away. What we are viewing following the edit is most likely an articulated mannequin; the collapsing body and reflexive leg kick manipulated by a simple control wire.

There are telling signs of reconstruction when comparisons are made with the press photographs. In the pictures, there is no evidence of the line of burning petrol that acts as a fuse. Furthermore, the petrol container is positioned about a metre behind Duc, while in the film, the canister is taken away and placed near the vehicle in the background. The assisting priest, kneeling by the vehicle in the film, is not evident in the photo. As the fireball engulfs the man it travels from the right, yet the photograph shows the right side of Duc’s face and shoulder free of flame. The vehicle itself is visible in both film and photograph and is accurately positioned, bonnet open in both cases. However, subtle differences are evident around the headlight and radiator area. Elongated shadows are visible in the photographs, cast from the observers and indicating a clear sky. No such shaded areas are evident in the film.

So, on closer examination, mondo’s first cultural kill is nothing but a charade, an elaborate reconstruction. Nevertheless, it was marketed as genuine and sold to the public as a real death spectacle.[7]

1964: Claude Lelouch investigates Paris in the Raw, where baffling and surreal things are likely to happen. Upon reaching the top of the Eiffel Tower, a woman in a wedding dress removes her clothes and prepares to jump. A sequence that shows the birth of a baby, generally relegated to the end of a mondo film, is here the opening gambit.

Arnold Louis Miller took to the streets of a different city for London in the Raw. Part of a London trilogy comprising the banned West End Jungle (1964) and the forthcoming Primitive London (1965), it opens with reference to the Profumo affair and continues in a scattershot fashion with aspects of Britain’s capital today. This means the Whiskey A Gogo (“where there’s youth, there’s chance of life”), a clip joint (“selling conversation and promises”), a pub in the Isle of Dogs (“this is a pub”), and numerous analogies between nightlife and illusion. One element is devoted to personal appearance, which means in no uncertain terms, a visit to a health club, the voyeuristic study of a young woman shopping for a bra, and a gruesome hair transplant. Multiculturalism is represented by terribly unconvincing accents, while the hedonistic lifestyle of the beatnik is negated by the revelation all beatniks eat cat food.

Roberto Malenotti’s Slave Trade in the World Today has a decidedly unpleasant flogging sequence (and an opening title that suggests the crew faced danger in filming it), but on the whole is rather tedious. Roberto Montero’s Mondo Balordo may have Boris Karloff as its narrator, but he fails to bring weight to the film’s coying self importance. Viewers will have a sense of deja vu as they revisit the secret duelling society of Berlin that opened Il mondo di notte 3 (1963), and then encounter a Rudolph Valentino impersonator, who appears to arrived from a similar scene in Mondo Cane. Not that it prevents Karloff taking a dig at Mondo Cane at one point. But all it offers in its place is a Miss America contest, Bedouin prostitutes, transvestism on the Barrio Chino (it has reached “frightening proportions”), the fad for outdoor camping, and Franz Drago, midget front man for a rock’n’roll band, whose routine, unlike his stature, goes on a bit.

Paolo Cavara, collaborative director on Mondo Cane and Women of the World, directs Malamondo. Nobuo Nakagawa makes Spots in the Sun. Mino Loy returns with Le Mille E Una Donna and more striptease material. But the popularity of such cabaret compilations as these has had its day. The mondo film in general is moving away from the random global agglomerate of earlier films toward thematic continuity. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore aka Love Meetings is indicative of this transformation. Hardly a mondo film per se, Pasolini’s vox pop interviews on matters of love, sex and fidelity are more accurately in tune with Jacopetti’s concept of the documentary filmmaker as artist. Indeed, far more so than, say, the same year’s Sexy Proibitissimo (Marcello Martinelli detailing striptease through the ages) or Go! Go! Go! World (various directors lost on a topographic ocean). Recognized only for its caustic narration, the Monthly Film Bulletin (August 1965) called Go! Go! Go! World a ‘bubble in the wake of Mondo Cane’ — which is exactly what they would also say of Paris in the Raw some months later (March 1966).

Another novel approach to mondo is Luigi Scattini’s Primitive Love. Jayne Mansfield is our host through some rather insipid travelogue type material, bookended by a fictional narrative that posits the blonde bombshell as an unlikely student of anthropology. Animal cruelty by way of cockfight and snake aphrodisiac would prove problematic for the BBFC, and may be the reason Primitive Love remains unavailable in Britain today.

KWAHERI — VANISHING AFRICA (1964)
D: THOR BROOKS & DAVID CHUDNOW

Africa, land of great beauty. Africa is also a land of great brutality; a continent of desperation. Here in Africa, all this, beautiful and brutal, uniquely African, all this is disappearing. And here, the ancient things, and the ancient ways as well, are giving way to all that is new and modern. And very soon now, the Old Africa will exist only in the memories of men, and in their history books, and all this will be seen no more. In the film you are about to see, Old Africa will remain alive and the battle between the old and the new, the battle of blood, the battle to the death, that will remain alive, also. The old is losing the battle of Africa, but not without a fight. And that conflict has made the African soil red with the blood of Africans. But everywhere, fighting and dying, the old gives way, the old loses, the old disappears, the old is swallowed whole. In the film you are about to see, the agonies of its death will live on this screen, even as they are living now in vanishing Africa.

This introduction aside, Kwaheri concentrated almost entirely on ‘primitive’ peoples and age-old customs. Subsequent African expeditions by other filmmakers tended to redress the balance with blood and fatalities — no less the films by the Castiglioni brothers, and Jacopetti and Prosperi (whose Africa Addio opened with an announcement remarkably similar to the one above). A dual advertising tactic, masterminded by road show stalwart Kroger Babb, focused on the sexual and violent attributes of the film independently. This, it was reasoned, would give the film two potential audiences. One Kwaheri poster guaranteed pygmy sex orgies and witch doctors’ powers over women, filmed in the ‘land of Kisee — home of the Suks’ (the sexual connotation being quite obvious). The contrasting poster offered the burning of a virgin, arm torture and brain surgery performed without drugs.

Kwaheri was one of mondo’s less impassioned efforts, lacking the vitality of the Italians. It was slightly more ethical in its documentation, but still the desire to shock was present with the sudden close-up of a child disfigured by a tumorous eye, a ridiculously contrived encounter with a monstrous anaconda, and so on.

The much publicized trepanation and brain surgery are revoltingly real. An elderly woman, suffering what may be nothing more traumatic than a headache, sits in the grass as the tribal doctor slices down the centre of her scalp. The wound, bone-deep and eight-inches-long, is yanked apart to reveal the skull beneath. The exposed skullcap is scraped with a metal implement until a paper-thin section can be prised out. With brain bared, flaps of scalp are then pulled back into place, secured with leaves, and left to heal. Proud of his skills, the doctor oversees a parade of former patients, each exhibiting a hideously distorted head.

Far less spectacular is the climactic sacrifice. A virgin is shrouded in leaves and hoisted to a platform, upon which, it is said, she is cremated alive during a fertility ritual. The tribesmen and women cavort in frenzied celebration under the influence of a narcotic drug. Whether the sacrifice is authentic is impossible to say, but given mondo artifice in general it seems doubtful. More likely the event was a cremation ritual, supplemented later with footage of a live girl and a misleading narration.

1965: Alessandro Jacovoni’s Wild Wild World pledges to be so exciting it will leave audiences limp. “So startling, so shocking, so strange you won’t believe it even after you’ve seen it,” promises narrator Eddie Bracken. Bestiality in Paris, “enjoyed and cherished by all,” is one highlight. Cockfighting in Manila is another. The film is promoted on ‘scenes that are among the most gruesome footage ever made’. In Macabro, Romolo Marcellini looks at tribal circumcision, soon to be a staple of the mondo documentary. Arnold Louis Miller, meanwhile, uncovers Primitive London, one teeming with battery chickens. His cinematographer, Stanley Long, has said: ‘Quite a few of the sixties’ mondo movies featured scenes of animal cruelty, which were really quite sickening… Perhaps, with hindsight, what I was proposing was a kind of political statement on consumerism.’[8]

The rest of Europe jumps in. From Spain, Javier Aguirre’s España insólita (Unusual Spain). (Aguirre directed a number of documentary shorts, but is best known for his work with Spain’s premiere horror star Paul Naschy.) From France, Edouard Logereau’s Secret Paris divulges circus freaks, bodies imported for medical experimentation, a black mass and slaughtered animals. From Germany, Manfred Durniok’s Mondo Bizarre has a cannibal in a cage, the slums of Singapore, English pub life and the incomprehensibility of American football rules.

1966: Working under pseudonyms, Bob Cresse and R.L. Frost shoot Mondo Freudo (The World of Freud) and Mondo Bizarro back to back and release them both in 1966. There isn’t much to differentiate New York City from Tokyo when viewed within closed doors, as demonstrated by the black mass of the former film and the voodoo rites of the latter. Mondo Freudo claims to be ‘too real for the immature’ with its depiction of mud wrestling, human slavery and prostitution. Mondo Bizarro on the other hand, set within a ‘world of beauty, sensuality and repulsion,’ offers massage parlours, human slavery and a pincushion man. One sequence purports to be a neo-Nazi theatre performance filmed in Germany, although it is not believed Cresse or Frost shot anything for either film outside Los Angeles. (Frost and Cresse expanded on this sequence for Love Camp 7.)

If there is a reason why mondo tended not to look to its homeland for feature-length study, Pasquale Prunas’ The Wild Weird Wonderful Italians is perhaps it. A mondo about Italian customs, it filters 3,000 years of history and tradition (as we hear both at the beginning and end of the picture) into one blandly sanitized mess, deserving of its obscure status. Case in point: The tweest, we are told, is the Italian pronunciation of the dance craze the Twist, and somehow a counterbalance to the Italian love of spaghetti. Several sequences run on interminably, while many others are curtailed without explanation. Powerful scenes lifted from Cecila Mangini’s short Stendalì (suonano ancora) (1960) embarrass everything that has gone before.[9]

Edward Stewart Abraham’s Our Incredible World proves a rather misleading title given that the film doesn’t venture beyond British shores. The Cambridge Veterinary School, fairgrounds, a beauty contest, dentistry, a slaughterhouse and the skinning of a mouse are the ‘incredible’ things on offer.

AFRICA ADDIO (1966)
D: GUALTIERO JACOPETTI & FRANCO PROSPERI

What the camera sees it films pitilessly, without sympathy, without taking sides. Judging is for you to do, later.[10]

In this, Jacopetti and Prosperi’s third collaboration, there is no denying that people died — shot point-blank before the camera. The production was ostensibly a real life account of the changes occurring in Africa in the early-1960s. Sequences include the uneasy takeover of the Kenyan government from the British in 1963, the final stages of Mau Mau terrorism, the brutal civil war in the Congo, a race riot in Dar Es Salaam, the two-week revolution in Zanzibar, the genocidal slaughter of the Watusi by the Bahutu in Rwanda, and the nationalistic revolt against the Portuguese in Angola. Among this are scenes of thousands of wild animals being killed in game parks, rich Africans employing white servants, the futile efforts of preservation societies to save wildlife from slaughter, and murder, torture, mutilation. It is claimed — by Jacopetti and Prosperi — the crew itself came close to death on at least one occasion.

The two filmmakers had entered the continent on an unrelated filming expedition,[11] and subsequently became ensnared in the political upheaval and revolutionary change as British colonialism came to an end. Various tribal factions vied for rule and the result was sporadic conflicts, anarchy, random executions, total chaos. Yet, this opportunity of being in the right place at the right time (in a journalistic sense) was an opportunity abused. Despite being in the ‘thick of it’, documenting events that few — and in some instances, no — outside news teams could reach, the filmmakers still thought it necessary to fake a number of scenes. Moreover, the technique of altering the soundtrack to manipulate meaning was pushed to ridiculous extremes. Take, for instance, the trials and convictions of arrested Mau Mau. The suspects, accused of murder and cattle mutilation, are brought before a white magistrate. The narrator details each defendant’s crime and the magistrate’s voice cuts in to pronounce sentence. What he utters is: “I sentence you to four years imprisonment.” The overdub by contrast is “forced labour for life”. A slight misrepresentation to say the least. Similarly, another defendant is sentenced to two years, but the overdub dictates “life imprisonment”. Incongruous details such as these tend to pass the casual viewer by, yet even the staunchest critics heralded Africa Addio as ‘an honest and useful document’.[12]

Most daunting and unstomachable for the public was the animal slaughter, notably the deliberate slow deaths of a family of hippos at a water hole. The creatures are surrounded by a group of natives who continually spear the animals, concentrating their aim on two parents who attempt to protect their offspring. When finally dispatched after a prolonged attack, the infant is dragged from the water with ropes and repeatedly hacked and speared. There is no quick kill here. The young creature is stabbed and slashed from all sides. Spears protrude from its body giving the animal the pathetic appearance of a living pincushion. When it opens its mouth in pain and terror, its throat and tongue become the target and are methodically sliced and skewered. The attackers are proud of their achievement. The harrowing nature of this sequence resulted in its removal from many prints.[13]

One must consider the proximity of the camera crew to the incident. If this is a hunt, was it coincidence the filmmakers were in the vicinity, random witnesses to an inevitable event? Or were they complicit, and the whole thing planned and pre-arranged?

The sequence that follows is patent fabrication. A wildlife preservation facility — resembling a military control unit on a James Bond-type movie set — has a large table-map of the area peppered with models of various species of animals. The uniformed personnel dilligently push the plastic creatures to co-ordinates on the map. A radio message is conveyed, a flying doctor is dispatched to a sick elephant, and the animal is given a blood transfusion.

Africa Addio is as contrived as Jacopetti and Prosperi’s earlier work, although here Jacopetti’s script is rife with racist insinuation. When the camera pans from one black man to reveal a stretchered corpse at his feet, the whole of black Africa is tarred. “He’ll never figure out why the whites make such a fuss to find out who ate this fellow’s liver,” determines the narrator. “Or why they arrested those soldiers who raped those rebel bitches in their cells.” This xenophobia hasn’t changed from the days of Mondo Cane, nor indeed Ingagi back in the 1930s.

The suggestion of cannibalism rises again in the bogus Mau Mau trials, where one particular culprit is accused of anthropophagy for eating monkey flesh.

A sequence showing the massacre of Arabs on a beach is suspicious. The scene shows civilians fleeing from gunmen, from the vantage of a helicopter circling overhead. Despite the commotion the camera crew leaves the scene. On returning the next day, the beach is littered with bodies and gunmen running to the trees for cover. A massacre would appear newsworthy enough, so why break filming to return the following day? The camera records only the pursuit and aftermath, no actual shooting. The scene of supposed devastation is neat and tidy, some ‘corpses’ lying comfortably with their arms folded beneath their head. The majority of victims are dressed in white robes but there is no sign of blood. Immediately following this sequence is one damning in its similarity: The location is again a beach, but this time crowded with wildlife, not people.

It’s all relative. Despite the manufactured situations outlined above, there is no doubting the authenticity of many deaths that place in Africa Addio. People are literally put up against the wall and shot. On one occasion a black citizen is roughly manhandled by a group of uniformed mercenaries. In order to dissuade any audience sympathy, the narrator accuses the captive of burning alive twenty-seven children, an indictment that is almost certainly untrue. The camera follows the ruckus from a distance of no more than three-metres as the terrified man, eyes wide, hands held out, pleads with his captors. Regardless, the white commander strides forward, draws his pistol and shoots the defenceless man in the chest. Wounded, he twists and falls to the ground. The self-appointed executioner leans forward and dispatches the victim with a second round through the head. Death draws the body into a foetal position. The leaking corpse is dragged away for unceremonious disposal.

A similar sequence caused Jacopetti and Prosperi great problems. Allegations arose that the filmmakers had actually encouraged an unlawful killing for the sake of powerful documentary footage. Indeed, the claims were in the public arena long before the film was released. The first the public heard of Africa Addio was in the magazine L’Espresso,[14] notably this report by Carlo Gregoretti:

Leopoldville. It was Saturday, October 24, 1964. The 54th Column of the Armée Nationale Congolaise… had only just started toward Boende when three rebel boys suddenly appeared on the road… marching toward their enemies completely unarmed… In a jeep at the head of the column was the South African mercenary Ben Louw. He put his finger on the trigger of his machine gun, and then, instead of shooting, turned around toward the first truck behind him, saw [Antonio] Climati, the cameraman, eye to the aperture, hands on the focus-finder; saw [Stanis] Nievo and Jacopetti at Climati’s side… and asked them if they were “ready”. But they weren’t… Louw turned around for the second time, then a third time, cursing, and said that he was going to shoot anyway; but at that moment Climati signalled for Louw to go ahead. The Arriflex rolled together with the machine gun mechanism; and the three rebel boys fell to the road.

Gregoretti also wrote that the time and place of a subsequent execution had, at the request of Jacopetti and Prosperi, been re-arranged so that ‘the light would be right’. The filmmakers published an absolute denial. Jacopetti claimed that Gregoretti hadn’t arrived in the Congo until November 28, some four weeks after the incident he claimed to have witnessed, and never went to the area in question.[15]

The charges against the filmmakers were reviewed and ultimately dismissed by the Minister of Justice. However, the furore went a long way in damaging Africa Addio’s box office return. Though the film received the Donatello David, Italy’s equivalent of the Oscar, and was hailed by many critics as an outstanding piece of work, the public were nevertheless apprehensive. When Jacopetti spoke at the Centre for Italo-Congolaise Relations in February 1965, fistfights broke out in the audience. When the film did eventually open, police in Bologna received warnings that the cinema would be bombed, and in Berlin protesters mobbed the theatre, tore down the screen and hurled stink-bombs at the projectors. It fared better at the US box office upon its re-release in 1970 under a new title: Africa Blood and Guts.

1967: In Norman Cohen’s The London Nobody Knows, James Mason talks his way through the gentleman’s lavatory at Holborn station, a Salvation Army hostel, the ‘catacombs’ beneath Camden freight terminal, and other salubrious haunts in England’s capital city. Salvatore Billitteri reflects on the more unpleasant attributes of human nature in Sadisimo, courtesy concentration camp footage and torture devices. Stanis Nievo, credited on Jacopetti and Prosperi’s Africa Addio, embarks on a directorial adventure of his own. But Mal d’Africa is very soon lost on the mondo landscape. “Africa is seeking to find herself,” opines the commentary. ‘Much could be said of this film,’ retorts the Monthly Film Bulletin.

There is an explosion of youth-oriented mondo pictures in 1967. Norman Herman’s Mondo Teeno has British sequences filmed by Richard Lester. Other efforts include Peter Perry’s Mondo Mod, Pierre Roustang’s Teenagers and Edgar Beatty’s The World of Acid (The Hippy Revolt). Odder is Robert Carl Cohen’s Mondo Hollywood, coming from a filmmaker more noted for political work. Some believe the soundtrack originally featured music by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Or perhaps incorporated music by them under an assumed name. But this was only ever a rumour[16] and somewhat more interesting than the film itself. The subjects for the most part are dull. People of local character (hippies) with over inflated egos, freely expound on the loveliness of Hollywood and their important place in it. One young man is something of a recurring motif, running around the film doing a madcap impression of Bela Lugosi as Dracula. Elsewhere, a woman recounts how she loves colour and once ate a piece of crayon in a sandwich while on acid. “We are the avant garde of the fashion field,” she confides — and Rudi Gernreich, creator of the topless monokini, “is it.”[17]

1968: The youth trend continues with Frank Willard’s Mondo Daytona: How To Swing on your Spring Vacation, a rather tame ‘hidden camera’ peek at college students frolicking in Daytona Beach, Florida. The hippies and diggers of Barry Feinstein’s You Are What You Eat, described by the promoters as the ‘pop film of the century’, groove to the sounds of the Electric Flag and Tiny Tim. Apart from a belated entry in 1971 — François Reichenbach’s We Have Come For Your Daughters — teen mondo pretty much peters out in 1968 with Jack O’Connell’s Revolution. In order to earn the film an R-rating, a shot of a young mother nursing her infant while smoking a joint is deleted. Tellingly, O’Connell portrays Haight Ashbury, the hippy Mecca, as crime ridden and rife with hepatitis.

Luigi Scattini unearths incest, drug addiction, nudism, and wife-swapping in Sweden Heaven and Hell. One sequence depicts a drunk chewing on boot polish for its slight alcohol content; another alludes to pornographic films, “the titles of which we are not even allowed to mention.” An investigation of the sex impulse — and beachwear — is the predilection of Vittorio De Sisti’s Excuse Me, Do You Like Sex?

1969: S-x by Advertisement aka Sex by Advertisement promises to expose personal ads placed in urban newspapers. A New York marriage broker preys on the physically disabled, a demented sadist roams Central Park delighting in whipping nude teenage girls, and a pimp posing as a theatrical producer lures young women into prostitution. Coming from Joel M. Reed, later to direct the notorious Blood Sucking Freaks (1977), it’s a suitably sleazy world of fabrication.

From Britain, Antony Balch’s Secrets of Sex (1969) is also fabrication. But it is noteworthy for a number of reasons, no less that it offers a somewhat abstract challenge to the orthodox sex education films beginning to emerge on the continent. Here we have wit and rhythm in lieu of formal narrative. “Imagine you were making love to this girl… Imagine you are making love to this boy,” proposes the narrator on repeat.[18] “Imagine you were making love to this girl… Imagine you are making love to this boy.” Balch’s first film was an experimental short with William Burroughs called Towers Open Fire (1963), a collaboration that clearly exerts an influence here. But Secrets of Sex is funnier.

“Norma. Go and get the Spanish Horse.” asks a dominatrix. Replies her assistant: “Is that the one with the weights?”

1969: Guido Guerrasio’s Secret Africa is quite a repellent spectacle both in terms of what it shows and how it shows it. Mostly blown up from 16mm and shot on a variety of non-matching stock, the film doesn’t for a moment shy away from the gruesome, such as a native eating larvae from a human skull, or the protracted close-up of a hippopotamus being dismembered. By this juncture in mondo, one need barely wonder why the narration avoids identifying many of the tribes or even countries depicted herein, or why shots of similar ceremonies from other countries are intercut on occasion without explanation. Co-directed by Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni and Oreste Pellini, the filmmakers were able to acquire enough surplus footage from this expedition to release Africa Ama two years later.

A new mondo partnership is born. Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni would be involved in a total of five mondo features, each one focused on Africa. Their distinctive film style and presentation, though arguably less exploitative than their contemporaries, feeds the genre with some of its most resonant images. In a letter to the authors, the brothers Castiglioni provide an insight into their motivations. Here is what they say of Secret Africa:

A lot of running around for three years through the continent of Africa. The aim was to show an unknown aspect of this continent. The film crew searched out small and isolated ethnic groups, directing a thorough inquiry ‘in field’ and documenting their customs and rituals. Without passing comment the crew established, on film, their ‘secret’ life, of which there existed no previous film document, only isolated pieces of information in specialist publications. The film’s remarkable success with the public pushed us to make the second documentary, Africa Ama.[19]

Benjamin Christensen’s 1921 picture, Witchcraft Through the Ages, finds itself applauded by fans of the mondo genre upon its re-release in 1969. Through a series of historical re-enactments, and the acquisition of a new soundtrack and narration by William Burroughs, it tracks the course of witchcraft from medieval times to the present day. Luigi Scattini was quick to complete his Angeli bianchi… angeli neri, a candid look at satanism and witchcraft throughout the modern world. R.L. Frost was equally quick to snap it up and release it in the States the following year as Witchcraft ’70, freshly edited and with the addition of several of his own sequences. “Witchcraft in the United States,” asks the narrator. “Absurd… or is it?” He then explains that one would normally equate witchcraft with the British, an assumption corroborated with footage of a black mass in Bedford. Other complimentary footage by Frost includes an interview with a Californian police officer (inexplicably situated at some distance from the camera), and the supposed secret film of a satanic ritual as performed by hippies. The location of the ritual is said to be Devil’s Canyon, a few miles from the Spahn ranch. The Manson analogy is used here as a deterrent to the evils of drugs and the occult. “Human sacrifice,” the commentary concludes, “will always remain our greatest danger.”

1970: Ironically, a new, harder edge in mondo is felt with the re-release of the original flag bearers Mondo Cane and Mondo Cane 2. Pitched together on a double bill with the more silly moments edited out, distributor Jerry Gross promises a DOUBLE SHOCKER SHOCK! ‘Thrill-seeking audiences,’ recalled Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford, ‘still came to see the films big and bad on the grindhouse screen, even though a heavily edited Mondo Cane was showing at the same time on local TV.’[20] And what better time to dredge the mondo back catalogue and unearth that flop of 1966, Africa Addio? Excised of historical patter when released as Africa Blood and Guts, it too is reborn a hit in 1970.

Sergio Martino arrives with Naked and Violent, purporting to be a round-up of contemporary American issues. Along with racism in Fayette and Vietnam War demonstrations in Washington, Naked and Violent comfortably obliges with nude restaurants, body painting, hot rod racing, and a man inflating a blow up doll. The only thing of interest in this drab investigation is the inclusion of yet another early and topical allusion to the Tate-LaBianca slayings. Following a long shot of Roman Polanski’s Hollywood Hills home, a “sect” of hippies is shown making a blood sacrifice. Avoiding the mention of actual names, the leader of the group is an obvious Manson clone and commands that candle wax be dripped onto the naked breasts of a girl. A (real) chicken then has its head cut off and blood is poured over the victim (to a background of sitar music). The pleasures and pastimes of crazy hippy youth take up much of the remaining running time, with long-haired kids munching on live beetles, a California Krishna group, and hitch hikers taking rides on Sunset Boulevard. Martino may take consolation in that he beat Romano Vanderbes’ This is America (1976) by several years. But Luigi Vanzi had already visited the land of the free as early as 1966 with America, Paese Di Dio.

John Lamb investigates Sexual Freedom in Denmark. It is one of many so-called white coaters, shovelling explicit content onto American screens under the pretext of education. Thus the liberation of pornography in Scandinavia is championed in a barrage of images and information so quick-fire as to be almost indigestible. It takes a long time to arrive at the fleeting sight of penetrative sex. From Adam and Eve to Nazi occupation to public opinion on the matter of the circumcised penis, every scene dances through a variety of hoops without pause. What is obscene? asks the narrator as a mushroom cloud fills the screen. Destruction and death, of course. Emaciated children in poverty stricken countries are inexorably linked to the repression of sex and pornography. The kaleidoscopic nature of this film and others like it befuddles the viewer (i.e., state legislator) with the intention that they might accept the result as a genuine scientific study, rather than simply obscene.

Alex De Renzy begins his own illustrious career in porn by directing white coaters. His Censorship in Denmark: A New Approach (1970) opens to the sort of travel montage familiar to many mondo films before it, before arriving at the world’s first major sex show, Copenhagen’s Sex ’69, and interviewing visitors. Later, a cinema club provides an example of explicit pornography available in Denmark. That De Renzy shot this material off the screens of actual theatres meant he could defend Censorship in Denmark as a movie about pornographic films as opposed to being itself pornographic. (The film played for a short time under the title Pornography in Denmark, before De Renzy thought better of it.) Censorship in Denmark is viewed favourably by critics, including the esteemed Vincent Canby of the New York Times, charitable to the idea of screen freedom. Authors Kenneth Turan and Stephen F. Zito cite it as a breakthrough production for New York in terms of explicitness, ‘playing boroughs and suburbs that previously had seen nothing more explicit than an occasional quick glimpse of pubic hair.’[21]

1971: We Have Come For Your Daughters aka Medicine Ball Caravan is indicative of the dissolution of the counterculture dream, or possibly the cynical embodiment of it. A major film studio, Warner Bros., bankrolls a project to send 150 hippies on a three-week trip across the US to England in a caravan comprising trucks, buses and motorcycles, with regular pit stops for music. Conceived as a madcap adventure, the whole deal is filmed by François Reichenbach, later to produce and appear in the pseudo mondo F For Fake (1973). Reichenbach has artistic aspirations for a serious film, albeit one that struggles through a haze of pot smoke and fundamental filmmaking slip-ups. Extensive work is required to knock the many hours of footage into shape, taking one editor and ten assistants almost two months to assemble. A mortified Reichenbach regards the result as the ultimate hippy downer. But this is no surprise to publicist John Grissim, Jr., who, from the outset, was wary of putting ‘a caravan of freaks into the heart of post-Mansonmurder America’. The film is not the peace sign intended, but a fist; ‘a primitive tribe of gypsy children,’ according to Grissim, ‘wandering aimlessly through the jungles of modern America, lost in a utopian vision, destroying itself with drugs, and living an apolitical fantasy life in pursuit of mindless pleasure.’[22] The film is almost jettisoned by Warner Bros., before a young turk by the name of Martin Scorsese steps in for yet another re-edit, managing to salvage something from the ashes.

This same year, Luigi Scattini and Mino Loy team up for Questo Sporco Mondo Meraviglioso, while Jacopetti and Prosperi return with Goodbye Uncle Tom. Adhering to the conventions they previously established, the two pioneering filmmakers give mondo a new slant: they take it ‘back in time’. Arriving via helicopter in the ‘nineteenth century,’ Jacopetti and Prosperi depart the cottonfield of their landing and travel via horse-drawn cart across the American South observing the conditions in which slaves are bought, sold and transported to the plantations. They shoot film of men being crammed like cattle into holds of ships, feeding from troughs and being selectively bred on a stud-farm. Into the fray come genuine historical personages such as the Reverend Falton Stringfellow, a Virginia preacher for whom the scriptures justify the trade in human beings. If not for the abstract time-setting, Goodbye Uncle Tom would look as relatively convincing a documentary as Jacopetti and Prosperi’s earlier mondo efforts.

In a rose-tinted study of East African wildlife, Simon Trevor brings us The King Elephant, and also trite commentary (“Come with us now to the misty plains”) and sappy theme song (“Nobody has to ask the sun to shine / Nobody has to bend the rainbow”).

Not surprisingly, Jeanne and Alan Abel are able to take mondo cliché and turn it into a successful — and very funny — parody: Is There Sex After Death? Driving through New York in his Sexmobile, Dr Harrison Rogers (Alan Abel) of the Bureau of Sexological Investigation, searches out luminary figures in the world of sex. He puts questions to everyone, from the aged Dr Elevenike (surrounded by topless girls) to porn filmmaker Vince Domino (“my films have a lubricatory effect on the audience”). Is There Sex After Death? takes inane commentary and rhetorical nonsense a step beyond, proving only a whisper hangs between the bona fide and the banal.

As man’s respect for nature grows polluted, Dan Lopert (Luciano Martino) wonders in Naked Cities (1971) what historians of the future will say…if there is a future. Walon Green and Ed Spiegel clue us in, however, with The Hellstrom Chronicle, an award winning faux documentary presented by a scientist with an apocalyptic vision about insects taking over the world.

AFRICA AMA (1971)
D: GUIDO GUERRASIO, ALFREDO CASTIGLIONI, ANGELO CASTIGLIONI & ORESTE PELLINI

The purpose of this film was to demonstrate the life affecting some ethnic african groups, from birth to death, through rituals of initiation, engagement, weddings, etc. Notable public and critical success spurred some directors to search out and construct similar films which, nevertheless, failed to arouse the public interest in the same way. It was enough to locate the Matakam and station a small group of photographers in the Mandara mountains in the North Cameroon. For twenty-one days the crew stayed in a small village consisting of a few hundred people.[23]

This is how Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni described Africa Ama. The result was a less sensationalistic, more credible Africa for the Italian filmmakers. Death ceremonies, circumcision and child birth were dealt with in a genuine matter-of-fact manner. Exploitative potential was avoided and only one section in the entire film was patent fabrication.

The documentary opens with a funeral rite in which a village elder, dressed in white, “the colour they are born,” is interred in a tomb. The remainder of the film focuses on tribal customs. Children’s bodies are decorated with deft use of a razor blade. Others have their teeth chiselled for cosmetic effect. One custom involves the killing of village dogs. The animals are throttled to death or have their heads twisted completely around. Their nipples and noses are sliced off for use in a therapeutic concoction. The ritual of male and female circumcision is explored in lingering detail.

Subterfuge is clearly apparent in a sequence showing a native foraging for food. The man reacts to stock footage of a giant millipede crawling on a forest floor. He pretends to pick it up and bite off its head, dropping the body into the tin can he carries. He repeats the exercise with a second ‘insect’ (evidently a short stick) and is barely able to stifle laughter. He is attacked by a snake when rummaging through undergrowth in the next scene, leaping back and swinging the creature (obviously dead) around. One of the production team runs into shot to aid the man. He too is unable to suppress a grin. The purpose of this charade becomes apparent when followed by authentic footage of a patient in hospital undergoing surgery, his finger amputated in arresting detail. The film producers no doubt manufactured the whole scenario to validate the grisly operation. Perhaps they thought the sight of young girls and boys having parts of their genitalia removed wasn’t gruesome enough? The film concludes with a graphic child birth showing that black people are indeed born white.

1972: The absence of an overriding narrative in Of the Dead leaves it a film rather alien on the mondo landscape. Directed by Jean-Pol Ferbus, Dominique Garny, and Thierry Zéno, it marks the dawning of the true-life documents of death, those video barrages that ultimately take precedence in the 1980s and nineties.

OF THE DEAD (1972)
D: JEAN-POL FERBUS, DOMINIQUE GARNY & THIERRY ZÉNO

Like Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), this film is a serious look at death and the ways different cultures approach it. Funeral rites in Thailand are compared to the sterile, industrialized equivalent in America. The Thai deceased is neatly clothed and left in a house for several days while family and friends converse with the body. By this point, the body has distorted due to gas and dilating subcutaneous tissue. When burial commences the face is so swollen it resembles more a pupating insect than the parent it once was. The burial team even have trouble fitting the corpse into the rough-shod coffin such is its distended shape.

For the more socially acceptable American, all natural changes are prevented for the sake of postmortem vanity. Here the corpses are swabbed, scraped, dusted with vacuum cleaners, gutted and sucked dry of all fluids. Then they are packed with embalming powders and sealed shut with nasal and rectal plugs, while cosmetics ensure they retain some aspect of the entity they once were. Finally they are locked into luxurious, airtight caskets and buried beneath a concrete slab with the unceremonious aid of a JCB.

A widow watches her late husband on television, having videotaped his final days in the terminal grip of cancer. Whenever she wishes to resurrect him, she simply slips the tape into the machine and presses Play.[24]

High pressure gas jets consume a body in a crematorium. This technological process is compared to the outdated methods in developing countries where the deceased is placed atop a slow-burning pyre, and the destruction of the body determined by the quantity of wood afforded by the bereaved.

In South America, a revolutionary soldier who has betrayed his comrades is executed by the roadside. The traitor is bound, forced to kneel and shot with two rifle rounds. As the executioners dig a hasty grave the camera focuses on the victim. The man is evidently still alive, bleeding from nose and mouth but distinctly drawing breath. When digging is complete — a hole just deep enough to conceal the victim — he is rolled into it and covered with earth.

Of the Dead offers no commentary from the filmmakers. Ersatz commentary is provided by the subjects themselves, morticians explaining procedure, funeral directors demonstrating wares, scientists championing cryogenics and reanimation, the wailing grief of the bereaved, and so on. This sincere approach sets the film apart from the typical mondo production. Rather than abusing the subject in a parade of horrifying images and off-colour monologue, Of the Dead leaves the viewer fascinated rather than nauseated. Even the minor mishaps that occur — a coffin salesman having to break off mid-sentence to run and answer a telephone; the smile on a mortician’s face when he seeks an offscreen prompt — helps establish candour.[25]

1973: Orson Welles turns his hand to fraudulent documentary as director, writer and host of F For Fake, a film about perception, reality and art forgeries that is more boring than clever. Later, he would narrate two mondo films about the end of the world in our lifetime: Robert Amram’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1976) and Robert Guenette’s The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981).

1974: Jamie Uys’ Beautiful People is a comedy-documentary eye on the animal population of the desert lands of southwestern Africa. It comes over as a real life cartoon, complete with zany cartoon sound effects. Uys would direct the successful The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), a comedy feature set in South Africa that incorporates several documentary-like episodes and also Beautiful People narrator, Paddy O’Byrne. MFB accuses director Uys of ‘treating a tribe of Bushmen with the same condescension he once extended to wild animals’.[26]

Akira Ide’s Guinea Ama asserts that Papuan tribesmen are cannibals, the skeletal remains of their quarry suspended in cages like trophies. The preparation of a more sociable banquet shows natives bashing the brains out of boars with clubs. Scarification is depicted, a black latticework on the face of a young woman set to an easy listening soundtrack punctuated with discordant chimes and sobbing. The camera can’t help but drift from the facial decoration to the girl’s protruding nipples. A funerary rite has mourners beneath the body of a loved one, suspended inches above their heads. Another corpse, decomposed, is wrapped in cloth, carried to a river and thrown in. The commercialization of the island is revealed in the closing shots of the film. Tourists are treated to a staged performance in which natives chase, flog and replicate the murder of a man.

1975: Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni’s Mondo Magic is said to have offended the unoffendable John Waters. Herb Schrader in Video Drive-In! (no 8) said it was ‘sick and bordering on snuff’. While often disgusting, there is little that borders on snuff. The narrator marks a new precedent in breakneck gobbledegook, however, rampaging through the script at a speed that almost defies comprehension. “The lynchpin of all existence is magic,” he blurts, thus establishing the theme for this particular African trek. Of their approach, the brothers Castiglioni said

it was necessary, in this film, to also show populations of other lands: the Yanomami of the Orinoco river in Venezuela and the Witch Doctor of the Philippines, who proved of remarkable interest to follow and document. The film took three long years of journey and research, and interested Alberto Mortavia, one of the most recognized Italian writers — also a big traveller to the continent of Africa — who wanted to ‘sign’ a declaration of authenticity for sequences contained in it.[27]

Focus is again on the subcontinents and their primitive indiscretions, combining sex rituals with the grotesque. Stomach turning visuals come by way of Dinka herdsmen and their cattle devotion. No spray-can insect-repellents here, the tribespeople shower under torrents of fresh cattle urine. Fertility rituals demand the fondling and licking of the cow’s vagina — shown in brazen detail. Elsewhere, animals are clubbed and skinned by tribespeople, and others held suckling to a woman’s breast. There is circumcision, a finger chopped off as a cure for migraine, and flagellation. When it comes to naked, well-endowed native men, “only slow motion does justice” to the sight of them jumping up and down. Of course. At least Jeanne and Alan Abel had the comic effrontery to furnish their nudist dance with a frenetic rendition of Good Golly Miss Molly!

The pre-credit sequence for Emerson Fox’s Journey into the Beyond: The World of Supernatural warns against mass destruction and loss of the self, offering a “better way” in the film to follow. This means scenes of an exorcism and Captain Edgar Mitchell, astronaut, plugging his new book on parapsychology. One priceless sequence has a spiritualist agreeing to let the crew film a séance taking place, we are told, in the catacombs of an Italian monastery. The camera shows the many interred skulls and bones. However, when the séance begins — almost in pitch darkness — almost nothing is visible, and the location could be anywhere in the world. One of the party supposedly enters a trance. No one expected the spectral form that appeared behind the spiritualist, informs the narrator. There isn’t one. “Mumbo jumbo, mass hysteria or evidence of forces occupying the invisible world around and/or within us?” Narrated by John Carradine, some versions of the film include the old exploitation gimmick of chimes on the soundtrack, warning sensitive viewers of ‘disturbing’ sequences.[28] Actor turned director Rolf Olsen made a handful of mondo films under his Emerson Fox nom de plume, including Shocking Asia (1980) and its sequel. He also directed the violent crime caper, Bloody Friday (1972), which is notable for its use of subliminal cuts.[29]

Gianni Proia returns to his mondo roots with World by Night Today. Jacopetti and Prosperi collaborate one last time on Mondo Candido. Mondo in title only, it’s actually a comedy. On the other hand, the first collaborative effort of Antonio Climati and Mario Morra[30] is Savage Man… Savage Beast, a film that promotes scenes of human fatality. As does Arthur Davis’ Brutes and Savages.

SAVAGE MAN… SAVAGE BEAST (1975)
D: ANTONIO CLIMATI & MARIO MORRA

Savage Man… Savage Beast resembled the panoramic world view of mondo cinema that prevaled in the sixties, but with an undercurrent of overt nastiness, typified in an abundance of animal slaughter (much of which is repeated in slow motion). The film opens to the pursuit and kill of a stag. Thus, the theme of hunting is established, a topic that allows for ample atrocity footage. Climati and Morra didn’t balk at the challenge and came up with scenes that overshadowed all previous, as well as most subsequent, documentaries.

Following the opening hunt comes a respite in a hippy communue. Here is the overworked trope of a woman suckling an animal. In this case a goat. A painted sign reads ‘more animals, no guns.’ On top that are perched two doves. Back to the savage: The brutal side of nature is evidenced in wildlife footage of leopards and anacondas devouring monkeys. A bizarre prehunting ceremony sees African tribesmen copulating with the ground. Each man uses his spear to create a hole in the ground, into which he then inserts his penis. This, explains the narrator, fertilizes the earth to produce animals for the hunt.

An anti-hunt campaign in Britain is pure contrivance. Saboteurs infiltrate a pre-hunt party and spike drinks with a laxative. To distract the hounds they employ an Afghan bitch on heat, adorned with ribbons. An archetypal professor in a lab coat observes the sabotage through a periscope.

One of the most unsettling sequences sees Pit Dernitz (our spelling), a tourist in a national park in Wallasee, Angola, leaving his vehicle to film a feeding lioness. “This sequence,” explains the narrator,

is part of the evidence examined by the court in a lawsuit brought by the heirs of the victim against an insurance company. Because of his tragic thoughtlessness, Pit Dernitz was torn to pieces at 9.25am before the eyes of his wife Carol, his nine-year-old daughter Kim, and his two-year-old son Graham. The incident lasted just over two minutes. Due to the nature of the terrain it was impossible to make use of the cars. The animals were driven off only after the arrival of the game warden. The lioness seized the victim’s movie camera. Stained with blood the camera was recovered after the animal was shot…[31]

The event is recorded on Super 8 by tourists in adjacent vehicles. Dernitz leaves the car from where his anxious wife and children observe. He approaches the solitary lioness unaware of a second animal in close proximity. Almost instantly he is pounced upon, dragged to the ground and eaten alive. The shots volley between Dernitz struggling and bloodied beneath the animals, and the reaction of his family in their car. One shot sees lions tearing at meat, Dernitz’s leg protuding above their bobbing heads — trousers and sock in place but minus the shoe. All that remains of Dernitz when the park ranger arrives fits into a plastic bag. His camera is retrieved along with the few seconds of footage that cost him his life.

The veracity of this footage is not easy to determine. It certainly appears genuine. But that opinion derives from the inherent danger of performing a stunt such as this, and closer study suggests it’s a fabrication. Dernitz is overpowered by two lionesses. During his struggle only two animals are present — one of which appears timid and is certainly not ‘attacking’ the man. A little later, with several lions in shot, there is no further movement from the man — which suggests he is dead, or replaced with a (meat-filled) dummy. There are several cutaways in the film and ample opportunities for a substitution. Contrary to claims made by the narrator, the terrain isn’t inaccessible, in fact several vehicles belonging to tourists are already parked a few metres from the incident. An official vehicle — a zebra-striped Land Rover — is visible in the background throughout the incident. When the game warden arrives he uses his Land Rover to disperse the lions. The narrator says the animal that carried away Dernitz’s camera was shot in order to retrieve it. This seems unlikely, so too the animal keeping the camera once it discovered it was not edible.[32]

The sequence has a precedent in a much older film, Savage Africa (1930). In this pseudo documentary, two filmmakers on the savanna order a native boy to fetch their rifles from the truck parked some distance away. The boy is chased by a prowling lion in a blur of panic. Later we see a lion feasting on something as the filmmakers lament the loss of their travelling companion. The sequence is much more primitive than the one found in Savage Man but otherwise mirrors it in execution and purpose.

Another of Savage Man’s disturbing scenes is preceded by the written statement:

This sequence belongs to the amateur photographer Ramon Ordonez, a surveyor, and the scenes from which the following cinematographic reconstruction was made were shot in 16mm film and reprinted at a speed of 24 frames per second.[33]

A camera pans over the occupants of a vehicle bouncing through a jungle in South America. A gang of men are smoking joints and drinking liquor, armed with pistols, rifles and machetes. An unnamed construction company has recruited this band of mercenaries to oust nuisance natives from an exploitable area of jungle. The vehicle reaches a clearing and the crew get out. A tethered dog senses the excitement and barks furiously at the scattering gang. A Molotov cocktail is thrown into the bush creating a searing fireball. Voices shout, gunshots are heard, the camera follows the men. Glimpses of Indians are snatched from the dense thicket. The camera picks out a group of bandidos surrounding something on the ground. Rising over a shoulder, a diminutive dark-skinned man is seen squatting on his haunches, wounded and bloodied. A hand pushes the camera back as a grinning man raises a pistol and shoots the Indian in the head. More rough-shod camerawork. Figures run and point. Another group is discovered. The mercenaries have a live victim on his back in the grass, begging and pleading. Two thugs hold his legs high and wide apart. A third man takes his knife and, after a few strokes of the blade, neatly detaches the victim’s penis and testicles. He holds the bloody genitals aloft before forcing them into the victim’s mouth. Elsewhere an Indian is being scalped, the human pelt then used like a cloth to clean the bloody knife. The final sequence shows the proud assassins bagging their trophies — severed heads, hacked limbs and other bodily parts. A happy refrain from the title song commences: “If we take / The harmony / That is the breeze / That stirs the trees…”

This sequence is a disturbingly convincing piece of film despite the disclaimer that precedes it. However, on close inspection it shows itself to be yet another fake. Giveaway pointers are a fleeing Indian being shot from behind but falling backward, defying the effects of bullet velocity and inertia. During the castration scene the victim has his legs held wide apart, giving easy access to his genitals. The knife rubs against his scrotum but doesn’t incise the flesh. The scene cuts to his face for a reaction shot, then back now to voided groin area where legs are firmly clamped together, obviously concealing genitals. Fake blood gives the illusion of castration.

Savage Man… Savage Beast was among the top three imports in Hong Kong cinemas, with a box office draw of HK$3,272,000 in 1976. It was shown uncut at a British Academy for Film and Television Awards lecture. The BBFC, under James Ferman, used Savage Man as collateral in necessitating the need for censorship and the Board’s own existence. Released in a cut form theatrically in the seventies, the film — like so many mondo films — has never been available for home viewing in Britain.

BRUTES AND SAVAGES (1975)
D: ARTHUR DAVIS

All scenes whether actual or simulated represent actual truth.

This particular film outstripped all others with its audacious and utterly bogus ad campaign. ‘See! See!! A man actually eaten alive by a giant crocodile’ guaranteed the poster with a garish artist impression of a screaming man in the jaws of a crocodile. In its favour, Brutes and Savages was the only film to admit to fabrication in its opening credits.

“Who are the beasts and who are the savages?” queries the narrator. Yet another travelogue-nature film with the spice of forbidden promise, the venue for Davis’ expedition is South America. Here “we witness constant scenes of jungle survival”, courtesy the animal food chain. These sequences are long and plagued by a funk-disco score by Riz Ortolani. The film endeavours to evoke sympathy in scenes of endemic squalor manifest in the ghettos surrounding affluent cities. The inhabitants, the narrator informs us, allow the filming of their children in hope that an evil curse from the camera will kill the youngsters and leave less mouths to feed. “We left this place depressed and named it… Death Village.”

True to form, Brutes and Savages resorted to animal slaughter for supplementary shocks. Leaving the suburbs the team seek permission to film an obscure “turtle-wedding”. Their guide introduces them to a “Mr Fixit” who can procure anything at a price, including authorization to film the ceremony. Contrary to Mr Fixit’s stated abilities, the crew are then told they cannot film the rite. Regardless, they persevere and apparently risk death for doing so. The fatuous wedding ceremony culminates in the killing of a turtle. Flipped on its shell, the creature’s throat is slowly cut, the camera close enough to enter the gaping wound and gasping mouth. Sexual frisson next as Brutes and Savages accompanies the newlyweds to the conjugal bed where they perform in embarrassed soft porn fashion. The caveat: The wife will be returned to her father and poisoned if she does not bear a son within one year.

A woman is prepared for sacrifice to the Sun God. However, in keeping with the animal exploitation, she is substituted with a llama. In a revolting sequence the struggling spread-eagle animal has its chest cavity cut open, a hand inserted and, after seemingly endless rummaging, the still-beating heart is yanked free. The organ leaps and jumps in the man’s hand as the remains of the creature are ritualistically dissected and buried.

Dressed in stereotype safari garb, Davis requests permission to film the customs of another Indian tribe. The tribesmen offer to demonstrate their manhood initiation ritual. This involves fifteen-year-old boys crossing a crocodile infested river. Should they reach the other side unscathed, they become men. However, if they are maimed in any way, their imperfection results in expulsion from the tribe to die in the jungle.[34] “We set up our cameras and waited,” says the narrator upon reaching the riverbank, whereupon the first initiate crosses cautiously. Stock footage of crocodiles plunging into water are edited into the scene. Safely across, the first neophyte waits for the second. Again, stock footage is inserted, but this time a model crocodile is utilized, too. Model and native clash, writhing in bloodied water until a severed hand floats to the surface, followed by a ruptured knee joint. Then appears the model crocodile with a chewed and detached head in its jaws. “After witnessing that secret manhood event we shuddered a little,” concludes the narrator. The attack is one of the most pitifully crude enactments seen in any mondo production. Being the focus of the ad campaign, it is precipitated in the film with crude references to crocodiles and their savagery. A crash course in the biology of the reptile is provided in the opening moments of Brutes and Savages. Later, as the expedition heads downriver and the beasts are shown wallowing at the river’s edge, a native confirms from the safety of a boat: “They’re very dangerous… They’re very dangerous.”

The climate of taboo infringement continues with an investigation into cocaine and its origins. In a Bolivian marketplace, Davis stands before the camera holding a bag of unprocessed cocoa leaves. “Ten cents a bag. Anyone can buy it.” Slipping a leaf into his mouth, he chews prudently as though expecting an instant high.

A customary event said to occur annually is a symbolic stone-fight between two villages. The narrator insists the origin of the fight has long been forgotten. Paradoxically, having forgotten his own comment, he reveals the custom emanated from the mass rape of shepherd women many years ago. The stone throwing reaches its climax with a one-to-one face-off. Equipped with sling-shots the two remaining marksmen hurl stones at each other, and dodge incoming. The cameraman is incongruously stationed between them. Oblivious to the missile landing behind him, one player feigns a strike to the head and falls to the ground. The production team decide the man must be transported to hospital for open-cranial surgery, which leads into appropriate surgical footage screened in its entirety. As with the finger amputation in Africa Ama, it is likely this footage existed before the script.

The crew visit a museum. “By now, we were getting used to filming without permission,” confides the narrator on entering the building. The clandestine footage is said to be rushed and inadequately lit, but there is no discernible change in quality. The ‘unfilmable’ objects consist of earthenware items depicting sexual acts. Homunculi copulate, fellate and — what the narrator claims is the depiction of torture — perform sodomy. Davis points at the sexual element of each piece like a cheeky child.

Added sensationalism comes with a simulated act of zoophilia. The lily-white buttocks of a farmer pump at the hindquarters of a llama, encouraging the narrator to observe that “animals have their own god and their own rights”. How he reaches this hypothesis through bestiality is not explained.

Brutes And Savages is a lame attempt to exploit taboos using artifice and constipated attitudes that hark back to the 1930s and a jungle adventure film like Beyond Bengal, which also includes scenes of a man in the jaws of a crocodile. The coverage of sex, drugs and death is patronizing and the film itself memorable only for its ‘real death’ promotion.

Davis would use much the same pitch for a Japanese martial arts documentary, packaged and released into theatres as Budo: Art of Killing (1978). This too was said to incorporate a genuine fatality. Davis is credited as executive producer, but is otherwise absent from this film. Dull if nicely shot, Budo: Art of Killing is scripted and directed by Masayoshi Nemoto, and largely bereft of the sensationalism that defines Brutes and Savages. It showcases various martial arts disciplines, as demonstrated by experts in Japan. A narrator constantly reminds viewers of the agony and cruelty of training practice, with an emphasis upon the samurai sword, whose effectiveness as a weapon concludes the film and provides it with the mooted death scene. “A sword can cut through a man’s neck in just one-hundredth of a second,” the narrator says wryly. “This is the shocking one-hundredth of a second.” A sword is shown slicing effortlessly through bamboo and straw in slow motion. Having insinuated the worse, two masters then demonstrate their prowess with the samurai sword. This dangerous ballet ends suddenly with the bloody decapitation of one of the men. Freeze-frame. The ‘death’ is clearly a manufactured scene on a studio set, passing so quickly that one suspects even the intrepid Arthur Davis must have felt slighted by it.[35]

DEATH: THE ULTIMATE MYSTERY (1975)
D: ROBERT EMENEGGER & ALLAN SANDLER

Death: The Ultimate Mystery is one of The Gamma Chronicles, a series of films purporting to challenge ‘the unknown, the unexplored, the uncharted’.[36] Much like the other Chronicles, it is horribly dull and consists of interminable conversations and speculation. Cameron Mitchell is the host. The film opens with Mitchell driving along in his car, looking out the window. “There was one photo that fascinated me,” he recalls of his childhood and the work of his photojournalist father. A black and white image fills the screen depicting a soldier crouching alongside a second man, who, face down in the dirt, has a cavity in his head from which his brains spill. As Mitchell attempts to come to grips with his fascination, the decimated head takes up more and more of the screen. “Death… what is this silent conspiracy of nature that keeps us from knowing what it’s all about?” Mitchell’s inquiry takes him to a Los Angeles psychologist. “Now hang on a dang minute,” he responds to one particularly unsatisfactory answer. The psychologist refers him to Dr Armstrong, retired Surgeon General of the USAF. And so it goes. From museum curators to hypnotherapists, from doctors to gurus… all pontificating on the meaning of it all. By far the most interesting sequence is Mitchell’s visit to the mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico. In the cemetery here, bodies are exhumed and propped up in the vault if relatives are not able to pay for the plot after an initial five years. The bodies are well preserved, still retaining eyes, hair, and flesh. The caretaker at the entrance to the crypt addresses the viewer directly: “You are the American that wanted to see the mummies? Okay, come with me.”

Mitchell punctuates the oratory of everyone he meets, with “interesting” or “I see…” Alas, it becomes clear eventually that Cameron Mitchell isn’t actually in the picture! It is Mitchell’s name on the credits and his voice on the soundtrack but the red-haired, bearded individual wandering through the movie is not he. The filmmakers go to wonderful lengths to hide this fact from us: Forced camera angles (i.e. from a distant corner of the room, from behind ‘Cameron’s’ foot); by placing ‘Cameron’ in shadow; by hiding ‘Cameron’ behind an object (with just his knees sticking out from behind a Guanajuato mummy); by framing only the tufts of ‘Cameron’s’ beard in the shot, by having the camera take ‘Cameron’s’ point of view, and so on. The title Death: The Ultimate Mystery takes on a whole new meaning in this light.

FACCIA DI SPIA (1975)
D: GIUSEPPE FERRARA

Faccia Di Spia aka CIA Secret Story is a mutation of fictional narrative, pseudo documentary and mondo film. It is very different in style to those other films reviewed so far, and remains relatively obscure. The opening frames declare that events depicted in the film have a factual basis. It may be true. But this exposé of CIA practice both at home and abroad is muddled and confusing. The main failing is the repetition of stock footage amid reconstruction and drama, confounding any sense of narrative cohesion and momentum. Faccia Di Spia is memorable only for the brief midsection that represents interrogation methods employed or advocated by the Central Intelligence Agency, in other words graphic torture in the form of rape, limb hacking, eye gouging and genital trauma. The sequence is manufactured using actors, clever makeup and special effects, but is nonetheless extremely brutal and convincing, in the manner of the torture scenes in another Italian production of around the same time, Emanuelle in America (1976). In the mid seventies, without the capacity to rewind and pause, the fabrication of these scenes would likely have been lost on audiences, especially given the infusion of authentic footage throughout the film — political assassination, public demonstrations, military coupes — and its otherwise bone dry presentation.

1976: The Late Great Planet Earth is based on the book of the same name by evangelist Hal Lindsey, a doomsayer espousing Biblical prophesy. “What are these perils that could mean the end of the of human life on Earth?” asks host Orson Welles early in the film. “Are they real or imagined?” It’s a rhetorical question. Lindsay and a host of notaries support the basic tenet that the human race is doomed and not likely to be around in the year 2000. The end may take any form, and the film does its utmost to cover every possible eventuality: Street riots, the ozone layer, genetic science, false prophets, danger from space, famine, disease, overcrowding, terrorism… Following some rather dull dramatization early in the film, The Late Great Planet Earth moves into rapid-fire mondo territory. Fascism in America will be called Americanism[37] and the antichrist will have a smiling face. Potential candidates for the role flash onscreen: Nixon, Reagan, Kissinger, Ted Heath. The number of the beast leads us into wild conspiracy theories. The impact would be incredible, deliberates Welles, should the Kennedys or Martin Luther King come back to life. No doubt!

Romano Vanderbes’ This is America promises a new-look America, but delivers instead male gogo dancers, demolition derbies, massage parlours, the Indianapolis race track and sex boutiques. Also known as Jabberwalk and Crazy Ridiculous American People (relying on the acronym C.R.A.P. as an attention grabber), the film proves popular enough for sequels in 1980 and 1982, also directed by Vanderbes.

Cashing in on Jaws, Bruno Vailati enters the world of Uomini e squali aka Men and Sharks (1976), an underwater mondo that becomes a veritable bloodbath of open wounds and detached limbs. Vailati cornered the market in the lovely named subgenre of water-shockumentary. His follow-up to Uomini e squali was Pericolo negli abissi (1977), where women of few clothes fall victim to various creatures of the sea. One scene in Pericolo negli abissi features a large eel attacking two female divers and killing them. The first woman is bitten on the nipple, which leads her to remove her bikini top and point a bleeding areola at the camera as the poison then takes hold. The other woman makes an unsuccessful attempt to keep the eel from entering her pants, before she too succumbs and sinks slowly to the seabed. Of course it’s pure fabrication (if nicely shot). The scene is accompanied by cutaways to the faces of the terrified women and the toothy grin of the eel, along with a funk jazz soundtrack and overdubbed water noises that are loud.

1977: Under the alias Jimmy Matheus, Bruno Mattei directs Mondo Erotico (orig: Le Notti Porno Nel Mondo), an account of sex clubs around the world and what goes on in them. The following year, Joe D’Amato makes Le Notti Porno Nel Mondo No.2. Mattei reciprocates with Emanuelle e le Porno Notti Mondo No.2 (orig: Emanuelle e le Porno Notti). Claudio Racca’s Tomboy — Sesso: Inferno e Paradiso is concerned with gender realignment and features a sex change operation.

1978: One of the sleazier, more peculiar entries in mondo is produced in 1978. Although not credited, Doris Wishman — director of trash classics Bad Girls Go To Hell (1966), Deadly Weapons (1973) and others — is responsible for the remarkable Let Me Die a Woman. Behind a desk, Dr Leo Wollman muses “what, who and why are transsexuals?” Wollman explains. He laments on one desperate young man who, unable to afford a sex change, hacked off his penis with a chisel. The bloody scenario is reenacted should there be any confusion as to what is meant by hacking off a penis with a chisel. In group therapy, one patient explains, “I always felt like a woman… even when I had a penis.” The stilted dialogue gives things a surreal quality, so too the camera that focuses everywhere but on the subject talking (a familiar Wishman trait). Grainy footage of a sex change operation — a man becoming a woman — includes inserts of a surgeon having his brow mopped. The jolly theme music plays as tissue is cut and a heartbeat pounds. Back in his office, Wollman points to the genitals of a transsexual, advising viewers that the post-operative vagina requires dilation. He then spends time fondling dildos.[38]

Don Como’s Unknown Powers features various celebrities recounting stories of the paranormal.[39] Because of a brief clip of the Reverend Jim Jones, this altogether dull film was catapulted into unexpected success when Jones inaugurated murder and mass suicide in Guyana the year of its release. Before the massacre, the original ad artwork made no reference to Jones. Afterwards he becomes its focus.

The second collaboration between Antonio Climati and Mario Morra is This Violent World. It eases the audience in with Queensland schoolchildren counting and playing among the local tern population (of which “there are 680,410 — no more, no less”), accompanied by a cute song. But then a sudden shift of location to the Mystics of Kavuani in the Orient. Penitents and fakirs are not the most original mondo meme. But here one fakir sticks out his tongue for the camera, takes a knife and slices it clean off. In another sequence, a man faces execution by firing squad. The whir of the camera on the soundtrack attempts to lend credibility to the faked sequence.

The same year, Bruno Mattei (again under the guise of Jimmy Matheus) explores man’s darker sexual desires in Libidomania. Quoting De Sade and Krafft-Ebing, the host in this instance is a bespectacled man in a brown suit wandering around with a microphone in hand and confronting ‘noted’ psychologists. His answers furnish the vignettes that comprise the film. These run from the mildly perverse (voyeurism) to less common traits. A leering fat man drags a woman into a barn, renders her unconscious and hacks off her leg with a shovel. A man drifts through a cemetery, coming to the statue of a woman which he then tries to fuck. A woman fills a glass with bubbly piss and offers it to a man to drink. Another man anticipates a faecal deposit from a woman straddling his face. It arrives in the form of a fake-looking turd. In another sequence, an old man spies a woman in a public toilet. When she leaves, he rushes in, fishes out a stool and rubs it between his fingers. A necrophile breaks open a coffin and removes the clothes from a recently deceased female. He has sex with the corpse before attempting to slice open her abdomen with a razor blade. A woman dreams of a monstrous cyclops in a forest who has sex with her in the rain, thrashing her breasts with his hair. Needless to say, most of the deviations portrayed are re-enactments or total fantasy. Not so the men with serious physical deformities seduced by women who crave such partners.

ADDIO ULTIMO UOMO (1978)
D: ALFREDO & ANGELO CASTIGLIONI

White men… go amongst all the lost villages of my land with your register, with your photographic machine and collect testimony of the truth, the controversy, all the old jealous customs of a very long human story. Trust only their own voices. When they die it is like your civilization burning all the libraries.

The Castiglioni brothers became the temporary torch-bearers of the mondo genre. They followed Africa Ama with the impressive Mondo Magic and, in 1978, produced Addio Ultimo Uomo (Farewell The Last Man), one of the genre’s toughest entries. The film retained a degree of sexuality but this too had changed, becoming more explicit. Unnecessarily intrusive at times, the camera offers fly-on-the-wall documentation of African natives copulating in their huts and women dilating their vaginas on greased, wooden dildos. Sex in supposed civilized society is courtesy of sleazy strip joints and coin-op porno loops, sex made impotent by commercialization.

It is, wrote the brothers Castiglioni,

a film composing aspects of life for the African population and comparing them to that of our ‘civilized’ society. This film was originally an invitation by Léopold Senghor, a great political man and poet, to address a few white writers on ethnology. An invitation that we have credited with the commentary of Vittorio Buttafava, one of the best Italian journalists (now disappeared).[40]

Thus the juxtaposition of primitive culture alongside our modern, accepted behaviour runs throughout Addio Ultimo Uomo.[41] Clubbing a dog to death prior to cooking it is offset with the extermination of several dogs by gas because they have simply become an inconvenience to society. Primitive scarification pales into insignificance when compared to the savagery of contemporary cosmetic surgery. Here, paranoid women undergo living autopsies in order to transform their natural appearance into something they consider more pleasing. Kilos of fatty abdomen tissue are carved away. Breasts are redefined with the sweeping slice of a scalpel. Noses are altered by hammer and chisel, and the fragments of shattered bone yanked out with pliers. These are extreme images, yet hardly ‘ordinary behaviour,’ as the culture comparison suggests.

The film contains some of the most harrowing images of the mondo canon. One scene depicts the preparation of a corpse for burial. Mourners weep, dance and play a solemn funeral dirge as unsophisticated morticians ready the cadaver for the afterlife. The days’ old body is propped against a wall, its face bloated. Relatives peel away pieces of shedding skin. One woman has particular trouble detaching the sticky derma from her fingers. The sloughing detritus is dropped into a hole dug between the deceased’s feet. Fluids are wiped from behind the swollen lips, and mucus squeezed from the nose as countless tiny flies feed on the postmortem matter. Wads of cotton are forced deep into the nostrils with wooden skewers. Eyes bulge behind sealed lids. The head is scraped of exfoliate. Only when the corpse is finally wrapped in its burial garb is the ghastly image exorcised. Curiosity compels the viewer to stay with the sequence.

Uomo contains yet another thoroughly disturbing sequence. It lasts only a few minutes yet leaves the viewer stunned. The camera follows a group of natives in pursuit of something through the trees. Each man is armed with spear, knife and machete. The narration tells of a fifteen-year inter-tribal dispute, and it transpires that a hut-burning adversary is being hunted. When finally captured he is pinned to the ground with a spear in his belly. Still alive, lying on his back in the dust, writhing on the end of the blade, his captors push the weapon through the stomach wall. Circling the group, the cameraman seeks the best shot. The victim’s hand grips the spear point as it pumps up and down, spilling blood. The camera picks out a ceremonial dagger sheathed on the forearm of one attacker. Next moment it is put to use. The antagonist’s penis, uncontrollably expelling bladder content, is taken in hand and slowly amputated. Blood spurts across the man’s thighs as the penis is cut and removed. The camera lingers on the damage before panning to further mutilation, and the victim’s hand being hacked away at the wrist. Says the narrator, “There you are, justice. Justice is done. But at least it’s something of the past that doesn’t belong to us in modern times.”[42]

Brutal and shocking as it is, the incident is nonetheless fabricated slaughter. The unrehearsed appearance sits the material comfortably with authentic documentary footage, ‘borrowing’ verisimilitude as it were, like so many other extreme mondo set-pieces. Analysis exposes the sham.[43] Even so, the Castiglionis avoided the condescending racism of, say, Jacopetti and Prosperi. The portrait of primitive savage extends from Africa through to the modern West, where arguably social mores are held up as being even more abstract and abhorrent. The castration sequence is immediately followed by more ‘civilized’, but no less violent atrocity; a brief excursion into the horrors of modern warfare. Unlike the castration scene this ‘techno-brutality’ is all real, no fabrication: Disembowelled babies cling to life, men are tortured, amputated limbs are tossed around like pieces of broken furniture, bodies so mangled they are not even recognizable as a species…

1979: The end of the decade advanced a new era of mondo film. Charles E. Sellier Jr and James L. Conway’s Encounter with Disaster is a compilation of tragedy footage depicting air crashes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and so on. A burning tower block in Sao Paulo ejects its residents from the topmost floors, the dramatic music intensifying each time a body falls to earth. Ships collide at sea, dams collapse, and the Hindenburg burns in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Sellier and Conway were also behind The Bermuda Triangle (1979), Beyond and Back (1978) and In Search of Noah’s Ark (1976) (which asks “is the story of Noah’s Ark really true?” before proving it is), all modestly produced as part of the Sunn Classic Pictures stable of family oriented films.

Fred Warshofsky’s Days of Fury has Vincent Price as narrator. Perched on a rocky shoreline, Price informs us that “Inevitably cars crash and men die… horribly.” Racing vehicles careen about on race tracks, which leads to another location for Price (and another garish suit), whereupon it is observed that “The wheels of the world are turned by oil.” Thus a perilous link is established between sporting disasters and crude oil spillage on shorelines. Sea, air, fire and volcanoes account for more fury, so too Bill Stewart, a journalist murdered in Nicaragua.

Following this thematic pattern, one film stood out and established itself as the torchbearer for mondo’s newfound focus on death. Faces of Death.

FACES OF DEATH (1979)
D: CONAN LE CILAIRE [JOHN ALAN SCHWARTZ]

This first instalment in this long-running series is diametrically opposite to the candour shown in Of the Dead. Hosted by the aptly named bogus consultant, Dr Frances B. Gröss and feigning to be a serious investigation into the mystery of death, Faces of Death is nothing short of freak-show exploitation. The film utilizes stock footage of autopsies, air crash victims and other newsreel atrocities, combined with fabricated scenes of execution, satanic cannibal ritual and similarly unconvincing set-pieces for a meditation on death. Added to this Gröss’ scripted polemic and an appalling musical accompaniment, the whole comes across more ridiculous than thought-provoking.

The first shot of Gröss (the umlaut disappears in later films) sees him removing a pair of surgical gloves. The attempt to dupe the viewer into believing him a genuine skilled physician, responsible for the pre-credit autopsy, is hopelessly futile. Gröss has more the look of a second rate mad scientist than self-professed doctor of the pathological sciences. His untidy hair, twisted and ill-fitting spectacles, weasel features and sparse beard forge a truly pathetic simulacrum. (The end credits acknowledge Gröss is an impostor, an actor by the name of Michael Carr.[44]) As for his fascination with death, we are informed it all began with a recurring funeral-dream. Consequently, Gröss was destined to travel the world to study death in its various forms.

The camera descends into the catacombs of Guanajuato, Mexico, for the mummified corpses on display. Lights are shifted around to create life-giving shadows on the dead faces, sensationalizing a genuinely fascinating spectacle.[45]

A farmyard chicken is decapitated with an axe to the tune of Old MacDonald Had A Farm. The headless bird is filmed running around the holding and Gröss remarks on his desire to now become vegetarian. Cue slaughterhouse footage and animals on meat hooks bleeding to death. Still debating the carnivore in man, a contrived sequence follows that is based in a Middle Eastern city, as suggested by stock footage, a studio-created restaurant and (Caucasian) belly-dancer. Four tourists sit around a table in anticipation of an unusual culinary delight. A waiter enters carrying a screaming monkey, securing the creature in a contraption that allows only its head to protrude through the centre of the table. The diners are given small mallets to smash open the exposed primate globe. Clumsily the task is accomplished and the fresh brain devoured raw. This one segment caused much distress with viewers worldwide, despite it being fake and the real monkey obviously substituted with a dummy head.[46] Animal atrocities continue with seal culling, upon which Gröss vows never again will he wear the skin of an animal. A laughable fabrication of a supposed alligator attack concludes with a game warden being dragged from a lake, limbless and dead.

The prevarication continues with a bogus assassin, interviewed wearing a Balaclava. Also false is a police shoot-out involving a psychotic family man who has cut the throats of his captive family. This sequence terminates with a hand over the camera lens.

Bleak reality is the city morgue. The camera glides through crowded corridors, and we see the dead sharing trolleys like lovers. We see the victims of murder, accident and suicide. We see their splayed internal organs, their shattered skulls and broken limbs. Adjacent to the corpse of an elderly man, a dead baby is opened like a colourful pop-up book. Despite the shock of these scenes and the cold detachment of the horror-display, the sight of genitalia is blurred as the camera passes over them. This is indicative of the film’s true point of origin, Japan, where the sight of genitals remain unnacceptable and are censored. It is difficult to comprehend in the West the rationale that penis and vagina are an unacceptable violation of decency next to unreserved images of the body in total destruction.

This short diversion into the authentic is succeeded by the spurious once again, in this instance state execution. A prisoner is escorted to the gas chamber and promptly dispatched in front of the camera. For dramatic effect, we glimpse the condemned man’s point of view within the death chamber. The narrator claims there are merits in this form of execution, a theme that continues with death by electric chair of one Larry DeSilva. Two guards escort DeSilva from his cell as a mournful harmonica plays in the background. Strapped into the chair, the music becomes upbeat. Electrodes are clamped to DeSilva’s leg and head. The condemned man bucks in his seat as high voltage courses through his body. The current is turned off and a doctor examines the body for life, giving the camera an exaggerated shake of the head. The electricity surges again until blood leaks from behind the tape covering DeSilva’s eyes.

More of the same follows in what Gröss claims is footage secretly shot by a tourist in the Middle East. This doesn’t explain the variety of camera angles and close-ups. A man is led from a tent, forced to kneel at a chopping block and beheaded with the single stroke of a sword. The headless body topples to the sand, refusing to bleed, such is the shabbiness of the economical effect.

An immortality cult performs a satanic ritual in a satisfyingly stereotyped manner. The leader — resembling Charles Manson,[47] as though this itself lends credibility to the sequence — disembowels a stolen cadaver and passes the organs to his followers, who devour with gusto the body parts. Gröss claims to have gained the trust of the cult and was granted permission to film the ritual. The orgy that follows is not shared with viewers in its entirety.[48]

Reality resumes with newsreel footage of a woman jumping to her death from an apartment block. Again, the choice of music is unfitting and desperately insensitive. The intro countdown to the musical piece (“One, two, ah-one, two, three, four…”) is timed to coincide with the woman’s leap. The same insensitivity is displayed toward victims of drowning, with the camera circling washed up, bloated forms as cheerful music plays.

A couple driving through a national park pull into a clearing, where the occupants of another parked vehicle are feeding and filming a grizzly bear. The scene alternates between footage shot by the two parties. One of the drivers exits his vehicle and approaches a bear, which promptly kills and eats him. The first cameraman records the death. Remarkably similar to Pit Dernitz’ death by misadventure in Savage Man… Savage Beast, the final shot here shows the bear ambling into the woods, a rubbery limb hanging from its jaws.

A severed rubber limb, however, is more fun than the extreme accident footage that comes next. The remains of a cyclist are removed from beneath the wheels of a truck, the camera lingering long enough to observe a paramedic scooping body matter from the tarmac. The voyeuristic approach to rail crash and air disaster are no less unpleasant. Again, the camera pans and zooms through wrecked machinery in search of organic debris. It only pauses when an amputated limb, crushed face or scattering of intestine comes into view.

In typical half-cocked fashion, the film lifts the gloom with a supposed investigation into life after death. Laughable audio recordings and ridiculous spirit photographs are presented as evidence of the afterlife. Faces of Death aspires to redeem its defective strategy by concluding with a birth scene, but that too is bogus: A woman’s contorts and offscreen a baby cries. Credits roll. The end.

Until recently, the creative force behind Faces of Death was a mystery. The release of a 1999 documentary, Faces of Death: Fact or Fiction?, lifted part of the veil, containing an interview with creator-director Conan Le Cilaire (albeit in shadow). Shortly afterwards the true identity of Le Cilaire became known.[49] In an interview with the authors of this book, John Alan Schwartz aka Conan Le Cilaire explained how Faces of Death came about. Schwartz says he was working in the US at the time for “a small family business that to this day remains anonymous. I was working for this company that did family documentaries. The backers were a company called Shochiku Films from Japan. The Japanese came looking for an ultimate movie about death. We presented a treatment and they loved it, and they backed the film. It was made originally just for the Japanese market. I came up with the concept; the boss’ son, who was my partner, came up with the title. And that’s how it all began”.[50]

Why the anonymity?

“At the time I was writing prime time television, I was a union writer, and this was a non-union documentary. So I didn’t want to bring attention to it. We were non-union. My partner, who I did this with, doesn’t want to take any credit for it, and neither does his company. So it’s all been on me these last couple of years. In those days, very few people did documentaries and reality television still hadn’t sunk in. Thirty-five years ago we were taking real life footage and incorporating it with made-up footage, and people couldn’t tell the difference between fact and fiction. That’s why the film got so much notoriety, because people couldn’t believe what they were seeing.”

As for the genuine atrocity material that appears in Faces of Death, such as the aftermath of a midair collision over San Diego on September 25, 1978, the source was freelance cameramen or news hounds. Regarded as the first major air disaster, commercial airliner PSA Flight 182 struck a Cessna light aircraft and plummeted into North Park, a residential neighbourhood. All 135 passengers aboard the jetliner were killed, plus the two on the Cessna and seven more on the ground. “We were in touch with a lot of stringers at the time,” says Schwartz. One of these happened to be around “when the PSA crash came down. He was the first cameraman there at the time, and what you saw was what he saw”.

Schwartz was familiar with Mondo Cane, having screened it at the production company where he was working. There was also a vogue for death related documentaries in the late seventies, and Faces of Death can be numbered alongside others as noted. But inspiration, says Schwartz, was a fake documentary called The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971).[51] Here, a doctor (played by an actor) deliberates on how insects are going to take over the planet. “I believed the whole thing,” says Schwartz. “After I saw that I thought what a great idea. And we just incorporated our own character, Dr Frances B Gröss, to be our host. That guy [Michael Carr] had never acted before on camera.”

Michael Carr appears not to have acted in anything since playing Gröss in Faces of Death. “Michael Carr was a documentarian,” says Schwartz. “I ran into him in the hallway at the company one day, when we were trying to find a great person to front Faces of Death, and play the pathologist. And he [Carr] was wearing his crooked glasses, he was about six-foot-seven, a huge man dressed in black, and I said that’s our doctor. That was instant casting. He was great. I could always use him as a mouthpiece for what I was feeling at that particular time.”

Was there a conscious decision to portray him in such an odd light?

“It was just him,” says Schwartz.

Faces of Death was made over a period of about a year-and-a-half, and impacted on the creator-director in more ways than one. “The more immersed I became in death,” recalls Schwartz, “the more embedded it became in my brain. Weird things would happen, like we were shooting the close of the film with a woman in a hot tub holding a baby, and we heard a horrific scream and a few yards away from us a dead surfer washed up on the beach. Of course, we filmed the whole thing.”

One of his overriding memories of the production is also perhaps the inspiration for one of the latter segments, pertaining to the existence of an afterlife.

“I went to see this psychic in East LA,” says Schwartz. “People who really have a gift don’t really charge much at all, and she lived in this little hovel in East LA, and her name was Maria Mareno. She went into a trance and started to scream at me: ‘You’re a murderer, what are you doing! Get out, get out, get out! I see blood everywhere!’ I said, I can explain it to you… Earlier that week I had shot at a slaughterhouse in Vernon, California, and she was picking up all the blood because I was soaking in that stuff. When you work the floor there you get full of blood and guts. It was just amazing to feel the other side of the power of death.”

Were the sequels predetermined from the outset?

“No, it was not decided from the outset. Faces of Death had been so popular in Japan that Shochiku Films did a second one. I was writing primetime television and I was at my typist’s house when Dan Rather came on the air, who was the anchor for CBS at that time. He said there’s a horrible, amoral film that is banned in forty-eight countries and now it’s coming to America and we’re not banning it. It’s called Faces of Death. I was holding a script in my hand and the pages fell out of my hand [in shock]. I said I’ll never work in this town again. Just the opposite happened. It became a [work] of great notoriety, and to this day this film accrues new fans. A rite of passage. We were so far ahead of ourselves. At the beginning nobody wanted to be associated with Faces of Death, it was so controversial. Over time it became a great calling card.”

1980: George Smith’s Libidomania 2, covering similar ground to Jimmy Matheus’ 1978 Libidomania, is related in name only. It lacks the panache of that earlier film, with ho-hum nude pageants, female wrestling, couples making love (filmed through a window from across the street) and satanic orgies, and would perhaps be worthless but for the preposterous end sequence. A search team is mobilized when tourists are reported missing in Africa. They locate a solitary hut in a clearing said to be cannibal country and sneak towards it undetected. Inside they find the tourists: One is badly decomposed and half-eaten; the other — a beautiful woman — is naked and tied up. A native man is overpowered by the team, only to be castrated when the woman is set free and grabs a knife in a frenzy. The discovery of a cine camera helps fill in the details: The woman is filmed by her partner approaching the hut. She beckons to the suspicious native inside and begins to remove her clothes. She entices the man to have sex, telling her partner at this point to stop filming and leaving us to speculate on the rather obvious outcome.

The German/Hong Kong co-production Shocking Asia is something of a watershed in mondo movies. Credited director is Emerson Fox, known to be a pseudonym for Rolf Olsen, a veteran of German low-budget cinema. Shocking Asia runs the gamut of topics while the commentary is parried between narrators, one sympathetic to the customs on display and the other challenging or mocking them. Sequences include mass piercing in India, cremated remains dumped into the Ganges alongside bathers and drinkers, a club in Japan that enacts Nazi S/M vignettes, and a sex change operation. In the United States, Shocking Asia was packaged with Mondo Magic (1975) and released together as the ‘Shock Box’. In 1985 came Shocking Asia 2, again directed by Olsen as Emerson Fox. Dedicated to the familiar customs, rituals, eating habits and prostitutes of the world’s largest continent, part two lacks the shock value of its predecessor. It does however substitute the sex change operation of the original film with some outrageous burlesque acts, notably a trio of young women who smoke cigarettes from their vaginas, and another woman who draws a string of razor blades from the same parts. On the whole the film is shoddy and looks to have been assembled from out-takes. One of the more interesting moments is not footage shot by Olsen, but medical archive film showing wolf children and a bizarre human oddity who sports a second vestigial face complete with salivating mouth. Shocking Asia reached part four at the last count.

THIS IS AMERICA PART 2 (1980) D: ROMANO VANDERBES

This is America Part 2 opens to Jello Biafra, lead singer of punk band Dead Kennedys, running for Mayor in San Francisco in 1979. A modern-day bounty hunter takes to the streets with a photograph of his latest quarry, showing it to passers-by. From here it’s a short step to the absurd. Deep beneath Manhattan, in labyrinthine underground tunnels, dwells a new breed of transient; his only neighbour is the ‘Super Rat’, born of pesticide. All-Girl Car Massage is a newfangled drive-through for the man who has everything: Young women cleaning vehicles dressed only in bikini bottoms (cue shot of happy man in his car as big breasts press against the windshield). A segment introduced as “Disco — one of the biggest fads of the last few years” purports to reveal the typical clientele of a nightclub. Girls caught in the throes of the music undress and climb into tubs of jello. Whipped cream from an “orgasmatron” (a penis-shaped electric keyboard) adds the finishing touch. The film adopts a different tone with Hell’s Angels and rapid-fire violence set to the Wings song Live And Let Die. Among this imagery is Alice Cooper, hanging himself in one of his live stage shows, plus an unidentified black man who is shot point-blank in the head. This is America Part 2 returns to the preposterous with the announcement:

This black and white film is a document of an actual electrocution in a Midwestern prison. The film was made in violation of state and federal laws by a local freelance cameraman at the request of the warden. Obtained by underground means, this film is being shown publicly for the first time.

Filming is supposedly clandestine, but no attempt is made to disguise the camera’s presence in the prison. It soon becomes apparent that everyone can see the camera as it vies for the best spot. Prisoners look sullenly into it, others give a “Fuck you!” It is ushered into and out of rooms by people of authority. “At precisely 6am the death ritual begins,” says the narrator as the condemned man awakens. No name is given but he is refered to as Charlie by those around him. He takes a shower and is examined by a doctor. A patch of hair is shaved from the top of his head. He receives a last meal and thirty minutes in which to eat it. At 8.30am, the final preparations are underway. The condemned man is manacled and led from his cell to the death chamber, where he is strapped into the electric chair. Tension mounts with an increase in film edits: Cut to the clock on the wall and the witnesses watching it. It reads 8.55am. Cut to a priest administering the last rites. Cut to the clock on the wall. Cut to a close-up of the condemned man’s face. Cut to a close-up of the man’s hands. Cut to the clock on the wall. The camera zooms in on the clock. Cut to a close-up of the man’s face. Cut to the lever that will initiate death. Cut to the man in long shot. Cut to the lever. Cut to the man in long shot. Cut to the lever being pulled. Cut to the man in medium-long shot. Cut to a close-up of the man’s groin and urination. Cut to a close-up of the man’s feet. Cut to the man in long shot, smoke rising from his body. The ordeal over, functionaries examine the body. The final freeze-frame is a rubber-gloved hand closing Charlie’s eyes.

The footage suggests at least two cameras were present in the unnamed Midwestern prison, with the capacity to create a remarkably intimate portrait of the event as it unfolds, despite supposedly filming in secret. Equally remarkable is that the footage found its way into Next Step (1989), an Amnesty International documentary.

1981: Narrated by Christopher Plummer, Harry Rasky’s Being Different looks at people overcoming serious physical disability. Sheldon Renan’s The Killing of America is another brutal export for the Japanese market but markedly different in attitude to that of Faces of Death. The first of the Faces of Death sequels appears in 1981. As if the original hadn’t been enough, Faces of Death II wallows in a truly reprehensible smugness with Dr Frances B. Gröss more than ever resembling a demented Crypt-Keeper.

FACES OF DEATH II (1981)
D: CONAN LE CILAIRE [JOHN ALAN SCHWARTZ]

Following the success of Faces of Death on video, it was inevitable a sequel would follow. Again Dr Frances B. Gröss hosted the show, retaining the air of insanity evident in his previous outing. “Several months after I completed my first study, I realized that some of my original theories were no longer valid,” he admits. “My optimism regarding life after death has greatly diminished.”

Unlike the preceding volume, Faces of Death II is composed almost entirely of authentic footage. Only one sequence, a hostage situation at a drug store, appears fabricated. The rest of the film is a barrage of atrocity. Animal experimentation, the slaughter of whales, cancer victim autopsies, Welshman Johnny Owen’s final and fatal boxing match, a murder museum, victims of the guillotine, a monologue from a man who believes he owns the severed head of a notorious Wild West outlaw, and mass execution following a coup d’état in Liberia. Here a cheering crowd gathers to witness the condemned men bound to poles and shot by several volleys of rifle fire. Another man walks into shot carrying a boom microphone.

The lack of hoax material doesn’t make Faces of Death II any less patronizing; the commentary remains just as imbecilic as before, with Gröss popping up every few minutes to provide continuity and vacuous opinion. A segment on the Vietnam War is presented with clear bias, so not to offend the American audience. With US-sanctioned napalm attacks and oft seen images of burned children fleeing their homes, Gröss insists it’s tragic and an accident. Similar images that show the effect of cluster bombs on a Lebanese village illicit a very different response. Gröss states flatly, “the enemy must be destroyed at all costs. Even if he is a child.”

The musical insensitivity of the previous volume is also evident: Death by avalanche has yodelling over it; the punch that kills Johnny Owen is anticipated by big band brass.

THE KILLING OF AMERICA (1981) D: SHELDON RENAN

All of the film you are about to see is real. Nothing has been staged.

Asuperior production from the pen of Leonard Schrader, brother of Hollywood writer and director Paul Schrader.[52] The documentary is an indictment against the out of control gun law in American society, and plays as direct warning to the perils of legal weapon availability. Aimed specifically at the Japanese market, as were many such documentaries, The Killing of America aka Violence USA is a statistical analysis of murder. The pre-credit declaration of authenticity proves reliable, although Chuck Riley’s downbeat narration, with its lengthy mid-sentence pauses, lends the proceedings a surreal quality — nowhere more so than in the tale of Dean Corll and Wayne Henley’s ruthless homoerotic kill spree. “Wayne Henley. [pregnant pause] He first gets involved in the Houston mass murders in 1971 [pregnant pause] when he is only fifteen [pregnant pause] by bringing his buddies to the house of a fatherly friend who is twice his age…”

Before the opening credits roll a suspect is shot dead on a street corner by armed police. As the film progresses, John F. Kennedy’s head expels its contents for the umpteenth time; assassin/scapegoat Oswald receives a fatal bullet from Jack Ruby; other politicos feel the bite of the bullet — fatal or otherwise — and Sirhan Sirhan apologises for the killing of Robert Kennedy. Bodies litter the streets of LA during the race riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King. The police brutally assault Vietnam protesters and, in what is one of the most widely and frequently seen snuff sequences, General Loan positions a bound Vietnamese suspect in front of the camera, raises a pistol and shoots him in the head. The cameraman instinctively films the dying man, blood jetting onto the road. (The execution was filmed and shown on television in 1968.)

A store’s video security system records a hold-up and the death of a cashier. It starts when one assailant pulls a pistol and demands cash. Unprovoked, an accomplice encourages the gunman to shoot. He complies and the cashier falls, fatally wounded. The men flee. Out of camera sight, the wounded man screams, his cries half buried by the in-store muzak.

The film utilizes an interview with serial killer Ed Kemper, and excerpts from the court case of both Ted Bundy and Lawrence Bittaker (the latter having recorded the torture and murder of his victims on audiotape). Other archive footage includes police laying siege to the clock tower where Charles Whitman shot sixteen citizens dead. Similarly, an assault on the apartment-roof bastion of sniper and black racist Robert Essex. Mad preacher Jim Jones successfully encourages his followers to kill their children then take their own lives. James R. Hoskins holds a Cincinnati TV station at gunpoint. After relating his qualms to the camera — about how police got the Magnums and are always hurting people — Hoskins requests that filming cease and turns the gun on himself.

A statement at the end of Killing of America warns viewers that ‘While you watched this movie, five more of us were murdered. One was the random killing of a stranger’. It’s a sobering conclusion to a sobering film, albeit akin to a William Castle gimmick, devised to generate maximum unease.[53]

Despite its popularity in Japan, The Killing of America was never released theatrically in the US and only recently found an official release into the home entertainment market. (It had none when this book first appeared.) It’s odd because the content is no more gruelling than many other mondos, and the film itself certainly more clear-headed and frightening than most. Perhaps it met with resistance from the pro-gun lobby? Marred only by the protracted tribute to the gunned down John Lennon on which it closes.

1982: According to filmmakers Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni, “ ‘tribal’ Africa is rapidly nearing extinction to make room for another Africa, that of the great urban conglomerate, that of political tension and groups. It’s a ‘different’ Africa, certainly, but not one changing for the better.”[54] Shocking Africa, their latest excursion to the Dark Continent, deviates little from what has gone before: Crude mutilation of teeth using a chisel (“for purely aesthetic reasons”), slaughter of animals (“a blood sacrifice is called for”), well-hung men jumping up and down in slow motion (“they have no need to cover their bodies”), and young boys hunting vipers (“it’s a stroke of luck to find so many together”). In one sequence, the film crew uncover an ancient mass burial site, where artefacts and trinkets are buried along with bones. As they excavate the area, a snake leaps from a clay pot and bites one of the men. He falls to the floor screaming. The scene is replayed in slow motion. Fortunately for the viewer, a “second camera also filmed this unique scene,” and that too is played. Written by Prof. Guglielmo Guariglia, teaching Ethnology and Anthropological Culture at the University of Milan,[55] Shocking Africa is most notable for its truly hideous circumcision scenes, or rather the sheer volume of its circumcision scenes. Early in the picture, each boy in a village is held down by their father while their foreskin is stretched over a wooden block. A blade is positioned, a mallet brought down and, writhing and screaming in agony, the boy is circumcised.

“Nobody may be excused from this moral obligation,” cautions the narrator. For what seems an eternity, the sight of squirming bloodied infant genitalia fills the screen. The crew arrive at another village and are witness to another such ceremony. Then, in Shocking Africa’s final moments, the narrator recounts that “the hour of suffering and rebirth has arrived”. Which is the cue for female circumcision. The first of many young girls is positioned on her back in the sand, her legs held wide apart in the air. The narrator back-peddles. “These scenes,” he says, “were not filmed in the interests of sensationalism. They are a record of a horrifying reality that still exists today and cannot be ignored.” A heartbeat pounds on the soundtrack as a razorblade slices away the first immature clitoris. Another one follows, and another, until each girl is done and the ceremony ends. As with their Addio Ultimo Uomo (1978), a quotation from Senegalese politician and writer Léopold Senghor is included, perhaps only to exonerate the filmmakers:

If man’s universal civilisations should be unaware of only one of the customs of its different peoples, mankind will be incomplete and not live in peace.

1983: Sweet and Savage marked the end of the collaborative work of Mario Morra and Antonio Climati. The following year, Morra embarked on a solo mondo project, Savage Zone (1984), which promised to expose ‘Man at his most inhuman in a dimension of violence unequalled in the history of motion pictures’.[56]

SWEET AND SAVAGE (1983)
D: MARIO MORRA & ANTONIO CLIMATI

Some five years after This Violent World and eight since Savage Man… Savage Beast, this concluding part of the Climati-Morra ‘savage’ trilogy utilizes outtakes — and sometimes the same scenes — from those earlier productions. The paradox of the title is quantified in a mix of pleasant and unpleasant sequences. Mike Gunn, wildlife conservationist, spends his days protecting the animals of the Serengeti. On first appearance he seems to be just another hunter. But instead of shooting the rhinos his rifle appears to target, he fires a round at the landmines in their path. To indicate how widespread the problem is, stampeding animals detonate the hidden explosives and spiral tattered and torn into the air. Of course what we actually see is footage of thundering hooves intercut with already dead carcasses heaped onto dynamite and blown up on cue. Stock war atrocities are edited in when Gunn reminisces about his days as a mercenary. The majority of Sweet and Savage is given over to the killing of animals. Fox hunting (from Savage Man) is met with the dour comment, “It’s called sport”. Mexicans chasing a deer with slingshot for sport prompts the observation that, for the men, it’s “an ancient memory of what they were”. But insight is muted by excruciating asides, like the two playful dolphins “called Honey and Sugar, because they’re sweet”. A lynx chases a white rabbit through the snow and the commentator suggests that, however unpleasant the scene, if we root for the rabbit to escape “we are condemning the lynx to starvation”.

Indian fakirs (from This Violent World) pierce parts of their anatomy to deter use of the designated appendage. The tongue is speared to impede speech, the cheeks pinned together to prevent sustenance and, to prevent intimacy, the penis is spiked like a pincushion.

The body of a Tibetan monk is carried to a mountain top in funerary tradition. There the corpse is systematically dismembered, gutted and decapitated “in a ritual never filmed before”. The remains are fed to waiting vultures and wild dogs. One would expect such a sequence to be fake but in this case it looks genuine. No neat, single stroke cuts here. The limbs are repeatedly hacked, emitting showers of fatty tissue with each chop.

In downtown Puerto Rico, Karl Wallenda, founder of the Flying Wallendas circus troupe, falls to his death from a tightrope slung between two buildings.[57] A stuntman plunges to his doom from the top of the Kentucky tower during a movie stunt. His life is terminated after he tears through the faulty airbag and falls to the ground. Scenes showing casualties of the Iran/Iraq conflict are followed by the apparent capture of a sniper. He is jostled by his adversaries who seem unsure what to do with him. Eventually he is forced to kneel and shot in the head. The moment of execution is conveniently obscured by an onlooker and the whole sequence looks distinctly fabricated. As does another sequence, which depicts the execution of another prisoner. Here the man is tied by his arms between two trucks. Amid the cheers of the small gun-toting crowd, one vehicle drives away. An arm is ripped from its socket and the man is dragged behind the truck. When the vehicle stops the victim is shot dead. Despite the inherent danger in such a stunt, it clearly is just a stunt. The man has his arm tucked safely away — the arm torn off is a fake. For the duration of the drag he is carefully monitored by a person running alongside him. When the victim appears to falter, it is this person who calls for the vehicle to halt. The camera also manages a second, better vantage point as the drag is taking place. (Sweet and Savage was released in Japan as Caramba!, where the image of the man having his arm wrenched off was central to the advertising campaign.) A brief look at aerobic exercise in an American gymnasium[58] is followed by scenes of naked African dancers — the supposed origin of aerobics. The tribe is named as the Mashoni. Identical footage as it appears in Savage Man… Savage Beast names the tribe the Lobi.

1984: Albert Thomas’ Naked and Cruel is mondo at its most anaemic. From scenes of childbirth to a game of football played by the physically disabled, then pornography for chimpanzees in a zoo, the film has no discernible correlation to it. Nonsense such as a man trying on a strap-on dildo in a sex shop (a comical boi-i-ing! on the soundtrack when the female assistant turns it the correct way up) is followed by a penis wrestling match (similar to an arm wrestle), followed by an overcrowded bus service that has the driver shouting “Duck!” whenever he spies a traffic cop. Naked and Cruel also has moments of animal crackers, too. The flimmiest of these begins with a man stealing his way to the door of a hut. BEWARE — POISONOUS SNAKES reads the sign on the door. Picking the lock, the man slips inside. The ensuing disaster looms large (not unlike a Benny Hill sketch), but director Thomas doesn’t have the inclination or resources to show anything but the door closing on the intruder and his piercing scream emanating from within.

SAVAGE ZONE (1984)
D: MARIO MORRA

Mario Morra’s Savage Zone, made without long-standing partner Antonio Climati, was evidence of mondo’s qualitative decline. Much lurid stock footage was familiar, seen before in Faces of Death II. Utterly unconvincing are the Llama Cult (whose members ritually spit fluids in one another’s face) and battered wives’ sorority (actors so inept they cannot even place a sticking plaster on a fake wound), contributing to the general air of embarrassment.

As much running time is given over to lame sexual titillation as it is the ‘savage zone’ of the title. One unfortunate and wholly expected concession is the theme of hunting. True to form, the native fauna suffers as a consequence of man’s actions. A sacrificial offering sees live goats thrown into shark-infested waters. A band of gun-toting hooligans surround a herd of nomadic elephants and empty their high-powered rifles into each and every animal. To ensure total destruction they stand on the fallen wounded and fire further rounds into the animals’ heads. The film feigns the usual disgust. But where Morra and Climati’s previous collaborative efforts had been satisfied with slow motion re-runs of the slaughter, Savage Zone rather gives the game away in placing the camera on the weapons discharging the fatal shots. It seems to have escaped Morra that he is condemning himself when he condemns the hunter. After all, who is firing the gun? Man’s predatory nature continues with the hunting of human quarry. In a jungle clearing, the bodies of Indians lie like rows of felled trees. One hunter removes the scalp of a victim for a memento of his grand day out. Then, for a spell, Savage Zone becomes a roster of genuine human catastrophe with newsreel footage of murder victims, subway accidents, a bloated corpse on a shoreline, dead babies, a New York cab driver being pulled from freezing waters, and so on. Equally as sudden, Savage Zone forsakes reality for a safe, more photogenic faked death: A ‘murdered transsexual’ in a flea bit hotel room, complete with detached penis that rests to one side, circled with chalk. Sex is represented by a Californian dominatrix who specializes in lesbians; an x-rated magician who pulls a rabbit, a dog and the star-spangled banner, not from a hat, but from his smiling assistant’s vagina; and, last but not least, a naked female backside at the Oui Madame leisure club.

The ad campaign for Savage Zone focused exclusively on the minimal human death toll. One poster featured a man carrying a severed head, the scene itself appearing only fleetingly in the film.

1985: Shauna, Every Man’s Fantasy is a documentary about an adult film star who committed suicide at the top of her game. Its director, Roberta Findlay, was one half of the team behind Slaughter, the Manson inspired movie that became Snuff (1976).[59] In the eighties, Roberta turned to porn. A Findlay production called Glitter (1983) starred Shauna Grant, a Minnesotan high school graduate whose fresh-faced innocence helped make her a porn idol. Unable to handle the pressure, Grant shot herself dead at age twenty. Findlay revived her. Shauna, Every Man’s Fantasy is described by adult star Jerry Butler as sick and sleazy.[60] High school film of Shauna laughing and joking appear along with episodes from her short porn career, plus interviews with friends and acquaintences. At one point Karen Summer swings her legs wide for the camera and says, “Shauna couldn’t do this like this!” Herb Schrader likens the film to Faces of Death. It uses the same structure, he writes in Video Drive-In! in that ‘a purported journalist from Cinema Blue (re. this film’s Dr Frances B. Gröss) traipses through porndom in search of Shauna’s tragic motivations. Asks our host:… DID PORNOGRAPHY KILL SHAUNA GRANT???’

A very different approach is found in Rate It X, which concerns the male gaze (i.e. sexism) in all walks of life, porn included. Here, Paula De Koenigsberg and Lucy Winer take to the streets with camera and microphone for vox pop opinion (and bump into Ugly George, a fetishist with a film camera who coaxes strangers to expose their breasts for him). Bizarre Rituals: Dances Sacred and Profane looks at the world of body-art through the lens of artist-photographer, Charles Gatewood.[61] Frank Heimans’ The Occult Experience takes aboard fringe religions and has the backing of the Australian Film Commission. Claudio Racca directs Love, another down-and-dirty variant of Libidomania and Noi E L’amore.

Following in similar footsteps to The Killing of America, the made for television Acts of Violence presents a country (America) in homicidal meltdown. Produced and directed by former 60 Minutes producer Imre Hovarth, three specific cases illustrate a problem nothing short of endemic: (1) McDonald’s shooter James Huberty is responsible for what was then the biggest mass murder in American history; (2) John Hinckley made an attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan, having deduced that assassination would be the best way to raise his miserable profile; and (3) amiable serial killer drifter Henry Lee Lucas is in no doubt he would still be killing given the chance (he refers to police efforts to capture him as “pathetic”). Lucas is interviewed at length, while the rest of the film is peppered with expert opinion and eye witness accounts. The film doesn’t have the visceral hit of Killing of America, but its conclusion just as depressing. The system is not simply failing, we are told, but engendering the problem. “Violence is profitable,” one expert ruminates, “but the treatment of violence isn’t.”

FACES OF DEATH III (1985)
D: CONAN LE CILAIRE [JOHN ALAN SCHWARTZ]

Faces of Death III opens with footage of European auto pile-ups and incinerated bodies trapped in crushed vehicles. Midway through is another slaughterhouse sequence accompanied by a comical soundtrack, de rigueur for a Le Cilaire production. The remainder of the film is a patchwork of fabricated incidents.

A television camera crew ride with police officers following a spate of brutal, random killings. Remarkably, they stumble upon the dismembered body of the serial killer’s latest victim. Also remarkable are the interviews with the victim’s friends, who mumble and bumble like the two-bit actors they evidently are. The camera peers into a skip where neatly cut limbs sit among the trash. This narrative structure gives many episodes in Faces of Death III the appearance of a Crimewatch reconstruction. A sniper is shot by police in an apartment block. A skydiver misses his designated landing spot and — confound it! — ends up in an alligator farm where he is eaten alive. Police are summoned to a house where a bomb has been planted, and search the premises with cameraman in pursuit. Having discovered the device, they try to diffuse it. There is enough explosive to level the entire building, yet the cameraman films the operation from a distance of only two metres. The bomb detonates and the image flickers momentarily, returning with the cameraman moving in for a shot of the engineer’s body.

On a top-floor window ledge stands a middle aged man. In the street below the gathered crowd encourage him to jump. He does… but first the camera joins him on an adjacent fire-escape. A second camera at street level observes a stiff mannequin tossed from the building. A mother drags a child over to view the ‘remains.’ One witness is asked to describe the sound the body made on impact. It was, he remarks, “a kind of splash, kind of gooey-like.”

The film also makes use of the snuff movie myth, specifically in the trial of one Mike Lorenzo (another fiction), said to have been arrested on suspicion of multiple murder. The foremost piece of evidence is a videotape on which Lorenzo tortures a victim. At the most pertinent moments, Lorenzo demands filming cease, “Shut that fuckin’ camera off…” The videotape is played for the jury.

The final section is another sham, but interesting inasmuch as again the set-piece is a comparatively elaborate one. It is also presented in the form of CCTV footage, indicative of the soon ubiquitous technologly and just how far things have travelled since the first Faces of Death in this respect. A car lot. The security camera that pans slowly from left to right, right to left, has recorded intruders entering the premises at night. Guard dogs pursue and snag one thief. When the camera returns to the scene in its unerring cycle, the man’s lifeless is being dragged around by the dogs. The intervention of the dogs is divine, believes Gröss, because dog is God spelled backward.

On these words we bid adieu to Gröss. This instalment would mark his final appearance in the Faces of Death series. It’s nice to imagine that perhaps even he could no longer cope with it all, relegating his fascination with death to the dustbin. But director Le Cilaire refused to lie down and he resurrected the cycle five years later. Faces of Death III is almost entirely fake. The half-decade interlude between this installment and part four saw the pot flowing afresh with new — genuine — atrocity footage.

THE SHOCKS (1985)
D: KENTARO UCHIDA

The pre-credit sequence shows a tear rolling down the cheek of the Statue of Liberty. Unlike previous Japanese entries into the lucrative death market, masked beneath pseudonyms and ambiguity, The Shocks made no attempt to hide its origins (nor did the many sequels). The Shocks is a big, bold Japanese production. Scene upon scene of genuine atrocity make for a disconsolate trip into hell. People leap from burning apartment blocks and cameras follow their lethal fall, right to the nauseating impact on concrete. A daredevil wing walker is ground to oblivion as the plane on which he stands inverts and flies too close to the runway. Mob hysteria in South Africa manifests with a scapegoat being chased from his home by enraged neighbours and scoop-seeking cameraman. Caught, he is stabbed and stoned to death. Another victim is tied to stakes in the ground, flattened beneath heavy boulders and then burned. Assassinations and executions, all horribly real, retain the bleak mood. (There is one faked sequence: Execution by electric chair lifted from This is America Part 2.)

A man leaning over a barrel of flammable content receives the full force of its blast in his face. Sport and leisure accidents are represented. Babies teeter between life and death in incubators. Elsewhere the few survivors of the Air Florida Flight 90 crash are pulled from icy waters, footage familiar to other mondo films. Somewhat different to what has gone before in mondo is the manipulation of authentic atrocity footage for added dramatic effect. This happens in a segment devoted to the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Following take off, mapping its brief course through the sky, the camera cuts from the shuttle to the watching crowd and back again. The soundtrack swells with delighted screams and cheers. When the shuttle suddenly explodes into a ball of flame the soundtrack stops dead, leaving the camera to document the pained disbelief of the crowd in silence. The ill-fated Challenger footage is familiar, but never has the anticipation of death been more potent than here in this silent reverie. It’s very different to chat-show punch-ups and bouts of anger on the sports track. Ridiculously exaggerated sounds accompany each strike of the fist.

The above sound effects are supposed to be humorous, one of the ways the filmmakers dissipate the numbing impact of The Shocks. Counterpoint to the carnage are pastoral scenes: Hang-gliders hovering over spectacular landscapes, surfers riding waves, and half-naked models strutting on catwalks. Female hands with red painted fingernails load bullets into a revolver and a woman skydiver pulls her rip-cord to free, not a parachute, but her large breasts. These scenes appear at regular fifteen-minute intervals, intent on breaking up the devastation and suffering into palatable amounts. Arguably it achieves nothing of the sort and merely puts the film within the derisible parameters established by Faces of Death.

More Shocks followed. From what information can be gleaned from the Japanese language Wikipedia,[62] the series was a spin-off from a popular run of television specials (for the Nippon Television Network) that appeared sporadically between 1984 and 1992 under the title Camera Ga Torareta Ketteiteki Shunkan. Credited as producer for the entire Shocks series was Norihisa Shibata.[63] Only this first entry credits a director: Kentaro Uchida.

1986: Magnum Video release ‘Shock Box 2,’ which consists of Shocking Asia 2 and something called Camps of Death. In general, the term ‘mondo’ is back in vogue. (It seemed to go flat in the seventies.) Max Steel’s Mondo Cane Oggi: L’Orrore Continua opens to the corpse of a small child lying by a roadside as commuters travel nonchalantly about their daily business. Deems the commentary: “Man has done wrong to the world and the world has done wrong to the man.” A dog fight credit sequence pays homage to the films of Jacopetti and Prosperi. Scenes of a nudist colony, body building and glamour photography are clumsily saddled with contemporary mores, such as drug smuggling and a sex change operation (“Voila!” chides the narrator as the surgeon drops the discarded penis into a wastebin). One method smugglers use to transport heroin is to hide the narcotic in the emptied body cavity of a corpse. Another sequence depicts a supposed cure for homosexuality: In a clinic, a young man is strapped in front of a screen showing slides of the naked human form. Arousal at the sight of anything but the sight of the opposite sex feeds an electric shock to the man’s genitals.

Les Interdits Du Monde, a film by Chantal Lasbats, puts an attractive French veneer on an otherwise dull worldwide sightseeing trip. The editing is snappy, the soundtrack often pleasing and the conservative use of narrator a welcome change. Commentary throughout is provided by a woman, perhaps a mondo first. Alas, the subject matter is nothing new. A voodoo ceremony in Brazil, penitents nailed to a cross and showgirls who draw on cigarettes placed in their vagina are scenes shot with flair, but overly familiar ones nonetheless. Bogus instances come by way of a fussy client in a brothel, and a couple who have sex in a city morgue beside a fresh cadaver. Uninspiring as it is, Mondo Cane Oggi nevertheless encourages another late addition to the Mondo Cane cycle of films: Gabriele Crisanti’s Mondo Cane Oggi: L’Incredibile (1988).

THE SHOCKS II (1986)
D: [NOT CREDITED]

The Shocks II begins with a lightning fast recap of the previous entry and the same arresting image of the Statue of Liberty with a tear rolling down its cheek. The film divides its clips into loose themes: Buildings ablaze, motor racing accidents, air show calamities, assassinations, war atrocities, stunts and stuntmen, and so on. Much of this material is hitherto unseen.

Persons trying to escape a fire in a tower block use what look like bed sheets to try and access the floor below. Their efforts are to no avail. Elsewhere, clandestine footage shot from a window shows a tank firing on and demolishing a car that is driving down an empty street. A montage of early aviation clips features a camera team being sliced in two by the errant wing of a passing plane. Bodies lay bloated in the aftermath of the Peoples Temple mass suicide, Guyana. A late change of heart in a case of self immolation renders the victim a panicked fireball rolling down the street.

As in the previous volume, there are regular interludes in The Shocks II. A collection of news item bloopers offers a respite from the death and despair, with several jolly clips devoted to the indiscretions of animals on live television. It is here that the relatively sedentary voice-over becomes altogether excitable, like a daft dog suddenly let off its leash. It prefigures the type of demented game show histrionics that would become a Japanese stereotype. It even accompanies footage of a rather awful studio mishap, where one presenter is engulfed in flames and runs screaming for his life. The clip appears to be in the wrong section in any case. Its presence next to the monkey that wets its charge, and an elephant with a curious trunk, is somewhat incongruous.

The Shocks II loses what credibility it has left with an extended segment culled from Romano Vanderbes’ This is America Part 2.[64] Topless disco dancing in jello, insect delicacies in the modern home, and derelicts living in the sewers. This material gives way to a somewhat hurried coda. The Vietnam War and the familiar sight of children barely escaping a napalmed village slips into black and white footage of a Buddhist priest ablaze. (Fire is a staple of The Shocks II.) This is unceremoniously halted for the film’s closing ballad. “We have the gift of love within our hands,” coos a woman with a guitar. The lyric floats by at the foot of the screen, suggesting that perhaps Japanese audiences liked a karaoke after their bloodbath. So concludes The Shocks II.[65]

The series continued without pause for several years, reaching volume eight in 1990. The filmmakers trawled deep into international film archives to find the most outrageous and uncommon material. The earliest footage dates from WWII, and the most recent 1985, which suggests the team had plenty of news connections, itself symptomatic of a growing trend. The less caustic material in Shocks II was lifted from television, specifically Camera Ga Torareta Ketteiteki Shunkan, as per the first volume and the volumes hereafter.[66] Thematically, the approach changed with volume four in 1989, when entries became less hodgepodge and concentrated on a specific subject, such as sporting catastrophes, or motor accidents, or natural disasters.[67] Only the original Shocks played theatrically in Japan (in Dolby Stereo no less); Shocks II and the others went straight to video.

1987: Tapping into the home video market is a series formed of highlights from the archives of British Movietone News. Running one hour, each of the five volumes focuses on a specific theme (Great Events, Triumph of Flight, Early Cup Finals, Animal Classics), while notably the first volume is Major Disasters. It is a great time capsule and latter-day shock video-compilers would do well to heed the short, snappy presentation of the original newsreels. Major Disasters opens with the Hindenburg airship collapsing in flames, followed by disasters equally familiar and many others that are not. The clips — b&w and undated, although evidently running through to the late 1960s — come from associate Movietone divisions in Britain, the US and Australia. The plummy Brit voiceovers have scant space for anything but the most basic details. A botched attempt to moor the US airship Akron, sees one member of the landing crew hanging on the end of a rope at 2,000 feet for dear life. It’s a miracle he survives. Yet he’s asked only one question in the newsreel and it barely concerns his ordeal anyway. The terrifying clip ends on a smile. A tragedy that befalls Skopje in Yugoslavia is shown at length but its precise nature is overlooked by the narrator. (It’s an earthquake.) Images of destruction are almost always balanced with scenes of aid, the notion of community spirit and references to the War. Shots of corpses and death are sparing, often in long shot, and used almost arbitrarily from one clip to the next. This might be due to the field cameraman in the moment, as much as any official company line. Quite a lot is made of the body on a ledge of the Empire State, in safe longshot several storeys down (victim of the building being struck by a military aircraft lost in the fog). When a storage tanker explodes during a gas station fire in Kansas City, fire fighters are seen running engulfed in flame. The narrator yells “Look Out!” in a rare lack of traditional British reserve. Things are back to normal in Wales, where the village of Aberfan is consumed by a collapsed mountain of mining sludge. Says the narrator, channelling the ghost of Dylan Thomas, “The black death has escaped its confines underground and claimed the children, too.”

TRUE GORE (1987)
D: M. DIXON CAUSEY

The film you are about to see is disturbing. It is not for everyone. It is assuredly not for children. It has already been banned in countries across the world. In part I agree with the ban because the footage you will see in a moment is troubling. But a pity it has been banned because after you see this film I think you will find it will be impossible to ever look at your life or existence with the same eyes.

This is an independent production created for the home video market. Underground artist and musical pioneer Monte Cazazza[68] is credited as creative consultant, his band the Atom Smashers provide the (industrial) music soundtrack, and there are clips from some of his short films. The narrator disguises his identity by use of optical effects “because of the controversial nature of the film”. Death is an eventuality we all must face, he says.

True Gore is divided into four parts; the first is titled The World Of The Dead. Following a monologue from the mystery narrator[69] is a medical training film of bodies in various stages of decay. The instructor demonstrates the ease of hair removal from a dead scalp, lifts flaps of blistered skin, and pokes and prods the gas-inflated features. A woman found dead in a vacant warehouse lies on a mortuary table, her body excavated by rats, her face a fleshless skull. Similarly, a woman who having laid dead in her apartment has lost all her facial tissue to her hungry pets. The wrecked faces of unsuccessful suicides are displayed void of features. The disturbing tape-recording of Jim Jones’ final sermon precipitating the massacre in Guyana is played at length. So concludes part one of True Gore.

Part two, The Eroticism Of Decay, utilizes material shot by Psychic TV for its promotional video First Transmission.[70] Naked people are whipped, smeared with blood and scarred during initiatory rites into Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). The narrator claims they are home movies confiscated by the authorities, but Cazazza was no doubt part of the supply chain, having strong links with Genesis P. Orridge, founder of TOPY.

Fake footage supposedly depicting the torture of a prisoner, as acquired by Amnesty International, shows a man suspended by his feet being beaten and submerged in a water-filled barrel. A snake is thrown into the barrel for added effect. Archival animal experiments provide horrifying scenes of cruelty. A pig is subjected to a pressurised blowtorch, the searing flame held over the squealing creature’s body. Observers note the effects. The hide blisters and splits before half-inch-thick flaps of cooked flesh pop from the animal, which is then offered water to drink. A living cat has its scalp sliced open and fragile skull cracked like an egg-shell. The bared brain is scooped out, the empty cavity padded with cotton wool and the scalp sewn back in place. The purpose of these operations is not divulged.

Art And Death, the third part, shows Tana Emmolo Smith[71] squatting on a toilet while a giant millipede scuttles over her labia. Her vaginal lips are obscured by an incongruous black square. Cazazza’s abscessed penis is then prodded with a metal instrument until it bleeds. The organ is censored to avoid offence. The scenes in this section are taken from the thirteen-minute experimental SXXX-80 (1980), directed by Cazazza and Smith. There is no masking in the original film.

One of Mark Pauline’s[72] animatronic creations is mutilated onstage during a performance by the band Factrix, fronted by Cazazza. The footage is taken from the Cazazza/Factrix document of the show, Night of the Succubus (1981). The creature is comprised of dead cow and pig parts, sewn together and reanimated by a mechanical skeleton, the muzzle of which is destroyed with a dentist’s drill.

An unidentified female necrophile is interviewed. Her lurid scenarios sound a lot like de Sade and case histories noted by Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis. The revelations of a young murderer are no more convincing.[73] A brief excursion into the perils of AIDS and its comparison to the Black Death is followed by a full autopsy, concluding part three.

The final segment is The Scientific Age. It opens with the Nuremberg rallies and Hitler’s ranting dogma, lifted from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). Scenes of exterminated Jews are intercut with the madman’s Utopian vision. The Nazis themselves are seen executed by rope and rifle. The theme of mass destruction continues with the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The disfigured victims of the atomic bomb — noseless, lipless children, eyeless women, earless men — are intercut with an animated US government film on the merits of nuclear power.

The film ends with a trip through a cemetery, distorted by a lens filter.

True Gore is a different slant on Faces of Death. In true mondo tradition, it has its share of fabricated scenes (the supposed suicide victim lifted from a bath; the Amnesty torture film) and tactless sound effects (the ridiculous squelchy noises added to a cranial excavation during autopsy). But given Cazazza’s background and the use of other aspects of his work and that of his entourage, True Gore can be viewed as a performance piece — one that also anticipated a shift in death film production.

Collaborator Monte Cazazza is adamant there should be no confusion that True Gore is video and not film. “You should not call True Gore a film,” he told the authors.[74] “It is actually a video made for the home video market at the time. Some scenes were shot in Super 8. But it was edited in video and all scenes transferred to video and released only in video. We would have liked to have had a video to 35mm transfer done of it but no one would give us the cash. Then we could have shown it on the big screen second run theaters and especially at drive-ins where it really belonged. So I think that is something that should be stated correctly, as that was our true intention.”

Asked how True Gore came about, Cazazza said it was fortuitous. “M. Dixon Causey made a really cool independent science fiction movie called Radioworld (year not known). I went down to Los Angeles with Matt Heckert, Eric Werner, and Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories — as some of their robotic machines appear in the film and we were doing stunts and special effects anyway. Joseph Jacobs of Factrix ended up composing the soundtrack and we [the Atom Smashers] were also in the studio recording The First Strike album. Causey happened to be up here and visited the recording sessions. We got talking and decided to make our own mondo movie, since a lot of the music could be used for the soundtrack. The A Is For Atom segment was tightly edited together by M. Dixon after the recording was mixed; it just all started falling together after I had asked him to do a video for the song. One added note to this: I tried to get A Is For Atom played on MTV but they refused to run it, saying it was too violent.”

True Gore is informed by the work of the mondo pioneers, with Cazazza — a fan — going so far as to describe the original Mondo Cane as an “existential film”. Elaborating, he said this: “Definitely had an interest in mondo movies. I saw Mondo Cane at a drive-in when I was a little child, and when I worked at the Strand Theater in San Francisco we screened it there and some other mondo movies. Plus I’m a history buff and I remember things on television like Victory At Sea, a great set of [1950s] documentaries, and one segment where they talked about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis after it delivered the atomic bomb.”

Cazazza talks of hostility as a consequence of True Gore, notably being fired from a job and thrown out of a video convention in Las Vegas. However, he is congenial about such matters. “I did do some public screenings, video projections, and some people would get bent out of shape and some people would like it — which is how it should be as a mondo movie, otherwise one has failed.”

In 1989, a follow-up to True Gore was released called Empire of Madness. (Some accounts claim it is little more than a re-edit of the original film.) The director was again M. Dixon Causey. But while the film is dedicated to Cazazza, Cazazza himself is absent. “I was supposed to be more involved in Empire of Madness,” he recalls. “But because of underfunding, that didn’t happen as much as I would have liked. I would have loved to have done a lot more and still have a ton of ideas for new ones. But without serious financial support that seems unlikely.”

1988: The pre-credit sequence for Mondo Cane 2000 depicts the culture and fauna of a far flung shore. The narrator submits that it is a paradise “lost forever”. Which is a good excuse to avoid having to do much searching and remain for the duration on the streets of America. The result more resembles Romano Vanderbes’ This is America than it does Mondo Cane. The first segment has a character paying for the privilege of attacking a police car in a scrapyard with a sledgehammer. The hammer is carried in sections in an attaché case like a high-tech weapon. There is a section on drug abuse and drug smuggling. A gay pride march segueways into still photographs of bodies on the sidewalk. Contrary to Max Steel’s Mondo Cane Oggi: L’Orrore Continua (1986), here erotic slides do not treat homosexuality, but are a cure for frigid women. Indeed, the sex change operation has been superseded by a hormone transplant, where the testicles of a dead primate provide a human male with the required hormonal balance. Both aspects of the testicle procedure are rendered in a graphic manner. But to make for a more uncomfortable viewing experience, the film implies a live and conscious monkey is under the knife, courtesy edits of a screaming primate.

Once it had been the sex change operation and before that scenes of women suckling animals. But now the shock vogue was for drugs concealed in an eviscerated body. The first mondo film to use the idea was Mondo Cane Oggi. Trailing a coffin as it is loaded onto a light aircraft (via a camera mounted on the fork-lift truck), the film cuts to a morgue where a male cadaver has its autopsy sutures plucked out. Upon opening the abdomen, visible among the guts are several bags of heroin. Unused footage from this sequence later appeared in the German compilation Faces of Death 5 (orig: Gesichter des Todes Teil 5) (1991). The framing is different, but little else. The episode commences in this instance with law enforcement officers preventing the aircraft’s take off, before jumping then to a morgue where a female cadaver is stripped of clothing and opened to reveal heroin. Also in Faces of Death 5 is the recovery of contraband from the abdomen of a baby (the infant face constantly being manhandled and presented to camera).[75]

1989: TCC Video Japan issue their ‘Shocking!!’ collection, a reissue of mondo films originally dating — as best can be determined — from the 1970s.[76] Gorgon Video releases Worst of Faces of Death, a direct to video compilation of material seen before in volumes one and three of Faces of Death. (For some unknown reason, the sequences lifted from volume three appear green.) Except for the animal slaughter, the extracts consist mainly of the bogus moments. Gröss is nowhere to be seen, despite his voice on the soundtrack. Instead, introducing the tape is another doctor, one who stares madly into the camera and fidgets with a skeletal foot. “What is death?” asks the strange new arrival. “That is a question my good friend Dr Frances B. Gröss dedicated his life to answering.” So we meet Dr Louis Flellis. “Three weeks ago during a simple operation,” confides Flellis, “Gröss died under my knife…”

DEATH SCENES (1989) D: NICK BOUGAS

The discovery of a private collection of photographs was the impetus behind this particular shockumentary. The photographs were taken in the early half of the twentieth century and collected by a Los Angeles police officer. Death Scenes is a video document of that collection. Death in all its guises. Grisly images of accident, suicide and murder fill the screen in a rota of human carnage. Bodies ripped and gutted like fish on a fishmonger’s slab. Heads, splayed and voided of contents from under-chin shotgun blasts. Pugilistic corpses burned to carbonized statues. Throats cut spine-deep. Dismantled torsos, limbs and heads, reassembled postmortem. The brain of a man, incongruously intact, sits on a porch, expelled from its skull by a suicidal shotgun blast. Babies tossed from high-rise apartments to an unyielding fate, others tossed from womb to trashcan, others strangled with cords, stabbed with knives, smashed with hammers. Rags, gristle and bone are all that remain of two juveniles after finding and playing with dynamite. A severed head — the face serene, relaxed — sits upright in the centre of a desert road; against a tree, while the wrecked car from which it was flung. And on it goes, one outlandish fatality succeeding another. Each sepia tone print accompanied by an awkward commentary from Anton Szandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, who mutters and stutters in a manner akin to Dr Gröss bumbling through Faces of Death. It’s austere for the most part, now then LaVey furnishes his oratory with the occasional fancy (“In a tell-tale tableau of futility…”) or a cosmetic aside; a ‘joke’. No matter how gruesome the images are, the stillness of time relegates each print to a safe distance. Echoing LaVey’s supposed own background as police photographer and player of the calliope, Death Scenes rattles picture after picture to the organ sounds of Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and similar. A quick burst of sixties beach seems somewhat irreverent. The music, more suited to a fairground carousel than a catalogue of death, is at times so cacophonous it deletes LaVey’s explication altogether. Nevertheless, the sheer power of the photographs propels the production along at an exhilarating rate.

The occasional movie clip and trailer appears, perhaps to pad out the programme to an adequate running time. But their inclusion is detrimental. The value of Death Scenes derives solely from the snapshots. Viewing them affirms the frailty of the human form. We can see how easily it is broken and destroyed. There is a surreal quality to viewing these still images in a moving picture medium, old pictures of death returned to life. Death Scenes is a window on perdition; the human body as it was then, the same as it is now — failing and in ruins . The film makes no qualms about giving us a coveted glimpse beneath the autopsy sheet.

Director Nick Bougas went on to develop similar, but far more restrained programmes for American television. Under the collective title of Murderers, Mobsters & Madmen and suffering the same secondary production values, these were focused on true crime, utilizing several sequences from Death Scenes.[77]

FACES OF DEATH IV (1990)
D: CONAN LE CILAIRE [JOHN ALAN SCHWARTZ]

Directed as before by Conan Le Cilaire aka John Alan Schwartz, Faces of Death belies at last a Japanese connection with the credits of this instalment. The film itself commences on a graphic scene of cremation. Gröss is absent, replaced by Dr Louis Flellis, a bogus neurosurgeon. The film denies itself any credibility with a host who suffers a more bizarre countenance than the one before him. Gröss at least maintained that his investigations were toward a better understanding; Flellis on the other hand is playing for laughs, hamming it up for the camera. He recounts the fate of his predecessor, driven insane after featuring in the previous three films. Flellis keeps the ashes of his late associate on his desk. Formalities out the way, Flellis then invites the viewer to descend into a world gone mad to study the many faces of death.

A nurse tortured and murdered by a crazed patient in a mental hospital is fake and a weak opening for the film, made more ineffectual by what follows: The bona fide dead. People electrified on rails, murder victims, suicides, auto and air crash casualties, a still-living man trapped in the three-inch gap between train and platform. Most harrowing is the terrorist who has fallen victim to his own criminal plot. An explosive device in the waistband of the man’s trousers has detonated accidentally, and he lies in the street almost in two, yet alive watching the crowd watching him. These images, played in rapid succession, are in stark contrast to the jocular commentary.

Fiction is next: An accident at a car wrecking plant results in the amputation of a man’s leg. An stage act ends prematurely when a big spike plunges into the face of an escapologist. (A similar scene in H. G. Lewis’ low-budget horror film The Wizard of Gore [1970] looks positively breathtaking by comparison.) A bungee jump goes fatally wrong because the rope is too long. Even more preposterous is the execution of a man under military dictatorship. He is tied to four horses and systematically quartered (reminiscent of another H.G. Lewis film, 2000 Maniacs [1964]). Flellis explains the victim was guilty of an $18 tax deficit. It continues: A robber inadvertently locks himself in a bank vault, his slow suffocation caught on CCTV. Execution by electric chair is less credible than the similar scene in the first Faces of Death. Elsewhere, an animal handler is attacked by a tiger and loses his arm. Viewers will observe that the man playfully mauled and the recumbent limbless casualty are two different people; no effort is made to ensure they wear the same clothing. An Indonesian family select a cute puppy for lunch. The animal is placed on a kitchen cutting board, next to the vegetables, and disembowelled alive (the dog having been replaced with a stuffed toy, from which offal is extracted). Flellis blames chemical pollutants for a mutated giant leech attached to the arm of a swimmer. FBI agents raid a house used by devil worshippers. Scattered throughout they discover dismembered remains of their victims, satanic bibles, burning candles, and other cultish paraphernalia. Plus a videotape showing the ceremonial crimes.

As happened in the previous Faces of Death, a snuff film is discovered. Rather two of them: One videocassette is the supposed film of a gangland execution, another contains ritual mutilation and murder. The concept of the snuff film has moved on from sexually motivated murder of South American origin, per movies like Snuff and Hardcore, to that of satanic crime. The ritual murder sequence would be used in an endeavour to verify Satanic Ritual Abuse, as we shall see later.

The film closes on high weirdness. Authentic footage of an orchestra collapsing through a stage floor,[78] prompts Flellis to take up the piano again; more than that, he says, it has inspired him to write a song. He stares wide-eyed into the camera as a rocking musical number commences. Its lyric goes:

I believe in children (BACKING VOCAL: death!)
I believe in life (death!)
But I’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind
Not to see the strife.
CHORUS: Faces of death, faces of death, faces of death all around me

Faces of Death IV was the last of the series to carry the director credit Conan Le Cilaire. However, in this instance John Alan Schwartz isn’t behind the pseudonym. Indeed, Schwartz claims to have little patience for any of the films outside the first instalment. “The first one had a novelty about it,” he told the authors, “and a pace about it that I don’t think was ever equalled by the other attempts.” Of Faces of Death IV, he said “I didn’t do the last one. My brother is the doctor and wrote it. Dr Louis Flellis — that’s my brother.”[79] Faces of Death continued as a franchise for a few more years in Germany and Japan, but these later films bore little resemblance to what had gone before.

In Germany, Faces of Death IV was branded a glorification of violence and banned outright. It was considered insincere in its tone. But the history of the film in that particular country warrants a closer look. The Faces of Death franchise had arrived in Germany under the cynical management of one Uwe Schier. He took the name and manufactured his own cut and paste editions (as he did with Mondo Cane).[80]

DEATH SCENES 2 (1992)
D: NICK BOUGAS

In this production we intend to further examine the compelling elements of cruel fates and malicious mayhem, and in the process perhaps gain a new understanding of the often bloody events that have helped shape our world over the last half-century.

After the crime scene photographs that constituted the first entry, Death Scenes 2 returns to a more traditional form. It brings together archive footage in a bid to trace death over the decades to the present day. A lengthy opening sequence highlights tragedy and suffering in WWII.[81] Mobs do battle in times of prohibition, juxtaposed with gangland violence on American streets today. The 1950s are heralded with dancing teenagers and footage of “the forgotten war” in Korea. The teenage obsession with motorcars introduces Signal 30, a driver education film, screened here at length.[82] With the sixties comes Kennedy’s assassination, so too Oswald’s. War in Vietnam brings civil unrest and the immolation of a Buddhist priest.

All of this is but filler for the next bit. One major selling point for Death Scenes 2 is the inclusion of rare coroner photographs of the Tate-LaBianca murders. Preceded by shots of their death certificates, victims of Manson’s Family are seen as never before outside of police files. Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring lie dead with ropes around their necks and knife wounds all over. Leno LaBianca is in his pyjamas with the word WAR cut into his stomach and a carving fork jutting out from it. Rosemary LaBianca is face down on the bedroom floor, her buttocks bare. The bodies of Abigail Folger, Wojiciech Frykowski and Steven Parent are also displayed as discovered. Following a sequence on celebrity deaths, the next coup for Death Scenes 2 comes with footage of Vic Morrow and the two child actors killed on the set of Twilight Zone The Movie (1982) (described here as an “offbeat thriller”). The instant in which a helicopter crashes into the trio is seen from the perspective of each of the multiple cameras deployed, frame by blurry frame.[83] There is a sequence on Mexican crime journals,[84] whose pages carry colour photos of grisly fatalities. The body of a man split neatly in two on a train track appears beneath a headline that screams SUICIDOSE! Other victims of murder, accident or suicide are mutilated to the point of abstraction.

Football violence is followed by reference to video technology and a “random sampling of some of the era’s most compelling and unforgettable images”. A rodeo rider is trampled by his horse. Racing car accident. A hanging. A man is beaten in South Africa. A man is tied spread-eagle and stoned. People leap from a burning building. An in-store security camera shows a hold-up and the cashier who retaliates with gunfire. Pennsylvanian State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer shoots himself on air.[85] Abortion matter oozes from a vagina… Not all of it is attributable to video technology as described.[86]

1990s–present: Come the latter half of the 1980s, video technology had opened new avenues of film exhibition and distribution. It also enabled new methods of production. Existing film titles were exhumed in a bid for more product (mondo was just one more genre to be dragged), while the accessibility and ease with which the video medium could be utilized and manipulated resulted in new works. We see here the Death Scenes films, the German Faces of Death series, and countless others.

Another child of this technology was the video mixtape or media barrage tape.[87] With few exceptions, these tapes appeared on the underground and were freely circulated. They were fast and loose compilations of visual imagery ripped from various sources, shocking and funny in turn with a dose of music videos interspersed throughout. (One can easily imagine their creation by disaffected young males with access to two VCRs.) Although these compilation tapes resonate with mondo, there are clear differences. The trite commentary is gone, for instance. There is no soul-wrenching sentimental slush, no flippant asides, no mock concern, no sympathetic conceit.

Come the 1990s, fewer mondo filmmakers were prepared to take their camera and travel the globe in search of the mysterious or outrageous — nor bother to imply that they were doing so. Indeed, filmmaking in the tradition of Jacopetti and Prosperi had become not the domain of the film director but that of video technicians and film editors, most anyone with access to a whole bunch of tragedy footage. These attitudes and this way of working inform the rest of the films in this section.

TRACES OF DEATH (1993)
P: BRAIN DAMAGE

EXTREME WARNING. This film is meant for the true ‘reality death enthusiast.’ Absolutely none of the footage contained in this film is recreated in any way, which makes Traces of Death 1 the first ‘true shockumentary’ ever released!! The material contained in this tape is explicitly graphic and is not for children or the squeamish of any kind. From this point of the film forward, view at your own risk. We are serious!!

The admonition that opens Traces of Death is echoed again in the first words spoken by the narrator. Not so much a warning, more a come-on. The film is comprised of television news and medical archive footage and endeavours to align itself with the much more famous Faces of Death. Traces of Death sounds like Faces of Death, but that’s where the connection ends. It is a ‘bedroom production’, compiled on a budget that probably extends no more than affording a second VCR and cheap ads in zines requesting unsavoury footage.[88] That the theme music is lifted from a direct to video superhero story, J.R. Bookwalter’s Robot Ninja (1989), should give an inkling of what to expect by way of production values. The film opens with Maritza Martin being gunned down by her ex-husband at their daughter’s graveside.[89] The footage has been lifted directly from a television screen, as evidenced by the black band obscuring the original network identifier and caption. The source for several other clips are also concealed in this way. Sometimes a video-generated trail of blood will add colour to the black bands. There follows the familiar shot of SAS men storming the Iranian Embassy in London, 1980, and a police pursuit last seen on I Witness Video, in which the felon, attempting to escape in a pickup truck, is cut off and gunned down by officers. Animal tests from True Gore are played (the nauseating heat and pig experiment). Still photographs of deformed human eyes are followed by the obligatory autopsy sequence followed by more autopsy, edited this time to spare us the more mundane elements of the procedure (but edited well, so presumably not by the Traces Of Death team). Some of this material is Japanese in origin.[90]

Traces of Death considers itself some rare and exotic bird. The self-aggrandizement quickly become tiresome. “We now present for you answers to one of the most mind-boggling questions ever asked. How, exactly, does a man physically and completely become a woman?” Cue a sex change operation. The footage incorporates no fatalities and addresses a question answered several times over in other, earlier mondo pictures. Traces of Death is preoccupied more with gross out than so-called ‘reality death’. Take for instance scenes of tumour extraction and a man displaying the cavity created by face cancer, and indeed a stuntman being struck in the groin when a stunt misfires (“Needless to say, I never did this stunt again”). Traces of Death is the product of too much Beavis and Butthead. Naughty adolescents with technology at their fingertips. There is no attempt to correlate order to the film and the clips look to have been left in the order in which they were acquired. Writer and narrator Damon Fox (probably also ‘Brain Damage,’ the producer credited with this mess), tries to sound like Anton LaVey by way of Frances B. Gröss. His delivery is flippant and mocking, but self-consciously so. It’s also edited to the point of being nonsensical (the first line of dialogue following the sex change operation is “not all deaths are accidental”).

Footage of R. Budd Dwyer concludes with a ‘rap version’ of the fatal moment the State Treasurer pulls the trigger. There is archive footage of the skin collection of Ilse Koch, the Commandant’s wife who turned the tattooed flesh of concentration camp inmates into decorative bookcovers, gloves and lampshades. Morticians prepare the body of the recently deceased. The death of Pit Dernitz, attacked by lions in a safari park, is also replayed in a clip taken from Savage Man… Savage Beast.[91]

A crypt door creaks shut. A voice-over says, “See you soon. Ha, ha, ha.” And the film gives way to a message on where to obtain official Traces of Death T-shirts, buttons, and ‘gruesome carnage collectibles’ which include actual human remains.

TRACES OF DEATH II (1994) P: BRAIN DAMAGE

The very definition of Shockumentary!! An unflinching view of life’s horrors which takes the viewer to the outer limits of his brief and fragile reality!

As part one, Traces of Death II commences with facile assertions of its own importance. Use of Italian mondo as its main source material, however, weakens the argument, especially the inference that here is authentic death footage. Included are Addio Ultimo Uomo’s spearing and castration scene, Savage Zone’s transvestite murder, and several episodes lifted from Sweet and Savage (the high point of Traces of Death II is the latter’s blatantly false dismemberment by motor vehicles). The lack of autopsy procedural makes for a more palatable assembly than the first movie, but the attitude and tone remain stiflingly crass. Narrator Damon Fox cackles through a distortion box, his voice affected to the point of an inaudible mush. While his ‘comic’ interjections are mercifully few and far between, there is a price for such small mercies: Wall-to-wall death metal music. Bands like Unleashed and Morgoth strut their stuff to a hot-air balloon striking a power line, sending its basket and occupants plummeting earthward; a shark attack victim losing his leg; and maggots devouring the carcass of a rat. For highwire artist Karl Wallenda walking his last tightrope, Fox narrates to the beat of the death metal accompaniment. Midway through Traces of Death II, the carnage pauses for a moment and a musical request: ‘Is your band good enough for T.O.D. III?’ Applicants are advised to send demo tapes in for the next volume, as well as a soundtrack CD and tour.

Less familiar news and home video footage includes a giant man-operated Transformer going haywire at a Monster Truck rally, firing a metal spike into a similar suited individual — at least that’s what Fox claims is happening. “Now, that’s what I call entertainment,” he quips. Several of the more catastrophic motor racing clips are replayed in slow motion with a sporting ‘Replay’ displayed on the screen. “In the spirit of fair play,” a female-to-male sex change is depicted. Another plug for merchandise concludes the picture and the promise that, since part one, the T.O.D. catalogue has increased to 145 pages and now includes 3,000 items (as opposed to 2,500).

Traces of Death made it as far as five volumes. In 2003, producer/distributor Brain Damage commemorated nine years of the series with a box set.[92]

DEATH WOMEN: JOSEI SHITAI SHUU (1994)
D: BAKUSHISHI YAMASHITA[93]

It opens on a crime scene. A woman’s body is discovered unceremoniously dumped in the undergrowth, her spread legs an indication of the cruel final minutes of her life. The strategic placement of a leaf over the naked crotch suggests uncommon discretion on the part of the investigators. Or perhaps the filmmakers requested it? One police officer dusts a nearby bottle.

Death Women: Josei Shitai Shuu (trans. Female Corpse Week) is composed almost entirely of footage of women dead, none of it fabricated. The production is Japanese, but shot in Latin America, hot on the heels of the emergency services and police investigative teams called to scenes of accident, suicide and murder.

The autopsy of a woman is next. The film returns to this autopsy at a later point, whereupon the corpse is wearing perfect white panties. Then follows a body being removed from water. (It might be female but it’s no longer clear.) A woman’s head has been caved in. A police officer uses his hands to shovel the spilled brains into a bucket. As police examine the corpse of another woman, a stabbing victim, neighbours peer out from their windows over the scene. Rivulets of blood escape from wounds on the back of the body. Another stabbing incident follows. This time the victim is in undergrowth and the wounds are across the breasts.

And so it goes. Police officers and paramedics go about their business with dutiful detachment, sometimes pointing a finger toward evidence or at a specific trauma on the body under examination.

Death Women is not at all removed from the many other death films to emerge from Japan in the nineties. In fact it’s effectively identical, save for the questionable focus suggested by the title. A tiny portion of the crime and emergency material would find its way into American compilations in years to come (see Faces of Gore). But the Japanese shockumentary remains for the most part a confusing commodity to western eyes. A message posted on the AV Maniacs film forum sums it up with a statement heartfelt and true: ‘Japanese shockhumentaries [sic] are the hardest ones to grasp.’

There are several reasons why Japanese shockumentaries are hard to grasp. Sheer volume is one factor. A large number of these films have been produced in Japan over the years, often bearing similar titles that constitute parts in a series. Few have ever officially been released in the West, which also means no concession is made to the language barrier. There are no subtitles, for instance. While some films have made it to DVD, many others have been out of circulation since the days of the videocassette. One series is called Junk, which extends to a total of seven volumes. Another series is Death File, which ran for a staggering fourteen volumes, not including a number of offshoot titles. It is comprised of crime and accident scenes on the streets of Southeast Asia, a soulless and seemingly endless procession of fried, mangled and sliced fatalities captured on bleached out video. The company behind Death File is V&R Planning, which is also the company behind Junk and Death Women — making it a pretty good entry point for a deeper look into this dizzying aspect of shockumentary film culture.

Tokyo based V&R Planning was founded in 1986. It was among several adult video production companies emerging at that time in Japan, specifically geared to the new VCR market. V&R (standing for Visual & Retail) and companies like them shot porn films cheaply and direct to video, counterpoint to the established pinku studios, whose old school concession to videocassette consisted only of transferring their existing product to the new format. Traditional films had glamour with recognizable stars, and were expensive to make. The new school by contrast, without much budget, couldn’t afford to be anything but edgy. It had a non-professional, girl next door quality that quickly found a niche in the video marketplace.

Sex on the Japanese screen had been simulated until this point. In competing with the larger studios, adult video — or AV as it came to be known — turned to explicit sex and incorporated plenty of close-ups of genitalia (albeit pixelated).

The style of AV is very much vérité, with the realism and immediacy of the films giving the impression of a documentary. Embracing many of the same themes as pinku movies (schoolgirl fetish, bondage, pretend rape), AV soon developed original ideas of its own. Bukkake and hamedori, for instance, are both enormously popular in AV.[94] V&R Planning pushed the envelope out further than most, and they are recognized today as specialists in scat porn and even more marginal exercises in degradation, such as Squirmfest.[95] But they also shot death documentaries, which is where the heart lay for V&R, initially at least. The company founder is Kaoru Adachi, whose background is television, importing films and shows for broadcast. He is said to have introduced Monty Python to Japan. An early associate of Adachi was Company Matsuo, who joined V&R in 1988. Matsuo has said in interview that Adachi ‘was mainly interested in weird documentaries, like death documentaries and these things. That’s his taste.’ Speaking with Johannes Schönherr for Midnight Eye,[96] Matsuo recalled that Adachi didn’t have much of a clue about

how to shoot a film. When he started his own company, he just went ahead and shot documentaries the way he thought they should be. It was a very weird company but Adachi tried to make all these very serious videos.

Among the ‘serious videos’ is an entry in the convoluting Guinea Pig series, as well as death films Adachi released on a V&R subsidiary label called Mad Video. The first of these was the Junk series, which was largely reissues of Conan Le Cilaire’s Faces of Death volumes one, two and three, as well as some newly commissioned volumes.[97] Matsuo explained how this new material — the ‘new’ Junk — came about.

These videos were made in about 1989. V&R didn’t make only AV, they also went abroad to shoot death videos. Cameraman Takeshi Ishikawa was working for V&R and he had a special interest in hermaphrodites. For that he built up contacts with a Brazilian tabloid paper, he knew well about Brazil. He told V&R: “If you want to shoot death videos, you should go to Brazil.” So, Adachi, Ishikawa and I went to Brazil together and we stayed there for about two weeks with those newspaper people.

The newspaper photographers listened in to police radio and went right to the scenes where things had happened. The police in Brazil was slow, usually the photographers arrived at the scene first. In Japan, the police always hide death scenes from public view. In Brazil, they didn’t do that. Everything was out in the open.

Matsuo worked on the sixth volume of Junk (Shin janku), which was shot in Rio de Janeiro. He travelled to both accident and murder sites in making the film.

They had a lot of murders there [in Rio de Janeiro]. I had no problems shooting those things. It was not enjoyable but… at the time I felt that only I could do that work, I had a sense of being on a mission… Maybe… Basically, you can’t shoot this kind of thing. But I had the opportunity to do it and went ahead… But I definitely prefer AV. There are parallels between death and sex videos. It’s both about things which are very common and part of human nature but which everyone tries to hide. We open the lid and make it possible to see these things.

The blueprint for the V&R death films was established with Junk. (The idea of chasing police and emergency frequencies is not new. The photographer Weegee did the same decades earlier in New York, often beating everyone else to the scene — hence Weegee, as in Ouija.) For subsequent death films, the location was no longer Rio de Janeiro, but it barely made a difference: Death Women was more of the same from Southeast Asia, and for the most part so too was Death File.[98] These compilations appeared through the nineties, while the porn side of production continued as usual. Eventually the Mad Video wing was dropped and all the company’s product emerged as V&R Planning, one and the same. This isn’t to say that AV and death films were marketed together and consumed indiscriminately. But a crossover existed and Death Women was one death title made available in sex shops. The Death Women tapes, of which there were two volumes, are undeniably licentious. The same goes for a Death File volume called Naked and Dead (19??). The video packaging for this particular entry takes a pretty good swing at looking like porn, a corpse ‘model’ ‘posing’ on the front sleeve and snapshots of (live) topless females on the back. Continuing the theme, the VHS sleeve for Death Women Part II (1995) depicts a number of ‘topless’ shots, all of them a corpse in stages of postmortem examination.[99]

In light of Japanese laws governing genitalia, the death films are no different to AV in that any such depiction is obscured by the ubiquitous pixelation. This has created a point of similarity between the two types of film — the pixelated mosaic having a clear association with sex. In the case of the first Death Women volume, the censorship itself has questionable intent, as per the aforementioned corpse dressed in white panties for autopsy. The presence of white panties, or any clothing for that matter, is not a requisite of postmortem procedure, so we can assume that a decision has been made for the sake of the camera. Furthermore, the panties are subject to the censorious pixels, which serves no purpose beyond a perverse implication of what it is these pixels represent.

The autopsy in Death Women is masked in other ways, too. Scalpel into flesh is rendered surreal at times, thanks to misappropriate post-production creativity on the part of the filmmakers. As noted earlier, Kaoru Adachi really didn’t seem to know how to make a film, rather he shot documentaries the way he thought they should be shot.

In the mid nineties, V&R Planning stopped making death film compilations. The reason appears to have been a run-in with the censor board, who were opposed to what they perceived to be violent pornography. Filmmaker and photographer Kiyotaka Tsurisaki was working on another entry into V&R’s Death File series when the plug was pulled. Some of the material Tsurisaki had already shot made it into his documentary Orozco the Embalmer, released by V&R in 2001.[100]

V&R Planning remain a comfortable exponent of AV in Japan, being neither a particularly large company nor particularly small. Having adopted the name V&R International, a number of their death films are available anew on DVD under different titles in Brazil, ergo genitalia and censorship are an issue no more.

EXECUTIONS (1995)
D: DAVID HERMAN, ARUM KUMAR & DAVID MONAGHAN

WARNING: The film you are about to see contains explicit scenes of real executions. The footage is graphic and disturbing. Many of the images have been censored or suppressed, as governments continue to promote execution as instant, clinical and humane. This film is a legacy to those executed. Images of their death are used to educate the living. To suppress such images on the grounds of taste is the ultimate indecency.

Placed into the category of snuff film by factions of the British press, even the few sympathetic to its cause, Executions proved to be a commendable, if hard-hitting, documentary. It begins with the intriguing and likely accurate theory that a person survives decapitation for a brief moment. The opening sequence is a re-enactment of an experiment performed by Dr Burieux in 1905 as he attempted communication with the severed head of a condemned man the instant it had been detached by the guillotine. According to Burieux, one victim of the blade showed signs of awareness when he lifted the head aloft, stared into the eyes, and shouted the man’s name. The filmmakers, in like manner, challenge the viewers to look into the eyes of those about to be executed.

Various methods of execution are pigeonholed into chapters: Beheading, Hanging, Stoning, Shooting, and so on. Some are detailed with the use of archive photographs, others with harrowing news footage and amateur-shot video. Cold statistics substantiate each example. One section, however, uses footage from Jacopetti and Prosperi’s somewhat unreliable Africa Addio, specifically the mass slaughter of Arabs filmed from the air, believed to be fake. Elsewhere, a policeman is killed in Haiti and rednecks applaud the electrocution of Linwood Briley in America. Decapitations are seen in still photographs and grainy black and white film. A woman in Mogadishu, in 1994, is given to a mob for stoning. Described as the opposite of all modern forms of executions — “the onlookers are the executioners” — the woman is jostled and stripped naked by the frenzied mob before being led to her death. The narration reflects on how this form of killing is held almost exclusively for women. Archive footage shows Chinese drug smugglers being dispatched in a field with the traditional single bullet to the head, and a similar fate awaiting political dissenters on the streets of Shanghai. The evolution of execution by chemical gas is explained; a process developed by the Nazis and adopted by the Americans. A large observation window allows a small audience to observe death by lethal injection — ‘execution as medical theatre’ as the text puts it. Thomas Edison’s death of Czolgosz by electric chair is shown. The victims of death squads in South America litter the street as family members root among the severed heads for missing kin. The final sequence is the most shocking. It shows the execution by Beirut gunmen of a young man called Mohammadine Salar. Bound with twine and with a hastily scrawled cardboard sign hung around his neck, Mohammadine, pale as a ghost, is laid on a bank of earth. A vast crowd has gathered to watch, some leaping to see over the shoulders in front of them. Likewise, cameramen and photographers vie for positions. Mohammadine lies still, appearing unusually calm as he awaits the first bullet. A man steps forward with an automatic weapon and fires into Mohammadine’s stomach. He walks away. Another gunman steps forward and takes a few shots, with many of the rounds striking earth as well as the victim. The camera zooms in. Mohammadine is still alive, his head slowly turning as another round blasts away the right side of his face. As if by design, the card sign flips upwards and covers the horrible sight. But someone steps from the crowd, perhaps a cameraman’s aide, to remove the obstruction and Mohammadine, face torn asunder, still gasps for breath. He is left to die from his wounds.

Executions had gone on sale in Britain amid much controversy, the sequence in Beirut often cited in the press as just cause for a ban. It wasn’t banned, but tabloid pressure forced the hand of WHSmith, who quickly withdrew the film from sale.[101] The filmmakers argued that Executions was a reaction to the popular consensus that state sanctioned executions were painless, and its purpose was to destroy the misconception of capital punishment. Almost everyone else believed it to be nothing more than a nasty and exploitative film, created for a fast buck. “Executions is horror for horror’s sake,” said former deputy leader of the Labour Party, Roy Hattersley. Writing for the Daily Mail, Hattersley held the filmmakers in contempt, and derided the audience for the film as voyeurs and perverts.[102] The psychological makeup of viewers was a major concern for an outraged media, so too the proximity of the video to other mainstream films displayed in stores (despite its comparatively plain and unassuming sleeve). Matters were exacerbated when Amnesty International, initially part of the project, bailed out, stating that Executions had deviated from its original plan.[103]

FACES OF GORE (1998)
D: TODD TJERSLAND

Faces of Gore is very much in the tradition of atrocity tapes that appeared in the mid to late 1990s, with its hands-on DIY punk swagger. It’s particularly close to the Traces of Death and Banned in America series in attitude. But Faces of Gore is one of the last of its type. Certainly in its callousness, it is also one of the most aggressive of its type and proved beyond the pale for many viewers. Composed almost entirely of official crime and accident footage from Southeast Asia, we see police officers and medics going about their gruesome business, collecting forensic evidence and turning the sightless face of each victim to the camera for a final portrait.

The film starts with multiple warnings about the graphic nature of the material contained, before cutting to our host, a long-haired young man in a lab coat who introduces himself as Dr Vincent Van Gore (Steve Sheppard). Van Gore says he is a member of the American Institute of Gorenology. He is seen wandering a cemetery, pontificating on the greatest mystery of mysteries — death — while occasionally sharing the company of a (fake) skull that sits on a gravestone. Van Gore is a transparent remodel of Dr Gröss. The homage (or parody) suggests that by the late nineties, Faces of Death was not only regarded as a shockumentary forebear but had kitsch value, too.[104]

Faces of Gore is split into sections. Referring to a folder in his briefcase, Dr Van Gore says the most fascinating death belongs to the category of motor accident. This revelation segues into the first batch of film clips, which Van Gore claims to originate from Japan. But immediately we can see this statement is erroneous (the personnel at the scene don’t appear Japanese; their insignia is not Japanese). It’s a grim opening that sets the tone of everything to follow. The human body is in total devastation, reduced to pure mush in some cases, and spread across motor vehicle dashboards and the roadside. A crowbar is required to separate one person’s head from a concrete post. Van Gore’s commentary gives the names of many of the victims and the supposed details of their demise, but none of it rings true. The duplicity becomes obvious fairly quickly; the contrast between what is shown and what is said.

One charred corpse is identified as a pregnant woman, whose foetus is said to be visible through a hole burned in her stomach. The viewer’s attention is drawn to a blackened shape centre-screen. “You get two dead for the price of one,” Van Gore muses with ‘comic’ affectation. The narration in this sequence is fairly typical of the insensitive, manufactured nonsense presented throughout. Personal artefacts belonging to the victim are pulled from the wreckage and displayed by officials for the camera (among them a photo ID), which inspires a misanthropic rant from Van Gore. The woman in this instance, he says,

was an unwedded mother and social misfit whom the world is probably better off without. As most scientific authorities in the world of anthropology will point out, unwed mothers are unfit parents, and their neglected offspring invariably grow up to become moral deviants, delinquents and criminals. Yes, it is better to let her and her unborn child die in the cleansing flames of righteousness than to live one moment longer to plague society with their welfare claims and moral degeneracy.

Other sections of the film unfold much the same way. One young male suicide who is discovered hanging by the neck is described singularly as a failed chemist student and self-defeatist. “If only the students in America were this conscientious,” Van Gore remarks. In another hanging scene, the breasts of a young female suicide are exposed by the functionaries attending the scene. This indignity is played out in slow motion as the narrator drolly remarks how the victim “died wearing a breastcup size 34c”.

There is no dramatic build up to any of the deaths we see in the film, and no critical aftermath. It just lurches from one vile incident to the next. The only semblance of continuity are oft repeated and clearly fabricated references to one Mr Sato, a familiar presence at the death scenes in the film. Most likely he is a detective. But Van Gore pegs him as a necrophile, making him the butt of the joke whenever the victim is young and female. Then there is an attempt to corral unrelated bloody crime scenes into the singular work of a bogus gangster Van Gore calls Tiger Joe Wang.

Faces of Gore proved popular enough to run for a total of three volumes, plus a ‘best of’ collection. But how did such a thing come about? And what of the man behind the films — writer, producer, director and narrator Todd Tjersland?

Former columnist for Cult Movies magazine, now self-professed entrepreneur, Tjersland was running a mail order business in the nineties called Threat Theater International. Its speciality was obscure sleaze, porn and horror movies from around the world. The Threat Theater catalogue is something to behold. Packed with outrageous film titles and descriptions, and murky video screengrabs, it represents part of the first wave that helped deliver Japanese pinku and weirdness to a wider Western audience.

Todd Tjersland clearly had access to a lot of films, some remaining to this day obscure. Much footage in Faces of Gore is lifted from these other films, notably the infinite Death File series, made by a Japanese production team but filmed for the most part in South America and Southeast Asia.[105] In interview with the authors of this book, Tjersland explained the criteria for the Faces of Gore selection process. “I simply picked the weirdest, bloodiest, and most disturbing segments from the available footage,” he said. “Oh, and anything with boobs. There was a conscious decision on my part to hold back some of the juiciest stuff for future volumes. Unlike most series’, Faces of Gore actually got ‘better’ (as in more disgusting) with each sequel. All the best stuff is in the existing volumes, although I had enough material for more.”[106]

As for making the film in the first place, he offered the following reason: “I wanted to do something different. Most shockumentaries were such dreadful, boring affairs. They took themselves way too seriously! I was looking to be more playful and transgressive. However misguided that decision may have been, it did ensure my films stood out from the rest.”

Tjersland distributed Faces of Gore himself when negotiations elsewhere broke down. Home video rights for volumes one and two were sold to a German company, while all four volumes became available worldwide through Threat Theater.[107] As to whether Faces of Gore could be made today, Tjersland replied in the negative:

“It was definitely a product of its time — the last gasp of a dying breed. Today, the death documentary has been replaced by reality television, with shows like America’s Dumbest Criminals, where D-list celebrities make fun of people’s misfortunes, like I did in Faces of Gore. It’s the same thing in principle, only nobody dies. Kind of like how nonlethal sports replaced the gladiator arenas of ancient Rome.

“Looking back on the experience with the clarity I have now, I know I would never choose to make a series like this again, and I shouldn’t have made it in the first place. It was a mistake conceptually, creatively, spiritually. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. For better or worse, the films are out there. I learned a lot from them, have forgiven myself, and moved on.”

Many viewers regard the flippant commentary inappropriate and offensive.

“The series was always intended as parody because humour was the only way I could deal with such awful material,” says Tjersland. “It was also intended as a warning against adopting the callous disregard for human life and the rights of others espoused by the narration. By pretending to take an extreme, right-wing position that was so ludicrous, so mockingly over the top, I assumed everyone would ‘get’ the joke. Some people did and became super-fans… and others even found it inspirational. A woman dying of cancer actually thanked me for making the films because after watching them and being able to laugh at death, she was no longer afraid to die.”

Alas, she proved the exception. Tjersland continues: “Many shockumentary fans said they loved the insanely disgusting footage, but hated the narration and comedy. Others hated everything about it to the point of making death threats against me — this is where a pseudonym would have come in handy. But not knowing me or what I was trying to accomplish, they understandably assumed from the narration I must be this horrible person in real life.”

Tjersland believes that shockumentaries as a whole are now redundant, driven away by reality television and the beast of political correctness. He regrets having contributed to the cycle with Faces of Gore, whose jovial approach is an embarrassment to him. But in many ways this jovial approach can be considered an inevitable development within the shockumentary echelon. The mocking tone and the subjective interpretation of ‘facts’ is certainly no giant leap from that of roadshow pictures and the many condescending explorations of the dark continent in the forties and fifties. Indeed, the Driver Ed films of the fifties often adopted a lofty tone in trying to hammer their point across and frighten viewers into becoming safer drivers. In some instances this spilled into outright indignation and the ridicule of the unfortunate victims onscreen. Similarly, Faces of Death, as we have seen, had no problems with duplicity.

Short of defending Tjersland’s film outright, we might at least consider approaching Faces of Gore as a reactionary tract. Consciously or not, Tjersland is making a pointed statement on the shockumentary scene of that time. This is particularly apt of the many films emerging from Japan, whose own commentary would be rendered effectively meaningless to the majority of viewers elsewhere in the world, who were seeing these films without subtitles, perhaps on bootleg tapes or compilations such as these. Western viewers couldn’t ever hope to understand the commentary in these films, let alone ponder their significance.

Faces of Gore flagged the end of the shockumentary era as we know it. With its demise in the late nineties, a different type of compilation film appeared. These new compilations were part atrocity footage and part nudity — and not a little substance abuse, in respect to subject and possibly filmmakers and viewers alike. But beneath it all was violence at a street level. The enormous success of a tape called Bumfights was the catalyst for this new era,[108] itself a product of several other factors, including video mixtapes and the Internet (which propelled sales and publicity).[109] It represented a cultural shift within male dominated youth culture, which remains the key demographic for such material. Felony Fights (2005), Almost Illegal (2008), Road Rage (2006), Gang Violence (2006), Going Postal (2011), and Crackheadz Gone Wild (2006) are all examples of this new type of compilation. To make a musical analogy, these compilations are more indicative of hip hop culture than the death metal and punk of the fading shockumentary scene.

BANNED IN AMERICA V: THE FINAL CHAPTER (2000) D: [NOT CREDITED]

WARNING!! What you are about to witness will disturb you. Even shock you. There is a dark side of humanity the censors won’t let you see…but we will.[110]

By 2000, the production of death shockumentaries had effectively come to a halt. However, interest in the films themselves continues, with audiences appalled and entertained as before. One long-standing US producer/distributor of such material was Brain Damage, whose Traces of Death in 1993 heralded a new wave of shockumentary for the video age. Nowadays their catalogue is predominately low-budget independent horror movies by new directors, a market once called ‘direct to video,’ not without a certain negative connotation. Twenty years down the line for Traces of Death and its progeny — what Brain Damage categorize Shock/Reality — and indeed direct to video movies in general, little more than the technology has moved on. A cursory examination reveals that death in the late nineties was given over to Southeast Asia, notably crime and accident scenes not dissimilar to V&R Planning’s Death Women. This footage was certainly gruesome, but it soon reached saturation point. One brutal roadside incident is much like the next. The ultimate indignity for the anonymous victims of stabbing, shootings and automobile collisions is that they are collectively monotonous. The parade is rendered meaningless (as exemplified by Todd Tjersland’s thoroughly glib delivery in Faces of Gore). Using Brain Damage as a model, the shift from shockumentary to Shock/Reality can be better defined. The fact that the company is still in operation is of interest in its own right.

The higher profile shockumentaries from Brain Damage run for several volumes, often repackaged and offered for sale anew as box sets. Among these, Traces of Death and Banned! in America are comparatively old school, while the seven volume Facez of Death 2000 bills itself ‘the shockumentary for the twenty-first century’. The keystone remains Traces of Death, which was given suitably lavish treatment when commemorating ‘nine years of Hell!’ The five-volume collected set, released in 2003, comes complete with bonus material. The blurb promises

all real footage of things that made members of the Brain Damage Films staff physically ill. People getting eaten, cadavers getting poked at, cut up, embalmed… Gut wrenchingly disgusting footage that should never be viewed by anyone, ever.

Part of the appeal of Traces of Death is evidently the music, which has proven popular enough to warrant one official soundtrack album, while comments on the subject of soundtrack populate the box set product page. Music in the films is supplied by metal bands on the Relapse and Nuclear Blast record labels.[111]

Purporting to be the definition of shockumentary, Shock X-Treme is another Brain Damage series repackaged as a box set. The first volume of the series, credited as a 2006 release under the title Shock X-Treme Vol 1: Snuff Video, is in actual fact Snuff Video Volume Red, an obscure shockumentary from Flatline Productions circa mid to late nineties.[112] The clips include segments lifted from The Killing of America and Executions, with shockumentary darling R. Budd Dwyer making a requisite appearance. Less familiar is a man in a crowd being shot point-blank to the head, a scene described by our host simply as a Mexican electoral candidate “assassinated on my television”. Later, rows of men are felled by military firing squad, captured on supposed “underground execution” tapes smuggled out of Iraq. In the second of these tapes, gentle applause from an unseen audience complements the execution. Also included is a relatively lengthy montage of the 1992 LA riots, recorded on many cameras. One surreal sight is that of a priest in a street of chaos, holding aloft a Bible as he offers sanctuary for one bloody and beaten victim at his feet. It’s an image better suited to centuries past, or a cheesy Italian horror movie, rather than a sprawling metropolis. Most all the material in Snuff Video Volume Red is played fast and tight, with static dropout separating one clip from the next. There is no metal or punk accompaniment here, but a lightly funky drum beat. Some of the choice moments of each clip are repeated. There is no caustic narration.

What helps establish Snuff Video Volume Red as a product of the mid to late nineties is the lack of material from Southeast Asia, which would become de rigueur in a year or two. The presence of a foreboding host also dates the film, in this instance an individual in a gimp mask, breathing heavily and bathed in video and audio distortion. “I now control your channels,” he warns us at the start.

The changing flavour of the shockumentary at the end of the millennium is also evidenced in Banned! in America aka Banned in America.[113] This five-volume series spans a two-year period, commencing with volume one in 1998. It opens with the freeway suicide of Daniel Jones. Diagnosed HIV positive, Jones believed the institutions of health in America had failed him. On April 30, 1998, he took his protest to a bridge in Los Angeles for a public suicide bid. The bridge was subsequently cleared of traffic by police. Displaying a banner for the circling helicopters, Jones then throws an object from the bridge (later identified as a bag containing a videotape statement) and gets into his pickup truck, which is immediately rocked by an explosion of fire. An apparent change of heart sends him flailing back onto the road to douse the flames. Burned trousers around his ankles, he next appears ready to jump from the bridge. But he retreats, returning to the pickup for a rifle that he uses to blow off the top of his head. The camera doesn’t flinch but slowly draws back, better framing the prone body with the blood that threatens to roll out of shot. The narration on Banned! in America is merely slim but perfunctory at this point, informing us that “in front of a live viewing audience of thousands, [Jones] made his statement”. Later, when events in the film are removed from US soil or their nature is unclear, the narration is altogether blasé. A hostage situation on a Venezuelan street, for instance, or a person throwing themselves from a blazing high-rise to the pavement below. “Now, that has to hurt,” the narrator quips at the latter.[114]

Some clips in the film are tagged ‘BIA’, presumably an acronym for Banned in America, suggesting they appear here for the first time. (This doesn’t happen a lot.) Other material originates from Snuff Video Volume Red and elsewhere, while a section on animal cruelty is lifted wholesale from Faces of Death. It ends for the film as it started, with the death of Daniel Jones. As Jones’ head splatters on the LA freeway, a reprise played in slow motion, Banned! in America attempts to align itself with political action. These are the type of images the government wants banned, we are informed, which is volunteered without any indication of how or why. We have the right to see what’s going on, says the narrator in the film’s hollow coda. “It is a freedom worth fighting for.”

Subsequent volumes of Banned! in America follow a similar pattern, with volume two already exhibiting the Southern Asian influence that comes to dominate the series and shockumentaries as a whole: Lengthy scenes, documents without sound in which officials tend to bodies and body parts, are shown with no attempt at contextualisation beyond a disparaging remark. By the time the last entry in the series has arrived, the spirit is seemingly broken and the narrator confesses that Asian crime scenes all begin to lookalike.

Banned in America V The Final Chapter (2000), like the other entries in the series, claims to be a Noichi Home Video presentation of a Nomo Ichi film, which is probably spurious. The mailing address for people wishing to submit their own video clips is based in California. On the whole, and for all its faults, Banned! in America represents a last hurrah for the shockumentary. After this, more recycling takes place but the emphasis for Brain Damage has switched from death to shock reality. Going Postal (2011) purports to be the darkest human behaviour caught on tape, collecting footage that depicts ‘bad people getting worse.’ These are explosive acts of violence, ranging from drunken brawls to schoolyard punch-ups, with occasionally animals on the attack. Road Rage (2006) promises evidence of the slayings said to occur every thirteen minutes on US roads as a result of aggressive drivers. Bad Cops (2010) is much like Gang Wars (2006) in that it is an indictment of the subject it serves to exploit. The packaging for these two particular releases call for an end to the madness and an end to police brutality.

These tapes behave as a sort of feral ideal for living. Noted earlier, this is a market that has gained currency in recent years. Online the trend is even more fervent. Websites such as Crazy Shit present and discuss street brawls in terms of entertainment value, with free streaming video clips that have been captured for the most part on mobile phones.[115] Brain Damage’s Battle of the Sexes (2006) is another strain of punch-up, one that features a kickboxing match between a man and a woman. The highly publicized event dates back to Arizona, October 1999, when professional fighter Deborah ‘Sunshine’ Fettkether was pitted against an outclassed construction worker by the name of Randy Pittman. The blurb behind this Brain Damage release promises an action packed brawl straight from the streets.

TERRORISTS KILLERS & MIDDLE-EAST WACKOS (2004)
D: [NOT CREDITED]

Many people were killed in the creation of this video.

This compilation is heavily promoted as a product of the same people who created Bumfights. Who these people are is not entirely clear. The premise of Bumfights was simple: For a cash or booze reward, vagrants performed a series of humiliating and dangerous stunts. There are no vagrants present in Terrorists Killers and Middle-East Wackos, but the film does delight in the same juvenile contrivances. It’s a collection of news clips and leaked footage that attempts to emulate the raw, streetwise success of Bumfights and reignite the controversy that erupted around that particular film. Its urban credibility bolstered by ‘a kick-ass hip hop and punk soundtrack’,[116] there is actually little that is new here, except a provocative if misleading title.

There is an early sequence that purports to be a video smuggled out of Iraq, depicting the execution of Kurds by firing squad. It might be true. But many of the clips that follow aren’t of Middle Eastern origin, as the title posits. Most of it originates elsewhere, South Africa and India, for instance, with a substantial chunk clearly from the West, notably the USA. For each infidel felled by an assassin’s bullet under faraway skies, there are plenty more episodes closer to home: Bull running through tiny streets, army tanks on a rampage, air show accidents and kangaroo culling. Lamentable American rock music plays over the top of most of it, while anything with lots of movement or genitalia tends to be accompanied by a silly, foot stomping instrumental (a stopover from the days of Faces of Death). Indicative of the film’s priorities, there are more credits for music than all other credits put together. Director and producer are both absent.

Baiting controversy, a number of comical — read insensitive — interludes appear throughout. The caption Hot Stuff, for instance, introduces a series of burn victims. A sequence depicting an autopsy draws the viewer’s attention to the hairstyles of the students witnessing the procedure, with a ‘mullet meter’ counting off the worst offenders. (It counts four.) One segment, which appears to show victims of bomb blasts, is screened in double quick time.

The film’s relatively short duration of sixty minutes is padded with some mondo favourites, such as insect delicacies, physical deformities, and poor Budd Dwyer blowing his brains out once again. A statement at the end requests that viewers submit more of the same: ‘We buy crazy shit bought on tape!’ [sic] There is also a warning against ‘cheesy copycat videos!’ the irony of which is evidently lost on the producers.

Terrorists Killers and Middle-East Wackos didn’t get so far as a sequel, and the Bumfights website has since been abandoned. This clawing attempt at another hit evidently failed to save it, and smacks of desperation. One reviewer on Amazon.com stated that Terrorists Killers and Middle-East Wackos is only for those people who have no ‘access to a computer and want to gross out their friends’. Quite simply, the film couldn’t better the Internet as a source for ugly videos, and yet it hoped to do so in competition with other, longer-standing compilation packages.

The nature of its presentation destroyed any chance of a release in Britain. Under the slightly more conservative title of Terrorists, Killers and Other Wackos, it was submitted to the BBFC for classification but rejected outright in January 2005. This in contrast to the similarly themed Executions, which had been passed a decade earlier to meet with press indignation. The scenes in Terrorists are no less harrowing, but they lack the facts and figures and seemingly loftier aspirations of that earlier film. The Board had no recourse but to ban it, stating in their report that cutting the film would not have been a viable alternative. The problem, said the BBFC,

lies not so much with any particular images (most of which would have been acceptable in a different, more serious, context) but with the manner in which the images are presented, and with the underlying, exploitative purpose of the work. Cuts would therefore be unlikely to modify the tone and overall effect of the work acceptably.

In 2004, the annual Melbourne Underground Film Festival screened Terrorists Killers and Middle-East Wackos as part of a bill entitled Death To Kulture (which also included Bumfights 2). The programme credits the film an Iraq/Iran/Syria/USA co-production (which is unlikely), and claims it to be a cutting statement from the US underground on Bush’s foreign policy. ‘The circle is complete,’ determine the festival programmers, ‘the American Empire has begun.’

And that effectively is it for the shockumentary: Terrorists Killers and Middle-East Wackos would prove to be the bloated carcass of a long capsized genre. Alternatively, one might still wish to chase the occasional Shock/Reality release from Brain Damage, but the latest of these from 2011 has a familiar veneer. (Impact 911 promises ‘real emergencies caught on tape,’ while Millennium Meltdown is ‘man, animal, and nature gone horribly wrong.’) These compilations are a far cry from the shockumentary of three decades past or more. Back in the seventies and eighties, filmmakers like Mario Morra, Antonio Climati, the Castiglioni brothers, John Alan Schwartz, et al, expressed themselves within the genre’s narrow parameters and made their mark. The goalposts have changed. Producers in the nineties are not filmmakers. The technology that made possible such compilations as Traces of Death, Faces of Gore, Terrorists Killers and their ilk has also robbed them of the creative spirit, leaving in its place a whorl of digital vile.

But is it wholly fair to measure the product of these different epochs against one another? The manner and capacity in which graphic scenes of death are captured, viewed and distributed has changed the playing field. The old order of shockumentary sought to observe and report on the world around it; in more recent years the shockumentary has had to battle to compete with it. Consequently, the shockumentary has been rendered next to redundant, bowdlerized in turn by video technology, the Internet and the rise of social media. Beyond this, the matter of copyright would almost certainly have inhibited any commercial growth, given that footage is constantly appropriated without accreditation.

Revisiting the early mondo and shockumentary films for this new edition of Killing for Culture has had predictable results. The visceral impact of the films is diminished. Unchanged however is the curious picture of these films once having played cinemas to a paying audience. (Some of them, anyway.) It’s still hard to visualize the public slapping down hard cash to see a theatrical presentation of, say, Faces of Death; on the other hand it is easy to imagine a group of friends sitting round a VCR watching the same. Already antiquated by the first edition of this book, the idea of the theatergoing experience now seems positively archaic. Yet mondo, notably death mondo, was drawing punters in the US through to the early eighties, even later in Asia.

Case in point is The Shocks II. Observing in hindsight, one is struck by its comparative naïvety. The film is at times disagreeable, but rarely does it come across as mean spirited. The same cannot be said of more recent shockumentaries. The attitude of death itself has changed. In The Shocks II, death is largely the result of accident, war or recklessness. There are no made-for-camera kills; no brutal executions by drug cartels, no beheadings as propaganda and no thrill kills.

The film opens on the Statue of Liberty, the camera pulling back to reveal the New York skyline dominated by the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The sky turns black and the film starts proper. Today’s audience is only able to see the sequence in terms of the biggest shock that is 9/11 yet to happen. The Shocks II is emaciated by our modern and knowing eye. The same goes for Faccia Di Spia, whose most intriguing image today is the very final shot: A freeze frame on the Twin Towers, animated rivers of blood then flowing from the upper floors and running down the entire length of the buildings.

Many years had passed since your authors bothered to watch another mondo film after the previous edition of this book. The review of The Shocks II that appears herein was written on the day a television station in the US was apologizing profusely for the accidental live transmission of a suicide on air. The Fox News network had tailed a high speed car chase through Arizona into the desert. The driver is seen leaving the vehicle and stumbling down a dirt track, before turning his back on the news helicopter and putting a gun to his head. Anchorman Shephard Smith said of the incident, “We really messed up. We’re all very sorry. That didn’t belong on TV.”

So-called legitimate news sources have not been adverse to transmitting scenes of horror, wittingly or otherwise. The difference is that now these scenes have a meta-life, ripped and uploaded to any number of streaming video spaces and openly available for viewing and reinterpretation. We have travelled far from the early shockumentaries and the legacy of Pit Dernitz, said to have been eaten by lions in Savage Man… Savage Beast. Death on film was once so unusual that it became in mondo a selling point, irrespective of misdirection or the fudge of truth. Mondo and shockumentary films are an important and influential cultural stepping stone into the twenty-first century. Back in the 1970s, none of the filmmakers behind these films could have foreseen our modern media streams, or the currency death and violence would have within them. But Pit Dernitz is more real now than he ever was: He has a place on IMDb and footage of his unlikely fate is decontexualized on platforms such as YouTube, with the ubiquitous drizzle of asinine viewer comments. In this habitat, the misanthropy of films like Faces of Gore and Banned! in America seem at once meaningless and perfect.

1Jacopetti appears way down the cast list for Steno’s comedy drama Un giorno in pretura. Made in 1953 and featuring a young Sophia Loren, it was not released in the USA until a decade later, under the title A Day in Court.

2For more on image and counter-image, see appendix: mondo cane synopsis.

3‘We refused a certificate,’ the Board’s John Trevelyan recalled in his book What the Censor Saw, ‘but the film was widely shown by local authority licence and eventually we passed it with cuts.’

4Jimmy McDonough, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer.

5The footage of the Grand Guignol that appears in Ecco is the only known footage to exist of the famous Parisian theatre of horror. Onstage, an actor playing Henri Landru aka the French Bluebeard is seen disposing of one of his victims. It is quite possible that this material does comprise the theatre’s last performance, as volunteered in Ecco. But it seems unlikely. More likely is that it is a play restaged specifically for the camera, which has been cut with shots of the auditorium and an audience. This is the hypothesis of historians Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson anyway. They recount in their book Grand-Guignol that, after some sixty years of operation, the theatre closed in November 1962, with the sale of props and scenery undertaken in January the following year. It is fitting that mondo should have been around to bid it farewell, with cinema being somewhat of a logical and sensational successor with new explicit horrors of its own.

6In November, 1963, the BBFC gave Mondo Cane an X certificate after specific cuts were made.

7In David Gregory’s 2003 documentary The Godfathers of Mondo both Jacopetti and Prosperi finally admit to the fabrication disclosed by the authors in the first edition of this book. “It was totally fabricated. I reject Mondo Cane 2 completely,” stated Jacopetti. The mannequin used in the film has been attributed to effects wizard Carlo Rambaldi.

8Stanley Long with Simon Sheridan, X-Rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker.

9The Wild Weird Wonderful Italians carries a US copyright of 1966, but the film likely dates before this in Italy. Most online sources consider the original title to be Gli italiani si divertono così, with conflicting years of production (1961 and 1963) and different credits to those appearing on the US print.

10Excerpt from the opening declaration in Africa Addio.

11But no doubt to make a mondo film. The more ‘goofy’ sequences in Africa Addio — such as the Animal Blood Transfusion Service — probably offer a good indication where this original film was heading.

12While on the subject of soundtrack, gunfire and bullet ricochets have been added wherever guns are deployed, giving more the impression of a spaghetti western than a documentary film.

13John Trevelyan of the BBFC thought Britain could do without this sort of stuff and removed such scenes. He also believed he was doing Jacopetti a service and told him so. People might otherwise be ‘sickened and walk out’, Trevelyan reasoned in What the Censor Saw, ‘and would tell their friends not to see the film. This seemed to satisfy him [Jacopetti].’

14December 20, 1964.

15Jacopetti had already divulged something of his methods to Gregoretti: Several months earlier, the filmmaking team had gone to Rwanda to record the massacre of the Watusi. “It wasn’t very easy,” Jacopetti told the reporter. “We tried three different times to cross the Rwanda frontier. First we tried with a chartered airplane; but at the last minute the pilot refused to take us over. Then we went across on foot; but the police caught us in a forbidden area, arrested us, hauled us back first to the police barracks and then to our hotel, where we were kept under guard, and then tried us. We apologized profusely and were released with a stern warning. So then we simply forgot about permission, drove to the border, bribed the guards with a few bottles of gin, and drove across.”

16There is abstract video imagery of Frank Zappa and Jimmy ‘Carl’ Black on drums during a party scene, which obviously inflamed the idea that Zappa’s work appears in Mondo Hollywood. No small consolation is the inclusion of a horrible Davie Allan track. However, the fuzz freakout of a band calling themselves the Mugwumps constitutes some of the ‘coolest’ music in the mondo canon.

17After years in limbo, Mondo Hollywood was officially made available again in 2005 by writer, producer, director Robert Carl Cohen. This edition was prefaced by a note on the film’s 1968 ban by the French Ministry of Information, on the grounds that it was ‘a danger to the mental health of the public by its visually aggressivity and the psychology of its editing’. The ban was lifted three years later. The new print also contains added information on the people portrayed in the film.

18Another Balch penchant was the horror film; Secrets of Sex can be said to be borderline horror. One might argue that it’s closer to the horrific than it is the erotic. It is a portmanteau for a start, usually the reserve of horror, and a number of unsettling elements are to be found in the various tales. The Strange Young Man episode, which is about an American tourist with a thing for lizards, is a standout in this respect. Another episode deals with a male fetish model whose death is orchestrated by the photographer and her assistant. There is also a diatribe on the matter of reincarnation (with diagrammatic representation of sperm cells), told in the manner of Roald Dahl and ending with a murder in a greenhouse. Balch deals with the nude body and sex and procreation with a bit of a sneer. Executive producer was Richard Gordon, a name better associated with horror pictures.

19Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni, fax to the authors, dated May 27, 1995.

20Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford, Sleazoid Express.

21Kenneth Zito & Stephen F. Turan, Sinema: American Pornographic Films and the People Who Make Them.

22John Grissim, Jr., We Have Come For Your Daughters: What Went Down On The Medicine Ball Caravan.

23Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni, fax to the authors, dated May 27, 1995.

24This bizarre sequence brings to mind David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and its posthumous Brian O’Blivion, a character who, likewise, exists anew in a vast series of videotapes.

25Two of the people behind Of the Dead, Thierry Zéno and Dominique Garny, were also responsible for Vase de Noces (1974), a tasteless feature centred around a young man (played by Garny) and the relationship he has with the animals on his farm. Again, there is no narrative as such. The man fondles the nipples of a sow. When she defecates, he does likewise in an old bathtub in the yard. Eventually, the reason for this becomes ‘clear.’ The man mounts the pig (possibly a simulated act, though none of the other unpleasantness is simulated) and she eventually gives birth. He takes the piglets and hangs them, observing the reaction of their mother and the chickens. He then kills the pig. Taking all of his excreta — which has been accumulating in the tub — he mixes in with it feathers and other scrapings, brings the concoction to boil and then eats it. He vomits and in the end we also see him hanged.

The film played the NFT twice in 1977 (April 21 and April 23) as part of a series of ‘New Films from Belgium.’ Known also as The Wedding Trough and Pegasus, it acquired the more offensive — and now more common — title of The Pig Fucking Movie when it played New York grindhouses in the early eighties. The Bradford Film Festival 2008 held a Thierry Zéno retrospective in which both Of the Dead (sponsored by Headpress) and Vase de Noces were screened. Zéno himself made an appearance.

26Robert Brown, Monthly Film Bulletin (March 1980).

27Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni, fax to the authors, dated May 27, 1995.

28The 10th Sitges Fantasy Film Festival in Spain included a film called Viaje Al Mundo De Lo Desconocido. The report in Halls of Horror (August 1978) sounds it sound very much like Journey into the Beyond under a different title. The accompanying photograph, however, is from the much later Shocking Asia 2 (1985).

29Bloody Friday (orig: Blutiger Freitag) is about a gang of crooks who take hostages in a bank after their plan to rob it goes wrong. Toward the end of the movie, the rape of a woman by Heinz, the main protagonist, is interspersed with actual slaughterhouse footage and hardcore sex scenes. The cutaways are so brief and rapid-fire, however, they are almost subliminal. It is evident there is something amiss, but at the normal running speed it is not possible to decipher what precisely. Only slowed down does the footage become clear: When the camera cuts to a close-up of Heinz’s face or the face of the rape victim, there are inserts of a hand carrying the head of a butchered animal, and also what appears to be a vibrator inserted into a vagina.

30In 1983, Franco E. Prosperi made Wild Beasts, a movie about zoo animals escaping and going on a city-wide kill spree after drinking water laced with PCP. It was edited by another mondo stalwart, Mario Morra. Not surprising, then, that scenes of rampaging animals are sometimes spectacular and look as if they belong in a mondo film. Wild Beasts opens on a statement that no animal was harmed in the making of it. But this is blatantly incorrect, given that (in its uncut form) the film contains rats on fire and wild animals in a pound attacking domesticated animals.

31Pit Dernitz is a widely debated topic online, although there appears not to be any evidence that he existed outside of his mondo death. IMDb even has a Pit Dernitz filmography, referring to the movies that incorporate this footage. Birth date is not given, but his death is recorded as 1975, the year of production for Savage Man… Savage Beast.

32Paul Verhoeven looks to have been influenced by the Dernitz footage. He incorporates a facsimile of it in his 1979 movie, The Fourth Man. There is also a parallel in the underrated M. Night Shyamalan horror film, The Happening (2008).

33Whether this is saying the sequence has been re-shot with actors, or is actually Ordonez’s original footage modified to meet the cinema format, is difficult to say. The ambiguity is no doubt deliberate.

34Elimination of the disabled sounds like primitive Nazism, likley owing more to a scriptwriter’s pen than it does genuine cultural practice.

35Another obscure martial arts documentary from the same era is The Super Weapon (1976). If the trailer is anything to go by, it is more sensationalist and appears more entertaining than Budo: Art of Killing, without recourse to a supposed fatality.

36Another title in the series was Target… Earth? (1980) starring Victor Buono as Homer 2, an being in outer space watching earthbound disaster footage on a television monitor. Gamma Chronicle videocassettes often carried an extensive trailers section. Based on these trailers… UFOs: It Has Begun (1979) is a “most comprehensive study”; UFO Syndrome (1980) is an “intensive study of UFO sightings and abductions”; Doomsday Chronicles (1979) speculates “why is there a strong feeling we’re standing on the brink of disaster?”; World of Mystery (1979/80) considers amoeba to be “aliens among us as lower forms of life waiting to take charge”; UFO Exclusive! (1979) shows a psychedelic blot throbbing in space and claims to be a “fresh look at a growing trend”; Amazing World of Ghosts (1979) follows “bigfoot, hoaxes, aberrations, rituals”; Legends (1983) ponders the Loch Ness monster and the “steel claws of the Bengal Tiger”; Land of Celtic Ghosts (1983) gets to grips with the turbulent sprits of Ireland; Mysteries of the Mind (1983) peeks at the untapped powers of thought (and includes Edgar D. Mitchell, US Navy, retired, last seen in Journey into the Beyond).

37Not so far off the mark in this case: Fascism in America is nowadays precisely known as ‘American exceptionalism’.

38A tie-in book, supposedly written by Wollman, was published to accompany the film’s theatrical release.

39The use of more than one narrator makes sense when one considers that Unknown Powers is composed of episodes from a cancelled television series.

40Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni, fax to the authors, dated May 27, 1995.

41The underlying sentiment that modern society is not necessarily better than primitive, is thrown off balance by one alternate title: Cannibalo Brutalo.

42An instance of mondo atrocity leap frog: The Castiglioni brothers evidently fashioned this brutal sequence on the Indian killing in Climati and Morra’s Savage Man… Savage Beast. Climati and Morra in turn tried to usurp the Castiglionis with the limb-ripping execution in their 1983 mondo Sweet and Savage.

43When the victim first comes into shot, he is already speared. He holds the spearhead to his torso, while blood pools in his indented stomach and runs to his groin. When the camera picks out his face, his eyes are closed but bear no evidence of pain or terror. The shot cuts to his legs being restrained by two men, panning then to the bloodstained torso and thighs, and the dagger strapped to the forearm of another attacker. Cut now to the act of castration. The stomach wound has disappeared as have all signs of blood. The victim lies motionless as two people perform the impromptu operation. One covers the base of the penis and pubis with his hand, the other takes hold of the organ and begins to slice the flesh. Another edit to a different angle: The penis is still being held, but no incision is visible. The accomplice’s hand is in position on the pubic area while beneath that is the hand of the victim — not, it would seem, attempting to prevent the loss of his manhood, but in fact retaining a prosthetic appliance. The victim urinates briefly. Cut again to a different viewpoint and the organ is virtually detached. Blood bursts onto the thighs as the shaft is severed. The second hand adamantly and conveniently remains in position, covering the base even when the mutilation is complete. Further indication that a manufactured appliance is in play.

44Possibly coincidence, possibly not, Frances Gröss sounds like Francis Grose, the name of a celebrated eighteenth-century antiquarian and author of a book on popular superstitions.

45It was a good year for the mummies of Guanajuato. Werner Herzog used the same setting for the title sequence of his atmospheric Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), but with far more agreeable results.

46In Germany, the order of events was changed so that Faces of Death concluded on the monkey-brains segment. In a later release, the sequence had to be excised altogether. The monkey-brains idea is predated by some fifteen years in Spots in the Sun (1964), a Japanese mondo film. Given what we now know about the origin of Faces of Death, this might not be entirely a coincidence.

47The cult leader is played by director John Alan Schwartz.

48Former FBI agent Ted Gunderson would use this sequence as evidence to perpetuate the myth of Satanic Ritual Abuse. See chapter nine: SATANIC PANIC.

49Schwartz directed Faces of Death: Fact or Fiction? under his real name.

50John Alan Schwartz telephone interview with the authors, April 24, 2012.

51Another (less expected) parallel can be found in Roger Corman’s portmanteau horror movie, Tales of Terror (1962). Faces of Death adopts the opening thumping heartbeat of Corman’s movie, as well as the meditation on death and its meaning linking the three tales (provided by Vincent Price).

52And the author of some Japanese pink films. For pink films see chapter seven: THE GUINEA PIG SERIES.

53Needless to say, this statistic is out of date. But while homicides have increased in the US from 22,520 persons in 1981 to 79,770 in 2013, the murder rate has declined — from 9.8 murders per 100,000 people to 4.5. (The Disaster Center online.)

54Alfredo and Angelo Castiglioni, fax to the authors, dated May 27, 1995.

55Guariglia’s involvement on Shocking Africa was the source of some pride for the filmmakers.

56There is a feature documentary by Antonio Climati and Mario Morra that is a bit of a mystery. An ad in Variety (May 7, 1980) announced it under the title Nel segno del male/The Sign of Evil and stated it was currently in production. However, no film by this name exists, and the timeframe is a little off for any existing Climati-Morra production. Our guess is that the ad refers to Morra’s Savage Zone, which would mean that Climati was initially involved but dropped out. Alternatively the ad may be pitching foreign sales rights for 1978’s This Violent World, or possibly even 1983’s Sweet and Savage, which took longer to complete than anticipated. It could of course be a different film entirely, one never completed. The ad promised ‘The violent and dramatic reality of life today as seen by Italy’s leading documentary filmmakers’.

57The legacy continues. Nik Wallenda, seventh-generation Flying Wallenda, commemorated his great-grandfather’s fated 1978 Puerto Rico stunt by repeating the walk (successfully) with his acrobat mother in 2011. In 2012, he became the first person to walk across the full width of Niagara Falls and, in 2014, was the subject of the Discovery channel’s Skyscraper Live With Nik Wallenda. Karl’s fall was used in the build up to Nik’s own potentially lethal stunt, a blindfold walk between two skyscrapers in Chicago.

58Women engaging in aggressive sexual thrusts are described as being “sweet and savage”.

59See chapter one: DEATHMASTERS. On how they did it, see chapter six.

60Jerry Butler, Raw Talent: the Adult Film Industry as Seen by its Most Popular Male Star.

61Charles Gatewood is responsible for the ‘Weird’ series — Weird Spring Break, Weird Biker Week, Weird San Francisco and the compilation of all three, Weird America (1990) — among other films, roving reports from the cultural underbelly of the USA. He has also produced numerous volumes of Erotic Tattooing and Body Piercing, documentaries exploring the work and ideas of body extremists around the world.

62With thanks to Clive Davies.

63Except The Shocks III, but likely he was involved.

64The original Shocks also used footage from this film, while The Shocks III went further, being simply a composite of This is America and its sequel (which is why Vanderbes is credited as producer on Shocks III).

65An insight into social convention and cinema in Japan can be gleaned from Nicholas Bornoff’s book, Pink Samurai. He is talking about horror films in general, but we might apply what he says to shockumentaries. ‘Teenagers and even pre-teens lick ice-creams and munch popcorn as they contemplate blood feasts onscreen, all the girls shrieking “ya daah!”, the proper expletive for ladylike revulsion. Or so they used to, until video sent the craze indoors and the splatter feasts came to line the shelves in rental shops.’ Today, cinema in Japan from all accounts is the multiplex, much like anywhere else in the world, with no room for screening anything outside the latest major releases.

66You don’t get off that lightly. When The Shocks were shown on television, the stronger material was edited out. In fact, the television-prepared versions were often a mish-mash composite of the video series, which themselves had been stitched together from the television show! Furthermore, the VHS (and laserdisc) release of the original Shocks was quite different to the theatrical version, with some scenes removed and many more added. Most of the removed scenes made it into later entries, most notably The Shocks IV. Confused?

67The Shocks (1985), The Shocks II (1986), The Shocks III (1987), The Shocks IV (1988), The Shocks Part II: The Super Crash (1989), The Shocks Part II: That’s Happening (1989), The Shocks Part III: The Sports Spectacle (1990), The Shocks Part IV: The Wild Panic (1990). These are the English language titles as they appear on the video sleeves. Some sources refer to the numerical chronology differently, i.e. The Shocks Part 1: The Super Crash, The Shocks Part 2: That’s Happening, The Shocks Part 3: The Sports Spectacular and The Shocks Part 4: The Wild Panic.

68He is also known for writing a song about Mary Bell and making the first art film to incorporate fist-fucking. Mondo Homo (1976), its title suggesting a long-standing interest in mondo for Cazazza, was supposedly filmed in secret at a notorious gay bar and is now believed lost.

69“To pretend to show death is sometimes tolerated, but to disclose the reality of death is treason. The treason is True Gore. Why turn away from reality? You are going to die. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow…”

70In 1992, First Transmission was the centre of a media storm, said to be ‘discovered’ footage of a satanic ritual. See chapter nine: SATANIC PANIC REDUX.

71Some sources, including the earlier editions of this book, erroneously credit Cosey Fanni Tutti as the performer in this footage. Tutti was a member of the industrial noise band Throbbing Gristle. The band ultimately sub-divided into two independent groups — Tutti’s Creative Technology Institute and Orridge’s Psychic TV/TOPY. She has also worked in the sex industry.

72Pauline is the founder of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), a performance group that manufacture part-organic robots, whose shows are promoted as the most dangerous on earth. The machines — a combination of mechanical appliances and dead animals — serve no determinable purpose and are often driven to total destruction during performances.

73In his essay ‘True Stories about True Gore,’ Jack Sargeant notes that the necrophile is played by actress Debra Valentine and the murderer by Cole Palme, a member of the band Factrix. He also says that the man under torture in the fabricated Amnesty International footage is Cazazza.

74Email from Monte Cazazza to the authors, July 7, 2013.

75Ruggero Deodato utilized the idea of a dead infant as a mule in his feature film (that looks at times like a mondo film), Cut and Run (1985).

76The nine volume set is comprised of the following: (i) Journey into the Beyond (ii) Vaudou (iii) Mondo Senza Veli (iv) Green Magic (v) World Virgin Report (vi) Lost Continent (vii) Guinea Ama (viii) Rivers of Sand, and (ix) The Hunters.

77Bougas claimed at the time of Death Scenes’ release that he intended to use the photos to make a deluxe coffee-table book. “It’s definitely in the works,” he said. Indeed it was. Published by Feral House almost a decade later in 1996, Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook redefined pictorial boundaries in mass market book publishing. It also gives a little more insight into the collection itself, the photographs having been pasted into a scrapbook (measuring 18″ x 24″ x 6″ thick) by Jack Huddleston, a homicide detective with the LAPD from the 1930s to 1950s. Huddleston wasn’t compiling evidence, not all the snaps in the book were pertinent to his own cases. It seems they simply held an interest for him.

78The collapsing orchestra footage was screened on British terrestrial television prior to its place here. Because no one was seriously injured, the incident was light relief in a news programme. In Faces of Death IV, additional scenes are tagged on to suggest mass carnage with musicians dead or limbless. In one shot a severed leg is carried past the camera and a lifeless face rests by a bloodied trombone.

79John Alan Schwartz telephone interview with the authors, April 24, 2012.

80See appendix three: the german faces of death.

81Death Scenes 2 includes commentary on Ernst Friedrich, whose astonishing Anti-War museum and gruesome War Against War!, a book published in 1924, have an uneasy parallel with films such as this.

82For more on Driver Ed see chapter eight: HIGHWAY SAFETY.

83Full details in chapter eight: BOUNDARIES OF IMAGINATION.

84Mexican crime tabloids, like the first Death Scenes film, became the subject of a book published by Feral House: Muerte! Death in Mexican Popular Culture, edited by Harvey Bennett Stafford.

85For facts about Dwyer see chapter eight: BLOOD AND GUTS AND IN LIVING COLOUR. The Dwyer footage becomes a recurring motif in subsequent shockumentaries. See also chapter seven: BARRAGE TAPES.

86Nick Bougas returned with a third volume of Death Scenes in 1993, which failed to generate the same morbid enthusiasm as the earlier volumes. All three Death Scenes have since been released onto DVD by a company called Anthem in the US, albeit cut and inexplicably renumbered for a different running order.

87Discussed at length in chapter seven: BARRAGE TAPES.

88‘shocking footages wanted. In any format (film/video). Amateur/Pro. Will pay cash for: Death Scenes, Accidents, Inhumanities Around The World, Military, Autopsies, etc. Call ———— Magnum Video, ask for Peter.’ Ad in Variety, date unknown.

89See chapter seven: BLOOD AND GUTS AND IN LIVING COLOUR.

90Censorship laws preclude genitalia from appearing in Japan films. Most often they are obscured post-production by pixelated dots, or mozaikusu — mosaic.

91Incidentally, the clip divulges something of its own circuitous history prior to landing in Traces of Death. Savage Man… Savage Beast is an Italian film that was released theatrically worldwide. Fox narrates over the clip used here, which has Japanese text, which itself is superimposed over English text.

92For more Brain Damage, see the review of Banned in America V The Final Chapter (2000).

93Production credits are arbitrary in the age of video shocks. Although V&R founder Kaoru Adachi is closely linked to the film, the company’s website credits Bakushishi Yamashita with ‘editing’ and ‘planning’ Death Women. Clive Davies points out (in an email to the authors, February 17, 2015) that this is ‘as close to a director credit as you will get’. And, incidentally, ‘ex-rental copies seem to be fetching about $150 online.’

94Bukkake depicts groups of men ejaculating over a woman (or a man), and hamedori is a sort of gonzo porn diary from the point of view of the cameraman/filmmaker.

95Squirmfest. The title sums it up. But if clarification is required: Women are filmed eating food that is full of maggots, then defecate and eat the faeces, which, likewise, is full of maggots.

96Johannes Schönherr, ‘Company Matsuo and the World of Japanese Adult Video,’ Midnight Eye website. Posted December 29, 2006.

97The fourth volume of V&R’s Junk/Faces of Death predates the American Faces of Death IV and bears no relation to it. It is instead a repackaging of Fred Warshofsky’s Days of Fury.

98Presented as ‘the untouchable report from the world,’ Death File also assimilated more traditional mondo elements among the street carnage, such as deformed infants and archive war footage. A narrator was also physically present in the film. Dressed in a suit, he appeared at a desk or was superimposed onto the scene being discussed.

99The sleeve for the first volume of Death Women is rather more reserved in this respect, having no exposed breasts.

100Possibly again in 2005. For more on Orozco the Embalmer see chapter seven: ACTS OF SEEING ART.

101Roger Kasper, Lucie Morris and Aubrey Ganguly, ‘BAN IT! News of the World exposes sick executions video that WHSmith is happy to sell,’ News of the World, June 18, 1995.

102Roy Hattersley, ‘Making money from sick voyeurs,’ Daily Mail, June 19, 1995.

103Involvement in the film of a team called the Associates warrants attention. Their precise role is unclear; they were not filmmakers or investors in films, but partway between publicists and procurers of material. They also had some control over late post-production, whatever that might entail. Their forte was the reality video and they undoubtedly navigated its early course in Britain, cherry picking jobs likely to cause ripples of discontent with the media. To this end, they worked with Barrie Goulding, the producer of Executions. In an article that appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine, the two-man Associates team of David Donoghue and James Hunt is likened to ‘the Bodie and Doyle of Internet age, The Professionals as media action men.’ A photograph shows them in a helicopter, primed for action. Some of what they divulge to the reporter seems implausible and a little bizarre. For instance, Donoghue, hailing from Brighton, claims to have been a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam conflict and one of the last to leave Saigon. The team speaks of a shadowy intentional organization called The Omen, of which they are a part. ‘We are lots of things,’ states Donoghue of the secret cabal. ‘We are researchers, marketeers, advisers, we are business people… we are media management specialists.’ (Christy Campbell, ‘Watching Over You…,’ the Sunday Times Magazine, December 8, 1996. The emphasis is theirs.)

Goulding had first approached the Associates to manage publicity on an earlier reality venture called Police Stop! (1994). Police were of the impression that a road safety film was being made and granted Goulding access to surveillance footage. The result, however, was not what they expected. The film opens with a dedication ‘to the traffic police who risk their lives every day on our roads.’ This is in stark contrast to the thrilling high speed chases and moronic road behaviour that follows, clearly intended to titillate and entertain. The conflict of interests between police and filmmakers was exploited in the press, resulting in Police Stop! being a hit and reaching number one on the Music Week video chart.

Sometimes the Associates had a more hands-on role. CCTV footage at the core of another film, Caught in the Act (1995), supposedly showed a couple having sex in a company storeroom. The intention in this instance was apparently to spark debate on the encroaching surveillance state and loss of personal privacy. Alas, the footage was found to be a fabrication and the couple in it simply actors. Goulding’s planned appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show was duly cancelled as a result. The Associates were coy about the subterfuge, not admitting to what extent they had planned it. But plan it they evidently did.

104‘Yeah, we sat down and discussed the comparative worth of both Faces of Death I and II and noticed how the good Dr Frances B. Gross (wotta name) was poorly dressed in the first one but had a nifty motorcycle and expensive boots in part II. We figured out he musta made a mint outta the first one…’ Reader’s letter in Video Drive-In!

105For more, see Death Women review this chapter. See also chapter seven: ACTS OF SEEING ART.

106Emails from Todd Tjersland to the authors, May and June 2012.

107Tjersland also claims to have sold home video rights to the UK. Whether this is the case, the films have never officially appeared in Britain and almost certainly would not have been granted a certificate by the BBFC if submitted.

108Bumfights: Cause for Concern Volume 1 came to public attention in early May 2002 amid almost universal condemnation. (The film’s subtitle is not a call for action, but glibly paradoxical.) The $19.95 video was sold only online, while publicity was dependent on posters around Las Vegas and word of mouth. The filmmakers claimed to have sold close to 10,000 copies in just three weeks. By September, after Howard Stern plugged it on his show, the figure was 300,000 copies. The background to Bumfights is mixed up. It was directed by Ryen McPherson on a modest budget. But following a buyout, the face of Bumfights became Ty Beeson, who steered a new course and resurrected media interest some four years after the film’s initial release. Beeson’s coup de grâce was a personal appearance on the Dr Phil ‘truth television’ show that ended prematurely with his unceremonious ejection. Syndicated daily by CBS, the episode titled ‘Convince Me!’ (air date December 12, 2006) has a pre-recorded segment about Bumfights on which Dr Phil calls time. The host then turns to his guest and says, “I don’t want to talk to you. That’s despicable.” Beeson complains bitterly as security men march him out of the studio. Dr Phil tells the audience he refuses to publicise “that” , and the audience gives a cheer.

In the Bumfights clip screened on the show, a smug Beeson baits the viewer when he says, “I see homeless people as talent. When I go out in the streets, I’m looking for talent.” He sniffs the air like a hound following a scent. Later he claims to be doing a service to the homeless by “turning these people into something special. I’m motivating them, inspiring them”. The subjects are encouraged to partake in stupid stunts as well as fight one another for a fee of $20. Or, in the case of one “crackhead” who uses pliers to remove a tooth, a bottle of Jack Daniels. “We put them to work,” says Beeson.

Dr Phil’s declaration that he will not publicize Bumfights is odd given that it comes only after he has screened the clip. The tape has already run to static when he calls for it to be stopped. The show is not a live show, so why the clip would be aired at all and not simply edited out doesn’t make sense. As tends to happen when a guest is ejected from a talk show, Dr Phil and Bumfights were soon the focus of television commentators all over the Internet. Many people did not like Ty Beeson, but fewer still, it seemed, liked Dr Phil. Many claimed not to have heard of Bumfights until Dr Phil featured it, while others considered the whole debacle to have been staged, serving both parties. The episode, complete with the Bumfights clip, is still among the CBS highlights posted online by the network.

An aside: Ty Beeson’s studio appearance is markedly different to the casual young man we see in the clip that airs on Dr Phil. He has impudently fashioned himself after Dr Phil for his television appearance, wearing a facsimile grey Mabro suit, fresh moustache and hair shaved to a bald pate.

109Chapter seven: BARRAGE TAPES. While not exactly the same, one might also look to faux snuff as a way in which the Internet can inspire interest and new markets for a subject. See chapter seven: NECROBABES AND THE RISE OF DEATH PORN.

110This warning was worded slightly different in earlier volumes of Banned! in America. In fact it was gobbledygook: ‘There is a dark side of humanity the censors don’t want you to see… but we will.’

111For more on the correlation between musical forms and extreme imagery, see chapter seven: LE DÉSESPOIR DE LA MUSIQUE.

112The Brain Damage Shock X-Treme line-up is as follows: Shock X-Treme Vol 1: Snuff Video aka Snuff Video Volume Red (c.1997), Vol 2: Death.com (2006) and Vol 3: Gangs of Death (2006). The fourth volume, Real Fights, appears only to be available as part of the Shock X-Treme box set, released in 2009.

113Banned! in America (1998), Banned! in America II (1998), Banned! in America III (1999), Banned in America IV (1999) and Banned in America V The Final Chapter (2000). The exclamation mark is absent from later volumes.

114If bonus footage at the end of Banned in America III is anything to go by, the commentary is recorded in a fun environment. We see the narrator stumbling over some of this lines and goofing around in the studio, dressed in a harlequin outfit.

115The top categories on crazyshit.com as of writing are Slut Pictures, Porn Videos, Bizarre Sex Act Videos, Fight Videos, Cruel Beatings Videos, Dumb Shits on Drugs, Fan Boobies Pictures and Yo Momma Jokes.

116Programme notes for the film’s screening at the Melbourne Underground Film Fesitval 2004.

Fake snuff films, or pseudo snuff films, are films that hold to the illusion of snuff. These are films advertised and sold on the idea of murder as a sexual impulse for the viewer, with the viewer buying into that idea. He (or she) might find the notion of real abuse and real murder totally abhorrent, but fake snuff is something else. It is pretend. It is dark sexual territory but it’s also safe. The films that qualify as pseudo snuff aren’t necessarily feature films, whose plot might involve a snuff theme, such as 8MM and Vacancy et al, per the first section of this book. Instead, these are vignettes closer to the aesthetic of the pornographic loop in that they are short and the focus almost exclusively on the ‘act’ — which in this case is murder. Beyond it there isn’t much of a plot, if any plot at all, and this is something of the point.

In this section we will consider pseudo snuff, whose murders aren’t real. It includes the work of people like Louis Ferriol and Wave Productions, who come to snuff as horror filmmakers. And it includes fetish films, and custom films, as well as many largely anonymous efforts whose own creators come to snuff in turn as pornographers.

The first instance of pseudo snuff, appropriately enough, is contained within the film discussed at the beginning of this book: Snuff. More specifically, the tagged on five-minute murder sequence that concludes the film, with only a superficial connection to what has gone before it. As noted, distributor Allan Shackleton resurrected an inept exploitation film called Slaughter, tagged a new ending onto it, and promoted it anew as Snuff, the film they said could never be shown. The shockwave still resonates today.

The power of Snuff is not in this end segment alone, which is cheaply done, but in the promise behind it. Few people watching the film are likely to be taken in by the sequence. But there is something compelling about it nonetheless, about being suckered into it. It’s rather like a magician’s trick, in that no one believes the illusion is real but everyone applauds the magician anyway.

Shackleton’s ending insinuates that a woman is genuinely being murdered and dismembered for the camera. The audience is nudged to believe that the director of the film we are watching has become sexually excited by his own violent work and gone quite mad, suddenly tearing into a member of his crew. The rest of the crew continue about their business, recording the murder scene as if it is nothing unusual at all. (Implying that this director, whoever he is, conducts himself this way all the time.) It’s an unlikely scene that exists only as a selling point for the film. This is the part the audience has come to see.

Snuff generated adverse press from the outset. It is an awfully boring movie that is resistant to favourable reviews, even in an age where most things retro are viewed as fun and kitsch. People are offended by this film’s existence, of the illusion it presents.

In the mid seventies, while maintaining an ongoing investigation into so-called snuff films, the FBI became aware of Snuff. The outcome of the investigation was that the film was indeed fake, no one was really killed. But it didn’t disentangle the true facts of the matter, and details about the tagged on end of Snuff remained shrouded in mystery until fairly recently. Shackleton was questioned on whether the murder footage was real. But no one considered to ask where the footage originated, or who shot it. (If he had been asked, there is no record of it.) Not until the release of Snuff on video in the eighties, introducing the movie to a new, culturally savvy audience, did anyone begin to care much one way or the other.

It was in the eighties that stories began to circulate about the origins of the Snuff ending, all of them pointing to filmmaker Carter Stevens, a key name in seventies adult cinema. In Britain, an article in the Monthly Film Bulletin (November 1984) accredits Stevens as the end game filmmaker, as did several other sources, including the artist and independent filmmaker Ari Roussimoff. In Headpress magazine in 1993, Roussimoff had this to say:

As a sometime actor I once did an audition for Roberta Findlay who made Snuff. She currently runs Reeltime Films, a film distributing company. A past acquaintance of mine, Malcolm Moral aka Carter Stevens, shot the ridiculous killing finale of Snuff which was actually filmed in his Manhattan loft. He recalled that they all laughed hysterically during production.[1]

CARTER STEVENS

For almost three decades Carter Stevens was prolific in adult features, both as an actor and director.[2] In the nineties, he was running his own company, Amsterdam Films, Inc., and in 2001 took early retirement for health reasons. His break into filmmaking had come in 1973, when Terry Levine of Aquarius Releasing gave him a distribution guarantee for Collegiates. It helped Stevens get financing, but Levine never released the film, referring him instead to another distributor for a better deal. In the mid seventies, Stevens was working on projects with Allan Shackleton. At around the time Snuff was being put together, Stevens says he and Shackleton were “in pre-production together on an R-rated satire based on the TV show Star Trek. We even had a script and were working on lining up sets and props. That project was killed by the lawyers when Paramount announced the first Star Trek movie.”[3]

But Stevens was not responsible for shooting the end of Snuff, admitting so in an interview for this book. Asked how the misconception may have come about, he told the authors, “I have no idea where this came from. I never claimed to have directed it. It probably got out somehow that it — the end sequence — was shot at my studio and someone either jumped to conclusions or garbled the facts.”[4]

The studio at the time doubled as Stevens’ working and living loft in Manhattan. He was on set during shooting as studio manager, supplying lights and equipment. “The end section was shot in one long day,” he says, “and the effects were second rate and rushed to boot.” Stevens “helped set up a bit, helped around the set, that kind of thing.” But no filming. The actual director was a man named Simon Nuchtern. “IMDb even credits him correctly,” says Stevens.

Before contacting Simon Nuchtern, we asked Carter Stevens a question about Roberta Findlay, one half of the husband and wife team who had made Slaughter, the film Shackleton turned into Snuff. One uncorroborated rumour put Roberta on set during the end sequence, a fact that, if true, could upset some existing conceptions about the origins of Snuff.[5] Stevens answered that “Roberta had nothing to do with the reshoot, and in fact she and Allan fought over the film as far as I know.”

The Carter Stevens Snuff connection has a satisfying coda to it, one that encompasses Paul Shrader’s Hardcore, another movie that helped to mould the modern myth of murder on film.

“I had done lots of non-union production work for companies like Dino De Laurentiis,” Stevens recalls, “and I had given some advice to the art director on Hardcore (I forget his name). Actually I’ve never seen the film. My advice had to do with set decoration. The art director contacted me because he was interested in some of the things I used in my film Rollerbabies (1976) for a futuristic look, and wanted to know where to get the lenticular matting I used for trim. Had nothing to do with the content of the script at all.”[6] Nevertheless, someone somewhere was evidently paying close attention, and the myth seems suddenly very small and localized indeed.

SIMON NUCHTERN

August Films Inc. was a New York based company[7] that provided production and post-production services during the seventies for overseas films in need of material shot in New York City. They supplied second and sometimes first unit services for people like Roger Vadim, and for Japanese action films starring Sonny Chiba. One client closer to home was Allan Shackleton and his Monarch Releasing Corporation, for whom August cut promos and made trailers.

The man behind August Films was Simon Nuchtern, who had his own career as a director of exploitation films, beginning in 1968 with the softcore The Girl Grabbers, through to 1985 and the biker themed Savage Dawn, starring George Kennedy, Karen Black and Richard Lynch.[8] Nuchtern also had a reputation for helping aspiring independent filmmakers. He was visited in the early eighties by a young Sam Raimi from Pittsburgh and consequently receives a credit of thanks on The Evil Dead.[9]

Turning to Snuff, the authors asked Simon Nuchtern about the notorious end segment and his role as its director.

Says Nuchtern: “As I recall, we shot the scenes over a period of two to three days to a loose script written by Allan in conjunction with a writer who worked with him on promotional materials. I had a lot of latitude in how the scenes were to be done. It was a general outline, but I knew what he wanted to show in the scenes and Allan knew I could ‘deliver’ the scene he was looking for.”

Had you seen the original movie prior to filming this end sequence, in its original incarnation as Slaughter?

“I only saw part of the movie: some selected scenes and a long promo that [director Michael Findlay] had cut in Chicago and had used to sell the film to Monarch. I don’t remember the original end of the movie. May have not seen it.”

Do you remember who was present at the filming?

“Only me and the crew. The ‘film crew’ within the film was composed of some of my assistants and film editors, and the ‘talent’ was cast from young non-union actors by Monarch. The actual crew was a good, competent low-budget freelance crew that shot b-movies, and the special effects were provided by people who had experience with George Romero. The main ‘talent’ did not have much acting ability and experience was not required. In fact, Allan made sure they were relative unknowns.”

What was your impression of the furore that surrounded Snuff?

“From what I learned after the film was released, this was all planned in advance by Allan and his team at Monarch. I was just a hired hand, sort of like a car mechanic to work on a racing car without knowing what race the car was going to be entered in. The women’s group that picketed the theatre in Times Square and the calls to the press were all manufactured. Even an anonymous call to the NYC police, who came to visit me in my office on a complaint of an ‘actress killed in a film during the filming.’ They left after they saw Polaroids of our lunch break, where the ‘dead’ girl — on a bed, disembowelled, her intestines hanging out — was happily eating a pizza with members of the crew. (She could not leave the trick bed where the special effects specialists had built the gimmick.) The cops appeared to have a good time hearing our stories and did not seem to mind the hoax.”

Did you have any involvement with Michael and Roberta Findlay?

“I knew the Findlays as part of the b-movie and independent scene in the US. But I believe they operated out of Chicago, so our paths did not cross too often. A couple of strange little side stories: Michael Findlay was having one of his films done at Technicolor NY, a lab in the same building as our offices, and came up to my office to say hello before returning to Chicago. He left my office to go to the Pan Am building, where there was a heliport on the roof to take him straight to the airport, and the rotor of the helicopter came off as he was boarding and killed him. On a parallel note, on another occasion, Allan, now living and working in LA, came to NY to do some business and called me to ask if I would go running in Central Park with him. (I got him into running as he was a very ‘A’ type personality, and I convinced him that this would be a good health choice.) But I was not able to join him. He had a heart attack and died on his run. I’m not at all superstitious, but I thought Snuff may have carried a curse. But it didn’t extend to me…yet!”

THE INVESTIGATION OF PORNOPHILES

The FBI investigation into snuff films consists of files spanning some 110 pages.[10] The documents, collected under the name ‘Snuff films,’ were released through the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts in the late nineties, becoming one of several FBI documents accessible on the G-Files section of APBnews, an online forum devoted to matters of crime and law enforcement. This is where the authors obtained it. (The G-Files section of APBnews no longer exists.) It’s an arduous read at times, being a fastidious official document with sensitive details blacked out, but nonetheless one that provides a fascinating chronological account of how the Shackleton bird took flight.

To put these files into perspective, it is important to understand that the FBI investigation into snuff films was not in itself unusual. To the contrary, pretty much every modern cultural phenomenon has been earmarked by the FBI at some point. From celebrities, including Groucho Marx, Sonny Bono and Vincent Price, through to Playboy, the Doors, and even the song Louie Louie by the Kingsmen, all have been put under investigation because of oftentimes foggy suspicion or issues of mistrust.

The earliest document in the FBI snuff file is a letter that originates from Citizens for Decency through Law, Inc. (CDL), an anti-pornography group based in Cleveland, Ohio. The letter is dated December 1, 1974, and opens with the statement ‘They’re producing “snuff films” now.’ It continues:

They’re called ‘snuff’ films because they show the torture, rape, and murder of a young girl. The torture is real. The rape is real. The murder is real.

The monsters who make these films and the perverted people who watch them, have taken one more giant step on the downward path of pornography.

Where once these men could satisfy lust with pin-ups, now they demand filmed scenes of multiple intercourse with an innocent girl — where once they could create sexual arousal with scenes of simulated sex, now they must make full-color movies of every imaginable perversion, from sodomy to bestiality. Where once they needed sexual brutality, now they must have actual murder.

Are they showing ‘snuff’ films in local theatres yet?

No, not yet. Impossible, you say? Well, think back ten years or even less. Suppose someone had told you then that a theatre in your neighbourhood would be showing color films of uninterrupted sexual activities — between men and women, men and men, women and animals, and even men and children? Would you have believed it then?

Pornography is taking a strangle hold on the very sensibilities of the people of this country. It deadens the mind, the senses, the soul — it shocks us briefly with every new and revolting plunge downward, and prepares us at the same time for the next, unthinkable step. From pin-ups to actual rape-murder in less than one generation!

The pornographers are using the most powerful communications tools in the world to deaden the conscience and dull the moral standards that more than 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian culture and training have built.

The letter from CDL had been forwarded to the office of the attorney general in Washington, DC, by a concerned member of the public. It is clear from the reaction of that office that snuff films are news, that hitherto no reference exists in the FBI database on the matter of snuff films. An internal memo goes on to explain the terminology; that such films are ‘reportedly hardcore pornographic films where torture, rape and then an actual murder is committed and depicted in the film.’

Citizens for Decent Literature, as it was originally known, was founded in Cincinnati in 1957 by family man and successful businessman, Charles H Keating Jr. It is credited as one of the first major anti-pornography organizations in the United States. Much the same as the Catholic Legion of Decency, the group held letter writing campaigns and organized boycotts in its perceived battle against pornography, both locally and across the wider media. In the seventies, having increased ties both in the political arena and with the church, the group changed its name to Citizens for Decency through Law. The primary function of CDL was to assist local, state and federal prosecutors with matters of law relating to obscenity. The new man in charge of CDL was Raymond P Gauer, as ardent an anti-smut campaigner as Keating Jr., and not adverse to guileful tactics in the fight against obscenity — as evidenced in the letter quoted above.

Gauer was editor of the organization’s monthly newsletter, National Decency Reporter. For the November-December 1974 issue, a copy of which is retained by the FBI in their file, Gauer wrote an article under the headline ‘Perversion For Profit.’ (It sits alongside the regular showboat feature, ‘Prosecutor of the Month.’) In the article, Gauer laments the overabundance of pornography and its exploitation by press and media, providing a familiar story of society spinning into a godless hole — unless CDL’s demands for strict enforcement of obscenity laws are met. The young and immature are becoming ‘porno addicts’, writes Gauer, while pornographers ‘seek ever more perverse material in order to keep customers coming back.’ He determines that modern pornography is indescribable, then makes reference to coprophilia, SM, paedophilia, bestiality, and finally snuff films. Of snuff films, Gauer states that

Reliable informants reported as many as twenty-five ‘snuff’ films in current circulation among certain select pornophiles. These incredible films culminate in the actual murder of a human being during a sex orgy — thus providing the ultimate kick for sick porno voyeurs.

‘Can it get any worse?’ Gauer surmises.

The article would raise questions of its own with the FBI. They wanted to know how this information had come about, and the identities of the reliable informants to whom Gauer refers. What did Gauer really know about the existence of these socalled snuff films? Leads were set out for Cleveland to investigate. On February 11, 1975, representatives of CDL, acting on behalf of Gauer, advised FBI agents that the reference to snuff films was conjecture: The CDL didn’t possess any information concerning the identities or the reliability of informants as outlined in the article. The matter of snuff films had been hearsay, likely gleaned during one of CDL’s many civil and public appearances over the years, or through their interaction with other anti-pornography groups. The story behind the rumour, as related by CDL to the FBI, suggests that snuff films originated in Los Angeles in 1969, more specifically the suburb of Will Beach, where a murder supposedly took place as part of a satanic ritual. Tellingly, the FBI was quick to note that the financial base of CDL was dependent on contributions from the public.

The pursuant snuff investigation, described by the FBI as ‘considerable,’ lasted several months. Acting on the story submitted by CDL, agents contacted the Los Angeles police department. But Los Angeles could shed no light on the matter. Their vice division had also received inquiries and heard rumours of snuff films, but had not seen one. It was a similar story in other cities, in Cleveland, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans and New York. The bureau was unable to locate anyone who possessed or had seen such a film.

The rumour persisted, however, and in a memo dated August 18, 1975, the FBI divulged fresh information on ‘snuffers,’ notably one 8mm film, or possibly a whole series of films comprising eight in total. The story originates in New York, while the film itself is said to have possibly been produced in a South American country. There is said to be current if limited availability on the West Coast, with national distribution expected to follow. The description of the film, referred in the memo as ‘the last film in the series’ and again based on a witness report that cannot be verified, in hindsight is consanguineous with a commercial feature yet to be released: Allan Shackleton’s Snuff, moreover the end of Snuff. In the ‘snuffer,’ a female model is said to be

actually decapitated and various sexual organs are physically removed, [culminating] with an incision being made in the abdomen followed by dismemberment.

In July 1975, Dick Brass, a staff reporter for the New York Post, contacted the FBI with a view to writing an article on the snuffers. At this time the FBI’s New York Office was unaware of the alleged existence of snuff films. Brass explains to the office that snuff is a new kind of pornographic film and that the story came out of Los Angeles. ‘“Snuff” Porn — The Actress Is Actually Murdered’ appears in the Post some months later.[11] Brass writes in the article that a film recently screened at an undisclosed location in New York culminated in the onscreen murder of a female victim. ‘Clearly unaware of the true nature of her role’ she is said to have been stabbed and savagely dismembered.

Brass’ article introduces to the public many of the tropes now commonly associated with snuff films: 8mm, Charles Manson, South American origin, the privileged screening price…[12] He puts the threat of snuff on the proverbial doorstep. Yet, at the same time it remains elusive, with the police in the article supposedly close to acquiring the physical evidence, if never quite reaching it. The carrot on a stick syndrome. Hot on the trail is one Detective Sgt Joseph Horman of the New York Police Department’s Organized Crime Control Bureau. Horman provides Brass with information that the FBI cannot,[13] and for a spell he is the press darling on matters of snuff.

Other newspapers quickly ran pieces of their own on the snuffers. These included the following morning’s New York Daily News and Detroit Free Press, both drawing on Detective Horman for expert opinion. Columnist Edward Kirkman in his article ‘Last Picture Show: Sex and Real Murder’ for Daily News,[14] introduces the detective as ‘a veteran smut battler.’ Reasoning why anyone would want to see something so horrible as a snuff film, Horman appears to paraphrase the concerns of CDL in that trends in pornography are going unchecked. Films now feature sex with children, bestiality, and sadomasochism, he says. ‘I guess this film is the ultimate sadomasochism.’

In the Detroit Free Press article ‘Latin Sex Film Ends With Actual Killing’,[15] Horman provides more clues. Snuff films are a secret operation that first came to his attention about two months ago. His source for this information was the editor of the magazine, Hollywood Reporter. Horman then divulges that a porn producer he knows claims to have purchased a script for a snuff film.

Let’s pause for a moment: Horman says the source of his story is the editor of the Hollywood Reporter, a major trade publication and a fairly important cog in the industry of movie promotion.[16] Perhaps the editor of Hollywood Reporter did know something the FBI did not. Or perhaps it’s just coincidence that Allan Shackleton’s Snuff premiered barely three months after this revelation.

Some commentators have claimed that Shackleton was inspired to make Snuff after reading the Dick Brass article in the New York Post, as opposed to being the imp behind the snuff rumour in the first place. It is not possible to know for sure, but the slim timeframe in which he would have been working makes it seem unlikely: Snuff was formally announced by the press at the beginning of December 1975, along with completed poster art (the now famous image of a young woman cut into pieces, resembling a destroyed photograph). This artwork and announcement featured on the front page of Boxoffice[17] and followed Brass’ article by only two months. If we take into account matters of copy and print deadlines, it’s actually less than two months. Even as a cheap exploitative cash-in, this doesn’t leave an awful lot of room for manoeuvre for Shackleton. Then again, to play devil’s advocate, arguably Shackleton wasn’t making a full length feature. He was simply adapting an old one to suit his needs. A cut and paste job, in other words.

Carter Stevens concurred on this point, saying that it was perhaps simply fortuitous that the unreleased Slaughter, by Michael and Roberta Findlay, became Snuff. “It probably could have been any film because it [Slaughter] was just sitting on Allan’s shelf,” Stevens told the authors. “However it didn’t hurt that it dealt with a bad version of the [Sharon] Tate murders anyway.”

News of a movie almost certainly inspired by the newspaper articles and rumours of snuffers has recenetly come to light. Snuff Movie was never made but plans to make it were announced in the trades, pre-dating news of Shackleton’s own Snuff by one week. Production evidently stalled under the advertising clout of its rival. Snuff Movie was going to be a joint venture between Albert Band Productions and Group 1 Films. According to Boxoffice,[18] it was in pre-production and had been pre-sold in France, Great Britain, Italy and Germany, with other territories expected. With a script by Frank Ray Perilli and Louis Garfinkle,[19] shooting was said to commence early the following year. (Snuff, by comparison, was wrapped up and released the month following this announcement, on January 16, 1976.) Group 1 Films were delighted in the response to Snuff Movie and stated that advance sales were the largest in the company’s history. Nevertheless, plans for the movie vanished and nothing more was said of it.[20]

The name ‘Alan Shackleton’ appears for the first time in the FBI casebook on November 18, 1975. It relates to the film Snuff advertised in Boxoffice the previous week. The report describes Shackleton as the president of Monarch Releasing Corporation, the sales distributors behind Snuff, whose headquarters are located at 330 West 58th Street, New York City. A telephone call made by a federal agent to the Monarch office on December 9 results in a conversation with an unidentified female (possibly Shackleton’s assistant, Helen Goldberg). The agent is unable to ascertain precisely from the call when the film will be released, nor whether the film was ‘the real thing or faked.’

By this point, the FBI had been bouncing the story of snuff films for almost a year. Their most concerted efforts into the snuff investigation followed the publication of the article by Dick Brass in the New York Post, which had kicked up a storm. Among the few dissenting voices was Al Goldstein, publisher of the sex tabloid Screw. In a typically acerbic editorial,[21] Goldstein likened snuff movies to ‘misshapen creatures who get off flying saucers and have Sony TV sets built into their heads. They’re nonexistent!’ He accused Dick Brass of irresponsible journalism, claiming that Brass, during a personal visit, had confided that the reliable source for his story was an associate who had spent a drunken night with Dennis Hopper. ‘Anyone who bases any kind of article on the drug-induced hallucinations of a Dennis Hopper story has to be stupid,’ quipped Goldstein, ‘and definitely deserving of a career in journalism.’

Each rumour pursued by the FBI went no deeper than a rumour. Leads across the country all faced a blank, but nonexistent evidence continued to mount. Snuff films had reached France, one source informed the vice department of the Chicago police. To restore some sense of perspective, FBI Los Angeles office stepped forward to remind the bureau that in March 1975 they had advised there was no substance to the snuff film rumours, that the source of the rumours was CDL.

Then suddenly the finger of suspicion pointed to Allan Shackleton, whose film Snuff was now at least something of a focus for the investigation. In the run up to the premiere in Indianapolis, federal agents were keeping a watchful eye on Shackleton, Monarch and the publicity trail for Snuff. Monitoring local press and radio interviews, they learned that Shackleton credited Indianapolis as a typical city in the United States and therefore a valid test for a movie of this type. They also noted his refusal to disclose whether the film contained an actual murder. Oddly, the number of victims in the movie was calculated to be as high as ten in some reports. (But this might be taking into account incidents in the Findlays’ original drama, such as shoot outs etc.) The Uptown Theater on North College Avenue, the venue for the premiere, came under scrutiny, too.[22] When Snuff did open, the undercover agents were waiting. But, having watched the film, Indianapolis duly called the case on snuff closed.

Earlier we heard underground artist and reporter Jay Lynch comment on how poor the attendance was for the premiere of Snuff on the evening of January 16, 1976.[23] Sixteen people in total. He couldn’t have known it, but among this small group were two federal agents, one medical expert and at least two local vice officers. With Lynch himself on professional assignment, the place was sorely bereft of legitimate patronage![24]

The report made by federal agents on the screening comprises six pages. Its purpose was to help determine whether the film was obscene and whether it portrayed the violence intimated by the Monarch publicity machine. (The presence of the movie in the United States had already been established as proper and above board, after an investigation by US Customs some weeks earlier.[25] So that wasn’t an issue.) The report is executed in a typically dry, objective manner. But the investigative protocol, applied to a movie that is wholly ridiculous, makes for surreal reading. A brief synopsis ascertains that ‘some scenes were filmed at a modern airport and a Lan Chile airliner was observed in the background.’ The agents profile the one-dimensional characters of the film and quote their hoary lines of dialogue. A concise breakdown of the final scenes is provided, in which the supposed director of the movie attacks, mutilates and kills a young female crew member. He amputates fingers using wire or bolt cutters and one of her hand is removed at the wrist using a circular saw, before stabbing her with a knife and removing her heart and intestines through an abdominal incision using his hands. The ‘murder victim’ in this, Shackleton’s twist ending, is quoted by the FBI as being

a white female American, approximately eighteen to twenty-two years old, five-foot six-inches in height, slender build, with light brown hair.

The ‘murderer’ is described as

white male, six-foot one-inch, 185 pounds, dark complexion, with dark hair and moustache. The ‘film crew’ photographed in the final scene consisted of five or six other individuals, one of whom was Negro female, approximately twenty-five years of age, who was clad in black leotards.

The agents did not find Snuff obscene (despite the film’s many allusions to ‘sexual perversion’ none are actually depicted, and nudity is kept above the waist). Nor did they at any point believe that actual murder was taking place onscreen. The medical expert who accompanies the agents, an MD Pathologist, agrees that the killing is simply a staged theatrical production. He substantiates his opinion with the following points:

(1) When the alleged victim’s left hand was amputated, there was no spurting of arterial blood as would be present if the radial and ulnar arteries had in fact been severed.

(2) The body organ extracted from the abdominal cavity of the victim appeared to be a heart. However, the extraction of a heart from an abdominal incision could not have been performed with the ease experienced by the alleged murderer.

(3) The heart removed from the ‘victim’ was in too good condition for one that had been ‘pulled out’, noting that the actual removal of a human heart has to be performed by cutting the many and various tissues and vessels that hold it in place. Furthermore, the heart in the movie appears to be too small for that of a normal adult and the heart depicted in the movie may have been that of an animal.

The findings of the FBI agents were put before First Assistant US Attorney John E. Hirschman, Indianapolis. He declined to prosecute Snuff in light of an absence of hardcore pornography, and the lack of any other federal violations.

Two more agents greeted the film when it played New York. The midday screening of February 13, 1976, at the National Theater, Broadway and 44th Street, was determined after investigation to be identical to that of Indianapolis.[26] The two agents arrive at approximately 11:40am, just in time to catch the two short support features. The first of these is a ten-minute film of history and custom entitled The Amish Farm and House. The second short film is Life on Mars or Not, being a consideration of the factors required to sustain life on the red planet.

The investigative agents in New York clearly have less patience with Snuff, and everything about their report smacks of it being a waste of their time. They even break form and provide an unexpected critique of the movie, stating that it is ‘obviously cheaply made with a complete lack of acting merit and no sense of screen direction or a continuing plot.’

Of the supposed killings and the final murder scene in particular, the New York agents are in no doubt as to the sham. The attitude of the victims is wrong for a start, with the actors continuing ‘to have facial contortions and locomotive action not indicative of mortal wounds.’ The agents conclude that Snuff is completely devoid of anything worth prosecuting and ‘does not even warrant consideration for presentation to the United State’s Attorney’s Office.’

If nothing else, Indianapolis, it seems, had a more entertaining afternoon of it.

The FBI case on the snuff film panic of the mid seventies comes to a close soon afterwards. No Snuffers are found, no murder takes place in Snuff. But the rumours don’t end here. The story was just too grave and compelling, and the media continued to report on its non-development, along with the occasional embellishment of its own creation. Even the adult press, who viewed the whole deal of snuff films with disdain and suspicion, were not adverse to feeding the rumour mill. Adam Film World queried in one article ‘Are Snuff Films for Real?’ (April 1976), and a few months later demanded in another, ‘Down with Snuff!’ (August 1976).[27] The former, an article by Dirk Hammond, opens on a long description of what would constitute a snuff film. Set on a beach, the blow by blow account of sexual antics, of hard pricks and fellatio, ends suddenly when a young blonde writhing in ecstasy is stabbed and mutilated by her two paramours. When the film is over, the privileged Beverly Hills audience is said to get up, adjust its clothing and leave the elegant thirty-seat projection room in silence. Hammond doesn’t say on what he is basing his opening salvo, whether it’s hearsay or literary licence. He plays devil’s advocate throughout the article, reciting a litany of horrors from the Roman Christians-to-the-Lions through to unsolved murder cases, before concluding in similar fashion when he writes ‘the public will most certainly be revolted and confused by the proliferation of snuff films — if it ever happens.’[28]

The same tact was adopted by Morton Green in an article for Night and Day. ‘Snuff Movie: The Ultimate Sadism’ (July 1976) is an even more transparent excuse to inflame public outrage with sex and shocks. This time a cameraman by the name of Alex Zimmerman supposedly spills the beans, relating how he unwittingly was drawn into the snuff racket after shooting a few kink films. His tale is fortified with protracted descriptions of the sex act, the raison d’être for the article, which is wholly unconvincing as anything other than a lurid fiction. Zimmerman tells how he was hired for what he believed to be a regular sex shoot up in the hills. He has a new camera — a 34mm Arriflex — and is keen to try it out. But the girl in the film, a sixteen-year-old runaway, is murdered while his camera rolls, stabbed to death by the two male leads. Asked whether Zimmerman has hopes for the future, he replies that he has not. “Maybe others will learn,” he says. “Maybe they’ll change things. For me it’s too late.”

If this sort of reportage was of a concern to the FBI, there is no record of it. Their case file on snuff films has a bare handful of references to local censorial issues surrounding Snuff in Baltimore and Maryland (where the film is examined again by medical experts), and then ends much as the file had started — with outrage and an appeal. A letter penned once again by a concerned citizen, dated March 28, 1977, refers specifically to a screening of Snuff that takes place abroad, in Tokyo. The author of the letter claims to have been there on business. Having a couple of hours to spare before leaving for the airport, he (we’ll assume it’s a ‘he’) heads over to ‘a tiny cinema behind the Imperial Hotel, in one of the arches near Shiatsu (?) railway station.’ The film playing is advertised in Japanese, but one word — SNUFF — is in English, and this he remembers reading about in an English newspaper some months ago. Curiosity getting the better of him, the author goes in to watch the film. He dismisses it as very unremarkable, until the end sequence and the mutilation-murder of the female crew member, which he describes in the letter in detail. The author leaves the cinema and is physically sick, deducing

that there is no possibility that this was not a real murder and mutilation. The whole action was in camera and the girl was not acting at the beginning. Only the man’s face was shown, apart from the girl’s. He certainly looked psychotic.

If nothing else, the letter informs us that Snuff was screened theatrically outside America. What’s more, it is testament to the persuasive power of the original campaign, still propelling the movie many months after the truth was out. The letter says something about how a viewer perhaps unaccustomed to modern screen violence might react to the movie. Clearly not everyone was able to differentiate between poor acting and moderately awful visual effects. The author has no problem seeing through the staged stabbings and mock blood from earlier in the movie, deducing they are ‘no different from hundreds of westerns or other thrillers.’ But the end sequence he considers ‘real’. Why is this? Well, the finale doesn’t look like the rest of the film. It has a grindhouse swagger to it that requires some familiarity on the viewer’s part to help appreciate and decipher. Not dissimilar to ham acting and kitsch, elements that might otherwise be regarded as negative aspects become to the grindhouse audience a merit.

THE PERVERSION SERIES

Pornography in the 1970s was markedly different to what we perceive it to be now; it could be well crafted with engaging or outré story lines. Gerard Damiano’s Devil in Miss Jones (1973), for instance, opens with the suicide of the central character. She goes to Hell, sexually frustrated for Eternity. Feature length pornography was often downbeat like this, or plain nasty, much like the plots of bona fide movies. The 8mm loops that played the peepshows on 42nd Street were somewhat different, falling beneath the radar and showing material that the movies dare not. (In this respect, CDL and the anti-smut campaigners were right.) Reminiscing in Grindhouse Purgatory magazine, Pete Chiarella wrote of a visit to 42nd Street with his pals during its sleazy heyday. Peepshows, he says, were playing 8mm loops containing scenes of pissing, shitting, bestiality, and even child porn. Twenty-five cents would return forty-five seconds of viewing time. Chiarella recollects that one of these loops was a snuff film. To watch the “shitty” loop in its entirety cost $7.50.[29]

Crossroads Books, aka the Porno Supermarket, is a grim den of a place located on the island between 7th Avenue and Broadway. Inside disco music is blasting. The booths are geared to various kinks and signposted accordingly. Chiarella and his pals are drawn to the one labelled ‘Snuff the Bloodiest Film ever on 42nd Street.’

The three of us crammed into the booth as we had our remaining two dollars in quarters. The film started with a girl being whipped and blood running down her back. This kept up until someone pulled out a steak knife, stuck it in her pussy and stared [sic] sawing upward. Flesh separated and blood flowed. Ian turned green and left, Jimmy followed. I left too. At the time I was working for the A&P Supermarket chain as an apprentice butcher. I knew raw meat when I saw it. This was way before any type of special effects make up. I would have to say what I saw was real.[30]

The story recognizes the rumours of snuff floating about at the time, as well as Shackleton’s own feature film, marrying them up in a tantalizing haze. What of this loop? What of other snuff loops? We turn back to two of the men at the bloody heart of the Allan Shackleton con trick, Simon Nuchtern and Carter Stevens, the director and studio manager who helped create the end sequence for Snuff. In our interview, we asked whether either had been aware of the snuff film rumours prior to their involvement with Shackleton. Stevens answered in the affirmative. As an adult filmmaker, he was among the many people the FBI called for help and expert opinion during its investigation. Stevens recalls: “I was asked at one point by an FBI agent to take a look at some [supposed snuff] films — this was before the days of video — and give them my opinion as to whether they were real or not. None of the films I looked at were even close to looking real.”

What year was this? Do you have any idea of the origin of the films?

“Hard to remember. It was after 1975, but before Snuff. I think they were all 16mm but some of them might have been 8mm. No idea where they came from. But I do remember them as being horribly amateurish and not at all believable.”

An FBI document dated September 10, 1975, refers to contacts made within the adult film business in Los Angeles. We might assume Stevens to be among them. These contacts are not said to be familiar with snuff films, nor are they aware of anyone associated with them. They do, however, help dismiss materials that have come to the attention of the FBI. This material is defined in the report as a series of films

currently in distribution which depict murder, death, and blood sacrifices, such as the Lasse Braun Series, but they are not believed to be films of an actual murder.

Alberto Ferro, under the name Lasse Braun, became notorious in the early seventies as a European director of many raunchy 8mm sex loops. These were distributed worldwide in their millions, for private sale but mostly for use in peepshows. He had a range of films specifically packaged for the US, which introduced Braun as perverse and exotic, ‘going beyond the limits other filmmakers impose on themselves.’[31] By and large, however, the series avoided some of his more outré 8mm efforts. The early Braun loops appeared as sets on a general theme, such as The Vikings, Casanova and Deep Arse (anal sex being a Braun speciality). Somewhat darker in tone were Top Secret, Forced To Sex and Perversion, which included storylines about abduction, rape and torture.

The byline for the Perversion series was ‘porno-shocks!’ Its three films are: Violence, telling of the rape of a little girl in a barn by two men and a hag; Lady M., the adventures of a female masochist; and Cerimony [sic], which concerns a black mass sex orgy. This one also features a blood sacrifice. Might Cerimony be one of the films to which the FBI allude in the above report? And possibly among those films screened by the feds for Carter Stevens?

Cerimony is a film of eight minutes’ duration, in colour but without sound. It takes place in a cellar, where a naked man (a ‘young boy’ according to one contemporary Braun film catalogue), bound to a cross, is tormented by a group of women wearing thin, colourful robes, pop makeup and wigs. The women hold flaming torches aloft and dance around the man, first lunging at him and terrifying him, then arousing him in a display of hairy genitalia and group masturbation. They bare their teeth while taking turns to fellate him and even draw (fake) blood from the shaft of his penis. Later, the man is forced into anal sex with one of the women, while the others observe or partake in an orgy of their own using a skeleton (the skeleton gets into just about every shot in the film). The film ends with more flaming torches. We don’t know what fate befalls the man, but there is nothing to suggest murder.

In any case, Cerimony is deflated by its promotional promise, which posits boldly ‘blood and sperm in an orgy of sex and colour.’

There is no active investigation into snuff by the FBI for almost a decade. On December 8, 1986, the matter of an ongoing sting operation is brought to the attention of the bureau and the file re-opens. The Lexington-Fayette police department believed they were in a position to purchase a snuff film through a source. This film supposedly ends with the execution of the actress. The following day funding is approved, and the four videocassettes purchased are forwarded to the director of the FBI later that month. The tapes are Dungeon of Torture Volume I, Dungeon of Torture Volume II, Violations and Snuff ‘Spanish language version’, plus related documents. Louisville recognizes the film Snuff as a fake snuff film.

The content of these tapes undergo a laboratory examination in New York, with the report making reference to a Pornographic Materials Reference File (PMRF) used for comparative tests. The tests last some weeks. According to a lab worksheet dated March 22, 1988, Dungeon of Torture Volume I contains portions of the film Snuff,[32] with an English language soundtrack, as opposed to Snuff ‘Spanish language version’, a tape previously examined and filed under the number 70413014 P XV. It is noted that Snuff depicts staged killings and actual death does not occur. The laboratory requests that the film remain with the laboratory for inclusion in the PMRF.[33]

Snuff enters a new age of home entertainment and is released onto videocassette, where the media kicks up the familiar concerns. The rekindled FBI interest in snuff is short-lived, however, and closes once again without further ado.

The supplier of Snuff and the video tapes in the above instance was a company called Vidimax in New Jersey. The mail order arm of Vidimax operated under the name Video Macabre Underground. As this name suggests, the company played on the idea that it was somehow beneath the radar and perhaps trading in illicit materials. It targeted the more discerning cult video and horror enthusiast, using words like ‘specialist’ and ‘confidential’ and baiting custom in a way more traditionally associated with pornographers. This sense of the lurid and of danger was the ethos behind the Video Macabre Underground. Sex and murder in the video age, with a very ambiguous line between the two. According to Louis Ferriol, the man in charge of the Video Macabre Underground, “camcorder grit” was the reason for its success. And from this success came the dark porn underground.

1David Slater, ‘Rivers of Blood: Ari Roussimoff in the Shadow of a Killer.’ Headpress 7, 1993.

2Sometimes using pseudonyms — Steve(n) Mitchell, Mal Worob, to name but two — Carter Stevens made and/or appeared in the hardcore films The Passions of Carol (1975), In Sarah’s Eyes (1976), Inside Jennifer Welles (1977), Take Off (1978), Punk Rock (1979), Pleasure Palace (1980), The Tiffany Minx (1981), The Crack of Dawn (1989), Severe Penalties (1993) and others.

3The year 1976 was not good timing for movie parodies. Chuck Vincent of Chuck Vincent Productions, another associate of Shackleton, was planning to spoof Superman in Up, Up and Away. This too was aborted in the face of a major studio effort: Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), starring Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman. Unrelated was the hardcore Superman parody Souperman (1976), which starred Marc Stevens as the eponymous hero masquerading under the secret identity Clark Bent. Souperman marked the directorial debut of Fred J Lincoln, a prolific adult filmmaker perhaps best known for his performance as the psychotic ‘Weasel Podowski’ in The Last House on the Left (1972).

4Carter Stevens, emails to the authors, March 15 and 17, 2013.

5Chapter one: DEATHMASTERS AND A CHEERFUL FILM.

6Stevens had also helped define Times Square for another influential movie of the seventies. He says, “I was approached to do some footage for Taxi Driver by one of the producers. It was additional footage work and had nothing to do with the director or the production crew. I don’t think any of my footage ever actually made it into the final film. It was third unit stuff around 42nd Street and pseudo porn footage for the theater scenes. I got paid and it was just another non-union production job as far as I was concerned.”

7Not to be confused with another August Films, based in Los Angeles.

8Savage Dawn ended Simon Nuchtern’s independent movie career. “We ran out of production money on a union picture and in Hollywood,” says Nuchtern. “I was a fish out of water and we had disastrous situations hitting us right and left.”

9Both Snuff and The Evil Dead would end up stigmatized as ‘video nasties’ in Britain in the mid eighties. For more on video nasties see chapter nine: NEO-TOKYO IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE.

10File reference numbers 145-5568, 145-6617 and 95-281728.

11October 2, 1975.

12Much attention is given to pricing the snuff films in Brass’ article: The film in this instance is said to have been divided into eight sequences available for home viewing on 8mm colour reels. A set retails at $1,500, while the wholesale price is said to be $300. A one-off screening will cost $200. These details lend credibility to an altogether sketchy story. The pricing of snuff films would be incorporated into all subsequent debates on the matter.

13Brass quotes the FBI as saying that if such a thing as a snuff film existed, prosecution would be problematic. If such a case came up, says a spokesperson, ‘the defendants would claim that the woman was not really murdered and that the film was really an art form.’

14October 3, 1975.

15October 3, 1975; the story is credited to United Press International.

16‘Tracking the Slashers: Murder on Film’ appears in an issue of Genesis dated March 1976. Here, reporter Lionel C. Bascom is cynical of the rumours and describes Horman as something of a crusader in a war on porn. “I first heard about slashers from [Horman] a New York City detective,” Bascom writes. “Ironically, he first got wind of them from another reporter.”

17December 8, 1975

18December 1, 1975.

19Louis Garfinkle produced and wrote the screenplay for I Bury the Living (1958), and is among several people credited with story on The Deer Hunter (1978). Frank Ray Perilli is an actor and screenwriter, or at least he was. His writing credits include The Best of Sex and Violence (1981), Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (1978) and Mansion of the Doomed (1976). He and Garfinkle share story and script on The Doberman Gang (1972).

20The authors contacted Charles Band, son of the late Albert Band, and a prolific producer (of bad movies) in his own right. He said he doubted he could shed any light on Snuff Movie.

21It appears in Screw dated November 3, 1975.

22Agent James B Young requested an audit should be carried out to determine the corporate structure of the Uptown Theater, and the identity of its management and stockholders. It doesn’t look like this operation took place. A previous unrelated case identifies the owner and operator to be Tudor Amusement Company, which in turn was owned by the Cosby Corporation, Indianapolis.

23Chapter one: JAY AND PICKLE AT THE PREMIERE.

24By our caluclation, ten paying paying customers at the most.

25It seems the bureau accepted Monarch’s word on the matter of customs clearance. In a memo dated January 6, 1975, the movie is described as a ‘Buenos Aires import’, which is sort of true given the Findlay’s Slaughter. But the ‘snuff’ aspect of course was filmed in New York. However, the report erroneously states the film was black and white when it entered the US, and later converted to colour.

26Screenings of Snuff at the National Theater began at 10am and continued through the day at two-hourly intervals, culminating with a special midnight showing.

27Dirk Hammond, ‘Are Snuff Films for Real?’ Adam Film World vol 5 no 10 (April 1976). William Rotsler, ‘Down with Snuff!’ Adam Film World, vol 5 no 12 (August 1976).

28Our emphasis.

29Coincidence or design this is also the ticket price charged by Shackleton when Snuff premiered in Indianapolis, after which he lowered the price. See chapter one: JAY AND PICKLE AT THE PREMIERE.

30Pete Chiarella, ‘Snuff Cinema,’ Grindhouse Purgatory no 4 (2014).

31Lasse Braun fulfilled one ambition in 1974 when his film Penetration became the first hardcore feature to play the Cannes film festival. It opened in Times Square (under the title French Blue) in December that year.

32Dungeon of Torture Volume I also contains short portions of three other untitled films, said to involve the death of animals, notably a dog, chicken and monkey.

33The content of the other videocassettes is not noted in the lab report.

The image depicts a bound woman with a gag in her mouth dancing over hot coals. It’s a badly spliced photograph of poor quality, advertising a film called Haven of Horror. The wording in the ad promises ‘A pretty co-ed roasted alive, right before your eyes!’ Beneath this the proposition: ‘Real or fantasy? You be the judge!!!’

Haven of Horror was one of a number of low-budget movies made and distributed by Vidimax, a mail order company established in 1980 that operated out of West Caldwell, New Jersey. It was a fairly typical sort of movie for Vidimax, with an emphasis on sadism, mutilation and female flesh, funnelled through bottom of the barrel production values.

But the origins of Vidimax are found in altogether more wholesome fare, notably Carlson International, a record label dating back to the early sixties. Under the aegis of one Louis Ferriol, a former cinema manager, the company expanded into other media in the seventies, adding to its arm a talent management service as well as television shows, commercials, industrial films and motion pictures. Vidimax was the next step, successfully anticipating the market for cult and trash movies within the burgeoning video boom of the eighties. They adopted the masthead “the Macabre Video Underground” and formed an exclusive members only customer base, feeding it old and often lamentable movies that were suddenly hot stuff in the age of the videocassette.

Vidimax had a predilection for the outré. They distributed some classic genre movies and are credited with the video release in 1982 of A Certain Sacrifice, starring a yet unknown Madonna. But sales of these couldn’t compare with material that depicted the plain and simple (fantasy) subjugation and torture of women. When the market for more mainstream product reached saturation, thanks to competing distribution channels, Vidimax concentrated on their niche as an exclusive club. For $5 customers were promised a lifetime membership to a world of the bizarre and the unorthodox, comprising movies not available in any store. Indeed this material, boasted Vidimax, was suited to a select clientele only. Their 1985 catalogue references a variety of outré themes and subject matter; everything from virgin sacrifice, the Gynophagia Societe, C’thulhu and medical butchery. Readers are informed that while “private collectors would pay a king’s ransom for these underground sights and sounds, you, as a member, pay less than twenty dollars each.”

Haven of Horror is advertised in the catalogue as follows [sic throughout]:

Ghastly sights and sounds found only in the macabre underground! After passing out on the roadside, Beth finds herself in what is suppose to be a hospital room. But, soon, the grusome terror begins! Injections, grisly shock treatments, force-feeding, then brought down to the “dungeon” operating room where she undergoes savage medical surgery (her intestines extracted without anesthesia) while a cannibalistic nurse prepares a flesh eaters gourmet, roast tenderloin a la Beth. See Beth’s long, tender, velvet legs roasted to a golden brown in the most graphically shocking “Human Roast” scene ever filmed and on direct VHS color video!! Approx 54 mins. Order 85008. $17.95

It had been a less auspicious start for Carlson International. Their early forays into film production were not a success. A handful of crime, suspense and human dramas all failed to make any kind of impact, which is the reason Louis Ferriol decided to take up directing and make a horror picture. His inspiration was the work of seminal ‘splatter’ director Herschell Gordon Lewis, having witnessed a packed house for a Lewis double bill at a theatre on Times Square. “Standing room only at 8am, 1,500 seats filled,” Ferriol told the authors.[1] Upstairs another horror picture was playing, Joel M Reed’s The Incredible Torture Show (aka Blood Sucking Freaks, 1977), and that was too was packed. It proved to be something of an epiphany.

Ferriol’s first feature as director was The Necrotic (1978). Shot on a 16mm Bolex cine camera using friends and non-union actors, The Necrotic was never intended for theatrical release. By the late seventies cinemas no longer accepted 16mm or 35mm blowups, only 35mm. (Fittingly, H. G. Lewis’ Blood Feast was one of the last blowups.) The Necrotic played as a midnight horror show on independent television and cable before it emerged as the first video release under the fledgling Vidimax banner. Ferriol’s way of thinking was that a movie about a doctor who slept with dead women would attract some attention. It was described in the Vidimax catalogue as having “a well done bathtub murder scene”.

Ferriol’s next production was The New York Centerfold Massacre (1982). It offers virtually nothing by way of plot, but rather a group of aspiring models fated to die. The instruments of their demise include an electric hairdryer, acid film bath and scorching flood lamps — “sizzling against young Carla’s tender flesh,” as noted in the catalogue.

By the time Haven of Horror emerged in 1985, the Macabre Video Underground was at its peak with a membership of 2,500, claims Ferriol. Two more films followed, Violations (1986) and Child of the Sabbat (1989), along with regular advertisements in the classified section of Fangoria magazine, which ran until Vidimax folded in 1991.[2]

While the Vidimax output can be regarded as a progeny of what we call today “gorno” or “torture porn” — horror films such as the Saw and Hostel series, which have a fetishistic attention to the detail of pain and suffering — its own lineage dates back to the roughies of the sixties: early kink films by the likes of Doris Wishman, Joseph Mawra and Barry Mahon, filmmakers who understood that acts of sadism and violence would get through the censors while that other draw — sex — could not.

Vidimax with their “camcorder grit” (to borrow Ferriol’s definition) ran a close path to the mainstream. The eighties witnessed a horror boom, and Vidimax sought to expose the tantalising sexual promise that lay just beneath the surface of these movies. The stalk and slash type plotline, for instance, very much in vogue, often featured females in peril who might be scantily clad at some point during their ordeal. The victim in Vidimax on the other hand is always female, she is always half naked, too, forever exploited and being punished. Or killed. There is no attempt at characterization or plot development: Vidimax simply cut to the chase and stayed there.

Ferriol’s The New York Centerfold Massacre echoes Dennis Donnelly’s The Toolbox Murders (1978), a mainstream horror movie that feminists found particularly offensive. It starred Cameron Mitchell in a ski mask. Vidimax borrows the ski mask and reduced Donnelly’s premise to a single-minded crawl involving the torture of a young woman in her underwear.

Vidimax didn’t make quality pictures. Not by any stretch can they be called competent. Nevertheless, for all their cheapness and flaws, these movies were to be an inspiration on other budding filmmakers, who had a go themselves and submitted zero budgeted efforts of their own to the Macabre Video Underground. Scarlet Blue is not a Vidimax production. However, shot on Super 8 it looks and behaves like one. The catalogue states that Scarlet Blue depicts “with candor the seamy [sic] world of flesh peddling”. It is described as having technical flaws, “especially a noisy soundtrack, but is a collector’s must since it will never be released in the mainstream and is pungent.”[3]

Technical shortcomings become a promotional asset with Vidimax, and are used to help define these films as befitting the sinister countenance of the Macabre Underground. They are promoted as exclusive product, unavailable elsewhere. Adding to the clandestine frisson, those customers who placed an order would receive in the mail a videocassette with no fancy packaging but instead a plain box without cover art. The title of the movie was printed on a plain white video label.

“Real or fantasy?” stated the advertisement for Haven of Horror. “You be the judge!” The answer of course is patently obvious on viewing, easily extrapolated within seconds of screen time. The ridiculously ineffectual special effects are described as “graphically shocking” but in short they are nothing of the sort. A leg roasting sequence, for instance, is a lump of wood wrapped in tin foil and held over a spit. This cuts back to the discoloured leg of the ‘roasted’ actress, as smoke blows in from somewhere offscreen.

Ferriol: “Actress Lesley Duncan was so co-operative. We used Provodine Iodine to colour the browning, Alka Seltzer to give it a boiling look, and actor Bob Rose (the medical examiner) blew cigar smoke lying on the floor behind the grill. Provodine Iodine actually streaked and got darker, made it look a bit more convincing.”

In another film, Dr Sadismo’s Theater of the Macabre (1986), a seated individual introduces the viewer to “hidden footages” from the Macabre Video vault. “Does theatre imitate life? Does theatre imitate death?” he asks of a relatively insipid SM sequence that bears little relation to the question at hand. We are prompted to deduce fact from fiction in the scene that follows, which shows a bound woman being menaced by a man holding a power drill. The implication is that he drills her crotch. A pool of unconvincing blood and a throat cutting concludes Dr Sadismo.

Vidimax disappeared in the early nineties, returning again recently with an online presence (without membership constraints). A number of their films were available to view or download free of charge from their website, along with many other clips from the MVU back catalogue. “Google ads pay the bills,” says Ferriol. This website has since disappeared but the MVU films have migrated to free streaming video sites.

SNUFF AND THE MACABRE VIDEO UNDERGROUND

Working as a manager at the RKO chain of theatres during the seventies, Louis Ferriol couldn’t have helped but notice the media circus surrounding Snuff. Years later Snuff would be among the titles he distributed on video as part of the Macabre Video Underground. He also carried something he advertised as Snuff ‘Spanish language version,’ which one might surmise is exactly that: A Spanish language print of Snuff.[4] Ferriol had no personal involvement with Allan Shackleton and claims not to have been influenced by Snuff, the film Shackleton had made (and which helped ‘make’ Shackleton).[5] Ferriol did however work with Carter Stevens for a spell, the filmmaker whose loft was used for shooting the infamous tagged on ending of that movie.[6] Ferriol says it was Stevens who gave Vidimax limited rights to release Snuff on video. But Stevens, in conversation with the authors, claimed to know nothing of the Vidimax release of Snuff. Whatever the story, Snuff did little to assuage people and groups angered by the material Ferriol was peddling, bringing him ultimately into the sights of the FBI.[7]

Asked who comprised the Macabre Video fan base, Ferriol said “everybody from basic gorehounds to the SM whip and chains crowd and all the camp and erotica-philes in between”. He had little competition. “Silver Rose imitated us, advertising in the same mags,” said Ferriol, “but that to me was a compliment. The worst punch came from a Florida web seller who made terrible pirated copies of the Vidimax titles (and others) and we got the complaints.”[8]

Another one-man outfit with a similar field of interest was Horror Femmes. Based in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Horror Femmes also advertised in Fangoria, a publication clearly helping to galvanize ‘scenes’ in the run up to the Internet. The bulk of the Horror Femmes catalogue comprised cheaply produced comic books and short story collections by way of photocopied pamphlets, but they did include some films. The proprietor was James Ahearn, a former staff artist on the New York based discipline tabloid of the eighties, B&D Pleasures. He put his hand to most if not all of the Horror Femmes illustrations and other material. The focus was on “vamps, villainesses and horror honeys of all kinds, who,” according to Ahearn, “love to cause trouble and who invariably bite the dust in inventive, ironic and, of course, graphic ways.”[9] The favoured mode of exit was the “neck-tie party” on the end of a rope. Also on hand were photo sets and short films depicting simulated death scenes. The six photos that comprise Tender Morsel, for instance, show a model roasting on a spit. Of the videos, some were trailer tapes of choice moments from exploitation films. Others were original subjects, as in the following, lifted from a Horror Femmes catalogue in 1991:

NAZI-GIRL SCHUTZENFEST
Scads of sieg-heiling honeys get shot and buy the farm in bloody ways. This one’s a keeper!

THREE WAY SMASH
Animated Gallows Adventure starring a swinging stewardess, a sleazy slideshow transfer focusing on Babes, Bullets, and Blades, and finally an hour-long burst of Hanging Trailers. This triple feature has some serious skin, weltering Gore, and heaven-sent Hangings.[10]

THE HANGING OF DANIELA & JOHN
The title piece of this hour-long video blast was inspired by a great Midwest collector who bugged out on a brilliantly conceived idea. It’s a classic: condemned lovers quarrel from the courtroom to the gallows with every conceivable sight gag c/o a sadistic executioner, magistrate and reverend. Strangling and hanging-oriented trailers follow.

The utilization of slides in the above video production (Three Way Smash) is presumably a safer and more economical mode of manufacture, but it also better facilitates the close-up examination of death-throe contortions. “Terrific tongue-fest” is the expression. The Horror Femmes vocabulary was much like this. Horror Femmes had a relatively good innings. Their catalogue in 1991 ran to several pages, and was still being offered — for the sum of $2 — on the Horror Femmes web page as late as 2000. At this point Horror Femmes seem to have ceased and their web page morphed into a Pittsburgh based fur coat company (with a decidedly Ahearn look to it).

When Louis Ferriol was asked about some of his own advertising, notably the ambiguous spin of his film Haven of Horror — ‘Real or fantasy? You be the judge!!!’ — he admitted that it pulled in the punters. “Schlocky as it was,” Ferriol told the authors, “we had buyers call Vidimax and believed it real.”

Camcorder grit evidently hit the mark and some customers wanted more of the same. Asked to elaborate, says Ferriol: “Oh, my gosh, they wanted to be invited to ‘the next one’ and offered to pay whatever it took to be there when we ‘cook the next girl’. One guy even came to the door all the way from Colorado to Jersey!”

Vidimax were one of the first companies to find a niche in the videotape boom. But they effectively missed out on the Internet and its ability to exploit the darker zeitgeist. Nor did Vidimax make films to order, custom films tailored for a price to suit the peccadillo of the individual customer.

On the matter of custom videos, Ferriol says: “One customer wanted to pay $200 to have a girl in heels step on a bug. We farmed it out to a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, outfit that did that sort of thing. We did do a couple of bondage loops and Dr Sadismo, but not made to order.”

Vidimax may have avoided the custom shoot, but the custom shoot was undeniably part of a growing trend. Through the nineties and into the present, the custom video client base has risen to a notable presence within the darker arenas of porn. And at the top of the narrow list of custom themes is the faux snuff film.

NECROBABES AND THE RISE OF DEATH PORN

The online discussion board Necrobabes in 1997 provided like-minded people with an opportunity to communicate ideas they hadn’t been able in polite society. Formed on the back of another site, Peter’s Art And Stories, from its base in Las Vegas Necrobabes created common ground for the dark and marginal fantasy interests of individuals around the world. One key fantasy illuminated by Necrobabes was gynophagia, the cooking and eating of women, and its greatest exponent Dolcett, an artist of some mystery.[11] Dolcett’s work takes the form of comics and standalone art. It depicts ample busted women being carved into prime meat cuts or skewered over open fires, interspersed with other unsavoury activities, such as rape and cannibalism. Dolcett’s distinctive, scratchy drawing style was already familiar to some people prior to Necrobabes (the Horror Femmes catalogue of November 1991, for instance, references Dolcett’s work), but it was on the web that it found its most appreciative audience.[12]

Through Necrobabes the first companies and producers of fantasy snuff films emerged online. Among the earliest were Club Dead and Wave Productions. Wave was founded by Gary Whitson in Deerfield, New Jersey, in 1987, primarily as a resource for horror movie enthusiasts who wanted to make their own films. Whitson had placed an ad in a local newspaper.[13] Little over ten years later, in 1999, Wave would launch its own website and boast of being the largest independent producer of low-budget video horror movies in the United States. Soon enough, Wave was producing films to order, and the majority of their ninety or so titles were in fact custom jobs starring a familiar roster of actresses. It is easy to see the progression into custom video in this instance: Wave had already found a niche in compilation tapes that featured choice death scenes from its back catalogue (sometimes enhanced with primitive digital effects). These compilation tapes won a small but dedicated audience, as did the actresses themselves, thanks to picture galleries on the website, including wet t-shirt shots. One such compilation, Wave’s Most Gruesome Quicksand Deaths, had a promotional blurb that promised

quicksand lovers! This is the tape you’ve been waiting for! This is a special edition of Gruesome Deaths, featuring only quicksand scenes. All of our best quicksand scenes are here! See Laura Giglio, Pamela Sutch, Cristie Clark, Lonna Cottrell, Dakotah, and Debbie D all sink to their deaths! Also see Dawn Murphy fight for her life in the quicksand!

Another tape, Wave’s Most Gruesome Deaths, is less fastidious. Volume five does indeed contain quicksand, but it also includes death by shooting, stabbing, suffocation, electrocution, drowning and hanging. Actress Tina Krause is the unfortunate victim for the most part. Krause was Wave’s most popular model. She is systematically slaughtered in a variety of films, was star of her very own Tina Krause Video and even had her own fan club.

Wave’s good-natured attitude would be lacking in the companies that followed. Real Detective Stories (1999), written, edited and directed by Whitson, is a montage of stories built around the lurid headlines of a true crime magazine. Arthur (Dean Paul) gets grief from his nagging spouse (Tina Krause) for living in a pigsty and reading Real Detective Stories all day. He starts to fantasize about the various crimes in the magazine, picturing himself as protagonist and his wife the victim. The most elaborate of the stories takes place in a cheap dungeon set. The naked Krause, tied to a workbench, is killed by rotary saw. The budget shies away from any scenes of physical mutilation and bloodshed.

Oftentimes Wave could be self-referential, especially when addressing the concept of snuff films head on. Photo Murders (199?) is the story of a filmmaker (Whitson) who kidnaps, rapes, and murders women on videotape, incorporating this footage in his horror movies destined for sales overseas. In Play Dead, Inc. (1998), the owner of a company producing fantasy snuff for the home video market (Whitson again), suddenly decides he has to film real deal in order to pay off a gambling debt. Bizarre Cases of Death (199?), aka Snuff Perversions: Bizarre Cases of Death, is yet another anthology, but one that offers recreations of supposedly genuine snuff films drawn from FBI files. It claims to be an educational police video designed for law enforcement cadets that has remained unseen until now.[14] A title card pops up to add the veneer of authenticity:

Homicide Representation Documentation
(a.k.a. Snuff Films)
File No. 0073654856
For official use only

Dr Samantha Lawrence (Paige Turner) educates the viewer on the matter of snuff films. “With over 10,000 unsolved murders occurring very year, you’d think it certain that someone would enjoy filming or videotaping a murder,” she ruminates. “For the purpose of future perverse entertainment, you’d think that someone would commercially produce an actual murder for the mere thrill of it, knowing that surely someone would pay a lot of money to see it.”

Of the dozen or so short films that follow, Wave offer The Electrocution, starring Tina Krause. The rest come by way of outside filmmakers working under the Wave umbrella. Undead Entertainment contribute Lunch Meat and Thrill Rape Kill, Dark Fantasies The Video Snuff Shoot, Yoho FX Group Stoner Roulette, Phroso To See What It’s Like and D J Kary The Video Psycho.[15] It’s a mixed bag of styles that range from the lightweight and blackly humorous through to the tough and cruel. The films are interspersed with more ‘expert’ ruminations, courtesy two more bogus officials. Their dialogue begins earnestly enough but soon deteriorates into the comic, which undermines the documentary façade the first half sought to establish. Early on, the arresting footage of an autopsy is played (it appears genuine), with our presenters commentating that such material is often passed around some film circles as entertainment. It’s a prudent observation (as we shall see later in this chapter). But elucidation is not forthcoming. Bizarre Cases of Death concludes on a silent pastiche entitled Black Balloon Snuff Film, by Severed Lips/Factory 2000, a group that would ultimately foster its own fantasy snuff fan base.

DON’T SEE IT, BE IT

The horror fan community at large viewed Wave and their sort with suspicion, and some material was unwelcome at fan conventions. The Perils of Penelope, for instance, was one Wave video banned at FANEX 1994 because of its bondage content. More than once, Whitson himself voiced concern that the nudity on his own website might attract undue attention. Such an attitude was not shared by Factory 2000, however, who would actively court controversy at every turn.

Operating out of a basement apartment in Ringwood, New Jersey,[16] under the aegis of one William Hellfire, Factory 2000 are one of the forbears of the fetish custom video shoot but at the same time are somewhat removed from it. Their pitch has always been queered by the bizarre, with fun as much as profit being the goal. Indeed, their most notorious production — Duck! The Carbine High Massacre (1999) — is not a scene film at all, but a thinly disguised adaptation of the Columbine high school shooting. Following its completion, Hellfire and his fellow star and director, Joey Smack, were arrested for having taken guns onto school property. For a time Factory 2000 was in the media spotlight Hellfire so craved.

The first Factory 2000 custom video shoot was relatively mild, comprising girls parading about in their socks, for which an individual named Bob paid $30. The process and the meagre reward was enough for Hellfire and his associates (stoner friends and girlfriends for the most part) to pursue more custom shoots. The Factory 2000 customer base grew and with it a notoriety for films on the theme of strangulation and asphyxia.

Hellfire shied away from overtly sexual content, but he had no qualms about incorporating rogue elements that might possibly subvert the whole experience for the customer and burst their fantasy bubble. Hellfire says this was his attempt to “distract” fans of strangulation and nudity. “We were kind of protesting the fact people were masturbating to strangulation films in a sense,” Hellfire commented, “although we understood we were perpetuating the fact by making the films.”

With Nude Strangle (1998), the second Factory 2000 film, Hellfire was cognisant of the fact that while strangulation fans wouldn’t consider the product quite fetish enough, they had little else to choose from. Nevertheless, in trying to subvert the very market he was exploiting, a new monster was created.

Virtual Kidnapper/The Strangler is a particularly diverting short film Hellfire directed in 2000, which in some ways defies the conventions of the custom market. It features a young actress called Misty Mundae, who was Hellfire’s girlfriend at the time and later found some success in the mainstream (under the name Erin Brown). Mundae became the biggest asset in a rotating roster of nymph-like sirens for Factory 2000, and was aggressively promoted by its production company Alternative Cinema. But even they balked at this film, which encourages the viewer to be complicit in the assault and murder of the subject, Mundae. The film unfolds entirely from the point of view of the assailant (your eyes his eyes; your hands his hands, etc.) and ends when Mundae, out of character and clearly having had enough for one day, angrily pushes the camera away.

In interview, Hellfire reflected on his films, and Virtual Kidnapper/The Strangler in particular:

This is the new pornography: there’s no penetration, it’s not anything you’ve seen before but it’s definitely what people are interested in. It wasn’t promoted that much. I think the distributors were a little afraid of what we did… But Virtual Kidnapper — aka The Strangler — is something that came out of my head like a demon that I exorcised. It was the be all and end all rape film, strangulation film. You be the strangler. If that is your fetish, if you truly are into this, do something really ‘witchy’, buy this movie and pretend to kill Misty Mundae.

I shot the whole thing from the point of view of the perpetrator… I think it’s very important that this is out there. I think that people should look at it and see this pro-rape video and be upset by it. I’m hoping that people get upset by it. It seems that even some of the audience who normally buy my movies did not go for that idea. Which is interesting for me. Virtual Kidnapper is maybe not okay to fans of rape movies because it’s promoting the idea that you are raping a girl ultimately.

Even Alternative Cinema got angry that I wanted a certain cover for the movie, one which says ‘Don’t see it, be it’ on the back. It’s as if they’re afraid to do it, you know. Alternative Cinema — what’s going to happen to you if you do this? Have some integrity. At least just do what the shitty director wants; this is going to sell like 300 copies.[17]

Having departed Factory 2000, Misty Mundae offered her own take on the matter. Although she had no desire to spit on her past, she confessed she regretted Virtual Kidnapper. It was different in tone to the early Factory 2000 films, which were created with a subterfuge lost on Virtual Kidnapper. For instance, of I Was a Teenage Strangler, one such early film, Mundae says that

the whole point was, okay, we have this quota, you want people to buy the movie, you have to have lesbian sex, or this much nudity. If you fill this quota, then people are going to buy it. And then it was kind of like a dirty trick, because then they were going to see the movie, and they were going to see these two hot girls getting it on, and then it was going to cut to somebody vomiting into a sink — how are you going to get off to that? I thought that was pretty clever. Yeah, these people are going to want to watch this, they’re going to want to jerk off to it, then they’re going to see that and they’re going to be mortified. That’s kind of the whole idea, and so in keeping with that tradition we made movies like Virtual Kidnapper, which was supposed to be repulsive. But the fan base for that kind of thing wouldn’t see that element of it. They would be turned on by the gratuitous sex, and the misogyny and all that.[18]

Fake snuff videos existed prior to the Internet, but here the bespoke custom scene operated at a different level. Snuff ideas were incorporated into drawings, comics, photographs, and even primitive animation. With the Internet, video became the dominant force, propelled exponentially by digital technology and the anonymity afforded customers online. Although Wave produced custom films, there were strict guidelines on the type of material they would shoot. They refused hardcore, for instance, and work they perceived as simply vicious.

Visitors to the Wave website were given the following incentive:

Dear Friend,

We hope that you found something of interest on our website. If not, why not have your own script or story idea produced exactly as you want it? Here’s how.

We’ve produced numerous ‘DAMSELS IN DISTRESS’ custom videos as well as horror and action adventure movies. Almost all of our available titles were custom tapes. We produce the tapes you want to see. All from your script or story idea. Basically our videos follow two patterns. The first are stories that are in a humorous vein. The second are stories that are much more serious and violent. All of our videos are now shot using a digital video camera and edited on a Super-VHS master and then dubbed onto VHS. This produces an excellent consumer copy. And we use professional or semi-professional actors and actresses and professional makeup people to produce the best possible movie.

Wave had little competition. Factory 2000 was perhaps it, but even they were bedfellows. It’s a different matter today: A simple online search reveals many specialist film companies that provide custom material. These are rather incestuous, and it’s sometimes difficult to know what separates one company and its product from another.[19] Manufacture and production is relatively low key and can comprise a group of friends or, in the case of a company called Necro Videos, man and wife.[20] But the means of distribution is more complex, which may explain the cross pollination that takes place between groups.

Starting price for a custom video can be anywhere between $100 to $1,000 and is dependent on story, which often utilizes one model from a company’s roster of models. Best Deaths, a company that adapts gay male fantasies, make it easy with a three step plan: (1) An online form gives options for story, cast, location and film length; (2) Following receipt of the form, a quote is despatched within forty-eight hours; (3) Pay securely online and download the clip. As with all custom shoots, the price increases incrementally with additional models, props, costumes, and complex plot. Some companies offer nudity and digital effects (such as gunshot wounds and blue screen) and this too will influence price. Filming and production costs do not entitle the customer to the film rights. Rather, at the end of the shoot the customer is presented with their fantasy committed to DVD-R (or equivalent), and the company adds a new product to its catalogue, offering the film to the general public at a regular retail price (between $15 and $40). Each film is advertised in the company catalogue, which may be accompanied by a breakdown of its key components, along with the names of the featured model/s. Casualties of Horror is one company that provides this information in chart form. The chart below, for a film called Betrayed, starring Raven Alexis, is fairly typical:

Things don’t always work out. One pitfall for the custom shoot was outlined in a post on the erotic death fetish board, Femmes Fatalities, in March 2009. Filmmaker Bluestone lamented how he was stiffed on a custom shoot when his customer was unable to foot the bill. ‘Needless to say, I will never film another custom without payment in full up front,’ Bluestone wrote. ‘As it stands, I will also never get my investment back on this video by merely offering it for sale on my site at the usual rates.’

The authors spoke with another individual involved in the manufacture of custom shoots, whose own filmmaking career is indebted to the Necrobabes website, and the vogue it helped create in the nineties. He runs two companies that specialize in the production of fetish films, but has requested anonymity to try to stay beneath the “radar of the Purity Police”. We’ll call him Heisenberg. He has no formal filmmaking education, but is self taught with a background in photography, having owned a photography business and studio for a number of years. His parent company ranks among the first to have traded online, while the other is an offshoot of it and covers much the same ground. There are a great many fake snuff custom productions between them; as much as forty per cent of their output consists of films sponsored by custom clients.

THE MODERN SCENE: SOFT

“Fetishes tend to be very specific for individuals,” says Heisenberg. “Sometimes even a word or phrase, or a certain style of shoe on a model that matches someone’s fantasies, is completely satisfying to the given individual. A number of clients with very specific fetish fantasies hire ‘produce’ movies depicting their fantasies. The overwhelming majority of these sponsors would never harm anyone. At any rate, the client has a specific fantasy and hires us to make that fantasy become more real, in a harmless manner, in a movie.”

On the subject of his customer base, Heisenberg is in no doubt it favours the “asphyxia demise,” which includes hanging, drowning, suffocation, strangling and gassing. Next would be shooting. Finally stabbing. “Then we have one other ‘subgenre’ that took me completely by surprise, and that is the fantasy hunt, where the subjects are attractive females that are scantily clad and running or hiding from hunters with guns, crossbows, longbows, and other lethal weapons. The first four of these particular type movies we produced were sponsored by groups interested in the subject.” One example of this surprising subgenre is Bailee Arnett’s Hunted (year unknown), from HorrorGasm Independent Films. It features a bearded individual called Chuck (Seth Rosenkrantz) and three frightened “city girls,” who are naked except for heavy hiking boots. The girls are forced to partake in Chuck’s game, which is to be chased through the woods and evade capture, lest they end up in his belly and their heads on his wall. The camera follows the prey as they dart about and try to hide in the undergrowth. But Chuck systematically shoots them all down with a pistol and makes a totem of their bodies. The film’s emphasis is on the hunt and the threat of the hunt, with very little bloodletting. When Chuck gets his hunting knife out and moves in on his prize, the film ends.[21]

Hunted runs a little over eleven minutes, which isn’t necessarily short for a fetish production of this stripe. Some films are barely two minutes, while others might run to feature-length (but this sort of commitment is rare). Heisenberg recalls one custom job running over three hours, trimmed back to an hour for general sale in his catalogue.

Hunted opens in a small tent, where Chuck lays down his ground rules. There is little room for invention or indeed anything much at all given the limited timeframe and budget, but at least an effort is made to add colour to the character of Chuck. Fetish productions rarely play for laughs, probably because nobody scripts their own peccadillo as a joke. The mordantly droll level on which these films invariably operate makes Chuck and his daft hick persona something of an anomaly.

Considerably more upmarket than Hunted, if no less specialist, are the hunting films of Olaf Winter. Trading through his Amazon-Warriors and Titaneia websites, Winter doesn’t offer custom shoots. His work resembles more the high end erotica of a company like Playboy. Not unjustly Winter regards himself as an artist. His greatest passion is the Amazonian goddess, those gladiatorial women of centuries old, fearless and without mercy. Most of his product features lithe Xena type models in period costume (leather loin clothes and no top) desperate for a ruckus, whether this is attacking a neighbouring stronghold, or giving chase to clueless travellers who have wandered into the wrong part of the jungle. All of it is geared to end with bloody death by broadsword, hand to hand combat, or on the tip of a spear or arrow. The Wild Amazon (2012), a film divided into chapters like an old movie serial, presents most of the favoured types of death, along with lingering images of the bloody aftermath[22] of battle and also bodies piled high in (digital) flame.

There are many films with themes other than the hunt. Themes begat sub-themes: Asphyxiation, erotic horror, postmortem, sleepy girls and chloroform fantasies, lifting and carrying, hypnotism, and so on. Here follow some examples of faux snuff films, offering a tiny insight into the companies operating today and their product.

Fetish Shooting Series: Shotgun Blast #1 (2007) is a Peachy Keen film directed by John Marshall. A woman (Savannah Costello) is washing dishes in a kitchen sink wearing nothing but panties when suddenly a man walks in brandishing a shotgun. It appears a case of mistaken identity and because of it she pays the ultimate price. The man shoots the woman first in the belly and then in the mouth. The set up and execution are quickly concluded, leaving what remains of the film’s six-and-a-half-minutes focused solely on the slumped and static body, oozing blood.

Fan Kill Britton[23] differs only slightly. Here, a deranged fan murders the object of his desire, a famous actress, having broken into her bedroom and forced her to strip at gunpoint. He shoots her point-blank in the belly and then in each breast. Following a leering last look at the carnage, the camera tracking up the victim’s legs and wounds, the four-and-a-half minute film draws to a close.

The star of Fetish Shooting Series, Fan Kill Britton and countless films like them are the bullet blasts. These blasts and the resultant wounds are manufactured using a combination of digital and prosthetic effects, orchestrated skilfully by the filmmakers.[24] It is what the audience has come to expect of an increasingly competitive market. The result is a highly fetishistic account of bullet trauma, with blood and flesh held far above any attempt at authenticity. (The makers of Fan Kill Britton evidently saw little point in expending time and effort on the soundtrack, which is recorded live and is noisy.) The girls, naked and beautiful of course, lie perfectly still as crimson drool issues from their mouth and their perfect wounds. Here, death is as carefully considered as a portrait.

Eyewitness Video profess to be ‘your place for hanging fantasies.’ Much as the hunting and shooting scenarios, the hanging fantasy doesn’t offer too many variations on its given theme, and Eye Witness sums them up concisely enough in Killing Girl Snuff (2002). One room and a chair in the middle of it beneath a noose. A woman in pinstripe business attire is manhandled into shot by a masked man, before being forced to balance precariously on the chair with her head in the noose. She pleads as the assailant molests and torments her, threatening to kick the chair from under her feet. This he does about two minutes into the film, which allows another eight minutes to concentrate on the suspended victim flailing, choking and ultimately becoming limp.

There are two cameras in Killing Girl Snuff, cutting between facial close-ups of the victim and midrange shots, playing out in real-time. Given the dangers inherent in such a stunt, the illusion here is extremely well crafted and equal to anything one might see in a Hollywood production — if not more convincing.[25] Sombre music on the soundtrack softly plays beneath the woman’s gasps and choking sounds. Cue Spanish guitar when the end is near. A shoe falls off. The man prowls around his victim, interfering with her clothes, letting her hair down and allowing for the occasional upskirt camera shot. When the twitching has stopped, he lowers the body to orchestrate a visual epithet for the camera, placing the woman’s secretarial glasses on her crotch. The end.

One might be drawn to speculate on the motivation behind some of the custom story lines, especially when they are as transparent as Killing Girl Snuff. This particular entry gives vent to the familiar frustrations of the workplace, of the downtrodden or neglected employee who imagines getting their own back on the boss. Perhaps the boss is a woman, and the fantasist a man who seeks to realign the office dynamic — ergo the battle of the sexes — in his favour.

In Valorie in Hang for Real (studio and director unknown), we see a filmmaker becoming exasperated with a model who is unable to play a convincing hanging victim. So he executes her for ‘real’ and cackles while he sets the woman’s body swinging to and fro. The brace effect is again well done for a production where everything else reeks of amateur hour.

Bastille Day (studio and director unknown) utilizes an uncommon guillotine scenario. In this particular short film, a robed and hooded man, much like a monk, places a naked and sobbing woman into the death machine and drops the blade. Her head falls into a basket and is then held aloft by the executioner. The guillotine is quite an elaborate prop, and there are some fleeting special effects. But the Bastille Day backdrop, a modern-day industrial estate replete with flatbed truck, fails to complement the illusion of France in revolt.

Consumers of this material are predominantly heterosexual male, evident in the examples above, whose victims are exclusively female. Male victims aren’t entirely absent from the custom scene, however. A number of companies produce films that depict the death of both males and females, while Dead Guys Cinema and the previousy mentioned Best Deaths cater specifically to a gay male audience. A slasher picture, Dead Guys (Dead Guys Cinema) has the tagline ‘dead guys never looked this good!’ Best Deaths offers well in excess of 1,000 clips for download, with a wide variety of fantasy subjects. Dead Guys on the other hand has a penchant for the asphyxiation of young males in their underpants.

As noted earlier by our contact Heisenberg, the asphyxia demise is perhaps the most common type of custom snuff subject. This may be death by hanging, drowning, strangulation or gassing, while within exists even more specialist subdivisions for the discerning asphyxia enthusiast.[26] Psycho-Thrillers, for instance, offer ‘Alfred Hitchcock-Style Horror with an Erotic Twist!’ which is, for the most part, asphyxia and rape with some victims drooling and/or pissing themselves. Gabrielles Smothering Girls on the other hand is the female-on-female bloodless strangle division of Gabrielles Fighting Girls.

Naturally, the scene has developed its own terminology. HOM, for instance, is shorthand for hand over mouth asphyxiation, or “handgagging.” Some people prefer their HOM to incorporate the thumb of the assailant against the nose of the victim; others like it to include elbow length gloves. One company that specializes in HOM in all its guises is the Serbia-based Stranglenail. If their film Marija Strangle with Gloves (2007) is anything to go by, the Stranglenail product is cheap and cheerful, and altogether indicative of a niche interest market. After carefully donning a pair of gloves, a young woman commences to strangle her victim, another young woman who has been waiting vacantly by a window. It’s a rather disinterested strangle, with neither girl being particularly energized by the situation. A radio plays dejectedly in the background, and the camera equipment picks up each mechanical nuance as the girls move through one strangle setpiece into another. Shy of six minutes, Marija Strangle with Gloves is nonetheless something of a Stranglenail epic: Generally their films are clips of two minutes duration.

Stranglenail boasts models with big hands. According to the all-important stats, Marija, for instance, is 179cm tall, was born in 1987 and has hands size 19cm. The company offers a more personalized custom service than most in that they encourage the client to visit their studio and act out their fetish on film. Cost is €800 for a film of sixty minutes’ duration starring one girl, which is payable half in advance. (Something defined on their website as ‘special wishes’ is available for an additional fee.) The studio itself is located in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second city some eighty kilometres outside Belgrade, on the banks of the Danube. It was bombed by NATO in the Kosovo War. But, thanks in part to a university populace, it has managed to rebuild itself as a city of cultural and economic significance in Serbia. Stranglenail is run by an individual called Bojan. One might read his enterprise as an allegory of the recent upheavals, akin to the uncompromising cinema of Srðan Spasojević and Mladena Ðorðević.[27] Bojan suggests that any customer taking the opportunity to visit his studio might also care to sample the local restaurant and market. A number of testimonials on the Stranglenail website are from clients who turned their fetish film trip into a mini-vacation, despite having initial reservations about Serbia. Mr Florian from Germany is typical in his recommendation: ‘For all people who are scared to travel to Serbia: there is no reason to be scared at all.’

Bojan himself sounds a thoroughly decent bloke, dining with clients, accompanying them to the pub, offering fetish advice and even providing a personalized shuttle service to Belgrade airport.

Of the private sessions, a Spanish client by the name of Mr Martin recounts his own experience thus [sic throughout]:

I had ordered 4 choking sessions. Each session is about 4 hours long, with one hour of free filming for you, were you can make your custom films of your dreams. There is plenty of time with no hurry. The model can polish her nails with a colour of your choice, you can hand compare with the model, she can massage your neck very sensually or choke you in any position you want. all of this done in a respectful way, and relaxed atmosfere. You can take a break, have some coffee or chat with the girls. Bojan’s cameraman is a young woman called Jelena (not the model). She speaks english, and understands it perfectly. She is a professional camera woman, who has a lot of experience filming this kind of fetish, and really reads your mind when it comes to explain to her what you want and how you want her to film you, camera angles, closeness, etc. Most models don’t speak english, so she also translates to the model what she should do and exactly how you want it. She really impressed me. For 4 hours I felt like some important hollywood director making his own film to the detail.[28]

Stranglenail also appears to be one of the few custom fetish studios operating outside the USA. As best as one can tell, the companies that produce such material are almost exclusively American based. A 2004 film from the Annabellesfantasy studio, titled Execute Her Now, however, may be another exception. It appears to be British. The actors in it are certainly British. Here, a paramilitary garbed man, who takes orders from a woman behind a desk, is duty bound to garrot a naked female victim.

THE MODERN SCENE: HARD

However else you address them, the custom films discussed so far do not feature any explicit sexual content. There is no hardcore sex in any of Stranglenail’s HOM fantasies, nor is it present in Dead Guys Cinema or the work of Heisenberg. These creative teams may specialize in a specific kink and use nudity but they have boundaries they do not venture to cross, such as hardcore or heavy sadomasochism. This is their preference. But as we see a rise in dark porn online, the concept of the snuff fetish becomes more widespread and the companies involved in its manufacture change. X-rated video streaming websites often share so-called vanilla porn with material devoted to abuse and simulated rape. Asked how the market for violent role play had changed during his years of trading, Heisenberg said this: “Two things. I get more requests for sadomasochistic topics than I used to and the industry has shown a trend toward showing hardcore sex in conjunction with the violent role play. I don’t produce films that have no plot and are simply a long, brutal, sadomasochistic saga involving continued brutality against a woman. The other thing I turn down is hardcore. If I can’t produce it with some sort of artistic merit, then I don’t produce it. I have produced a few movies with softcore, simulated sex. I believe that softcore can be produced with artistic merit. When you begin to shoot close-ups of penetration, body fluids squirting and dribbling, then I think films lose all artistic merit. Many of the hardcore films in this genre don’t even have a plot.”

One company that isn’t squeamish about explicit sexual content is Inshadow. A number of their films do follow the old school, less sexually explicit ideal of the custom shoot, such as Don’t Call Anymore (where a masked intruder chloroforms a woman, the camera fixing on her tongue dancing in her mouth as he then throttles her). But many other Inshadow productions take things a step further. The intruder in ’nuff Movie, for example, anally rapes his comatose victim and exposes her genitalia for the camera, before strangling her and masturbating over the corpse. The film lasts ten-and-a-half minutes, with an ominous score, occasional jumpy b&w edits, and REC flashing up in the corner of the frame. Despite its concession to violent role play and indeed the snuff enigma, ’nuff Movie is x-rated pornography, complete with facial cum-shot and the ubiquitous flashbulbs of unseen cameras taking snaps. This places it in territory that old guard fetish filmmakers, like Heisenberg, don’t much care for, while at the same time most adult film producers would dare not venture for fear of reprisal and possible prosecution for obscenity. Rob Black and Lizzie Borden of California based Extreme Associates spring foremost to mind in this respect; mainstream adult filmmakers who dared push out the envelope and paid the price. Under their real names Rob Zicari and Janet Romano, Black and Borden were sentenced to one year and one day imprisonment in July 2009, following a six-year legal battle. They were found guilty of violating federal obscenity statutes by distributing films through the mail and online that were judged obscene. Among this material was Forced Entry Director’s Cut (2002), directed by Borden, which featured three graphic scenes of simulated rapes and killings. Indeed, the type of thing that snuff custom filmmakers produce with seeming impunity. But, then again, they have far less of a profile next to Extreme Associates, and often no profile at all, operating in a digital vacuum.

These studios buy into the snuff fetish and milk it for all it’s worth. Sexual Murders III, for instance, credited as a Kinky Love Story production, features a man breaking into a house[29] after he spies a young woman doing housework. The man grabs the woman by the neck and threatens, in a language barely English, “i KILL YOU GIRL!” This he appears to do, before having some fun with the vacuum cleaner hose and performing explicit sexual acts on the limp body. The woman plays dead well, her limbs static and akimbo, while her eyes remain locked open in a dead stare (a requisite of these films).

Sexual Murders III fades to black without a cum-shot, but is not wanting much else.[30] At 24mins 33secs, it also runs a close parallel to most mainstream porno vignettes. It incorporates a variety of sexual acts and positions, as in vanilla porn, while tailoring a few to its own ends: The display the man makes of his lifeless victim, supporting her head by her hair in puppet fashion as he fucks her would not exist outside of this particular niche.

The origins of Sexual Murders III are not known. It may be American, but more likely it is of Russian origin or from somewhere in central Europe, where obscenity laws governing coercion and violence in pornography are evidently less strict than those faced by Black and Borden. Of course, once unleashed on the World Wide Web, it hardly matters anyway. The film is certainly no aberration. The information superhighway has helped transform the cottage community of Necrobabes into an enterprise largely disowned by original players like Heisenberg. He barely recognizes the snuff facsimiles that are presently in vogue, because, ironically, they go too far.

HARDCORE IN THE SEVENTIES

Backtracking, we can see something of this type of material in the hardcore porn loops and features of the seventies, the so-called roughies. These films often featured scenes of rape and abuse, playing on the idea that the participants were far from enjoying themselves; that somewhere along the line they had forfeited all control and were undone by circumstance. Loops featuring BDSM acts were particularly adept at creating this illusion. Often, the loops were untitled and without credits, with the ‘action’ confined to a single room, garage or basement, and filmed with a single camera. In one such film (c.1980s), a woman is abducted and tied to a frame in a basement. The antagonist strips her, hoists her legs into a position that offers maximum exposure of her vagina and proceeds to hammer a wooden shaft into the orifice with the palm of his hand. The woman writhes against her bonds and a looped scream plays on the soundtrack. The stake is removed. Heated pins are goaded through her nipples and the surface-flesh of her breasts. Her skin is pinched with pliers and alligator-clips. She is whipped and finally ‘raped’. Fade to black. In contrast to the flow of fake-looking blood, the pain and performance appears genuine. Another film features a woman naked from the waist down and tied with rope securing her knees at chest height. Bits of a familiar Ennio Morricone film score plays throughout, countered by random sound effects such as gunfire, church bells and a dentist drill. Two men sodomize one another before turning their attention to the bound girl, forcing her to fellate them both while they drop live mice onto her body. A perspex tube is inserted into her vagina and a mouse is encouraged down it with the nudge of a rod, disappearing momentarily inside her body. This bizarre film carries no title as such, but has come to be known as Kilroy Was Here, presumably because this wording appears as graffiti on a wall in the opening scenes.[31] A different film features a bound and sometimes-hooded woman secured to a chair, tormented by a man who does no more than constantly encircle her and walk out of shot. The long-running Slavesex aka Pain series depicts wall-to-wall humiliation and abuse. Believed to emanate around the early eighties, from Holland or perhaps Germany, this was a landmark series for the BDSM community. As one commentator online points out, Slavesex was ‘radically different from anything else on the market at that time.’ This, explains the scribe, is because the films [sic throughout]

had no music but strictly live sound, little or no editing, almost no close-ups but much wider angles; they weren’t shot on movie sets but in what looked like a well equipped dungeon. The people weren’t “actors”, and you could tell right away: which porn actress would be hanged by her tits — and look like she’s into it? The movies obviously showed a dynamic, a relationship, and an action that would probably happen even if the camera wasn’t there. The shooting style was more documentaristic than porno, and it would occasionally zoom in to capture faces, not crotches. The overall package, from the stark boxes to the bare credits and the abrupt ends, smelled like underground…[32]

Slightly less bare-bones and with the semblance of plot is Born to Raise Hell (1976), which revolves around homosexual men. Conceived and directed by Roger Earl, and taking as its inspiration Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), the film opens with the disclaimer that all scenes are performed by professional actors and that the theatre management ‘is not responsible for any psychological effects it may have on you as a viewer’. A group of tattooed, leather-clad guys take their victims (identified as ‘police informants’) and suspend them upside down or tie them across a pool table. They drive studded dildos into their anal passages, which are then fixed in the chuck of a hand-drill and rotated. Steel hose-grips are slipped over cock and balls, then tightened with a screwdriver until the recipient urinates in pain/fear/excitement.

There are many similarly outrageous loops from this time period,[33] including some by Lasse Braun, as described earlier.[34] But as puzzling and revolting as these films may appear to anyone outside of their designated audience, they nonetheless incorporate paid performers; celluloid prostitutes doing their thing for the right amount of financial incentive. Or, in some cases, for kicks. Any physical harm being inflicted has been anticipated by the performers in the same way a boxer will tolerate the consequences of a twelve-round hell-for-leather bout.[35]

EVIL CAMERAMEN

Before becoming a noted photographer of erotica, Richard Kern was an independent filmmaker, whose work, if not dissimilar, was altogether more edgy in tone. He said of his film The Evil Cameraman (1990), “I wanted to make something ‘real’, you know? The Jap girl at the beginning of the film was scared. I didn’t tell her what was going to happen. It was an exercise in power, I guess.”

Out of the New York punk scene in the late seventies emerged a small group of people who would turn their hand, and friends, to the Super 8 camera. Anti-Hollywood, anti-establishment, anti-you, films such as Beth and Scott B.’s Black Box (1978), Eric Mitchell’s Underground USA (1980) and Nick Zodiak’s They Eat Scum (1979), were screened predominantly in small downtown clubs to a select audience. Fuelled by a general lack of acceptance, it was Nick Zedd (aka Nick Zodiac aka Orion Jeriko aka Ernie Birk) who took the standard to create in 1984 a forum via the self published fanzine, the Underground Film Bulletin. ‘Continuity to us is when the film runs through the projector’, read the masthead. Zedd named New York’s new celluloid movement the Cinema of Transgression.

Among the coterie of transgressive filmmakers was Richard Kern. He had made a couple of features in the early eighties, but it was The Right Side of My Brain in 1984 (“the sexual misadventures of a sexually insane girl” starring Lydia Lunch) that landed Kern with the tag of misogynist. A certain outrage was guaranteed to swell audiences wherever Kern played. Alongside Nick Zedd, whose Police State (1987) is brilliant, Kern has provided the Cinema of Transgression with its most outrageous and controversial work. In Submit To Me Now (1987), friends of the director act out their sexual fantasies culminating in scenes of male and female masturbation, self-inflicted mutilation and mock suicide. Pierce (1990) shows a distressed Audrey Rose having her nipples pierced. “Richard!” she sobs into the camera, “They’re hurting me!”

The Evil Cameraman was shot over a period of several years and is pretty much a remodel of Submit To Me Now, but here Kern acts out his own fantasies. It opens to the waif-like Jap Anne being led into shot, unclothed. Bound to a beam, her head covered with a hood, Kern cuts off her knickers and snips at her pubes with a pair of scissors. Elsewhere we see the director trying to humiliate women with little success, and they humiliating him back. Commentators have called Kern’s work degrading and grotesque, and akin to fake snuff, while a screening of The Evil Cameraman at the Ritz, a prestigious club in New York City, was halted after thirty seconds and Kern thrown out when the owner deemed it ‘kiddie porn’.

Kern, Zedd and their contemporaries have been compiled numerous times over the years. One early video compilation The Cinema of Transgression Vol. 1, released by the BFI in 2000, includes Richard Klemann’s lesser known A Suicide (1978), whose focus is an anonymous individual preparing his own demise. The subject trails wires out from the electrical mains to a chair in the middle of his apartment. He tapes the ends of the wire to his bare chest and immerses his feet in a bucket of water. At the far end of the room a camera is ready to capture the moment he throws the switch. A series of still photographs conclude the piece.

Today the Cinema of Transgression is recognized as a legitimate cinematic movement worthy of study in its own right. Helping to generate the initial buzz around the movement were fanzines, fastidiously promoting Zedd, Kern, et al, in articles and interviews. This trade between one DIY aesthetic and another — independent film and independent publishing — is particularly fitting given that the Cinema of Transgression itself sprung from a fanzine. Neither did it stop here. Fanzine culture was to play a significant part in the promotion of death film and fantasy snuff in the years to follow.

GIVE ME ZINES OR GIVE ME DEATH

Donald Farmer’s once excellent film zine, the Splatter Times (the self-proclaimed ‘World’s Most Violent Magazine!’), marked the end of a three-year absence in 1987 with the arrival of an issue eight. Less than a quarter of its former page count, the latest edition proved a tired excuse to run ads for Farmer’s own mail order outfit, Mondo Video. “For complete listing of underground snuff variety and specialized fetish videos,” opined Farmer, “send SAE to Mondo Video.” Ostensibly providing a list of uncut horror movies and trash classics but rarely honouring customer orders, it wasn’t long before small press publications were running editorials charging Mondo Video of fraudulent business practice. In an open letter to Farmer, Rick Sullivan wrote in Gore Gazette (no 103), “The Tennessee Better Business Bureau is after your heiny so straighten up and fly straight — send customers the tapes they ordered…”

Fan publishing goes back a long way, with film and horror being natural bedfellows of the zine scene. In 1988, Midnight Marquee celebrated twenty-five years with a 200-page, perfectbound special anniversary issue. Quite some achievement for what started out as the twelve-page Gore Creatures, selling only twenty copies. A glimpse at the ‘Fanzines of a Lifetime’ listing in this anniversary edition gives some idea of the breadth of horror film zines over the years. Of course, not all titles were successful enough to make two years let alone twenty-five. Many of them remained one-shots. During the 1960s, with the influence of the mainstream magazines Famous Monsters of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein, fanzines devoted primarily to fantasy films boomed. In the early 1980s, a second boom occurred after the emergence of Fangoria. However, as this new phase of small press publishing evolved, coverage of movies broadened to more mordant topics. The classification of ‘fanzine’ seemed suddenly less suited. If these publications were fan-based, what were their readers fans of exactly?

A free newsletter to begin with, Bill Landis’ Sleazoid Express was imbued with an almost suicidal devotion to watching bad movies in bad places (on 42nd Street) and a general irreverence toward practically everything else (the Sleazoid masthead was ‘The largest circulation of anything of its particular type’, with an editorial address that shifted almost every issue). As time went on, the page count increased along with an eclecticism of content. Underage sex fixations of porn director Toby Ross, sex change movies, trashy books, drug-induced conversations with serial killers, and the ireverent question of whether Led Zeppelin are ‘faggots’ are typical of the later issues. Sometime around 1985, during a tenure with collaborator Jimmy McDonough, it looked as if the Landis smack habit had gotten the better of him and he suddenly disappeared in a whirl of speculation. When he resurfaced many years later, he resumed the sporadic publication of Sleazoid Express and even authored a Sleazoid Express book with his wife Michelle Clifford, which was published by Simon and Schuster in 2002. It proves a good indication of how material that was once removed from and even rejected by the mainstream was now assimilated by it.

Landis was sitting through movies of a type that, at the time, few people cared about, but would become acquired viewing years later. Moreover he was writing about them. ‘Oddity of the Week’ in his debut issue was the mondo title Let Me Die a Woman. By the second issue, Landis was announcing the first of the Sleazoid Express parties, in which ‘The legendary, infrequently shown bad taste classic Mondo Cane will be featured… I’ll be there as DJ, and to introduce the film and answer questions’.

A good number of mondo films were reviewed on their first US run, amid excitable crowds quite often baying for blood. Savage Man… Savage Beast had a special marquee at 42nd Street’s Liberty Theatre. But, wrote Landis, the movie proved a huge disappointment. “The only real and revolting footage here found its way into the trailer.” Of the Dead on the other hand was “powerful, disturbing, stomach turning.” Unfortunately it was “without a distributor and limited to a Museum of Modern Art showing.”

The Sleazoid Express legacy continued through other movie zines, including Gore Gazette, Trash Compactor, Psychotronic Video, Shock Cinema, Killbaby, Film Threat, Draculina, Cinema Sewer and DOA (Dead On Arrival). Here, attitude and a good rant quite often took precedence over the movies. For publications such as Subhuman, Murder Can Be Fun, Headpress, Mansplat, Bizarrism, Panik,[36] ANSWER Me!, movies were never a major concern, replaced instead by an askance meditation on life in general. These zines were predisposed to articles about serial killers, strange behaviour, disasters, sex and death. ‘Mondo magazines’ would be a fitting classification. A motorcycle accident that results in an amputated leg for the narrator is recalled in the second issue of Hungry Freaks. This Oakland California based zine also features pieces on black power politics, jazz musician Charles Mingus, filmmaker Jack Hill, Mexican wrestling and rockabilly.[37] Out of Allston, Massachusetts, the second volume of Version 90 (c.1990) may be perfectbound and some 165 pages, but it’s a similarly disarming aesthetic under the covers. Subtitled ‘Death Static & Interference,’ this edition features an interview with Michael Lesy, a piece on Joe Coleman, prose, reviews, ads, and pictures of dead babies.

Of the titles noted above only a small handful remain in print, albeit operating to the eclectic schedule of the small press, where years can separate issues. Others, such as Film Threat and Murder Can Be Fun, have retired online.[38] The rest are gone, and for the most part so too is the zine as a creative force and barometer of taste and antisocial mores. It is replaced somewhat by the ubiquitous Internet blog, altogether more sterile and easy.[39] The small press was the unsullied voice of underground communication. To be a part of it, a concerted effort was required from all parties — consumers, contributors and publishers alike. After all, production wasn’t cheap and very few zines could be found in the local store, or any store for that matter. It helped create a network in which most anything could happen and often it did for no discernable reason.

Hugh Gallagher, editor of Draculina, was once asked to comment on a certain faction of his readership. Notably the nut jobs.[40] Said Gallagher:

I’ve gotten a lot of strange letters over the years, people telling me who their favorite mass murderers were. One guy told me he used to be a hitman in Chicago, was involved in a satanic cult that sacrificed teenage girls and was involved in the making of three snuff films. One time he sent me photos of girls getting shot in the breasts with various kinds of guns, which I sent back and told him I wasn’t interested in that kind of stuff. I’d never seen anything like them before. After establishing his address with me, he never put a return address anywhere on his letters and used to write stuff like “I love animals and would never hurt any, but I love to hunt…” He was also involved in a lot of sexual things; he told me anything I wanted to see on video tape, just tell him and he’d get it for me. He quit writing all at once.

Perhaps the most outrageous zine was Fuck.[41] It contained misanthropic articles by editor-publisher Dr Randall Phillip that were borderline psychotic. A review of Fuck in Headpress Guide to the Counterculture describes the publication as deliberately setting out to be vile and disorientating. ‘You’re not supposed to like it or agree with it,’ writes David Kerekes. ‘Fuck exists to antagonise you. It parades death images, disfigured children and photos of abuse victims like pin-ups, and intersperses them with cut and paste genitalia and stupid comments. The text consists of expletives and vitriolic rants.’ The cover art alone makes the Mexican crime tabloids look like a model of understatement.

One article in Fuck[42] tells of a box containing child pornography being discovered outside a sex shop. It ends on a suggestion that author Randall Phillip kills a child on his way home as a consequence of viewing this material. Another article (in Fuck No 7) is allegedly written by a woman living in the Midwest, who sings the praise of pornography, prostitution, rape and murder. (Much the same as Phillip does.) Women in Bosnia who are raped eight or nine times a day are said to be ‘lucky sluts’ compared to the ‘whores’ in the US who only get raped three or four times a day. ‘Understand that humiliation and pain are beautiful for women to feel,’ the anonymous author writes, before then lambasting the ‘phoney dogooders of the mass media’ for arguing to the contrary. Recounting her own history of abuse from ages four to sixteen, she posits that snuff movies — ‘where bitches are actually murdered’ — are real:

I have seen them being made. I have seen men spit on women’s bodies, and ejaculate on their faces. I have seen men orgasm as women were murdered. I have seen men strip the skin from a woman’s head and gangrape her skull after filming her death. Sometimes I even gangrape myself in my sleep.

Fuck made it as far as at least issue eighteen, published in 2000, which is comparatively late in the day for this type of thing.[43] Phillip had already funnelled some of his concerns into a short VHS compilation he called Terror Tape (c.1995). This comprises vignettes of Phillip up to no good: Advocating death at a pro-life rally, ranting at a pregnant porn actress, and hosting a puppet show with what appears to be a mummified foetus. “It’s a sick, sad, wretched byproduct of free speech in a free country,” one commentator said of it.[44]

If Fuck was late in the day, it’s hard to know where to place The Meat Socket: Ordeal IV. This multimedia CD-ROM, which shipped out of Ontario, Canada, may well have been one of a kind. Dated 2005, the content is in keeping with the zines discussed in this chapter (extreme music, faux snuff, etc) ehanced by audio visual clips. So, while not quite a zine, it’s not yet a blog, either. The disc fires up with a short ‘humorous’ film in which the Meat Socket editors kill a female job applicant and dispose of her body in the basement.

BARRAGE TAPES

The most graphic unaltered autopsy footage we could get our hands on! SLIT SLIT SLIT! Two recently deceased members of our Armed Forces (circa 1960) are the subjects… brains exposed, testicles sliced and diced, livers pinched, hearts punctured, and more! The color of the footage is slightly faded in that “high school educational film” sort-of-way, so it is especially disgusting… BON APETIT!!! #0180 $25

In the book Amok Fourth Dispatch,[45] in a section on forensics, the blurb above advertises a US army training film called Basic Autopsy Procedure. Amok Fourth Dispatch served as a mail order catalogue for Amok, a radical LA bookshop and publishing house run by Brian King and Stuart Swezey. Published in 1990, the whopping 370 page compendium touted itself as a sourcebook for the extremes of information in print, and was cognisant of the darkening cultural climate and its own place in it. Amok Fourth Dispatch can be seen as an extension of other voluminous and influential sourcebooks, such as the Whole Earth Catalog and those put out by Loompanics. Amok also created The Amok Assault Video (1989), a barrage of incendiary and plain dumb footage culled from many sources. It is a mash up of clips featuring slumming television stars, bizarre religious propaganda, R. Budd Dwyer’s final moments, a pit bull attack, and more in a package designed to shock and outrage. An advertisement for Assault Video describes it as

the beachhead for an infestation of the raw, the cruel, the explicit, the crass, and the surreal in the form of an explosive forty-five minute video cut-up. Compiled and assembled for maximum viewer trauma by Amok, Assault Video is available in half-inch VHS video format. #0088 $15 [46]

Together with Cathode Fuck (1986) and TV Sphincter (1987), two compilations created and sold by Film Threat magazine, Assault Video[47] is widely credited as having spawned the phenomenon of the video mixtape, sometimes referred to as a barrage tape. A seemingly random collection of clips, the manufacture of mixtapes relied on access to two VCRs or more, and a stockpile of videocassettes of dubious origin. Among the first to follow was Video Macumba (1991), which is rumoured to have been assembled by Faith No More front man Mike Patton for close friends.[48] It opens with a montage of death clips, including the lamentable sight of a drowned baby being scooped from a private swimming pool by paramedics. Other early entries include Video Screams (19??) and Videoscramble 1 (1988). The creation and marketing of mixtapes (such as it is) echoes the work and exploitation mindset of the original mondo filmmakers. This is evident in Amok’s promotion of their own Assault Video, quoted above. Unlike the mondo filmmakers, however, video mixtapes are made outside of censorship constraints, with little in the way of moral or legal consideration. What’s more, they are usually circulated free of charge. In terms of content, effectively anything goes.

The critic and filmmaker Andy Copp followed closely the evolution of video mixtapes.[49] He is also responsible for contributing a number of entries of his own to the oeuvre, including the notorious The Sickest Tape on Earth (2001). Not proud of his creation, claiming not to have seen it in six or seven years, Copp nevertheless agreed to speak with the authors about it and about video mixtapes in general.[50]

Almost two hours duration, The Sickest Video on Earth is a suitably eclectic mix of clips that run from obscure music performance to serial killers to motor sport calamities. There is no narrative thread: GG Allin in concert, worms and shit from Squirmfest, Jeffrey Dahmer in the courtroom, tragedy on the set of Twilight Zone The Movie, John Wayne Bobbitt and Ron Jeremy in the x-rated Frankenpenis (1996), Tupac Shakur’s autopsy photograph, roadkill, a penis nailed to a table, and so on.

Copp said that the tape had been inspired by “hanging around fellow deviant horror and apocalypse culture fanatics.” Indeed, the idea was “a dare. A friend of mine had a mixtape from someone he knew in an industrial band and was always claiming it was the most upsetting, disgusting thing around. So I took it upon myself to make something that would make that one look like child’s play. And I did. Format-wise they were the same, hardcore disturbing music videos surrounded by just sick footage. A lot of it mondo/death stuff.”

Copp defined the video mixtape as “short attention span theatre,” being “an assemblage of various pieces of video, sometimes from movies, or television. Other stuff is home-made but it is all cut up and placed together into a new, usually humorous context. They try to gross out or shock the viewer, or the best ones just amaze them with weird shit they have never seen before.”

In his own mixtape endeavours, sourcing the material was easy. Copp admitted to having collected underground videos for years. “I have probably 7,000 movies, laserdiscs and DVDs of all kinds. But a lot of it is stuff I have traded with people over the years that would fall into the very hard to find pile. People trade fucked up shit. I got a stack of fifteen DVDs of genital body modification videos once. Or just tours of morgues in South America. There is a lot of unsavoury shit out there. So it was not a big deal to have the footage I used for that tape. A lot came from mondo movies as I recall. There are two cuts of it [Sickest Tape on Earth] running around: One with and one without a significant clip from the Ohio made underground gay biker porno The Anal Birth of Bert.”[51]

In the case of The Sickest Video on Earth, Copp didn’t apply any criteria to its assembly, outside of “just trying to be really fucking offensive. Basically it was nasty shit, music video, nasty shit, music video.”

Asked about his other creations — which, he said, number many — Copp offered further insight into the mixtape trend and its beginnings: “I started doing it as a gag for friends’ birthdays and Christmas, which turned into a huge thing as all my friends did it, too. It was our own secret video cabal. But I also did it for public access television with two different ‘cut-up’ or ‘mixtape’ TV shows, not unlike what the Smile Orange guys are doing now.[52] This was 1997/98 that I started the TV stuff: One called Psychotic Feed and a couple years later one called Pirate TV. Pirate TV is up to sixty-five episodes and still airs today. I traded mixtapes like crazy all those years.”

Distribution of mixtapes was for the most part a nonprofit exercise with only the occasional sale. Effectively, your tape got someone else’s tape. Later, these tapes would turn up on video trading lists. For Copp, business, such as it was, took place through a website he maintained. “These tapes are then copied and traded — it started on VHS and people physically mailed copies to each other like mail art. But once bittorrent technology was widespread, that became the main way people got material. That blew the doors wide open and anyone could make and distribute professional-looking mixtapes just using video capture cards and their computer.”

While one may argue its heyday ended with the demise of the videocassette, the video mixtape is far from dead. Some recent noteworthy examples, in Copp’s opinion, include “Retard-O-Tron from Cinema Sewer, which is mostly weird porn and obscure movie clips. Skeleton Farm Productions does a new one now and again. The Crazy Dave Tape is the most intricately edited of all of them, to the point it becomes transcendent of the material. Those are like someone’s acid dream. But if you follow enough bittorrent sites it seems new ones pop up now and again.”[53]

The inevitable question: What is the most disturbing mixtape you have seen and why?

“The Sickest Tape On Earth remains at the top of most people’s list,” replied Copp. “There is a lot of death footage and some stuff of that nature that is just really unpleasant and hard to watch. But there was a movement with a lot of the mixtapes a few years ago to include bestiality footage and scat/shit porn that got really tiresome, really fast. There was one I only saw part of called The Mongoloid Tapes that had a long section of a couple of redneck teens in their garage torturing and ultimately cutting off the head of a pig with a chainsaw. All real, and all very illegal if the right people ever saw the footage. I saw that clip and got rid of the piece of trash. And actually that was sort of the end of my fascination with mixtapes, too, because it has hit an all-time low.

“I made Sickest Tape On Earth in 2001 and it still crops up online. It made a mark, but I am far from proud of it. I made it as a dare for a friend and let it get loose into the world. I can’t really even look at it now as I am far removed from that place. I can’t deny I made it, but ultimately kind of wish I hadn’t. There is a wanton disregard for humanity on there that I have outgrown and don’t feel is entertaining anymore.”

The video mixtape can be viewed as a gateway to more commercial minded product. We can see its spirit in moneymaking endeavours such as Banned from Television, raw video compilations without narrative cohesion that depict humankind at its most base and stupid. The Banned from Television series was borne of material considered too violent and risqué to air on Real TV, a syndicated show from Paramount comprising amateur footage and human interest stories. The brains behind Banned from Television was Joe Francis, who would later found the lucrative Girls Gone Wild entertainment brand. This, too, utilized a street level amateur video aesthetic, but the pitch was sex: The crew would turn up at party locations and film girls taking off their clothes and partaking in lewd acts for the camera. Francis made his fortune selling Girls Gone Wild via late-night infomercials. The cable access connection, as Andy Copp describes above, is therefore interesting and apt. It is the point at which the frugal methodology behind the original barrage tapes sniffs big business.

LE DÉSESPOIR DE LA MUSIQUE

In 1982, the band SPK released their ‘music’ video, Despair. It found a cult audience beyond the band’s own fan circuit when referenced in the book Incredibly Strange Films. Frank Henenlotter, director of cult classic Basket Case (1982), was quoted in the book, “When I saw the video [Despair] I thought, ‘What a fabulous thing; what a strange way of using music. Who would make a music video to such horror — with actual severed heads…’” It is no coincidence that hereafter SPK’s Despair became a much sought-after item on the video underground, where film, music and zine cultures were gravitating toward a new cultural consciousness, one far more cynical than its counterpart in the sixties.

Despair consists of sixty minutes of screeching, heavily distorted guitars, electronics, and various tape and vocal effects. The graphics mutate from lines running up and down the screen to random images, such as a sex shop and an autopsy. The soundtrack drives onward relentlessly. The mutilation of a dead cat (its eye gouged out and its tongue sliced off) and the unspooling of intestines from a cadaver’s gaping abdominal cavity are intercut with footage of SPK performing live. The frontman — in bondage mask and swastika armband — bites meat from a rancid horse head. Slides of death camps, brain surgery, foetal deformities and pathological specimens take the video to its conclusion and infamous mortuary footage: An individual, seen only as a pair of industrial-gloved hands, manoeuvres a detached head to perform clumsy fellatio on a penis belonging to a corpse. The head is then replaced by a skeletal hand, woven with strings of yellowed tendon, which is used to simulate masturbation of the grey member.

Hailing from Australia, SPK were one of the first wave of industrial noise groups. Throbbing Gristle’s label, Industrial Records, put out an EP of theirs (one track, Slogan, also appears on Despair) and rumour had it that band members consisted of ex-insane asylum inmates.[54] The source for several autopsy images in Despair is a twenty-minute professionally shot document of a pathologist demonstrating human postmortem procedure. The autopsy was released independently on video in 1983 as Two Autopsy Films: Human Postmortem. Split into two parts, the first half of the tape shows the autopsy accompanied by an SPK soundtrack and cheap optical effects, while the second is the straight autopsy with the original instructional monologue playing over it.[55] These videotapes would have been available mail order and at concerts, but were not widely distributed. There was conjecture that SPK had initially denied responsibility for the films, but contemporary interviews with band members do not support this claim. Any secret about their involvement was finally quashed with the 2008 DVD release of SPK’s Despair (Digitally Extracted), which contains Despair and Human Postmortem (albeit in different forms), and extra materials.

SPK co-founder Tone Generator aka CaTV is credited with the visual identity of the band during its formative years. In a recent interview for Despair (Digitally Extracted), he states that SPK wasn’t simply about industrial noise but was rather an attempt to “create an alternative aesthetic, a different way of thinking, trying to use the schizophrenic way of thinking to create something new.” (This echoes the challenge against conventional psychiatry exemplified by R.D. Laing.) The idea behind SPK was to create something that couldn’t be readily commercialized, which appears to have led to friction within the band and Tone Generator’s departure.

Graeme Revell is another founding member of SPK. He led the band in a more commercial direction and has since become a composer of Hollywood film soundtracks. In an interview conducted in 1983 for the zine Music from the Empty Quarter,[56] Revell talks about the death imagery with which the band had become associated. He also plays to the interviewer a videotape comprising atrocity footage and very likely the material that is discussed above. The interviewer, an individual called Naked, says at one point he feels like laughing because in a way the material doesn’t seem real. Responds Revell:

It’s an obvious reaction. In a sense it’s stupid because a lot of the things we are showing are things that science does. Science tends to have some claims of truth, science claims ‘this is fact’, whereas rituals are now looked upon as some sort of quaint thing that people did when they really didn’t know what they were doing. A lot of the images in the video, like heads in bottles with bits carved off and names signed on babies foreheads, collecting bizarre things and hacking up bodies in autopsy when there’s no reason to do so is patently stupid. In five years time we’ll look back and say ‘My god, what a stupid thing to do’, but now society will defend these practices and it’s no different from a ritual state of society. In fact, society has taken a backward step. There used to be no definition between a physical occurrence and a psychological one and magic. Imagine if I was a witchdoctor and you’re the person I’m trying to put the cure on. You’ll believe me and the cure will really happen to you physically.

Plenty of other musicians have found kinship in extreme visuals. Hijohkaidan, a Japanese performance art and noise group, produced a video compilation of studio sessions and live performances called Live and Confused (1988), which features yet more autopsy footage. Stefan Jaworzyn writes in Shock Xpress 1 that “this autopsy footage is actually different (for one it’s Japanese) and contains an edit which provides a genuine shock — a cut from some solarised porn to a nude girl of almost the same build as the porno starlet being opened up.”

Flipping from one visual grotesque to another, we might consider Despair and Live and Confused are ultimately self defeating as conceptual works. The imagery is repellent but arguably no more profound than music videos playing everyday on television, where noise often runs secondary to the accompanying visuals; a catchy signature that hopefully consumers will remember. Certainly, MTV isn’t adverse to genuine atrocity footage, per the screening of Sacrifice by Motörhead, a music video that sees the band performing against a backdrop of genuine war dead footage and mutilation scenes (with scantily clad dancing girls thrown in for good measure). Perhaps the music is redundant, given that an element of the audience for, say, SPK and Hijohkaidan won’t be interested in the bands themselves. This appeared to be the case in Britain in the early nineties, when the clampdown on so-called ‘video nasties’ created the market for rare films on videocassette.[57] Despair and Human Postmortem were on lists of horror and porno titles circulated among collectors.

Nico B, who founded Cult Video mail order in Amsterdam, later to become a store and label, recalls manufacturing a music video for experimental band Sixth Comm. He told the authors of his guerrilla approach. “Me and my friends used to add some crazy stuff at the end of commercial VHS releases in the eighties, to mess with people minds. I don’t remember much of what we tagged, but one I do was a video I made for a song by Sixth Comm, with edited footage of Mondo Cane, Faces of Death, and so on. We tagged it onto the movies we would rent out. When I showed it to [musician] Patrick O’Kill years later, he said I was almost as sick as he. Wish I still had it.”[58]

In terms of shock-rock imagery, the Monkees beat everyone to it. Monkeemania was in deep decline when Head (1968) was made, the band’s one and only feature film. Manufactured for television in the mid sixties, The Monkees became international stars, but constantly sought to ditch their teenybopper appeal and find acceptance as serious musicians. The darkly surreal Head was their swansong, its cynicism far removed from the slapstick and empty sentiment of the television show. At one point, footage of the band in concert (performing Circle Sky) is intercut with film of Vietnam War atrocities, including the bullet to the head execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém. In his essay on the film, Peter Mills observes that the Vietnam War footage was contemporaneous and may well have been taken from that evening’s news. (He also points out that Van Lem is felled to the lyric “but what you have seen you must believe, if you can.”)[59] The concert audience is shown ecstatically cheering the band and, by association, the casualties of war.[60]

Nine Inch Nails aka NIN have something of a penchant for controversial music videos that get banned. The music video for their track Happiness In Slavery, starring performance artist and “supermasochist” Bob Flanagan, toys with ideas of snuff,[61] while Broken Movie (1993), a promotional film for the EP Broken, is said to utilize footage from a snuff film itself. This belief is widespread enough to have found its own epithet: “NIN-Snuff”. (A Nine Inch Nails tribute album from 2002 bears the title, Soundtracks from Snuff Films.[62]) Broken Movie has never seen an official commercial release, but word of mouth and the availability of low quality dupes on the Nine Inch Nails fan circuit have generated the requisite buzz. Broken Movie compiles music videos for a number of tracks[63] and loosely links them together with images of dismemberment, cannibalism, and a young man being tortured while forced to watch NIN music videos. It is this linking material that has led to rumours of snuff content. Rapid-fire editing and transmission glitches feed the idea that it is ‘real,’ while the devolution of the earlier analogue bootlegs through repeated copying served to make the images more potent.

Opinions differ on why Broken Movie has never been commercially available. The graphic nature of the film is cited as one possible reason. A less likely suggestion is that NIN frontman Trent Reznor is bound by law not to release it, having been arrested for the murder it supposedly depicts.[64] Broken Movie is presently circulating the Internet in a superior digital format supposedly drawn from master tapes. Whoever leaked the film was evidently someone close to it, possibly Reznor himself, who has given reason enough to fear the film. In a post on his website, he wrote:

we didn’t know it would look so real. at the time, we felt releasing it would cause an uproar of attention that would overshadow what i was trying to do musically.[65]

Indeed. Why damage its notoriety with an official release now?

Army Medicine in Vietnam (1970) is a military training film that archivist Jack Stevenson didn’t want to see misappropriated by musicians. Stevenson helped track down a print of the film in 1990 for screening as part of his touring road show across the US and Europe. He also made a copy and sent it to the Werkstattkino, an off circuit cinema based in Munich, renowned for its unconventional film programming. Army Medicine in Vietnam contains graphic and disturbing scenes of surgical procedure in the field of war. Acquiring a certain notoriety, Stevenson began to receive requests to screen the film at concerts, but he considered it much too important a film for that. He told Shock Xpress 1 that Army Medicine in Vietnam was “a political act” that needed to be “seen intact, unto itself,” adding that while he had “been asked to show it as a backdrop for bands I utterly refuse to ever do so as I don’t wish to see it rendered into an industrial band video backdrop decoration à la Butthole Surfers.”[66]

Pain Killer, a band showcasing heavy and avant garde musical disciplines, used an autopsy photograph as the sleeve of their 1991 debut album Guts of a Virgin. The subject is a pregnant woman whose foetus is on open display, an image that proved too much for HM Customs, who seized a consignment of the album on its way to Nottinghambased Earache records. As a result, Guts of a Virgin was dressed differently for its UK release, with a close-up of the face of the corpse and an explanatory note pertaining to the original artwork and its absence.

Back to the sixties: Use of death related imagery on an album sleeve can be traced to the Beatles, who appeared in white aprons on the 1966 Capitol album Yesterday and Today, covered with raw meat and dismembered dolls. The surreal ‘butcher’ sleeve, as it became known,[67] made it into print but was quickly pulled and replaced by something more wholesome. While the Beatles may be the forebears of death image record sleeves, generally it is the reserve of more aggressive musical forms. The 1971 eponymous debut album by rock band Dust, has for a sleeve the portrait of three mummified corpses. The Japanese industrial outfit Dissecting Table utilized murder and autopsy photos on the sleeves of their early releases — including that of the anonymous female with exposed foetus, appropriated by Pain Killer. She appears on a Dissecting Table seven-inch EP from 1986 entitled Ultimate Psychological Description, in the company of a decapitated head, dismembered limbs in a trunk, and a heavily mutilated victim of sex murder. Another Japanese band, Corrupted, did much the same when they packaged their early records with attention-grabbing graphics from lurid Mexican tabloids.

Metal, industrial and power electronic acts with limited and marginal presence freely dress their releases in a manner indicative of the ideas and attitude of the music itself. This might be a frugal photocopied sleeve depicting, say, death by a thousand cuts (per Inhuman Torment, a split CD by Steel Hook Prostheses and Mörkermännen, 2006), or a lavish collector box that includes sex toys and booklet containing thumbnail images of questionable paraphiliae (per USA — The United States of China by Brandkommando, 2009). The glorification of murder and torture is a staple of the genre, writes historian Jennifer Wallis, which often extends to “painstaking album artwork and presentation.” She adds: “With extreme sounds requiring extreme subject matter, albums often appear to be catalogues of abuse, violent hatred and medical experimentation.”[68]

Wallis has also made a point about how types of imagery differ, bands from different parts of the world adopting visuals pertinent to their own culture and taboos. European bands, for instance, might use images of children, sexual paraphilia and serial killers. We see this in the early work of British power electronics pioneers Whitehouse, closely associated with the cute-child horror artwork of Trevor Brown, and also notorious serial killers. On the other hand, bands from Japan tend to focus on the body in extremis, while in Eastern Europe it is war imagery. (It should be noted that some artists claim not to have a say in the matter of record sleeves, that the choice is with the record companies.)

Whitehouse feature on the musical soundtrack to Borja Crespo’s short film Snuff 2000 (2002), which is adapted by Miguel Ángel Martín from his own blackly humorous comic strip. In the film, two men in (pink) gimp outfits talk about the snuff film they are engaged to make, all the while observed by the intended victim, a bound and gagged pregnant woman. No physical violence is shown, but their description of what they propose to do becomes more extreme. Then they start chatting about what they wouldn’t like to do, which of course is equally as extreme a conversation.[69] It’s a nice, tight satire. The Whitehouse soundtrack is apt. The closest that noise comes to celebritydom, Whitehouse have always promoted violent and extreme imagery in their work, remaining at once wholly conscious of its place and impact. For a time they had a predilection for the serial killer Peter Kürten. His picture adorns more than one early Whitehouse release, as well as the album in his name, Dedicated to Peter Kurten Sadist and Mass Murderer (1981). In turn, the Whitehouse album Right To Kill (1983) is dedicated to Denis Andrew Nilsen, and its track The Street Cleaner is credited to Peter Sutcliffe.[70]

Asked his opinion about extreme music and its connection with Snuff 2000, and that of the snuff enigma in general, Miguel Ángel Martín told the authors: “William Bennett [Whitehouse founder and front man] was one day at the set while shooting the film. William let us kindly use some tracks on the film. I don’t know if extreme electronic music has influenced the snuff movie myth. I can say that it has been a great influence on me. Most stories in my first book, Psychopathia Sexualis — the English version of which is translated by William Bennett — are inspired by Whitehouse tracks.”[71]

BODY-ART AND PERFORMANCE

GG Allin was no stranger to controversy. He cradles a limbless body on the sleeve of his 1993 album, Brutality and Bloodshed for All, and toured the US with his band the Murder Junkies, billing himself “the sickest, most decadent rocker of all time.” Johnny Thunders type riffs with lyrics about rape, masturbation and bestiality, Allin, in concert, engaged in acts of self-mutilation and debasement. He would take a shit onstage, gobble it up, spit it out and swing punches at whatever was left of the audience. He was arrested an estimated fifty-two times and imprisoned for slicing a groupie’s breasts. Allin said on occasion he would commit suicide in front of a live audience. He never made good on the threat and died alone of a drug overdose on June 28, 1993.[72]

Sometimes, in a paroxysm of contempt for the audience (which is fairly shockproof by now, but likes to be titillated), it tries to achieve catharsis through an overload of disgust… The problem with such blood-and-guts spectacles, as anyone who has seen one can attest, is that the promised catharsis never happens.[73]

So writes art critic Robert Hughes in the book based on his BBCTV series, The Shock of the New. It could be a comment on Despair, Live and Confused, or any one of GG Allin’s shows. But Hughes is referring specifically to body-art and live art action. That he doesn’t much care for such things is manifest in the fact subsequent editions of the book are without the damning passage above. Gone too are images and references to the granddaddy of the blood and guts spectacle, Hermann Nitsch, who seems to have had a particularly de-energizing effect on the author. Indeed, photographs of Nitsch’s work resemble more the butchery of Jack the Ripper than any traditional notions of art. Nitsch conceived the Orgies & Mysteries Theatre in Vienna in 1957. Performing before an often bemused audience, Nitsch might on any day pour blood and egg yolks over the genitals of a young man or woman, lacerate raw meat, and disembowel slaughtered animals before trampling their entrails. His troupe then poured the muck over one another, for an event lasting several hours. Arrested for his work more than once in more than one country, Nitsch baited authorities with a statement of intent prior to each show (a detail that separates body-art from musical performance). A typical forewarning:

On 4 June 1962, I shall disembowel, tear and pull to pieces a dead lamb. This is a manifest action (an ‘aesthetic’ substitute for a sacrificial act), the sense and necessity of which will become clear after a study of the theory of the OM Theatre project.

Through my artistic production (a form of the mysticism of being), I take upon myself the apparently negative, unsavoury, perverse, obscene, the passion and the hysteria of the act of sacrifice so that you ARE spared the sullying, shaming, descent into the extreme.[74]

The OM Theatre was the culmination of a number of elements in postwar Viennese art: The action/destruction photographs of Arnulf Rainer (an artist in search of ‘antisocial inner structures, to discover the sub-human in me’),[75] as well as neo-Dada sound-poems and action-pieces by H G Artmann, Gerhardt Ruhm, and others. Filmmaker Kurt Kren, an integral part of the Vienna Group’s activities, made in 1967 Reel III 16/67, a creative documentation of the Destruction in Art performances of Günter Brus and Otto Mühl. In these performances, use of the body’s ‘lower functions’ are central to the idea of forcing the boundaries of art. (Reel III 16/67 is also commonly known as The Eating, Drinking, Pissing & Shitting Film.) Performances by Günter Brus often entailed defacation, self-mutilation and coprophagy. The title of Otto Mühl’s event in Cologne in 1969 was The Death of Sharon Tate. Described by Amos Vogel as possibly “the most scandalous filmmaker working in cinema today,”[76] Mühl’s films are based on his notorious ‘Materialaktionen’, live happenings involving real acts of sexual violence and defilement. In Sodoma, the most famous of his films, the action entails copulation, fellatio, masturbation, urination, the tying up of participants (mainly women), the insertion of various fluids or objects into vaginas, pumps attached to penises, and coprophilia.

The death image is used as live spectacle in the work of other artists, too. Robert Delford Brown staged a Meat Show in New York City in 1964. It took place in a cold storage locker, where a mirror-ball bathed the place in light and perfume was doused everywhere. The public, ushered in wearing white coats, wandered through chambers containing the heads of pigs, cows’ livers, hearts, and other animal parts. Other actions include Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964), an intermingling of semi-nudity with blood, dead chickens and fish. Chris Burden was shot in the arm for art in 1971. Sailor’s Meat (1975) is film of artist Paul McCarthy in drag, fucking raw meat with a hotdog sausage hanging out his arse. Joe Coleman bit the heads off live rats and threatened his New York City Kitchen audience with a shotgun in 1981. The work of leading British contemporary artist Damien Hirst often deals with death. Hirst achieved notoriety with Mother and Child, Divided in 1993, a work consisting of a cow and calf cut down the middle and preserved in formaldehyde. The parts were exhibited in Perspex cabinets, allowing the audience to walk ‘through’ the animals and survey the internal organs. For its exhibition Forensics: The anatomy of crime in 2015, London’s Wellcome Collection commissioned a multimedia installation by šejla Kamerić, Ab uno disce omnes, which drew on the troubled legacy of the artist’s native Bosnia. In a miniature morgue in freezing conditions, clips and files drawn at random from a vast database were projected onto a wall, of people searching for and trying to identify the dead in the aftermath of war. With over eighty-five hours of material, it was not possible to witness more than a fraction of the material, nor did the environment comfortably allow it.

There exists film of lesser known confrontational art and performances by lesser known or completely forgotten performers. One of these is a sheep carcass being mutilated and gutted in an open field by a person who then bathes naked in the offal. Another film shows people in a nightclub throwing themselves in turn, from a chair, chest-first onto a wooden floor. A small crowd applauds each slam. It isn’t known where these two particular films originated. In this instance they were simply used as ‘filler’ and tagged onto the end of a VHS tape, sometime in the early 1990s, landing eventually in the hands of your authors.[77]

THE GUINEA PIG SERIES

The black market distribution of films in this manner was common before YouTube and bittorrent downloads. Obscure and desirable films could be purchased mail order, or traded freely on videocassette among friends and collectors. Favoured content comprised cult films, sleaze and horror. Quality was invariably poor, no small thanks to a master tape several generations removed. But two bleached and blurry movies would often sit comfortably on a three-hour videocassette, leaving room for a little ‘filler,’ which might consist of random fan compiled film clips, trailers, or something suitably esoteric. One such proto mixtape, containing a bootleg of a short film called Flower of Flesh and Blood, became the celebrity epicentre of an international investigation into snuff films.

In the early months of 1991, actor Charlie Sheen and friend found themselves in possession of a film of Asian origin rumoured to contain actual snuff footage. Sceptical, the two men played the videocassette expecting to dash the rumour but instead were horrified by the material it contained: A murder, which they felt unable to dismiss as acting or special effects. They contacted the MPAA and the videocassette was then handed to the FBI. Agent Dan Codling informed the men the film was already being investigated by both FBI and the Japanese police. The case was eventually dropped.

Flower of Flesh and Blood, the film in question, hails from Japan and is part of a series of short films known collectively as Guinea Pig. The film opens with the pursuit of a girl through a modern Japanese city at night. Upon her capture, the location switches to a small room, where, tied to a bed, the girl is drugged and systematically mutilated by a man wearing the garb of a samurai warrior. He waxes lyrical as he goes about his bloody task. When the girl is dead, the cycle appears to start over again with the pursuit of another potential victim.

The violence is brutal and shocking. The dazed and delirious victim is first stabbed, then one hand is removed (a hammer and chisel are utilized when knife proves ineffective) and a leg sawn off before finally she is disembowelled and has her head hacked off.

Commenting in Dreadful Pleasures (no 1), Mike Accomando says of Flower of Flesh and Blood: ‘The special effects are really good. Almost too good… A few scenes left my stomach feeling like a broken Slinky.’ In Britain, a copy seized by customs made national headlines when it was considered a genuine snuff film.[78]

The Guinea Pig series totals six, seven or perhaps eight films of varying length. Some contention has arisen as to the actual episodes that make up the series and the order in which they run. The English titles are literal, often conflicting, translations, while films are handled by different directors and the series itself more than one production company. The following filmography is thought to be accurate:

Devil’s Experiment (1985)

Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985)

He Never Dies (1986)

Making of Guinea Pig (1986; the making of episodes one, two and three; in other words, the series to date)

(Live) Mermaid in a Manhole (1988)

Android of Notre Dame (1988)

Devil Woman Doctor (1990)

Making of Devil Woman Doctor (1990)

Slaughter Special (1991; highlights from the entire series)

Each film is a self contained story. Most can be described as horror, while one is a comedy, and another, Mermaid in a Manhole, appears ill disposed to genre pigeonholing. Both this episode and Flower of Flesh and Blood are directed by Hideshi Hino, about whom more later.

Flower of Flesh and Blood follows all the motifs of what we have come to expect a snuff film would look like. Apart from the opening and closing shots the setting is confined to one small room, the victim is bound and helpless, and it looks cheap. What’s more, given the modes of underground distribution in the eighties, most copies of Guinea Pig were relegated to third, fourth, even fifth generation video copies — meaning the quality was invariably poor and by extension more ‘dangerous.’ However, clearly the film is not ‘real.’ It has credits for one thing. There is no nakedness, no depiction of breasts or genitalia. When the killer is removing the woman’s undergarments the film fades out, returning when her body has been covered with a sheet. This may oblige the Japanese censorship law, but is an unexpected courtesy on the part of any supposed snuff film maker. Despite the carnage, the drape never slips from the victim. When finally it is cast aside so the killer may work on the torso, a convenient spill of intestine cloaks the offending pubic bush. On top of this are cinematic flourishes, tracking shots and audio effects. The opening and closing sequences are seen from the killer’s point of view, while the rest of the film is shot objectively for the most part. The introduction to the killer — for both victim and audience — is by way of the rasping sound of a knife being sharpened in the corner of the room. Later, engaged in the act of dismemberment, the samurai-garbed protagonist becomes increasingly excited and shares with us his ideas about art and the Japanese way. He props the decapitated head of his victim up on the bed and enucleates an eyeball with a dinner spoon, sucking on it cross-eyed with delight. In a post-coitus cliché he smokes a cigarette and the camera then leaves to pan round the room while he sings a song. Camera angles swap and change; at one point we even get to see things from the point of view of a chicken!

Scenes depicting torture and mutilation are for the most part obscured by an ill positioned object, such as the Samurai’s elbow. Otherwise they take place in such extreme close-up they become almost meaningless: a tangle of flesh and blood followed by reaction shots. Moreover we know it’s not ‘real’ because of a ‘making of’ documentary, which details the special effects work. One sequence shows the crew working the fingers of the victim’s severed hand via a series of wires. When the take is over, the girl bursts into laughter.

Guinea Pig is the brainchild of film producer Satoru Ogura, who fostered an idea for a series of films that would somehow be a progression of the modern horror film, taking it to a new level. Ogura made the first entry himself, Devil’s Experiment, which chronicles in a clinical fashion a variety of tortures upon a lone female. There is no reason or meaning to it; the victim is subjected to agony upon agony, and reduced to the status of a lab rat — or, indeed, guinea pig.[79] For the second film Ogura turned to noted horror writer and manga artist Hideshi Hino, of whom he was a fan. Hino’s best known works in the west remain perhaps Zoroku’s Strange Disease and Panorama of Hell. More recently he has been hailed Japan’s master of horror with a whole series of his nightmare manga released in English under the imprint Cocoro Books. The author’s picture in these books shows a grave Hino brandishing samurai swords.

Things were a different matter in the late eighties. His publisher at that time had gone out of business. With no money for him in manga, Hino felt he had little to lose in making a film. Flower of Flesh and Blood effectively reworks Ogura’s extraordinarily bleak effort, Devil’s Experiment, infusing it with Hino’s manga obsessions. There is a certain cultural deference and some pitch black humour, which is manifest in the killer’s samurai garb and his soliloquy. He says at one point: “Now the woman is in a state of rapture. Due to the drug I injected into her, as can be seen, she is completely unable to feel pain. But, instead of feeling nothing, she feels only ecstasy.” About to mutilate the woman, the samurai determines, “In this world, there is nothing more beautiful. I shall now reveal clearly the ideal of beauty. First the red flower shall bloom from her wrist.”

This is a translation from the Japanese. Early versions of the film in circulation didn’t have subtitles, thus denying English speaking audiences an important element of the film and rendering its message even more ambiguous. As Jim McLennan points out in Trash City, the girl’s pain and suffering are mere barriers that the samurai warrior must surmount in order to attain his true objective: the ‘flower’.[80]

Hino ditched initial plans for a high concept drama, working instead with the little resources available. Hence a supposed snuff film — a conceit whereby budget, lack of production values and a single location matters not. Hino even created a back story, which is solemnly related in text form at the start and conclusion of Flower of Flesh and Blood. The bogus narrative informs viewers that the film is a reconstruction of materials sent to Hino in the mail by an anonymous fan of his work; a horrible package that consisted of ‘one 8mm film, fifty-four still pictures and a nineteen page letter’ detailing a bizarre crime performed by persons ‘of aesthetic paranoia in some secret place’.

Hino has always been open about this little subterfuge. “I really wanted to shock everybody with Guinea Pig,” he told the Comics Journal.

I wanted people to remember who I was and what my talents were, and take them by storm. When home video technology came out, I knew that snuff video was going to be next. It’s easy because you don’t have to take the film for developing. So I wanted to be the first to do it in Guinea Pig, and cause some commotion.[81]

Flower of Flesh and Blood runs a parallel to The Tattooer, a short story by Tanizaki Junichiro published in 1910. It too deals with an artist obsessed with the perfect woman, drugging her so that he may use her for a canvas and deliberate on matters of beauty. In this instance the protagonist tattoos the girl as opposed to removing her limbs. From a cultural standpoint, Flower of Flesh and Blood is part of a Japanese tradition of violence that author Ian Buruma says is committed as a form of art for art’s sake. Japan once demanded extended gore versions of Hammer films and later created Faces of Death. Continuing down this line, we might also see in Hino an extension of the erotic pink film, or pinku eiga, a popular sexploitation genre that emerged in the early sixties. Pink films are shot on film, are low-budget and run for about an hour, often blending themes that might be considered abhorrent to Western eyes. Molester Train (1975), for instance, is a comedy series about women being groped on public transport. Shogun’s Sadism (1976) is a reconstruction of a variety of cruel punishments in the age of the Tokugawa shogunate (a credit sequence displays genuine, altogether more recent atrocities in photographic form). And there are plenty more. Pool Without Water, a pink film released in 1982, concerns a ‘reluctant’ rapist and the woman of his dreams, whom he drugs and assaults.

These films clearly inform Flower of Flesh and Blood. But Hino makes a point of distancing himself from them. Pink film is traditionally shot on 16mm or 35mm film stock for theatrical presentation. Hino’s film on the other hand is shot on videotape for viewing at home, with the medium providing new freedom in terms of accessibility, production and distribution.

Hideshi Hino directed one other entry in the Guinea Pig series: Mermaid in a Manhole. This film, with its abstract, childlike story and images of body decay, is wholly more indicative of Hino’s manga work. In it an artist finds a mermaid in a sewer, takes her back to his studio and proceeds to paint her. When she begins to decay, the artist updates his painting accordingly. Flower of Flesh and Blood by contrast is a channel for the communication of Hino’s ideas about art and death. As noted, producer Satoru Ogura wanted Guinea Pig to be a progression of modern horror. The result makes for a brave effort, despite slotting deftly into common cultural heritage, as we have seen. Only the first two episodes are experimental, while the later episodes are at best so-so and do little for the reputation of the series as a whole.

One might care to debate Guinea Pig in terms of influence, which is a wholly different matter. Since Guinea Pig, the lines between J-Horror and pinku have become increasingly blurred. A prime example is V&R Planning[82] and the prolific director Hisayasu Satô, who has made close to sixty films as of writing. Satô often forgoes the sex scenes required of pink film to concentrate on his own dark and bitter visions, bringing to the fore some disturbing imagery. His most notorious effort remains perhaps Lolita Vibrator Torture (1987), no small thanks to the title. It is about a loner who rapes, slaughters and photographs schoolgirls in an abandoned freight container. Two decades earlier, Atsushi Yamatoya made Dutch Wife in the Desert aka Inflatable Sex Dolls of the Wasteland (1967) which deals with an apparent snuff film murder. So the concept of snuff in Japan is hardly a novel one.

Updating Flower of Flesh and Blood and uniting it with the pink film is Tamakichi Anaru’s Psycho (1998).[83] An average young man and woman appear in a porn film together at the behest of two cameramen. The woman tries to quit when things start to get rough, only to be rendered unconscious, tied to a bed and systematically tortured and dismembered on camera. Her legs and one of her arms are hacked off with a machete; her tongue is destroyed with a potato peeler and tin snips. (These effects are pretty cheap.) The male co-star happily fucks an incision in the woman’s belly that reveals her innards. But he too falls victim to the demented filmmakers, losing his testicles and left to die in a pool of blood.

The sex scenes in Psycho, which include dildo play and the administration of an enema, are for real. In the traditional Japanese way, genitals are partially masked beneath pixel blur. The film takes an inordinately long time to shift into this gear; up to this point it is following the couple around, watching them eat and interviewing them on camera. Some bored critics have derided Psycho for not making sense, while others simply regard it as another example in a trend for gore without plot or meaning. (It should be noted that, once again, English language viewers do not yet have the benefit of a print with subtitles.) Is it simply empty headed horror-titillation? A po-faced pastiche, perhaps? One early sex scene concludes with a fake cum-shot, the mechanics of which are explained to the actors in detail. Later we witness a second cum-shot, this one amid the bloody carnage that was once the female performer. Combining sperm with blood and the woman’s guts, this is for all intent and purpose the ‘real’ money shot.

ACTS OF SEEING ART

Nonfiction filmmaker Frederick Wiseman says of his work, “The way I try to make a documentary is that there’s no separation between the audience watching the film and the events in the film.” Unlike those of his contemporaries, Wiseman’s nonfiction films do not choose to personalise any one man, but rather concentrate on an institution or process, commenting on those men within it. Wiseman doesn’t utilize narration or music.

Titicut Follies (1967), his first film, is shot within the walls of the modern-day Bedlam of Bridgewater State Hospital, a hospital for the criminally insane. Inmates often walk around naked and are interrogated by the warders. One man is constantly provoked by warders, intent on pushing his calm manner into violent rage. (“Jim? Is your room clean, Jim? Jim, is it clean?”) Many of the warders seem to be of a less sound disposition than those in their care. When one inmate won’t eat his food he is force-fed through a nasal tube. The doctor pouring the slop into the funnel has a cigarette perched precariously on his lips, ash about to follow the liquid sustenance. As the camera zooms into the patient’s face, there is a startling cut to an extreme close-up on the face of a dead man. He is on a slab, being prepared by a mortician. Back to the force-feeding: The doctor, still pouring, jokes that the slop ought to be whiskey. Cut to the slab and the mortician padding the dead man’s eye sockets with cotton wool and sealing the eyelids shut. Little wonder that Titicut Follies incensed the institution’s supervisors. Consequently, Wiseman was charged with a breach of contract and for violating the rights of the patients.

In Hospital (1969), made at New York’s Metropolitan Hospital, Wiseman chronicles human suffering throughout the vast healthcare system. Roaming through the departments and wards, the camera captures the sight of a young man suffering a bad mescaline trip. “I don’t want to die,” he screams between bouts of vomiting. Elsewhere, a terrified woman tries to comfort her dying mother. Psychotic homosexuals, smack addicts, bewildered alcoholics, cries for help — all manner of strangeness is found in the corridors. Often deemed his best work, Hospital is but a dry run for Wiseman’s pinnacle achievement: The six-hour observation that is Near Death.

Set within the intensive care unit at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, Near Death (1989) slips casually into the lives and conversations of those who pass through its doors. The world exists here in a twilight, forever a fine line between life and death. In hushed tones, members of staff discuss the best prescription for any given patient as families sit waiting in tearful anticipation. Sobriety and tranquillity are enhanced by the monochrome film. The viewer cannot help but tread with respect in the light of such humanity. The hours roll on, like a vigil itself, and faces and people in the film become casually familiar. There are no titles, no narrative, no dissolves or fade-outs (the passing of time is indicated by external shots of the hospital in day; the hospital at night), everything rolls on regardless of whoever’s living or dying.

Richard Meran Barsam writes in Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, ‘Wiseman is fascinated with the internal operation of institutions, but instead of showing how they work, he tries to show why they don’t.’ This is true of Wiseman’s films up until 1974 when Barsam’s book was published. But with Near Death it is a case of ‘can’t work’ as opposed to ‘don’t’. As one of the doctors ponders, “God decides, we don’t decide.”

Wiseman will make an edit from the noise and bustle of general hospital activity to the silence and solitude of nameless individuals standing over a motionless body. Sometimes, when the focus of attention is neither family or staff, the distant pulse of a life-support machine will take precedence. Every now and then there is the piercing bleep of a ‘flatline’. The sound is unnerving, but conversations do not falter and no one seems to notice (soon we won’t): It is the sound of other machines, other rooms, other lives and responsibilities. In many sequences, the doctors stand around in conference and deliberate on a specific case. The language is medical jargon and will be alien to most viewers. It is at once distancing and reassuring. In another sequence, the same doctors seem apprehensive. “What is terminally ill?” queries one doctor. “There’s no blood test for terminal. It’s like: ‘what is competence?’” Another muses, “Are we managing people to stay alive, or managing their deaths?”

When Near Death ends it’s something of a relief. It’s fascinating. But we don’t really want to be here and most certainly not this close.

Stan Brakhage is hailed as one of the founding fathers of the American avant garde. His films tend to concentrate on the extreme moments of birth and death. Song XXIII; 23rd Psalm Branch (1966/7), for instance, “is a study of war, created in the imagination in the wake of newsreel death and destruction.” Murder Psalm (1980) covers childhood terrors and death by way of television images intercut with brief narrative tales. In one of the tales, a young girl is splashed by a ball that lands in a garden font. The girl falls to the ground and a doctor is seen examining her in his surgery. With this the film recalls images of war casualties, dissections and headless corpses on a slab.

Perhaps the most notorious Brakhage films is The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes. Along with two other films, eyes and Deux Ex, it forms the so-called ‘Pittsburgh Documents’ directed in 1971. With eyes, Brakhage received permission to film within the Pittsburgh Police Department. For Deux Ex, it was the West Pennsylvania Hospital. The Allegheny Coroner’s office provides the setting for The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.[84] Its title being a literal translation of the Latin word for autopsy, this particular entry in the trilogy has become something of an underground arthouse classic of sorts. It is a poignant record of death without the explanatory notes. In the city morgue, bodies of various race, sex and dimensions are opened from throat to groin. The outer layers of flesh are peeled back like some body-hugging overcoat to reveal organs encrusted with cancerous tumours, hearts coated with solidified fats, multicoloured layers of subcutaneous tissues blossoming like carnations. Faces are peeled from skulls like rubber masks and crania are split to reveal brain tissue. For a third of its thirty-two-minutes running time, The Act of Seeing observes the pathologists as they prepare themselves and the cadavers. The anticipation of the first cut is a painful thing and it’s something of a relief when it does finally come. What follows is a dark travelogue with the handheld camera jostling from one grotesque to the next. Brakhage, in a letter to friend Robert Creeley, wrote at the time of the film’s completion: “At first I kept telling people that I intended to interweave these Morgue images with mountain ranges, moons, suns, snow, clouds, etc — the mind leaping to escape in every conceivable symbol… One good look at the footage (once the lab had processed those 3000-some feet) and I knew it was impossible (for me anyway) to interrupt THIS parade of death with anything whatsoever.” The same cannot be said of Bogdan Borkowski’s Le Poeme (1986), a short film of an autopsy with a flighty reading of Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau ivre’ over the top of it.

Some point of reference for the work of Stan Brakhage has been cited in Georges Franju, whose The Blood of the Beasts (1949) (Les Sang des Bêtes) is a film that shows the slaughterhouses of Paris. Running a little over twenty-two minutes, it opens with the narration of a young woman approaching the city. It then evokes life and the lower classes through a surreal series of images: A discarded showroom dummy, radios carrying price tags, a family portrait on wasteground, a man at an empty table, and children playing. Jaunty music accompanies this visual hodgepodge. The woman meets her boyfriend and they kiss. The attitude of the film changes suddenly when an older male voice introduces the various slaughterhouses in the city, the slaughterhouse workers (men, women and boys) and the tools of their trade. The tools are put to immediate use on an old horse, which is quickly felled with a gun and stripped of its flesh. Another sojourn with the woman gives way again to the male voice, who, in this instance, guides us through the grim demolition of cattle. There is nothing so technical as a gun here. The first animal is struck by a mallet with a nail in it, and is kicking when butchered. A shallow tin bucket captures some of the blood; sand is liberally dispersed for the pools of blood building on the floor. The camera shows the foetus removed from one animal, before fading to yet another scene of carnage. Here, calves are tied to wooden beds and decapitated. The stump of one carcass, without head or limbs, still jumps at the touch of the butcher. Cut to a clock tower and the heavy chimes of its bell. Then across the city’s smoky rooftops, which serve to instil a solemn inevitability on the unfolding world below. In the end, a kind of peace. The gates of the slaughterhouse shut on another day; nuns walk along the street, a barge floats down a river.

Blood of the Beasts, like Near Death and The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, is a curious amalgamation of fact, art and death that dances on the periphery of ‘rational’ cinema. Death here appears less of a conundrum than the film itself, whose component parts are a nightmare that confounds and challenges.[85]

Perhaps the best known alliance between art and death in documentary form is Gimme Shelter (1970). What begins as a Rolling Stones tour film becomes the postmortem of a murder, following a now notorious live performance in northern California on December 6, 1969. Inadvertently captured by the camera crew, the sight of audience member Meredith Hunter being stabbed to death at Altamont speedway track by Hell’s Angels has elevated Gimme Shelter to the status of a rock’n’roll Zapruder film. The fleeting act is played and replayed and analyzed within the film. Gimme Shelter transcends the concept of mere musical odyssey, as it does the documentary format per se, gaining strength with time to become a mythology.[86]

The documentary films listed below do not carry such high credentials. But they occupy a similarly eccentric canvas, where death and the promise of death are more a distracting brocade than any sort of real point.

Barbet Schroeder’s Général Idi Amin Dada (1974) is a serious film about the tyrant ruler of Uganda, self-appointed Major General Amin, made with his full cooperation. However, the production did little to assuage public perception of its subject as anything more than a very dangerous buffoon. Parisian audiences roared with laughter, and critics hailed it the best comedy in town. By the time Général Idi Amin Dada — subtitled No One Can Run Faster than a Rifle Bullet — reached Britain, Amin had enforced 141 seconds of cuts by threatening the lives of French nationalists living in Uganda. The film’s producer Jean-Francois Chauvel capitulated because the version seen by General Amin, who had a contractual right of prior review, did not correspond exactly to the version that was distributed. Amin had been pleased when the film was released, but changed his mind on hearing that audiences were laughing at him. One of the parts excised was the opening scene, showing a public execution along with commentary noting that the Amin Government had ordered the deaths of thousands since it came to power in 1970. Scenes left intact included the President arriving in a small town and receiving a rapturous welcome from the townspeople. In fact — as the narrator points out — the reception was organized by Amin himself for the benefit of the documentary. In sport, Amin is allowed to win and laughs off questions that he has fed people to the alligators. He tells his cabinet, “You must show determination and make the people love their President, their Government, their administrators, and make the world love Uganda.” As for the Foreign Minister who “didn’t make the world love Uganda enough”, his body was later discovered floating down the Nile. Swiss director Schroeder is quoted as saying of Général Idi Amin Dada, “I wanted to make a film showing the ugliness of power.” The MFB countered with the fact that, “Instead, the director conducts something of a travelogue… and, even in its uncut state, ignores almost entirely the torture and thousands of executions that have taken place since the General’s coup.”

David Caesar’s Body Works (1988) consists of interviews with people whose job brings them into contact with the dead everyday. Postmortem technicians, forensic pathologists, embalmers, hearse drivers and nurses all give anecdotes along the lines of ‘my first time’. “I was over forty. I just had never seen a dead person,” explains a funeral director. A monologue on the postmortem and decay of the human body intercuts the film at various junctures and is accompanied by the sight of slowly wilting flowers. There are contrived close-up shots of the hands of each interviewee and an eerie organ sound that concludes each conversation. One elderly crematorium operator shifts nervously through his dialogue, gesticulating how “the fat content… helps to cremate the body. It… just… rolls off the body as liquid and just… comes up in flame and helps to cremate.”

Not dissimilar to Body Works is A Certain Kind of Death (2003), a film by Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh. Where the former film is concerned with the people behind the postmortem process, A Certain Kind of Death follows those who are involved in piecing together ‘lost’ lives: The men and women whose function it is to handle the lonely corpse discovered often by chance. The beat is Los Angeles. One man is found naked and dead and covered in shit on the floor of his apartment. Among the investigative team is a coroner who dictates possible cause to an assistant: “Insanguination,” he says, “that’s what it means: bled to death.” No attempt is made by the filmmakers to obscure the decedent’s face (or genitals), as one might expect, and he is even identified by name. Many people die in the bathroom and nude, it would seem. One man has spent his later years existing in a squat room among cockroaches, while another has the foresight to provide a drawing of the plot in a cemetery where he wants to be buried. Elsewhere, crematory staff face the conundrum of ashes whose identity is lost. Lacking the knowledge of next of kin, they are forced to pour the many forgotten remains into a communal grave. Ultimately, and rather fitting, we end up knowing more about the forgotten dead in A Certain Kind of Death than we do the people investigating them.

Robert Adrian Pejo’s Der Weg Nach Eden (The Way To Eden) (1995) follows the daily routine of János Keserü, a pathologist based in Budapest, Hungary. We see him at work with associates dissecting and analyzing bodies in the mortuary, preparing the bodies for funeral, and speaking with medical students. We also see him at leisure and at home, washing his car, mowing the lawn and preparing a meal. In one lengthy sequence he has his feet checked by a chatty chiropodist. The narration (provided by Christian Brückner and in German, while the film itself is an Austrian production) is befitting the mordant, existential tone of the piece, as is the music. There are frequent cutaways to the infirm and aged of a hospital ward, passing time doing nothing much but anticipating the inevitable Keserü, who is tending to yet another cadaver. Beginning and ending with a cremation, Der Weg Nach Eden is a film that hovers at the frail boundary that separates the dead and near-dead; those lives that have passed with those near to passing.

The setting for Orozco the Embalmer (2005) is the Colombian city of El cartucho en Santa Fé de Bogotá, home to Froilan Orozco Duarte, an amiable mortician. He conducts his business from a squalid room that opens directly onto the street. People sometimes stop by for a chat while Orozco (a former police inspector) is preparing a cadaver for burial. He empties the stomach of one fat corpse, identifying various organs, and informs the film crew that he charges only fifty pesos (US$10) for his work. Elsewhere in the city, he says, it is eight times more expensive. He cleans and embalms the body, stitching it back up before confiding that he loves to dress a corpse. It might be true, but then Orozco has a dry sense of humour. He refers to the corpses as “shits” and “bastards”, and considers himself a conscientious embalmer. The camera takes to the streets to show the abject poverty surrounding Orozco. Derelicts wander around, much like animated dead, only occasionally bothering to hurl abuse at the camera focused upon them. Sometimes the street is no less bloody than Orozco’s mortuary slab. The camera locates a corpse lying in a ditch and another in the middle of the road, surrounded by onlookers. One little girl tugs at her mother’s hand, scared by the sight of a dead fruit vendor, stabbed on the street. Elsewhere, children play on swings in a playground, regardless of the corpse that lies a few feet away.

Directed by Tsurisaki Kiyotaka, Orozco the Embalmer was originally intended to be another entry into the shockumentary series of films released by V&R Planning during the nineties, but not appearing until after that wave had passed.[87] The street scenes in Orozco are indicative of those films. But here, Kiyotaka has crafted a superior, more considered work that spans a several year period, from 1996 through to 2002.[88] This brings to it a sense of humanity otherwise lacking in earlier V&R death films. At one point the crew arrive for a day’s filming only to find Orozco’s mortuary is locked and news that he has died in hospital — complications brought on by lifting too many cadavers, suggests a friend. Suddenly the film and crew are robbed of their subject and (perhaps) their friend. The moment is both touching and quietly underplayed. One can imagine how different it would be with Werner Herzog at the helm, pausing for reflection and a monologue.

A Glimpse of Hell (2007) is a short film that originally featured as an extra on the DVD release of Andrey Isanov’s Philosophy of a Knife, a movie about Unit 731, Japan’s death lab in WWII. It expands on material from the main feature, being unedited b&w footage of a morgue lined with dead bodies. Without any information to the contrary, the inference is that the material shows the morgue belonging to Unit 731. Narrator Stephen Tipton waxes philosophical throughout, his voice distorted in the manner of a mid nineties mondo death compilation. “Shall we exist?” he ruminates as the camera prowls among the cadavers like a high school art project, gloomily zooming into hollow faces here and there. It is pretty clear that these are genuine corpses, but it is unlikely they are the victims of Unit 731. All the bodies exhibit signs of autopsy for a start, and it’s difficult to imagine that the butchers of men would bother to sew their discarded subjects back up again.[89]

One of the most perverse and surreal meditations on death is also the most recent. The Act of Killing (2012) follows a couple of petty gangsters who were once part of the state sanctioned death squads of Indonesia, collectively purging the country in the mid sixties of political dissidents. Anwars Congo and his friend Herman Koto reflect on the deaths for which they are responsible. It isn’t with any sense of remorse, however, not to begin with at least. The country on the whole has a wholly relaxed attitude to the genocide in its recent past, elevating these gangsters — euphemistically called “free men” — to the status of hero. Indeed, a show on national, state controlled television describes the extermination of 2.5 million communists as an “amazing vision,” which elicits applause from the audience.

The film doesn’t point any fingers. It allows its subjects to speak for themselves, illuminating past atrocities in the form of colourful re-enactments that are scripted and performed by the killers themselves. In a courtyard Congo demonstrates for the camera how he would decapitate his victims, one after another, day after day, the floor becoming a deep pool of blood. He advises on what type of clothing is most practical for an executioner in such circumstances. He presently looks like he’s dressed for a picnic, he says, and that’s no good. (Jeans are best for a massacre, apparently.)

The killers see themselves as potential film stars, and are viewed as such in the street. Koto speaks of Hollywood and their potential place in it, once the film is released. As the film moves on, the reconstructions become more elaborate. No one balks that Koto should revisit his past in the guise of a lavish musical number in a forest by a waterfall, dressing himself as a woman. On the whole, though, the vignettes are rather more solemn. When Congo posits himself in the place of a victim, having to endure interrogation and the threat of death at the hands of his compatriots, something in him — and in the film — changes.

Circumstance dictated that The Art of Killing take the standpoint of the persecutors as opposed to that of the persecuted, which was the original intention. According to codirector Joshua Oppenheimer it would have been too dangerous a project otherwise, with Indonesia still under paramilitary rule and hardly welcoming of communist sympathy. Thus, no photographic records are used to depict the atrocities that occurred in the mid sixties. Making a public appearance at a London screening in 2013, Oppenheimer said that The Art of Killing represented “the abuse of the past in the present.” This for our purpose we can take as a metaphor. The horror in the film is conveyed through reminiscence, role play and primitive makeup effects. The killers relate what they did and how they did it, and after a fashion are forced to face themselves and come to terms with their actions. Particularly Anwars Congo, who considers for the first time in his life that he may have done wrong. He once believed that the dead would perhaps reward him for having accelerated them to a place in Heaven. Now he is not so sure. “Have I sinned?” he asks.

WE WANT YOUR SUICIDE ON TAPE

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge has a reputation for being the prime location for suicide. More people have ended their life jumping from it than anywhere else in the world. With a span of 4,200 feet it is an arresting landmark on the skyline, and a somewhat romantic way to end what many perceive to be a troubled and insignificant existence. In any case, with its low railings, it makes for a cheap, less messy alternative to hanging or gunshot. On reading about the dark attraction of the Golden Gate (in an article in the New Yorker by Tad Friend), filmmaker Eric Steel was inspired to produce and direct The Bridge (2004). For a period of one year he set his cameras to observe from afar the people using the bridge, slowly panning across the countless distant faces for language that might indicate a jumper. Often there is no sign of it and a man will simply step from a crowd, out from the tourists and the joggers, climb over the railing and jump without any clear preamble, which is what happens in the opening scenes of the film. Hardly anyone survives the massive drop. In 2004, the year on which the film focuses, twenty-four people jumped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge. The cameras witness a number of them, sometimes tracing the fatal descent, sometimes not. In between this, family members, friends and eyewitnesses give an account of some of the victims. It’s an amazing archive. The material is blackly humorous at times, as in the case of a little boy who says a woman he saw jumping off the bridge was acting “like a gorilla.” The boy’s mother chips in to say that’s not true, he likes to make things up. Back on the bridge one determined old timer struggles to negotiate the railing, failing and falling flat on his back. It’d be nice to think he’d give the jump a miss that day, but the film isn’t telling. Some might question the morality of posting film cameras that are waiting for death to happen. Steel is on suicide watch, but isn’t about to step in and do anything about it. The film offers no formal comment on what takes place. But the way in which it is cut suggests that Steel feels some deaths are better than others, certainly they can be more spectacular. Take for example Gene, a young man dressed in black with long hair and sunglasses, who is shown throughout the film from afar, wandering the bridge. Finally, at its close, Gene stands up on the railing, his back to the abyss, like the errant Jim Morrison, and allows himself to fall.

One short feature that isn’t ‘real’ but looks like it might be is Graeme Wood’s Teenage Babylon… (1989). An Australian production, it is a lyrical, disturbing and haunting look at lovelorn adolescent death, comprising a series of case studies that look genuine and every inch to have been lost and forgotten for decades (perhaps in a police officer’s bottom drawer, much like the legitimate photo album Death Scenes). Its Super 8 graininess pops, starts and jumps constantly. The black and white imagery, when not overexposed, is subject to indiscriminate editing. A hand obscuring our view, or a shot of the floor, or a shot of nothing will slip by while the soundtrack whirs noisily, like a record stuck in the play-out groove. Teenage Babylon is a facsimile of a crime scene record, fastidiously clinical in its execution. A clapperboard reads ‘23/6/61 Mornington’. The next shot is of a car parked facing the sea, both doors wide open. Several edits take the viewer around the vehicle. A boy is seen in the driver’s seat, a shotgun between his knees, his head thrown back and bloodied. Traces of the blast pepper the interior. Further edits. The boy is shown laid out on a blanket, on his back and then again on his stomach. His head is held up for the camera. A detective stands motionless and expressionless, displaying the shotgun. A second detective, standing on a grassy hummock, marks the location of a revolver bullet casing. The body of a girl lies nearby, clutching blades of grass in a last reflex action. Again, the body is laid out for the lens, front and back. Her skirt blows gently in the breeze. Celluloid hiccups bring a second clapperboard: ‘7/10/63 Windsor’. Static shots reveal a bathroom. In the sink, blood, hair and a pair of scissors. A girl lies in the bath, her wrists cut with a razor blade. The bloodied water is pure black on the monochrome film. The girl is topless with what looks like a name carved into her stomach. ‘Jerry’ or ‘Jenny’. The final instalment is ‘25/2/65 Pt Melb’ and again is set on a beach head. Two lovers in their beachwear lie embraced upon a blanket, thermos flask to one side, pills to another. Detectives hold the bodies up for display. Fingers of a sand-covered hand, grasping at sea shells, are unfurled. A fly crawls over the face of the boy. The girl stares beyond the camera lens, her eyes clouded and unseeing.

Teenage Babylon is comprised of reconstructions with actors. So convincing are they and so convincing is the attitude of the film, one might easily think otherwise; that the whole thing was ‘real.’ The closing shots of the girl staring beyond the lens, for example, are a disturbingly effective simulation of death on film, a ‘ruse’ dispelled only when the end credits roll. Wood has based his film on actual scene of the crime photographs and genuine tragic teenage suicides, possibly as filed by Det. Sgt. Richardson, credited at the end of the picture. The imagery is rendered even more potent by the accompaniment of sentimental ballads, like When I Fall In Love and The Masquerade Is Over.

‘WE WANT YOUR SUICIDE ON VIDEO TAPE’ announced an ad in the classified section of Film Threat Video Guide no 5. ‘Submit a video tape depicting how you would commit suicide not exceeding ten minutes. All entries will become the property of ATV.’ It isn’t known what, if anything, came out of this request, or what ATV had in mind for the material.[90]

In 1992, a private television channel in Germany came under criticism for screening the suicide of one Wilhelm Schmitz. Despite having since remarried, Schmitz, a fifty-year-old electrician, never came to terms with his first wife leaving him. He decided to kill himself. On March 30, 1992, Schmitz prepared his elaborate suicide note. He rigged a video camera in a corner of his bathroom, focused it on the bathtub and set it to Record. He ingested a lethal cocktail of barbiturates, stripped naked and slipped into the warm water. The tape was an hour-long, time enough to capture the twenty-minute demise.

Germany’s SAT.1 network refers to Akut as a ‘news magazine with guts’. A Wednesday evening in August — some four months after the event — Akut presented tragic highlights of the suicide. Following an announcement, the television screen cuts to the attenuated colours of a cheap home-produced video image. The grey haired, bespectacled Schmitz lowers himself into a bathtub. At the bottom right of the picture the camera’s automatic clock reads 1:45pm. Facing the camera, Schmitz explains he has overdosed on pills and that death is his own decision. A television station edit. The time is now 2:09pm. Drifting out of consciousness, his head rolling to the side, Schmitz slips deeper into the water. He has begun to vomit. The network evidently finds this aspect of the suicide unacceptable and blurs the offending part of the screen, thus sparing 1.6 million viewers the sight of retching. At 2:10pm, Schmitz is fully unconscious. His head has dipped below water level in the bathtub and he is inhaling water. His body begins to convulse and it involuntarily jerks out from below the surface. Finally the spasms cease and Schmitz sinks down and becomes still. Back to the studio. Reduced to the status of a soap opera drama, these are the final pathetic minutes of a human life as television entertainment.

Suicide provides the media with legitimate currency when it comes to showing death and dying. The familiar arguments need not apply, so it seems. Hence the existence of a number of television programmes on the subject of euthanasia. The moral and legal conundrum offers filmmakers an opportunity to document the human condition at the end of its rope, while at the same time not appearing entirely ghoulish about the fact. One such programme is Death On Request. In Holland, where assisted dying is not illegal, sixty-three-year-old Cees van Wendel de Joode is suffering from a debilitating nerve disease. He is becoming progressively weaker and has respiratory problems when eventually he asks his doctor, Wilfred van Oijen, to terminate his life. He explains how he is a burden to his wife and is suffering greatly. Van Oijen, working to strict guidelines, confirms his patient’s condition and receives permission from the authorities, before arranging with van Wendel a death date.

Death on Request aired in Britain in March 1995 as part of the BBC2 ‘Modern Times’ strand. As happened in Holland the previous year, the programme caused a stir with the press and met with debate on the ethical issues surrounding euthanasia. Confined to a wheelchair, over the course of a few short weeks we see van Wendel lose the power of speech. He relies on his wife to ‘translate’ his notes (not without irony, these notes are accessed via something approximating a Ouija board). The doctor visits and speaks with the couple on a regular basis. When the designated day arrives — per request, the patient’s birthday — the doctor verifies that van Wendel still wants to go through with it. The means of death is lethal injection. As the patient holds his wife’s hand, the poison is administered. The doctor explains that van Wendel is slipping away, his heart is slowing, his breathing is stopped. The camera pans from the patient’s face at this point.

Series editor for ‘Modern Times’, Stephen Lambert (better known for creating Wife Swap and Faking It), defended Death on Request as a sensitive and unsensational portrait of one man’s experience. He said:

This is an important issue of worldwide public debate — the film has now been sold to twenty-two different countries — and this documentary gives a unique insight which will allow people to make more informed judgements.[91]

There was a condition attached to the sale of Death on Request. When the BBC bought the rights, they had to agree to screen the programme in its entirety. Ikon, the Dutch production company, refused to sell it on any other condition. Consequently, the film is nowhere near as exploitative as it could have been.[92] Then again, Ikon turned down a lot of money, because the majority of networks were only interested in the last five minutes. In other words, the death scene.

1Louis Ferriol interview with the authors via IRC Chat, February 7, 2010.

2The ads in Fangoria ended in 1991. In Ferriol’s words, the plug was pulled when a televangelist called the Fangoria office to denounce the Macabre Underground as satanic and evil.

3Scarlet Blue appears in the Vidimax catalogue on a bill with The Necrotic, under the collective title Tales of the Bizarre Vol 1.

4A Spanish language print of Snuff raises interesting questions about hitherto undisclosed avenues of distribution, as well as a potentially different cultural impact to that of the common English print. Assuming it does exist, where would the Spanish version have played? Perhaps Shackleton himself screened it at the Cine Theater, his own theater in Tampa, Florida, which served a Spanish American community? See chapter one: ALLAN SHACKLETON AND THE MONARCH RELEASING CORPORATION.

5Ferriol’s mentor was Barry Mahon. He says of the producer-director: “Barry Mahon in the sixties gave me the notion in the biz that to get films noticed you have to piss people off.”

6Ferriol worked with Carter Stevens on After Hours with Carter Stevens, a cable show that tried to give Al Goldstein’s Midnight Blue a run for its money. The show was filmed in Stevens’ loft apartment. “I didn’t think anyone remembered that show,” Stevens told the authors of this book. “It was mostly me sitting on a couch in my studio interviewing a porn actress occasionally with a softcore clip from one of her films. Don’t remember how it started but Midnight Blue was popular at that point and the idea was we would sell ad space during the show. I seem to remember one of the video companies did start to sponsor us but I don’t remember why we stopped production. Probably because I got involved with making a ‘real’ film and didn’t have time.”

7The FBI investigated videotapes released by Vidimax for their touted snuff content, being Snuff and some of the company’s own productions. See chapter six: THE PERVERSION SERIES.

8Ferriol also ran into trouble with Meir Zarchi, director of the notorious I Spit on your Grave (1978), who sued Ferriol in 1985. Ferriol explains: “A Trenton New Jersey video company sold us rights to a movie labelled I Spit On Your Grave, Part 2. It was actually California Axe Massacre (1977). The owner of that company got busted for drugs and I held the bag, the master, which infringed on Zarchi’s right on making the sequel to his original I Spit… We settled out of court for five grand. While titles cannot be protected by copyright, [Zarchi] is the producer of I Spit On Your Grave. By Vidimax selling a bogus Part 2 it infringed on [him] making a sequel, which he was planning.”

9Letter from James Ahearn to David Kerekes, dated November 17, 1991.

10Gallows12 is a shot-on-video short film that may or may not have seen a release through Horror Femmes, but it fits the timeframe. It features a basic-looking gallows in a vaguely period setting. Three men are in silent attendance when a naked young woman has a wooden block kicked from under her and is ‘hanged’ from a noose. A title at the beginning of the film requests the viewer ‘look for the spot where she [the actress] passes out.’

11According to the limited and possibly misleading biographical information available online, Dolcett hails or hailed from Toronto, Canada.

12Dolcett didn’t invent gynophagia. Its themes are present in the films of Louis Ferriol and the Macabre Video Underground, with Ferriol having received and published fan art of this nature back in 1979. “I sorta sensed a Dolcett Gynophagia wave coming on and I just rode on the forefront,” he told the authors. For more on extreme artwork in general, see appendix: guro.

13Wave was an acronym of Whitson’s Amateur Video Entertainers, and later Whitson’s Audio and Video Entertainment.

14Not such a far-fetched concept. The FBI use training films for behavioural analysis and psychological profiling. More than one source online has stated that among the material contained on these tapes are the on air suicides of Budd Dwyer and Chris Chubbuck, discussed in chapter eight: BLOOD AND GUTS AND IN LIVING COLOUR.

15Some of this material comprises clips taken from feature-length work, as in D J Kary’s contribution, which is lifted from Video Psycho (c.1999). A shot-on-video production lacking in skills and talent, Video Psycho is the story of a young hitchhiker who ingratiates himself into the home of a good Samaritan, before revealing his homicidal tendencies. We never see him with a camera, but he keeps a recording of his many kills on a VHS videocassette that he carries in a rucksack. Much as Bizarre Cases of Death, this movie is also framed as a clinical case study.

16Someone might care to decipher why so much of this scene has origins in New Jersey.

17Interview with Bill Hellfire by David Kerekes, ‘No Safe Words: The World of Factory 2000,’ Headpress 22 (Headpress: Manchester, 2001).

18This interview with Misty Mundae, as well as some of the other material in this section pertaining to custom fantasy snuff, originally appeared in a different form in David Kerekes’ ‘The Small World of Snuff Fetish Custom Video,’ in From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, edited by John Cline and Robert G Weiner (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2010).

19A number of the companies that follow have already disappeared or changed names.

20Risque Renee stipulates in the Necro Videos custom shoot criteria that ‘Filming with any man other than my husband’ is a definite no-no.

21The illusion that the girls are in peril is diffused somewhat by the constant buzz of men at work somewhere close-by. Much like the early days of cinema production, this is one independent shoot that appears to take place in a private garden.

22‘Aftermath’ is one of the keywords used in listing the different films on Winter’s websites, along with ‘topless’, ‘finish off’, ‘neckbreak’ and ‘boots’.

23As with several of the snuff fetish films discussed in this section, Fan Kill Britton may not be an actual title. These short films are available to download from kink sites, either as pay-on-demand or on subscription, and occasionally do not incorporate a title or credits. In such a case, for the purpose of clarity, the file name attributed to the film has been used, i.e. fankillbritton.wmv.

24An early example of digital bloodletting in the mainstream is Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo (2008). But the practice is increasingly common, à la the AMC television drama, The Walking Dead (2010–). At the low-budget end of the spectrum, Julian Richards’ serial killer movie Shiver (2011) has an eye for the photoshop fetish of the faux snuff shorts.

25The case of Geoffrey Jones, similarly preoccupied, but whose stunt backfired, can be found in chapter nine: SAFETY LAST.

26Hollywood anticipates, or perhaps even inspires, one aspect of this particular kink in the 1996 Renny Harlin action-thriller, The Long Kiss Goodnight. A salacious torture scene sees Geena Davis (as a government agent) tied to a water wheel in her underwear and slowly dunked by her gloating captors, before left to drown. The sequence lasts a little over five minutes, which is longer than some of the fetish clips under discussion here.

27Whose A Serbian Film and The Life and Death of a Porno Gang are discussed in chapter three: MAD AND UNSCRUPULOUS ARTISTS.

28Taken from the Stranglenail.tv website.

29The intruder in the house is a common shorthand in these fetish films, much like the television repairman in vanilla porn.

30When the intruder has intercourse with the body there is evidence of blood, which doesn’t appear to be a makeup effect.

31Kilroy Was Here was distributed by HOM/Videorama of Holland. (It may have originally been part of a compilation called Him, Her and Pets. The other featurettes on this tape have bestiality themes and all incorporate the strange music prevalent in Kilroy Was Here.) Widely bootlegged, Kilroy Was Here appears to have been among the pornography confiscated from the Cromwell Street home of serial killers Fred and Rose West following their arrest. It certainly corresponds with a description found in Geoffrey Wansell’s book An Evil Love: The Life of Frederick West. See also chapter nine: FREDERICK AND ROSEMARY WEST.

32Sergio Messina, ‘There First. Presenting The “Slavesex” And “Pain” Movie Series,’ text from a 2008 Berlin Porn Film Festival presentation, reproduced on kagablog.

33A top ten of perverse moments from the hardest of S/M tapes can be found in the one and only issue of Sewer Cunt magazine. The round-up, by Meinheim Jerkoff (probably not his real name), includes the Violence series, the Pain series, Color Climax no 291, and several other features. His description of Procession Anale runs as follows. “Cute young female initiates are ritually abused in this satanic rite. Klanlike hooded figures are selected for various sexual abuses. Church officials give a serious dildo sandwich to an exalted cutie on all fours, then her bleeding arse is savagely fucked by a fellow cult member while priestess and strongman hold her open for inspection. An anal tug of war ensues as two girls saw a double ended dildo between each others’ shitholes as they rock back and forth — the tighter the arsehole the less you get reamed — a great way of settling the old dispute over who has the tightest arsehole. The black priestess rams a dildo up the arse of a male in the congregation as he’s fellated by the cult designated cocksucker. Two girls present themselves on a table to have a fist crammed into their inner sanctums though the guy can only get one in up to the wrist, thus depriving him of the ‘pair of human gloves’ look. If only all religion was as much fun. Orgiastic rituals — that’s my kind of worship.”

34Chapter six: THE PERVERSION SERIES.

35Some performers might claim otherwise once they have reaped financial reward from their work. Several years after the success of Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace, seeking kudos with her new social associates, contended that she was made to perform in the film at gunpoint by her then husband-manager J.R. ‘Chuck’ Traynor. Prior to Deep Throat, Lovelace had performed on film with a dog in Collie Sex. It goes by many titles. In the 1970s, Collie Sex was advertised simply as ‘Linda Lovelace with a Dog’. Lovelace told Gloria Steinem in one interview, “I thank God today that they weren’t making snuff movies back then.” The male star of Deep Throat, born again Harry Reems, denied Lovelace’s claims, explaining in an interview with the Independent newspaper, “Chuck was an asshole, but he was hardly around for filming. [Director Gerard] Damiano sent him away because he would get jealous of how much she was enjoying the sex. She was really into it.” In 1986, Lovelace testified to the US Attorney General’s Commision on Organized Crime that women acting in porn films were being murdered on camera or after filming when they were deemed of no further use.

36Panik was a tabloid out of Long Beach, California, the contents of which are a good indication of the edgier spirit of the underground at the turn of the millennium. Editor as of Vol 2 No 1 was Michael Berandi. The following issue he was joined by Scott Peterson.

37‘Tim’s True Tales Of Horror And Gore’ by Tim Hartman, is reprinted in The Factsheet Five Zine Reader: The Best Writing from the Underground World of Zines.

38Robin Bougie and his Cinema Sewer is something of a lynchpin for today’s demented film student, transposing Bill Landis’ beloved 42nd Street into the home for its focus on for sleazy video viewing.

39Zines have been resurrected of late, for low-fi aesthetic reasons as much as anything else.

40Hugh Gallagher interview by Jeff Queen in DOA no 1.

41Not to be confused with Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, which was published, printed and edited by Ed Sanders in New York in the early sixties. Sanders, of course, later wrote the book The Family.

42No 11.

43This in spite of a run-in with the US mail, because of a free giveaway in issue eleven comprising flakes of Phillip’s own dried excrement.

44Post on the Horror Drive-In forum.

45Brian King and Stuart Swezey (eds.), Amok Fourth Dispatch.

46Taken from Fourth Dispatch.

47Running just under one hour, The Amok Assault Video has pretty much all the trappings in place. It opens with material from The Hawaii Experience, a pilot for a proposed television series in which actor Bob Crane looks askance at different peoples and cultures. The shoot was troubled from the start, or cursed as one crew member puts it, and the series curtailed by the brutal (unsolved) murder of its irreverent host. From here, in no particular order, we get clips of fundamental Christians with claims of witchcraft in children’s cartoons, as well as in the murder of Sharon Tate; UFOs and cattle mutilation; Nikolas Schreck defending his corner on the Wally George show; and assorted movie trailers and mondo clips throughout.

48In 2008, Mike Patton took a concert on the road called Mondo Cane, which consisted of Patton with full orchestra performing sweet interpretations of Italian pop songs of the fifties and sixties. According to the official press release, the tour ‘title refers, maybe “accidentally”, to an old Italian 1962 cult documentary which raised a lot of discussion’. A Mondo Cane album followed in 2010 to generally favourable reviews.

49Andy Copp has authored the only article on the subject to date. ‘“I Wish I’d Taped That!” The Original Underground Compilation Videos,’ Cinema Sewer No 23. April 2010.

50Email interview with Andy Copp, September 2012. The undergound lost one of its most stalwart supporters when Copp took his own life in 2013.

51Based on what little information is available, The Anal Birth of Bert appears to be a standalone film of eight minutes duration, supposedly originating out of Ohio sometime in the mid eighties. It follows the leatherboy mentality of Born to Raise Hell, and features a man suspended in chains, who is fisted by other men before a ‘doctor’ arrives to help him give anal birth to a doll (modelled after Bert in Sesame Street). A clip showing the birth scene was added to Sickest Video on Earth for its transition from VHS to DVD-R. This, recalls Copp, was because one of the clips on the original VHS wouldn’t convert to digital.

52Emanating from Bradford in the north of England, Smile Orange made a number of no-budget surreal comedy films in the nineties, including the extraordinary Hunt for the Yorkshire Grimace (1996), before becoming Eagle & Feather and moving into equally surreal video cut-ups. A DVD compilation called Kipple (2011) consists of clips from VHS tapes sourced from charity shops, car boot sales and waste grounds over a fifteen-year period. The choice bits (mostly how-to guides and regional interest items) are edited together to create new and sublime narratives. (Early versions of the Kipple DVD carried a request that the product should be given to a charity shop after viewing, thereby fulfilling a natural cycle.) Kipple continues online, with doctored film clips being uploaded whenever Eagle & Feather find the time and inclination.

53There are three Crazy Dave tapes at last count. Beyond Bizarro (c.2013) is another recent mixtape. This one, however, was screened theatrically — possibly a first for mixtapes — at the Metro cinema in Edmonton, Canada, in September 1993, as part of a series of fringe film nights. The person behind the mixtape, werewolfgal, has since uploaded it to a bittorrent site, making it available for peer-to-peer sharing. In a post on the site, werewolfgal said the aim of Beyond Bizarro was to provide an introduction to the form, that it was created for theatrical consumption and therefore ‘rather safe in terms of true-gore or vomit/scat/hardcore.’ Werewolfgal followed with another mixtape, Bride of Beyond Bizarro (2014).

54Depending on the source, SPK is an acronym for Surgical Penis Klinik (Industrial seven-inch); Systems Planning Korporation (first LP); Socialiste Patienten Kollectiev (second LP, and apparently named after West German mental patients, who, inspired by the Baader Meinhof Gang, killed themselves while attempting to make bombs in an institution); and/or SePuKu. The band was cloaked in mystery in its early years.

55The optically enhanced version of Human Postmortem also circulated without the SPK musical accompaniment, the idea being that you, the viewer, should add your own soundtrack.

56The interview is reproduced on the Music from the Empty Quarter website.

57See chapter nine: NEO-TOKYO IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE.

58Nico B, email correspondence with the authors, September 2015.

59The Monkees Head, review by Peter Mills in Mark Goodall’s Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation. Van Lem also appears in Sleaford Mods’ 2014 music video, Tiswas.

60Mainstream artists who have recently adopted visual shock tactics in a live environment include Black Sabbath and Morrissey. In Hyde Park on July 4, 2014, an event sponsored by a major bank, Black Sabbath opened their set to War Pigs and war atrocity imagery displayed on towering monitors. A Morrissey 2011 concert tour elicited mixed reactions from fans and caused distress when the track, Meat Is Murder, a militant ode to vegetarianism, was performed to film of graphic animal slaughter shot in an abattoir.

61Directed by Jonathan Reiss, who had previously made films for Survival Research Laboratories, the video for Happiness In Slavery features a man (Flanagan) locked into a mechanical chair that excites and maims him before ultimately killing him. One crew member during filming commented that it felt as though he was working on a snuff film. See ‘Happiness In Autonomy’ by David E. Williams, Headpress No 6.

62The artist, the Klone Orchestra, is the house band for covers label Klone Records.

63The actual tracks vary, supposedly because of the various fan edits in circulation, but generally they comprise Pinion, Wish, Help Me I Am In Hell, Happiness In Slavery and Gave Up.

64Reznor apparently only gave close friends copies of Broken Movie, each one “marked” so that any bootlegs could be traced.

65From the Access archives on nin.com, Trent Reznor response to fan question dated May 7, 2004.

66Of course, the film can now be found in its entirety on YouTube. In an email to the authors, Jack Stevenson said that as far as he is aware there are still only two prints of Army Medicine in Vietnam outside of military jurisdiction: One in the possession of Werkstattkino and one in his own possession. “Someone must have filmed it at a show and put it up on YouTube,” he says, “or it might have been transferred at some point that I don’t recall. Today it is a totally different situation than back in the 1990s. Basically everything is common property now, for good or bad.”

67A dig at the band’s US record label and its policy of chopping up studio albums, i.e. butchering them, removing tracks and releasing them independently to create more ‘new’ product.

68Jennifer Wallis, review of the album Deathpile by G.R. Gathering of the Tribe by Mark Goodall.

69By way of example: One gimp in the film directs the other to cut off the pregnant victim’s nipples, slit her belly so that the foetus drops out and then fuck her. But the accomplice has a problem in that pregnant women don’t turn him on. The men then converse about a possible alternative, about making a snuff incest film with members of their own family, but they deduce nobody watching would know for sure so there wouldn’t be any point.

70The motto for Come Organisation, Whitehouse’s early record label, was ‘The Most Violent Music.’ Come Org issued a twilight cassette release of Charles Manson’s LIE album in 1981, while Manson also featured on the 1982 Come Org compilation Für Ilse Koch (cassette and vinyl), presented as a homage to the notorious female Nazi concentration camp commandant.

71Email to the authors from Miguel Angel Martin, July 28, 2010.

72Footage of the dead Allin can be seen in the postscript to Todd Phillips’ fascinating life and times documentary, Hated (1993). Also included are scenes of a spoken word performance ending in turmoil when Allin punches a girl, and later celebrates his birthday by drinking piss and puking. A disillusioned exband member hits himself in the face repeatedly to illustrate how self-inflicted pain is no big deal.

73Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change.

74Quoted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings.

75Rainer quoted in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New.

76Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art.

77For many years, Graf Haufen has run the film rental store Videodrom in Berlin with a keen eye for cinematic oddities. Asked specifically about the slam diving and sheep mutilation footage, he was not aware of it (“Judging from the description I would most probably remember”). But he had this to say: “I do remember buying some tapes from a very old videostore in Kassel, things like [Jesus] Franco WIP movies and the likes, and this guy (or his customers) actually added some ‘bonus features’ after the movie ended. I have had one of these which featured some clips from Dutch released hard SM of a disturbing albeit partially faked nature. One involved nails and labia, the other a dildo with spikes being handled by a hooded guy in uniform. Pretty nasty concepts but not seemingly arty as the ones you described. Maybe it was a tape from these sources? I don’t know.” Email to the authors September 30, 2014. Nico B of Cult Video, who freely admits to tagging clips to the end of commercial movies in the eighties, has no recollection of these two films either. For more on Nico B, see le désespoir de la musique in this chapter.

78Distribution and backlash is discussed fully in chapter nine: NEO-TOKYO IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE.

79See appendix: unabridged agony.

80The English text quoted here first appeared in Trash City no.14/15. In a letter to the authors dated August 30, 1995, editor Jim McLennan explained that the translation came about through a friend who had a Japanese wife. “To avoid unnecessary grief,” wrote McLennan, “she didn’t actually watch the film, but just listened to an audio cassette of the soundtrack we gave her! Though with hindsight, I don’t think it actually fooled anyone, and given the squelching noises, it might actually have been counterproductive.”

81Tomo Machiyama, ‘The Illustrated Man: The Hideshi Hino Interview,’ The Comics Journal Special Edition Vol 5 2005.

82See review of Death Women in chapter five.

83The original title is reported to be Niku Daruma, while the film is perhaps better known under the bootleg title Psycho The Snuff Reels. Aka Tumbling Dolls Flesh, Psycho The Snuff Files, Judge for Yourself.

84The authors saw The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes at Manchester’s Cornerhouse cinema in 1989 as part of a Arts Council Funded touring programme of short films called The Body In Extremis. Also showcased in the programme were Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959), Jan švankmajer’s The Ossuary (1970; a ten-minute study of the Sedlec church decorated by thousands of human skulls and bones from the Hussite wars and Great Plague) and Kurt Kren’s Reel III 16/67 (1967). A member of staff warned that the last film of the evening, The Act of Seeing…, contained autopsy footage and that a screening in Liverpool had ended with fainting among the audience; anyone wishing a refund could obtain one now. No one accepted the offer, but some audience members did leave once the screening was underway.

85Documentaries that are pro animal rights often use unflinching scenes of cruelty and butchery to get their message across. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all such films can be regarded in the same manner as Blood of the Beasts. Those wanting to take a look anyway are directed to the appendix: ANIMALS.

86For more on Gimme Shelter see the appendix.

87See Death Women review in chapter five for more information.

88Many sources credit the film as a 2001 production. But the print under review has a coda that shows the crew returning to the city of El cartucho en Santa Fé de Bogotá in June 2002. Here they discover Orozco’s workshop and the whole of the surrounding area has been levelled. Kiyotaka’s most recent film is The Wasteland (2012). Apparently it shows rescue operations in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, appearing alongside footage from earlier films and a full length soundtrack by the band Corrupted.

89Lest we forget: Rosa Von Praunheim’s Death Magazine, or How to Become a Flowerpot (1979), is a compendia of images of dead people. It was scheduled to be aired on German television, but then unexpectedly cancelled. Speaking with Jack Stevenson, Praunheim explained that, “It was a studio technician, really, who was viewing the film and suddenly just stopped it, saying he was too disgusted to continue… others started to agree… they said people would kill themselves in front of their TVs if they showed it.” (A book of the film exists called Is There Sex After Death?) Another example: Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss (1986) is a visual essay on death on the banks of the Ganges in India. Better known for her acting roles, Diane Keaton directed Heaven (1987), a film that challenges an assortment of people on death and the afterlife (intercut throughout with old movie clips). “It’s a perverse little film that thinks it has nothing to do with Faces of Death or Shocking Asia when they are in fact close relations,” wrote Greg Goodsell of Heaven in Subhuman (no 10). Directed by Jac Avila and Vanyoska Gee, Krik? Krak! Tales of a Nightmare (1988) has been likened to a visual poem. Material from a variety of sources help illustrate Haiti’s traditional voodoo religion and how it was used to sustain the tyrannical rule of Papa Doc and his son. Some scenes of bodily dismemberment are thought by some to be fake. George Haggerty’s LA Requiem (1993) is a film of the artist ManWoman, whose mission is to rehabilitate the swastika. In the persona of Mr Death, beneath a dapper top hat and with a cane, ManWoman travels Los Angeles with a cheery greeting to those people he meets. “Catch you later,” he says to one man. “Oh no, you won’t!” comes the man’s equally chirpy reply. “Oh, yes I will!” retorts Mr Death.

90We might be thankful for small mercies. A clip floating online purportedly shows a twenty-six-year-old Russian man hanging himself live on Skype after his wife and daughter left him. Details are scant, but we see the victim in his underwear, swigging from a can, before putting his head in a noose in a doorframe. It is reported that no one viewing the feed considered notifying the authorities, but, rather, some viewers actively encouraged the man to go through with act.

91Stephen Lambert quoted by Nigel McFarlane in ‘Dead Wrong?’ Manchester Evening News, March 15, 1995.

92Another documentary aired some years prior to Death on Request featured a self-portrait by film director Frank Perry, living with cancer. Perry talks of how he toyed with the idea of filming his own death, pressing the trigger of the film camera when he felt himself slipping away.

A man’s death was inadvertently filmed and broadcast on television in March 1984. Tommy Cooper, a British comedian, was just one of the acts performing at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, a variety show aired live nationally. As the Sunday peak viewing figures closed in on the twenty million mark, Cooper was onstage going through his routine of magic tricks that invariably go wrong. He was on good form. Partway through one gag his assistant came onstage bringing a flamboyant gown. She fitted his garment and Cooper reacted in a typically humorous manner as she fastened the lower buttons. Before she left the stage the comedian slumped into the backdrop curtain and started to slowly slide down. The audience roared with laughter, the assistant grinned, too. Cooper’s face reflected considerable distress, however. Cooper sank to the floor gasping for breath before slumping deeper into the curtain, his trademark fez pushed over his face. With the audience still laughing, the show cut abruptly to a commercial break. When it returned, Cooper was gone and another act had taken his place. Only afterwards, during the end credits, was there an announcement that the comedian was dead. He had suffered a heart attack onstage. In the subsequent news reports and programmes celebrating Cooper’s work, still photographs of the fated act were used, or footage which sensitively stopped just short of the comedian’s collapse.

This event helps to illuminate the diverse changes that have taken place in media. Over a relatively short space of time, the notion of death — indeed, the public consumption of death — has been dramatically altered because of developments in consumer technology. Television here is the primary focus. Whether an unforeseen circumstance beyond the control of the network — as in Tommy Cooper — or purely a mercenary decision in pursuit of ratings, death in the comfort zone of the living room is different to death online. It’s a more personalized sort of death, and has a particularly debilitating effect on its audience. Earlier editions of Killing for Culture didn’t travel much beyond this point in terms of death and media. There is no reference to the Internet in those editions. Now, however, we can almost consider television in terms of ‘old’ media.

This chapter represents an era that might is a stepping stone for media in transition. Before arriving at an age suited to acronyms like LCD and WiFi and WWW, we have the cathode ray tube and a very analogue sort of death.

The live transmission of the death of Tommy Cooper, by way of an example, was not followed by any action replay, nor was the incident ever screened again in its entirety on British television. The event was very much of the moment; one saw it then or not at all. Recalling the incident as it played out that night in 1984, in the company of family and friends, one author of this book is struck by the curious attitude of the comedian slipping to the stage in the middle of his act. Something is amiss, a fact corroborated when the show snaps unexpectedly to a commercial break with Cooper still crumpled on the floor amid howls of laughter. No one else in the living room has been paying much heed to what we later learn is a celebrity death. They saw it but didn’t see. Cooper had died under the gaze of millions. That sort of thing didn’t happen very often, and in this instance it literally wouldn’t happen again — not for many years anyway, when the beloved comedian’s death song eventually surfaced on the Internet. Twenty-five years after the fact, in 2009, Cooper’s final performance was posted to YouTube. Speaking for the action group Mediawatch UK, John Beyer spoke for many when he said: “This is very poor taste. That the broadcasters have not repeated the incident shows they have a respect for him and I think that ought to apply also on YouTube.”[1]

BLOOD AND GUTS AND IN LIVING COLOUR

The first genuine television mortality — a fate ‘delivered’ to the cameras — was broadcast under a very different set of circumstances. Shortly after midday on November 24, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused of assassinating President John F. Kennedy, was himself shot down. Under police escort to more secure holdings, surrounded by members of the press and other persons, Oswald was felled in the basement of Dallas police headquarters by a single bullet from the gun of Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner. Two NBC cameras recorded the event, which was relayed live to audiences across America. Oswald was rushed to hospital, the same hospital in which Kennedy expired; both victims slayed within a forty-eight hour period and dying in the same building. Another synchronous fact is that Kennedy, like Oswald, had been assassinated on camera.

Probably the most prominent death footage of all time is that depicting the death of JFK. Re-run countless times in documentaries and feature films, as well as being ‘interactive’ in various digital formats, the short sequence is one of the most graphic and recognized murders on record.

In November 1963, a re-election campaign takes the President and first lady, Jackie Kennedy, to Texas for a five city tour. The tour is in Dallas on the twenty-second of the month when the President is shot. The open blue Lincoln in which the Kennedys are travelling is rolling down Elm Street on Dallas’ Dealey Plaza. The eighteen seconds of silent 8mm film shot by amateur cameraman Abraham Zapruder shows the President first reacting to a throat wound. Jackie Kennedy leans across to examine her husband as Governor Connally in the front seat responds to bullet impacts. A split second later, Kennedy’s head bursts, peppering the occupants of the vehicle with fragmented tissue and bone. As he topples forward, a four-inch flap of scalp folds over his face exposing the devastated brain within. His wife scrambles over the trunk of the vehicle to retrieve a section of detached skull.

The film was sold to Life magazine for a reputed $250,000. Although several stills of the murder were reproduced in the publication, it wasn’t until March 1975 that the footage was aired on television, courtesy Good Night America, hosted by Geraldo Rivera before a live audience. (It was followed by an extreme close-up in slow-motion of the devestating head shot.) Rivera describes the footage as the most upsetting thing he has ever seen. More than a decade had passed from the occurrence of the event to its television broadcast.

Twelve years after the airing of the Zapruder footage, an equally horrifying death was recorded on film. However, the time span between this particular incident and its broadcast was approximately thirty minutes, considerably shorter than that of Kennedy’s murder.

On January 22, 1987, R. Budd Dwyer, the State Treasurer for Pennsylvania, gave a press conference following his conviction for bribery the previous month. During his trial at the Federal District Court, officials from a Californian computer company testified that Dwyer had illegally received $300,000 to secure a lucrative contract for the company. Dwyer, forty-seven, was to be sentenced the following day. He faced a possible fifty-five years prison term.

Reporters believed they had been summoned to the conference to witness a resignation. But the portly man had other intentions. Dwyer’s protestations of innocence lasted almost half-an-hour, during which he claimed to be the victim of an “American Gulag.” He rounded off his monologue by handing out sealed envelopes to three of his former colleagues.[2] This done, he reached for a manila envelope lying beneath documents on a desk and removed a firearm, a .357 Magnum revolver. There was a brief moment before colleagues and reporters became aware of the weapon. Then panic. Camera shutters fired rapidly as Dwyer backed to the wall warding off potential interference. “Please leave the room if this will affect you,” he nonchalantly warned. The panic stricken journalists called out, “Don’t Budd… don’t do it.” Dwyer looked nervously from left to right. “This is loa… may hurt someone,” he said before putting the barrel to the roof of his mouth and pulling the trigger. So rapid was the event that several cameras, whose shutter-release buttons were pressed as Dwyer pulled the trigger, caught only the falling form. With his body slumped behind the desk, television camera operators and newspaper photographers moved in. The final image of the man showed his glazed eyes slowly closing to slits, head sinking to his shoulders, and virtually his entire blood supply haemorrhaging from his nostrils. Rather optimistically, someone over the moans of the stunned onlookers could be heard to request a doctor.

At least two television cameras were present at Dwyer’s press conference. The most frequently seen footage is courtesy the camera nearest to Dwyer, which views the subject from his right hand side and is relatively unobscured even after he slumps to the floor. The second camera is positioned in the centre of the room, looking directly at the desk and Dwyer standing behind it. At this angle, when Dwyer falls to the floor only his head remains in shot. Following an initial glimpse of the State Treasurer as he lies bleeding, this particular camera pulls away to focus at the wall (out of respect or possibly looking for blood splashes or brain matter). The camera returns to Dwyer as an aide urges everyone to remain calm, at the same time attempting to veil the mess from the rest of the room. “You’ve got your footage,” says the aide. “Would you kindly wrap up your footage. Get your cameras out. Please, get out of the room.” The camera remains steadfast. “You’ve got everything that can be gotten at this point.” The aide looks to the body behind him and, voice shaking, mutters, “Oh my God in Heaven.” Composing himself, he continues, “Please, that’s enough. That’s enough.” The camera shuts off.

Dwyer was officially pronounced dead at 11.31am. By lunchtime his suicide was broadcast into household USA. Television station WPVI-TV in Philadelphia showed the suicide in full, as did WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh. Officials validated their decision to screen the shocking footage by calling it an ‘historic event’. It was run again in a later broadcast but in edited form. Several stations showed only the gun being taken from the envelope, and others cut away as Dwyer inserted the weapon into his mouth. The CBS and ABC networks abstained from transmitting the videotape footage altogether and opted instead for a still photograph of Dwyer.

Later that same day, a series of photographs showing the event in sequence — the gun in Dwyer’s hand, then in his mouth, and finally his head thrown back from the blast — were placed on an international transmission network preceded by a warning as to their disturbing quality. Less than twenty-four hours after his death, newspapers round the world gave everyone everywhere the opportunity to study Dwyer’s last seconds of life. As with the television networks, the press employed a standard of discretion in illustrating the story. All but the tabloids refrained from using the explicit photographs. ‘MAN SHOOTS HIMSELF ON TV’ declared the front page of the Daily Mirror. A two-page, stage-by-stage photospread publicized the event, concluding on an optimum shot of Dwyer’s head being shattered by the exiting bullet.[3] In 2010, a documentary titled Honest Man: The Life of R. Budd Dwyer investigated the incidents leading to the State Treasurer’s dramatic suicide. Asked for their reactions to the suicide film and its broadcast, family members empathized: Although they disapproved of it, they understood that it had been Dwyer’s personal choice to take his life in front of the cameras.

Following her studies in broadcasting and film at Boston University, Christine Chubbuck went through a succession of jobs before arriving in 1973 at WXLT-TV, in Sarasota. It was a youthful station, and Chubbuck saw it as a potential stepping stone to a larger network. At WXLT she took over the regular early morning talk-slot Suncoast Digest, devoted to local issues and personalities.

On July 15, 1974, Chubbuck arrived at work in good spirits. Indeed, she seemed more relaxed than usual, and was ready at the news desk as the Suncoast Digest theme played. The control room countdown brought her on air with a smile, and she introduced herself and the morning programme to viewers. Everything was running fine. But then a technical hitch: An outside broadcast relating to a news item about a shoot-out juddered onto screen and off again as quickly. The screen blank, the control room quickly switched from the outside feed back to the studio. It was nothing too serious, more an occupational hazard for those in the profession.

Back on air, Chubbuck said to camera, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living colour, you are going to see another first — attempted suicide.”

Half-expecting a spontaneous diversion following the fault, the studio crew wasn’t unduly alarmed by Chubbuck’s remark. A number of them thought it a gag in bad taste, as initially they did the incident that followed. The thirty-year-old anchor drew a revolver, fired off one shot at her head and slumped forward, pumping blood onto the desk. The screen cut to black. Chris Chubbuck died fourteen hours later at Sarasota Memorial Hospital.

Michael Simmons, news director at WXLT, told police that Chubbuck had joked about buying a gun only a week prior to the incident. She had told a colleague, “Wouldn’t it be neat if I were to take the gun, pull it out on air, live and in living colour, and blow myself away.” Her family stated that she’d been depressed and talked of suicide. The Sarasota police department took possession of a videotape of the show for investigation. Sheriff Capt. Ellis Denham reported to the press, “why she did what she did or the way she did it, nobody knows.”

This tape has apparently yet to surface in any form. Despite some claims that footage of Chubbuck’s suicide had once circulated on the Internet, there is no evidence to suggest it is there now. Frankly, it is unlikely that such material — any material — would ever surface and then simply disappear completely from the virtual reservoir. A deliberation on the matter of Chubbuck took place on a gaming website some years back. In May 2009, plaintiger posted on Newsgrounds [sic throughout]:

it might ease some people’s curiosity to know i saw the chris chubbuck video once, someplace online a long time ago (it was online for a while there), and there really wasn’t much to see. the video i saw wasn’t very clear, so you wouldn’t even know it was a gun in her hand if… well… you didn’t already know it was a gun in her hand… and she just puts it to her head and there’s a popping sound and she falls out of her chair really fast and out of sight onto the floor behind the anchor desk. leading up to it she’s totally calm and speaking just as you would expect a newscaster to speak. it’s a lot like watching an ordinary newscast except the newscaster falls out of her chair at the end. if you’re a death hag looking for gruesome details, there were none to be seen in that video; no visible blood or anything, and she fell out of her chair too fast for you to even see a look on her face.

A rebuttal of plaintiger’s remarks appears next, followed then by a post offering anecdotal possibilities on the Chubbuck tape. Writes Michael555 in October 2009:

I’ve done some research into this and I’ve found that copies of this footage may exist. The tape was called quad tape (2inch tape) and it was huge, it wasn’t some small flimsy type of footage, this was huge. And the police wouldn’t have been able to play it, so therefore the station had to make a copy of that footage on a different format playable on equipment the police could view. It’s also been said the station manager let people view the footage and may’ve given copies to other people and was going to sell it to a station in New York but evidently the Chubbuck family got an injuction to stop it from happening. I’ve heard that the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] got a copy, through someone who knows someone who has worked at the FCC for twenty years, but they weren’t even allowed to view it. I’ve also heard the FBI has it on “training” tapes in Quantico and I’ve also heard it was leaked but quickly pulled from the Internet a long time ago.

It is not likely the unexpected transmission fault was the cause of Chubbuck’s dramatic suicide. Obviously it couldn’t have helped matters. Some have said a change in show format was bothering Chubbuck. But having just turned thirty and alone in life, Chubbuck nurtured a certain romanticism about killing herself on live television, and indeed had arrived at work armed with a pistol. A recent short film about the incident shows friends and associates recounting how Chris Chubbuck was a troubled individual.[4] Professionally, she loved television and was relaxed conducting interviews in front of a camera. However, she did not fit the mould of a news anchor, and was apparently ill at ease with violence on air and what she perceived to be a growing trend in news sensationalism.

The televised death of another news figure took place years later under very different circumstances. ABC news correspondent Bill Stewart was unceremoniously executed on June 20, 1979, while on assignment in a politically volatile Nicaragua. The incident was captured on film by his crew. It was against a backdrop of increasing civil unrest that the team travelled by van through eastern Managua. Encountering a roadblock manned by Nicaraguan national guardsmen, Stewart and his translator leave the van and continue the short distance on foot in order to negotiate a passage with the soldiers. From within the van, a colleague is able to clearly film the encounter: Stewart holds out his identification and press credentials and is instructed by one soldier to fall to his knees, then to lie spread-eagle in the road. The reporter obeys, face down, is abruptly kicked in the ribs. His pleas are ignored. The guard places a rifle to the man’s head and shoots him dead. The camera jerks up and the film ceases. The translator, Juan Espinosa, is also killed. (But this particular incident isn’t witnessed by the camera.)

Stewart’s murder was broadcast on international television the day after it occurred. One US network qualified the screening of Stewart’s murder on the grounds that it was “an important documentation of the savagery of the Nicaraguan war.”[5] In the UK it was shown in an edited form on the early evening news with promise of the full event in a later edition. The footage eventually became part of the mondo film Days of Fury,[6] where the stunned voices of Stewart’s colleagues reacting to the incident are replaced with dramatic music and Vincent Price’s laconic narration.

Head of the Toyota Shoji gold company, Kazou Nagano stood accused of financial malpractice and defrauding his clients. On June 18, 1985, television crews assembled outside his Tokyo home to interview and record his reaction to the charges. Nagano refused to appear. Instead, two former clients arrive and, undeterred by the media presence, begin to kick the door of his house. Nagano’s attempts to hold the door closed prove futile and the assailants force their way in. A fraças — unseen — takes place, then the two men re-emerge brandishing a bloodstained bayonet. In the hallway, Nagano lies dead.

On June 20, 1991, a small entourage of council staff, journalists and police officers gathered outside the ramshackle bungalow of Albert Dryden in Butsfield, County Durham. A television crew from a regional news programme was also there. It was typical local news fodder, the culmination of a three-year legal battle that Dryden had fought with local government. The fifty-one-yearold former steelworker claimed the bungalow he had built with £13,000 of his redundancy money did not require planning permission; the council insisted it did. Dryden had lost the public inquiry. Now, under the gaze of the BBC, the prolonged battle was about to reach its unforeseen climax on Dryden’s own doorstep. Refusing to accept a demolition order from principal planning officer Harry Collinson, Dryden instead levels at him a pistol from a holster strapped to his leg. Glancing at the television camera, he fires, striking the official in the chest at point-blank range. Dryden calmly reloads, climbs his fence and fires off a second fatal shot at the fallen Collinson. The camera keeps rolling as the entourage flee for cover. Dryden continues to fire at random, wounding a reporter and a police constable. Following a two-hour siege, he is finally arrested. The incident was splashed across the media, and screened often on news programmes throughout the day. In April 1992, Dryden was convicted on counts of murder, attempted murder and wounding. The Daily Express recorded the verdict as ‘Jailed for life! Cold blooded TV killer Dryden.’

Cameras caught another cold-blooded shooting in January 1993. In the grounds of the Queen of Heaven cemetery in North Lauderdale, Florida, thirty-four-year-old grieving father Emilio Nunez was being interviewed for television. He placed flowers on his daughter’s grave while he related to Ocurrió Así (This is How it Happened), a Spanish language news show, how he held his ex-wife, Maritza Martin, responsible for the girl’s suicide the previous November. Unexpectedly the thirty-three-year-old Maritza arrives on the scene to pay her respects. The crew unceremoniously drop their interview with Nunez and rush toward her, microphone at the ready. But Nunez beats them to it. He pushes past, draws a 9mm automatic pistol and pumps several bullets into the back of the woman’s head. Maritza falls to the ground. Circling the body, he fires again until the pistol is empty. “I should have done it a long time ago,” Nunez exclaims before he runs away. The cameraman stops filming. Nunez is captured by police a few hours later.

The footage was aired by several networks across the US, including NBC. Hundreds of calls were received protesting the fact the footage had been screened at all. The on-camera killing was reported in the tabloid press in Britain, with some newspapers likening it to the suicide of R. Budd Dwyer. The front page of the Daily Sport was devoted to a blurred frame blowup (250mm x 190mm) of Nunez blasting the fallen woman, with the headline ‘THE EXECUTIONER’. One might recall Chris Chubbuck, at her newsdesk taking her own life, prophesying a future media of “blood and guts and in living colour.”

In relation to another gun fatality, Louisiana based KALB-TV was forced to address a tide of viewer complaints as well as the disdain of rival networks when it screened a suicide. The incident concerned one Paul Broussard, thirty-nine, a deputy sheriff suspended from duty amid claims of assault made by his wife of six years. The relationship was on the rocks. Andrea Broussard, twenty-nine, was already filing for divorce (papers having been served to Broussard during his birthday celebrations). On the morning of September 15, 1994, Broussard waited for Andrea to arrive at the Rapides Parish Courthouse where she worked. She parked the car and he approached with a gun, shooting her five times in the chest. She died instantly. Broussard then ran from the scene only to be cornered by police outside the nearby First National Bank. Here he sat on a wall as officers sealed off the area. The KALB news team arrived and trained their cameras on the fugitive and the marksmen surrounding him. Threatening to shoot himself should anybody get too close, the gunman, after an hour, asked to speak to his long-standing colleague and friend, Ray Delcomyn. They greeted each other that day armed, Broussard carrying a .357 Magnum, and Delcomyn a .45 calibre semi-automatic. They sat down together, weapons at their sides. Delcomyn tried to convince Broussard to give himself up. The family priest joined the party. Some three hours after shooting his wife, it looked like Broussard might be ready to surrender his weapon. Contrary, however, he blew his brains out. His body fell. The camera pulled away.

The stand-off, broadcast live, met with angry telephone calls. One of the main problems that viewers had was the fact that children were watching. News director for KALB-TV, Jack Frost, upheld there had been “an extremely compelling and urgent reason to provide live coverage. There was a potential danger to those who were working or living in the immediate area.” He added that he wasn’t able to cut away in time because, unlike radio, television had no tape-delay facility. Rival station KLAX-TV was quick to point out that they wouldn’t have shown something quite as abhorrent as a suicide. “I think it’s in poor taste,” said their own news director, Grant Uitti. “I would not air a picture of such a graphically violent act.” Perhaps not.

In 1992, while making an episode of Mi Socio Imposible (My Impossible Partner), Argentinean actor César Pierri was severely injured when a smoke grenade exploded in his hand. The device was meant to emit a comedy smoke cloud, but a fault resulted in an unexpected blast that disintegrated Pierri’s lower left arm and caused severe facial injuries. Two other actors were also injured. Pierri later died in hospital when complications arose during reconstructive surgery. The series was cancelled due to the tragedy and this final episode never aired. However, in 1997, a clip showing the accident was eventually screened on television following a telephone poll. The reality show Fenómeno Real (Real Phenomenon) aired the footage after viewers voted overwhelming in its favour: 3,113 votes for the screening and 976 against. Absolving himself of all responsibility, host Mauro Viale effectively blamed viewers for the broadcast to follow.

Sensationalist news show Here and Now, on Brazil’s SBT channel, aired a live suicide in July 1993. Locally, it attracted a record number of viewers: Two-and-a-half million tuned in to see the teenage Daniele Lopes perched on a window ledge eighty feet above the streets of São Paulo. Lopes had been jilted by her boyfriend and was threatening to jump. Eleven minutes later, she did. The incident was broadcast into homes as tragic entertainment long before firemen were on the scene to try a rescue attempt. In September 1993, another leap captured on film occurred in the centre of Stockholm. As firemen prepared a safety net, a teenage girl threw herself from a five-storey apartment block and plummeted sixty feet to the pavement below.

Detectives in Holland were angered by an amateur video screened on national television in August 1993. The footage, said to have shamed the Dutch people, was broadcast on the show Nova. It depicts the plight of two Moroccan children after their dingy capsizes on a pond in a busy Rotterdam park. The older of the two girls tries frantically to pull her nine-year-old friend out of the water. She fails in the attempt, her screams falling on deaf ears as her friend drowns. Approximately 200 sunbathers are present; most stand and watch, while some turn to walk away. No one helps. The cameraman later confesses that he wasn’t prepared to help because his priority was covering the accident. Reporting on the tragedy, the Los Angeles Times referred to a phenomenon known to sociologists as bystander apathy, i.e., “people in groups standing by in situations where they would act if alone.”[7]

EXTREME SPORTS

Televised death on a much larger scale took place in the month of May 1985. Not once but twice, in the guise of live football matches. The setting in the first instance was Britain, specifically Valley Parade, the home ground of Bradford City Football Club. On May 11, a record crowd turned out to watch the final game of the season for a home team enjoying a winning streak. The competition was Lincoln City. Midway through the first half, television cameras picked out a column of smoke rising from the main stand. Within minutes, flames could be distinguished and concerned spectators made for the exits. Strong winds fed the fire and soon the antiquated wooden structure was engulfed. On discovering that exits were locked, many fans sought refuge on the pitch. By this time the intensity of the heat was great enough to thwart rescue attempts, and, as the camera panned across the stadium, viewers could distinguish bodies of spectators in the flames, overcome while in their seats. A human fireball walked almost casually before the cameras much to the shock of the commentator: “And look at that! Oh, the poor man. This is awful. The police desperately trying to save the life of a supporter… he’d come to watch the football… this is human tragedy.” Over fifty people died in a catastrophe that was broadcast live to Saturday afternoon television viewers. The worst scenes never aired again and several years passed before any footage at all reappeared in documentary context, suggesting strict control over the material by Yorkshire Television. The footage is now used in fire training videos. The more gruesome aspects have since become available on various websites, a fact attributable to much archive material discussed in this chapter.

Several days later, on May 29, 1985, tragedy struck again at a football match and transmitted live to millions. The game between Liverpool and Juventus at the Heysel stadium in Brussels was delayed when rival fans clashed. Television cameras focused on the hooligan factions and their running battle, which included the sight of a pistol being fired. The crush that resulted, as panicked supporters tried to flee, caused the collapse of a wall. Forty-one people perished in the incident. Cameras focused on those dying beneath an avalanche of bodies, and the already dead, their clothes stained with vomit and urine.

Another live football tragedy, Britain’s biggest sporting disaster to date, remains one of raging controversy and investigation. Ninety-six people lost their lives on April 15, 1989, at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. The venue was the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, where South Yorkshire police had assigned 1,122 officers to ensure rival fans remained separated. Police were determined to avoid a repeat of a similar playoff the previous year, when victorious Liverpool supporters invaded the Hillsborough pitch. As the Liverpool fans arrived for the three o’clock kick-off, there was confusion outside the stadium as to how to get in. Turnstiles serving the Leppings Lane terrace were badly overworked, and the crowd was quickly increasing in size. At 2.40pm, some 5,000 fans at turnstiles A through G began to fear they might miss the kick-off and moved forward. The intensity of the pressure lifted a police horse clean off the ground. One man tried to clamber over a gate C but was prevented by police, who had opened another gate in order to reach him and inadvertently allowed fans to slip in. Once inside the ground, the stream of supporters would have seen that the nearest accessible pen was full to capacity. Each of the pens at Hillsborough could safely hold several hundred people. Their intended purpose was to divide supporters into manageable groups by means of fences and crash barriers, thus preventing any surge forward onto the pitch or any movement to the sides.

Police outside the ground were not aware of the overcrowding within the stadium; their fear was for the fans pressed against the turnstiles. In the control room, officer-in-charge Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield refused more than one request to postpone the kick-off but did eventually agree to gate C being opened. This only made matters worse as some 2,000 fans poured through, shoving, being shoved, and screaming with pain. Duckenfield watched on his television monitors. It is said that at this point he “froze”. The pressure intensified after kick-off. Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar later testified that he turned around on hearing screams — “not the ordinary crowd noise” — and was amazed at the concentration of fans in one particular area, when on either side it seemed relatively clear. Then he realized they were trapped in the pound. One fan called to him, “Please, get the fucking gate open.” The match was halted at 3.06pm.

Those who tuned in to watch an FA Cup semi-final on television saw instead the wretched sight of people having the life crushed out of them: Men, women and children slowly turning blue, pressed against one another, pressed against the pen. Faces could be clearly identified and were recognized by friends and relatives watching at home. Many attempts were made to tear individuals free from the surging mass. For the most part, spectators in other parts of the ground didn’t know what was going on. News of the problem and its terrible consequence filtered down by word of mouth and via fans carrying transistor radios. It wasn’t until 3.56pm, almost an hour after kick-off, that an official address was made over the PA system.

In the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, South Yorkshire Police and their handling of events that day were called into question. But it wasn’t until 2012, following an independent enquiry, that the full extent of the catalogue of errors and official cover-ups was made public. Some factions of the media, notably the tabloid press, were heavily criticised at the time for their uncompassionate stance toward the ninety-six people who lost their lives and the hundreds more injured, having incorrectly surmised that hooliganism had been the root cause.

Unlike the Bradford City fire, graphic footage from Hillsborough did appear on subsequent news bulletins and was oft repeated.

‘The thing about sport is that it legitimizes violence.’ This remark by Don Atyeo isn’t directed at Hillsborough or football specifically, but all sport in general. It appears in his book, Blood & Guts: Violence in Sports. ‘Incidents,’ says Atyeo, ‘routinely occur in the name of sport which, if they were perpetrated under any other banner short of open warfare, would be roundly condemned as crimes against humanity.’[8]

One phenomenon discussed is that of the daredevil thrill show. Here fearless individuals put life and limb on the line for an audience. The sport, such as it is, pits man against the odds, with a risk of fatality that is pretty high. Carl Boenisch was killed in 1984 when he parachuted off a cliff for That’s Incredible!, a long-running ABC magazine style show that happened to be sliding out of public favour. For the two-hour Fox television special in 1991, Live! The World’s Greatest Stunts, motorcycle stuntman Johnny Airtime raced against time with an oncoming locomotive. The ramp that took him over to safety was destroyed by the train a half second after he cleared it. Fox brought Johnny Airtime back that same year for a series called Ultimate Challenge. Here the young stunt rider soared clear of the spinning blades of four helicopters. Another series, Stuntmasters, continued the Fox penchant for daredevils who might escape death by the skin of their teeth. It debuted in 1991 and ran for twenty-two episodes. One element favoured in the show was fire, with stuntmen often tumbling about in it or crashing through it.

In his book, Atyeo makes the observation that the popularity of legendary Evel Knievel was not due to his competence as a stuntman, but the fact that he invariably failed and had an accident. In 1974, Knievel attempted to jump across the Snake River Canyon on what he called his rocket-cycle. Instead he plummeted to the bottom. His proposed leap over thirteen London buses in 1975 left him trapped with a damaged spine after crashing on the landing ramp. Another endeavour in 1977, a proposed flight across a shark-infested tank at the Chicago Amphitheatre, met with similarly disastrous results.

The Chicago Amphitheatre stunt was the proposed climax of a CBS special called Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers. The live broadcast featured a number of stuntmen in different cities doing what they did best: Dangerous stunts. Orvil Kissaberg blasts himself into the air with four sticks of dynamite and is then seen staggering about, unable to respond to questions put to him by the studio; Jumpin’ Joe Gerlach leaps eighty-four feet onto a big sponge, a stunt he admits broke both his legs when last he tried it; David Merrifield is suspended beneath a helicopter by his teeth; Ron Phillips leaps twenty-five feet into the air on a snowmobile and sprains his back; while the ageing Karl Wallenda, with eyesight failing, walks across the Chicago Amphitheatre on a highwire spanning 720 feet. The show cuts to a commercial break in the middle of his act. (Wallenda would fall to his death from a highwire a year later.)

But the star attraction is Evel Knievel. He is the reason the show exists in the first place. In a prerecorded film clip he is seen helping to catch the sharks that are the basis of his own particular stunt. He is catching them humanely, the studio informs viewers. The stunt isn’t to be. Knievel crashed his motorcycle during a practice run prior to broadcast and has been hospitalised. Unperturbed, the presenters of Death Defiers assure their audience that Knievel’s accident had been captured on videotape and will be screened in due course.

Death Defiers scored near-record ratings. But critics weren’t impressed. The Pittsburgh Press[9] called it television’s all-time low. In a scathing report, William Allan described Death Defiers as a monstrous thing to stage and ‘that everyone concerned — announcers, “death defiers,” and what have you — cheapened themselves and cheapened life.’

Even Kevin O’Malley, director of CBS sports programming, hedged his bets. In answer to the Death Defiers critics, he acknowledged that the “definition of sports has gotten very fuzzy.” He also admitted to having refused to schedule a man willing to swim through a shark-infested tank as opposed to jump over it, and another who wanted to hang himself on air. With the public appetite for such displays growing, O’Malley pondered whether television would go so far as to screen premeditated death. “I can’t sit here and say nobody would ever put an execution on television,” he said. “I know I wouldn’t and I’m pretty sure nobody on this network ever would. But then again I’ve seen the standards change so much.”[10]

Indeed. At around the same time as Death Defiers, Australian shark hunter and documentary filmmaker Ben Cropp was contracted to fight a shark to the death for a million dollars. The location was an underwater arena off Samoa. “If the guy gets eaten,” said the promoter, “the film rights will be very valuable.” The deal ultimately collapsed, much to Cropp’s relief. He was pestered to do it, so he told reporter Peter Thompson years later. “I said yes, but didn’t want to,” recalled Cropp.

And then the press — oh, everything went crazy as soon as I said yes. Even the Wall Street Journal had a go at me. You’d think, “What the hell has the Wall Street Journal got to do with it?” But they had an editorial having a go at me, and the RSPCA. And I was really thankful when it all collapsed. The promoter died. And, so, the shark was left alone. And I felt relief, you know, that it was all over.[11]

Another proposed fight to the death was that between a supposed karate champion and a wild Bengal tiger. It had been arranged for American closed circuit viewers. The Haitian government had supposedly given a Mr Co the go ahead to organize the face-off when pressure groups intervened and this match, too, was cancelled.[12]

BOUNDARIES OF IMAGINATION

When character actor Vic Morrow was asked to do his own stunt in a major motion picture late in his career, many involved in the production voiced concerns, no less the cavalier attitude toward safety. Few, however, anticipated the magnitude of the accident when it happened. Morrow made his name in the movie Blackboard Jungle (1955), becoming thereafter a familiar face onscreen and on television. By the seventies however, he was considered a Hollywood has-been and had little choice but to accept whatever work was offered to him. This led eventually to Italy, where exploitation cinema represented a kind of elephants’ graveyard for down at heel film stars. It was while in Italy, filming a Jaws rip off called The Last Shark (1981), that Morrow received news of landing a part in a major Hollywood project. The producer for this new project was Steven Spielberg, a wunderkind with several hit movies under his belt (Jaws coincidentally being one of them). It was the best opportunity that Morrow had had in over a decade. Unfortunately it was also his last.

Twilight Zone The Movie was set to be a big screen adaptation of the beloved 1960s science fiction television series. Composed of four standalone stories, directors Joe Dante, George Miller and Steven Spielberg would each adapt an episode from the original show, while John Landis undertook an original story of his own. It was in the Landis segment, ‘Time Out,’[13] that Morrow was to stage his comeback. He stars as a racial bigot for whom the tables inexplicably turn when transported back in time to experience for himself hate crimes.

Contrary to the ethos of the original show — whose stories were invariably downbeat with no happy ending — the Landis treatment proposed Morrow’s character would come up smelling of roses. Having been persecuted as a Jew in Nazi Germany, then a black man in the American deep south, he is in war torn Korea under heavy US gunfire when he decides to risk his life and rescue two Korean infants.[14] His plan is to carry the children across a shallow river and to safety, despite the devastation taking place all around.

It was to be a physically trying stunt, particularly in light of the pyrotechnic excess that Landis plotted for the scene. Landis didn’t want a stand-in for Morrow either, he wanted the fifty-three-year-old actor to perform the stunt himself. Morrow obliged because he needed the break. And Landis didn’t want dummies substituted for the two children: He wanted Korean children of ages six or seven for added realism and the all-important close-up. It was going to be a dangerous operation. Evidently the director believed it was worth risk, even if his crew didn’t. Before the end of the take, Morrow and the two children were dead.

The location was the Indian Dunes motorcycle park in Valencia, Los Angeles, a secluded property used for the filming of other Vietnam based war movies. The children hired to play the war orphans were Myca Dinh Le and Renee Chen, both from comfortable backgrounds, enchanted with the idea of being in a Spielberg picture, as indeed were their parents. The pay was $500 a day for each child. The children were hired illegally, cash in hand.

Additional cameramen were brought in for the big scene. Shortly after 2:00am on the morning of July 23, 1982, a helicopter bedecked as a gunship rose over Indian Dunes into position. The pilot was Dorcey Wingo, a veteran chopper pilot but not one with experience in movies or movie pyrotechnics. More qualified pilots had declined the job, considering it too great a risk. At 2:20am, Landis advised everyone to be prepared and with that he called action.

Myca Le and Renee tucked under his arms, Vic Morrow started out across the river as simulated gunfire peppered the water round him. He fought to maintain his balance against the turbulence created by the chopper overhead and the panicking cargo squirming in his arms. The chopper dropped to twenty-four feet, much lower than planned but satisfying the director. At the rear of the village the first devices were detonated, followed almost instantly with another series of blasts. Explosions and flares then continued in rapid succession, creating fireballs that rose as high as 200 feet. Wingo struggled to maintain control of the chopper when debris struck the tail rotor.

When the chopper came crashing down, Morrow was attempting to retrieve one of the children from the water, having stumbled and dropped the infant. He and Myca Dinh Le were decapitated by the main rotor blade. Renee Chen was crushed by the broken rotor mechanism. The three of them were killed instantly.

All exposed film was immediately seized. Landis, along with members of his crew, producer Spielberg and Warner Bros., were tried for involuntary manslaughter, criminal negligence and violation of child labour laws. A verdict of not guilty on all counts was reached.[15] Part of the evidence was a screening of the footage showing the accident. Six cameras in different locations had been rolling that night. This material was compiled into a showreel of twenty-eight minutes duration and shown to the jurors out of court (specifically the Samuel Goldwyn Theater of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in Beverly Hills, which is where most Hollywood press screenings take place, and where each year Academy members view Oscar nominated movies).

The tragedy happens very fast, with no pause from one frame to the next. Morrow and the children are in the water and in the next moment they are gone, replaced by a fallen helicopter. Next, a frantic John Landis wades into shot. He quickly examines the scene and waves for the cameras to be shut off.

Twilight Zone The Movie was completed and released some years before the case came to trial. Needless to say, nothing of the tragedy exists in the final cut of the movie; none of the footage of the village, and nothing of Myca Dinh Le and Renee Chen, whose names are also absent from the credits.[16] Unlike still photographs taken of the crash, which were handed to Warner Bros., who then lost them, footage of the accident did leak through to the media. The source was said to be a surreptitious copy that had been made before the footage was given over to the authorities. Circulating long before the movie reached theatres, these out-takes were in fact floating around only weeks after the incident itself. They clearly reached the BBC in a short space of time. British television viewers got a glimpse of the Hollywood death scene in 1982, when extreme longshots were shown by film critic Barry Norman on his late-night programme Film 82. In hindsight it seems a little odd that Film 82 would have shown such material at all, and one can only assess the decision in terms of a media coup. Several years later, the Morrow Twilight Zone out-takes would be incorporated by Nick Bougas into his shockumentary, Death Scenes 2.[17] Here we see the footage as the jurors in the trial must have seen it, which is to say all the various camera angles one after another.

The Twilight Zone death footage is pretty much as one would expect: Tragic and compelling, factors exacerbated by the circumstances of the accident and the high profile names attached to it. But it is also repetitive. There is no sound with the footage. The multiple cameras allow Morrow and his infant company to replay its final moments as slight variations on a theme, like the visual equivalent of a Steve Reich concerto.

When eventually released, nothing could disengage Twilight Zone The Movie from the atrocity that had befallen its production. Even the ads and poster art are uncommonly low key; the publicity junket itself appears broken by the disaster. News of the deaths on set had festered for years, making the very existence of the movie disagreeable. The heart had been ripped from it. The movie opens and closes on a lame Landis filmed segment in which actor Dan Ackroyd turns to ask whether we want to see “something really scary?” The scare, thankfully, is only a Halloween mask.

Vic Morrow isn’t the only actor to have lost their life on a movie set. Brandon Lee, actor son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee, was fatally wounded on March 31, 1993, while working on the movie The Crow. He died twelve hours later. In the movie, Lee plays a rock star back from the grave to avenge the murder of his girlfriend. One scene called for the twenty-seven-year-old Lee to be shot. It was later revealed that the prop firearm had a bullet projectile unknowingly lodged in the barrel from previous use. The blank cartridge contained sufficient charge to propel the wedged slug into Lee. Police removed footage of the scene for investigation. Following a two-month hiatus and several revisions to the script, the movie was completed. The National Enquirer[18] stated that some weeks before Lee was killed, ‘another actor on The Crow discovered a prop gun loaded with a live bullet.’ Police ruled the killing an accident.

Movie stuntmen and women since the dawn of cinema have faced danger in the pursuit of dreams. Often a camera is rolling when tragedy strikes, as invariably it does from time to time. One scene in John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers (1959), a tale set during the American Civil War, called for character actor and veteran stuntman Fred Kennedy to fall from a charging horse. On a professional level, the stunt was a relatively simple one and should have posed no problem. At the designated signal, Kennedy simulated being shot and threw himself from the animal. His landing was headfirst, however, and Kennedy tumbled a little before coming to rest on his back. The moment the camera stopped rolling, Connie Towers, the movie’s female lead, ran over to plant a kiss firmly on the burly man’s cheek. There was a camaraderie between the two and the kiss was a running joke during production. But in this instance, Connie screamed. Kennedy’s neck was broken. He died minutes later.

Having worked on a number of blockbusters, including James Bond and Indiana Jones movies, thirty-four-year-old Tip Tipping plunged to his death on February, 6 1993, while performing a parachute stunt for BBC television. The stunt was for an episode of the true-life human drama series 999. The basis of 999 was to reconstruct real life narrow escapes that might so easily have become a fatality. (Somewhat ironic really, when one considers the danger inherent in reconstructing a dangerous situation.) The amiable Tipping was set to recreate the fall of skydiver Terry Wakenshaw, who escaped death after his main parachute became entangled on the plane from which he was leaping. Tipping practised the stunt twice, readied himself for a take and, at 10,000 feet with the television cameras rolling, he made the jump. Unlike Wakenshaw, Tipping’s parachute did not open; nor did the two in reserve. The stuntman plummeted to his death.[19] It is rare that footage of such tragedies come to public light, although still photographs do occasionally see print. No film of Fred Kennedy leaping from a horse to his death has ever surfaced. Nor that of Brandon Lee being shot or Tip Tipping spiralling 10,000 feet without a parachute. There are exceptions. Sometimes footage of a fatality is leaked to the media and screened on television, as in the case of the Twilight Zone. Perhaps in this particular instance a member of the production team was incensed enough by the debacle to make a copy of the film. Indeed, there can be few examples in the annals of movie making that compare with the arrogance displayed on that particular set. Who knows? Maybe if footage of the accident hadn’t leaked out, it too would have become lost, as happened with the Twilight Zone still photographs.

The most famous instance of a stunt death is often credited to William Wyler’s remake of Ben-Hur (1959). The spectacular chariot race sequence is a landmark of cinema and the point at which one stunt double supposedly lost his life. What’s more, the fated scene has been retained somewhat callously in the final cut. Rather, that’s how the story goes. The collision that springs stuntman Joe Canutt from the chariot he is riding, throwing him several feet into the air and into the path of running horses, certainly wasn’t scripted. Despite appearances, however, the episode didn’t result in loss of life or even severe injury. The public believed otherwise. This rumour about fatalities on the Ben-Hur set prompted an angry second unit director called Andrew Marton to speak out. Marton had been in charge of the chariot race. At a press conference he said the death toll was twenty men, adding, “That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”[20] Most understood the remark to be one of sarcasm borne of bitterness and frustration. Nevertheless it served only to fuel the rumour.

HIGHWAY SAFETY

Death scenes entered the American classroom at the tail end of the 1950s. This in the form of a celluloid scare tactic known as Driver Education, or more commonly driver ed films, designed to educate postwar youth on the inherent dangers when in charge of an automobile. Gaudy looking with washed-out colours, these films of approximately ten to twenty minutes duration became increasingly brutal, traumatizing viewers with a message they might not soon forget. From a relatively inauspicious start in 1950 with Last Date, these films by the end of the decade were regularly incorporating images of authentic motor accidents: Fragile bodies impacted with dashboards, crushed beneath wheels or strewn like rag dolls across the tarmac. The victims depicted would likely have been of an age similar to the audience, that is to say teenagers with rock and roll haircuts. Sometimes a storyline would be built around the death footage; other times the traffic accidents were simply paraded one after another, hammer blows to the retina. The ubiquitous narration was often sarcastic, laying fault with the victims and chiding them for their own fatal predicament. Particular emphasis was placed on the male driver, for whom a road accident can take away good looks, or worse, a girlfriend. Statistics are a common factor, so too patrol men in training.

The most notorious driver ed film is Signal 30 (1959), a presentation of the Ohio Department of Highway Safety. Before the credits, in darkness, a screech of car tires herald a woman’s screams and the sound of a collision. An introductory notice advises the viewer that Signal 30

is not a Hollywood production as can readily be seen. The quality is below their standards. However, most of these scenes were taken under adverse conditions, nothing has been staged. These are actual scenes taken immediately after the accidents occurred. Also unlike Hollywood our actors are paid nothing. Most of the actors in these films are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone. They paid a terrific price to be in these movies, they paid with their lives.

The title — Signal 30 — refers to the State Highway Patrol code for a fatality. The phrase is often repeated throughout these films. As violin strings play a pleasant if inappropriate melody, what was once a man, now a burned crisp, is shown onscreen. In another scene, a crushed driver hangs out of the door of his vehicle. In yet another, the victim is impaled on the steering column. Each fatality is accompanied by a brief run down of the possible cause of the accident, and a little flippant aside. As a corpse is dragged from a vehicle and pushed into a body bag, the narrator quips, “A last offering to the great god Speed.” In another episode, a patrolman questions a widow on what it’s like to have lost a loved one in a crash, and whether the deceased’s skills as a driver are open to question.

“We’re cruel and harsh, you say?” baits the Signal 30 narrator. Horrific scenes of death and dying are followed by more examples of death and dying. “How could we give you a better lesson on carelessness?” asks the narrator. “See for yourself how sordid and sickening impending death can be.”

Accident scenes in driver ed are rarely played with their original soundtrack. Film of rescue squads circling wrecked cars is often silent, except for the commentary track and musical accompaniment. The quality of the original sound recording, when heard, is invariably and almost unintelligible. On the rare occasion producers choose to use it, however, the result is generally disturbing: Through the extraneous sounds of carnage come piercing screams of absolute agony.

The more confrontational driver ed films were made by a company called Highway Safety Films, Inc. They are responsible for Signal 30 and others discussed below. Of anecdotal interest, the company was created by Richard D. Wayman, a Cleveland, Ohio, businessman who had no formal relationship with road safety or photography but liked to snap pictures of automobile accidents. One might consider him a proto newshound of sorts. Or a little odd. Author John Harrison describes him as a ‘part-time photographer and police station groupie.’[21] Wayman soon found an associate and moved into the filming of accidents, following some rapport with the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

Wayman’s Mechanized Death (1961) has two narrators. Good narrator, bad narrator. One offers background details on a given scene and not a little sarcasm; the other a philosophical discourse.

NARRATOR #1: On expressways you get all kinds of drivers. This boy thought he was pretty sharp. [Body of young man, face down on ground, hands by his sides, car crushing his head.] It seems, however, he had too flippant an attitude. At top speed he had passed — he thought — another car. But he cut back into the proper lane a little too soon, clipping the car he was passing. He lost control. With his car in a rampage he left the expressway, taking with him an EXIT sign posted along the thoroughfare. It was quite appropriate as it turned out — it was his exit also.

NARRATOR #2: Dead is forever. Take time to think… Speed is a relative matter. It’s what comes with it that kills.

Another twist was Wheels of Tragedy (1963), which fabricated the story of rookie Highway Patrolman Bill Bradly, and his coach, veteran of ten years, Charlie McQ. Although the death footage is still very genuine, contrived sequences are used to illustrate events leading to the tragedy. A broken muffler, lack of sleep, and speeding, are key factors in the death of two black brothers, for example. They ploughed into the back of a lorry. Another lorry, whose driver had been travelling for hours without a break, runs into the side of a car. Among the fatalities are two children. “Why? Why do things like that have to happen?” laments Bill. “They don’t have to happen,” interjects McQ. Shots of patrol men looking pensive are cut with the death footage.

Options To Live is the last of the driver ed films and is compiled from the uglier moments of those productions that preceded it. Made in 1979, it features Karl Mackey seated at a moviola, introducing clips with the sort of effrontery we have come to expect by now. “We make the films that show it and tell it like it is,” he warns. A pseudo jazz score underplays the sight of mangled people being dragged from destroyed motor vehicles. A state trooper weeps at the sight of a lifeless infant. “A five-month-old baby, a sixteen-year-old girl,” says Mackey. “They’re all dead.” Another batch of clips shows victims who weren’t killed outright but instead suffered a slow, agonizing death. The flute and saxophone continue their escort. “We showed you pain,” says Mackey. “But we didn’t think seeing was enough. So, we let you hear the sound of pain.” A woman’s screaming voice cuts through a cacophony of overdubbed cries and wailing. “Those screams impress you? Will they make you more alert in driving?”

If one considers the statistics at the end of most driver ed films, which detail the extent of road fatalities, the answer to that particular question must be in the negative.

In the world of classroom scares, the automobile wasn’t the only topic of scorn. For over two decades, young audiences in America[22] were also shown films warning of the dangers of recreational drug use, delinquency and other hot potatoes. If there is an underlying message common to these films it is one of social integration and conformity. Young people must behave themselves. “Most teenagers have good manners,” says the narrator in Safety or Slaughter?, a Canadian lensed driver ed from 1958, “and they usually make good drivers. If they are well mannered human beings.” In all, there were thousands of classroom films, says Ken Smith, author of the authoritative book on the subject, Mental Hygiene. But rarely did any of them provide such gruelling visions of carnage as those in the driver ed category.

One exception is The Child Molester (1964), a presentation of the Highway Safety Foundation, and written and directed by Herbert J. Leder. This twenty minutes film is aimed at children and parents, being a dramatized account of child abduction perpetrated by an unidentified male, the shadowy child molester of the title. When two little girls jump into a stranger’s vehicle on the promise of more sweets, the narrator goes to work. He chastises parents for not having warned their offspring of the potential danger. “Molester education is your responsibility,” he growls. Although it plays much like a sanitized television movie, cutting between the plight of the girls and the police investigation, it ends soon enough with a jarring reality check. The missing girls are found. Cue actual police film of two child corpses. The bodies are dressed identical to the young actresses a few moments earlier, beaten and discarded in woodland. Officials take the bodies away. The closing shot is one of a small shoe floating downstream.

What may be construed as a spin on classroom scare tactics was suggested more recently in regard to urban warfare. It was proposed that members of LA gangs should be placed in the pathology lab to observe autopsies and reflect upon the consequence of their actions. That was the idea anyway. The idea was nixed. “These kids are hard enough,” said one police detective. “We don’t need to make them harder.”[23] We might also consider the obligation of cigarette manufacturers in countries worldwide, warning off custom with packaging that incorporates pathological images of bodies in decay.

January 23, 1991. Constable Darrel Edward Lunsford, a forty-seven-year-old police officer, apprehended three men on a stretch of road near Garrison, Texas, and requested to search their vehicle. The search was filmed from a dash-mounted camera in Lunsford’s vehicle and the sound recorded via a remote microphone worn by the officer. Following a few questions conducted around the open trunk of the suspects’ car, two of the men set upon Lunsford and dragged him to the ground. The third man left the vehicle and joined the assault. Lunsford was punched and kicked to the head several times. One assailant took Lundsford’s gun from its holster and shot him in the back of the neck severing his spinal cord. The police officer died instantly. A colleague of Lunsford arrived thirty minutes later and discovered the video still recording. The tape was duplicated and played at the local police station. The following day, brothers Baldemar and Reynaldo Sambrano Villarreal, along with Jesus Zambrano, were arrested and charged with the officer’s murder. During the trail Zambrano testified as a government witness and the brothers were found guilty of murder. Baldemar received a life sentence and his brother forty years. Spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, David Wells, said this was the first case of a violent crime being recorded by the in-vehicle cameras. The sequence was aired on American television’s I Witness Video programme shortly after it occurred. Lunsford’s wife appeared on the Geraldo Rivera Show and the footage was shown again. In this instance the widow’s face was inset so viewers could watch her distraught reaction as the thugs murdered her husband. (The presentation is calculating and heartless. It is also a nod to the ‘reaction video’, a social media phenomenon discussed later.) There was a vogue for true crime shows at the time Lunsford’s murder was aired. CBS’ Top Cops (1990–93) offered reconstructions of dangerous crime incidents as related by the officers involved.

BABYLON’S BURNING

Events that took place on September 11, 2001, shaped the way in which the world looks at images of death and calamity, becoming the definitive televised atrocity as Islamic extremism collided, literally, with the West. On the day in question, small groups of middle-eastern men legitimately boarded four passenger planes in the US. Airbourne, the men murdered crew members, commandeered the planes and deliberately crashed them. The targets were American landmarks. Of these, the Pentagon was severely damaged, and an attack on the White House narrowly averted. But the World Trade Center, twin towers 110 storeys high dominating the Manhattan skyline, were the most visually dramatic and highly populated targets. Two French journalists, Jules and Gedeon Naudet, were making a documentary about the New York Fire Department and filming in the street when the surprise attack commenced. At 8.46 am a noisy, low-flying plane caught the cameraman’s attention and the first impact was filmed in what can only be described as total bewilderment. The Boeing 767 was travelling at almost 500 mph when it entered the north side of the building between floors ninety-four and ninety-eight.[24] Three minutes after impact, CNN was reporting an explosion at the World Trade Center and news teams headed for the location. Within ten minutes of the initial strike, images of the burning north tower were broadcast live internationally. There was confusion as to what had happened. Witnesses reported seeing an aircraft crash into the tower and were perplexed at what appeared to be incomprehensible pilot error. At three minutes past nine a second Boeing 767 struck the south tower, an event witnessed live by millions of television viewers around the world. The plane hit at around 600 mph and banked before impact, cutting through floors seventy-eight to eighty-four (leaving a cartoon-like aircraft-shaped entry hole on the south face). Human remains, office equipment, aircraft wreckage and a vast ball of burning aviation fuel ejected from the north and east sides of the tower. There was no mistaking in this moment that the country was experiencing a major terrorist attack. Around thirty minutes later a Boeing 757 crashed into the Pentagon, killing all sixty-four people on board and 125 members of staff in the building. Surprisingly little imagery is available of the Pentagon strike.[25] Inconclusive frames from a security camera were released to the world media in 2006 but they showed very little in comparison to the WTC footage. At 9.59 am, the World Trade Center south tower collapsed and within a further thirty minutes the north tower came down.

The availability and popularity of video cameras made certain the unexpected event was captured on film from a variety of angles. At least two home video cameras recorded the first plane hitting the north tower. Many more caught the south tower impact. The delayed collapse of the buildings ensured professional news teams had time to attend the scene, set up equipment and film the incident with something more sophisticated than off-theshelf domestic cameras. They were able to zoom in with high definition clarity to pick out survivors of the initial impact, trapped above the burning floors. People waved frantically from a height that made rescue impossible and many chose to jump to escape the overwhelming smoke and flames. The plight of the jumpers, falling to oblivion, were captured on film.[26]

The official death toll of the World Trade Center attack stands at over 2,700. When the event was shown on BBC News 24, newsreaders spoke to a backdrop of the second collision playing continuously on a loop. Indeed, throughout the whole coverage of the attacks, footage was played on a loop until new material was acquired. The effect was an unsettling visual mantra; the news reduced to a hypnagogic state.

The world was changed. The depiction of events that morning of September 11 were not of a city in chaos, but almost the polar opposite, a beautiful bright blue sky splintered silently on repeat. And in these moments a new form of terrorism was written, one in which film was paramount: The ‘snuff film’ as psychological weapon of terror.[27]

1Daily Telegraph. May 9, 2009.

2The envelopes contained Dwyer’s organ donor card, instructions for funeral arrangements, and a letter addressed to Governor Casey stating that he had not resigned his post but remained Treasurer until the end. The letter also suggested that his wife should be considered as his successor.

3Footage of Dwyer’s bloody demise features in a slew of shockumentary films and barrage tapes, among them Mondo Cane VI, Cathode Fuck, Assault Video, TV Disasters, News Nightmares and Traces of Death. (See also the review of Death Scenes 2 in chapter five, and chapter seven: BARRAGE TAPES.) One early appropriation of Dwyer in this way is Media Carnage (as it has come to be known), a compilation of horrific broadcast news stories c.1988. Sometimes the footage appears under the name “American Gulag.” It has also found its way onto the extreme music circuit and as back projection for some bands during live performances.

4The film, which includes no footage of suicide, is part of the E! television series Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

5Unidentified video clip on LiveLeak.

6See chapter five: 1975 and the review for Death Women.

7Sara Henley, Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1993.

8Don Atyeo, Violence in Sports.

9February 5, 1977.

10Ibid.

11Ben Cropp interviewed by Peter Thompson for ABCTV’s Talking Heads. Aired 2007. In the wake of Jaws (1975) sharks became fair game for destruction. The proposed aquatic plans for Cropp and Knievel can be counted among the real world repercussions of this cinematic fear-frenzy. Another Jaws cash-in was Shark Fighter (Paramount Books, 1975), a pulp novel written by the prolific Leonard Levinson (under the pseudonym Nicholas Brady). Its premise echoes that of Cropp some years later. Here a Navy frogman cum shark hunter (who likes to listen to Pink Floyd) is pitted against two killer sharks in a multimillion dollar deal for closed circuit broadcast.

12Don Atyeo, Violence in Sports.

13The segments are as follows: ‘Time Out’ by Landis; ‘Kick the Can’ by Spielberg (the worst of the bunch); ‘It’s a Good Life’ by Dante; ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’ by Miller. Landis also directed a wraparound segment, ‘Really Scary.’ These titles appeared in press materials for the movie, but curiously do not appear in the movie itself, where end credits list the segments only as numbers.

14It wasn’t meant to end this way. Landis’ original script closed with Morrow’s character being transported away in a cattle train by the SS. His cries for help unanswered; his imminent death a certainty. The studio didn’t like it; they considered it too much a downer. The alternative was to redeem the character in Korea, which provided Landis with a new ending and the opportunity to create plenty of huge explosions against the destruction of an entire village. It was by far the weaker ending but the sense of spectacle appealed to Landis.

15Civil lawsuits were brought against the filmmakers by the parents of Renee Chen and Myca Dinh Le, and the children of Vic Morrow. These were settled out of court by Warner Bros.

16Also missing from the credits is the name of the second assistant director, who disowns the project behind the pseudonym ‘Alan Smithee’.

17See review in chapter five: Death Scenes 2.

18April 20, 1993.

19There have been many cases of movie stunt deaths in front of a camera. Here is a run down of some of them, beginning in 1977 when Jim Shepherd was killed during the making of Comes a Horseman while being dragged behind a horse. In 1981, Bullet Bailey was towed behind an aircraft at 500 feet when the cable snapped. In 1981, Jack Tyree was killed doing a jump for The Sword and the Sorcerer, after he missed the airbag; the same year, Jack Tanberg, working on the CBS TV movie The Five of Me, was hit and killed when a car went out of control on the set. In 1985, Reid Rondell, the resident stuntman for the television series Airwolf, standing in for actor Jan-Michael Vincent, died after a helicopter crashed and exploded. In 1986, Dar Robinson died impaled on a tree following a high speed motorcycle chase. In 1990, Jay Currin, a human fireball specialist, jumped off a cliff and missed the airbag. In 1996, Collin Dragsbaek lost his life while filming a high fall and landing on a faulty airbag in Love Serenade. In 2002, Larry H Connor, Vin Diesel’s stunt double, died while filming a rappelling sequence in xXx. In 2008, Lu Yanqing was burned to death during John Woo’s Red Cliff. And in 2011, Kun Lieu died in an explosion working on Sylvester Stallone’s Expendables 2.

20John Baxter, Stunt: The Story of the Great Movie Stuntmen.

21John Harrison, Blood on the Windscreen.

22It is almost exclusively an American phenomenon. This is not to say the classroom film didn’t exist outside America. Classrooms in other parts of the world had their own particular celluloid guidance, but its voice tended to be a lot more reserved. For example, no teenager in a UK school ever got to see a genuine fatality projected onto a screen.

23Quoted ‘On the Record,’ compiled by Robert Martin, CrimeBeat: The Newsmagazine of Crime, April 1993.

24The only audible reaction is a cry of “Holy shit!” When the footage was made available to television networks, some edited out the expletive, the word perhaps offensive to viewers and the images not.

25An incongruity that has led to numerous conspiracy theories.

26No footage of bodies impacting with the Plaza below was broadcast, if indeed such footage was recorded. From the first plane hit to the collapse of the last tower, more than 200 people jumped to their deaths. Film shot by two tourists from a hotel room adjacent to the towers, used as evidence in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the conspirators in the 9/11 attacks, briefly show the results of the impacts.

27September 11 has influenced the way in which media operates. Catastrophe and death are now measured by it, intentionally or otherwise. Media and entertainment are informed by it, which is probably why an awful lot of passengers are ripped from planes in Hollywood movies nowadays, e.g., Superman Returns (2006), World War Z (2013). And why the upper floors of many tall buildings are the focus of collateral damage in an alien attack, e.g., Battleship (2012), The Avengers (2013). The same goes for rolling dust clouds and choking persons within them, another requisite of post 9/11 disaster movie realism. Take Man of Steel (2013), in which superheroes demolish the skyline, or Godzilla (2014) where legendary monsters do likewise. So profound are the events of 9/11 that they operate retroactively, too. It is impossible to see the skyline of predawn New York, when the twin towers were still framed against the sky, and not automatically consider them gone. Any reference to WTC is interpreted as a visual metaphor for their destruction, e.g., King Kong (1976), Man on Wire (2008). A short experimental film, Just Like the Movies (2005), tackles this very subject. Here, filmmaker Michal Kosakowski reconstructs 9/11 in a narrative formed from clips of Hollywood movies that predate the catastrophic event. Among these are Swordfish (2001) and Q — The Winged Serpent (1982), anticipating the destruction of WTC and its aftermath. Other movies collected by Kosakowski, such as Taxi Driver (1976) and Ghostbusters (1984), see the twin towers as backdrop, unmoved as life in the city goes by, yet eerily cognizant all the same. The piano score by Paolo Marzocchi puts everything into the frame of a silent movie.

Be careful little eyes, what you see. You can’t un-watch this stuff and
you will be forever changed.[1]

Websites showcasing graphic forensic content, scenes of murder, accident and carnage in general, are no longer relegated to the marginal back roads of the Internet. These sites and the publication of such material has grown exponentially over years, and today are enormously popular. Two of the first such sites were Rotten.com and Ogrish.com, appearing in 1996 and 1999 respectively. Rotten outrageously claimed to get around fifteen million hits a day — which is more than the New York Times website — and Ogrish declared a more credible 750,000 hits on a “bad news day”. If even remotely accurate, such figures testify to the popularity of the shock site, although some hits are evidently the result of misdirection, innocent looking links on other websites mischievously luring the unwary Internet traveller.

Rotten has the tag line “Pure evil since 1996”, and provides more than just gruesome photographs and bizarre sexual images. Its content includes articles, editorials and commentary that are often well researched, poignant and amusing. The Daily Rotten, for instance, “news you cannot possibly use,” collates the more unusual news items on a daily basis. Ogrish, on the other hand, our case study, is more committed to the straight presentation of shocking imagery. “Can you handle life?” reads a banner depicting a pair of mutilated hands cupping the word Ogrish. It underwent a renovation in early 2000, which brought a more professional-looking home page that irked some regular visitors. One forum post demanded, “What the hell happened to the original start page of ogrish.com? The new one SUCKS!!!”

When Ogrish changed ownership the site altered significantly. Arguably, its raison d’etre was lost in that all the gruesome imagery was removed and replaced with inoffensive material. Perhaps its original content offended the new owner, in which case we can only speculate why it had been bought in the first place. It was still a site covering death and real life horror, but the gruesome images and streaming videos were replaced, for the most part, by text, which invited a spat of irate comments. When visitors dropped off, the site changed hands again and the content slowly reverted to its familiar ghastliness.

The new owners expanded Ogrish. The servers that hosted the site were located in the US and the operating personnel in Europe, Asia and South America. A spokesman for Ogrish told the authors, “It has been through three different owners. That also explains why the site has changed dramatically since the beginning. We have defined different goals to the previous owners. We would like to be taken more seriously and in the long term be considered as an alternative uncensored news source.”[2] The uncompromising nature of the imagery posted on the site inevitably brought undue attention and consequences both legal and moral. Said Ogrish, “We’ve had to deal with several copyright and privacy issues. There have also been a couple of bigger issues in the past where some local governments wanted the site to be shut down and all people working for it prosecuted. They’ve never succeeded since we are 100 per cent legal.” One of Ogrish’s first problems came with the posting of a video showing the execution of journalist Daniel Pearl. “From what I’ve heard Ogrish was the first western site that had the footage up after it was acquired from someone who happened to visit an Islamic forum where it was originally posted. I don’t think there were any legal consequences, even though the FBI made threats. However they soon realized that posting the video was not breaking any law.” Offence was taken when a gallery of images showing the remains of victims from the Madrid train bombings was posted on the site. “A Spanish judge (Juan del Olmo) who took care of the Madrid bombing research tried to get the site shut down and wanted to prosecute us through the American government system. Once again there wasn’t any real law broken, even though del Olmo claimed privacy and security laws were broken. To be safe we censored faces in the Madrid bombing pictures. Since del Olmo could not get us shut down he contacted a big ISP in Spain to prevent people accessing the site there.”

Shortly after posting a video that showed the beheading of Korean captive Kim Sun-Il in Iraq, a series of attempts were made to dislocate the site. “Some Koreans tried DoS[3] attacks, which sent a lot of request per second to the webpage to try to get the servers shut down.” The assault failed and the video remained on the site, although official steps were taken in Germany to prevent access. “I’m not sure what the current status of the block is,” said Ogrish. “We are aware that Ogrish was blocked for a while through Level 3[4] in Germany, however this might not be the case anymore. We supplied Level 3 with legal documents in which we explained that no law was broken.” But site closure threats and official requests for removal of material are not the only pressures. “We received death threats on a weekly basis. However, since the site has been restructured and transferred to a more mainstream one, this has declined dramatically. The majority of the feedback we receive nowadays is very positive.”

The quality of the video and photographic material on Ogrish varies considerably, drawn from sources that range from basic mobile phones to high definition forensic crime scene photographs. Ogrish explains the supply of source material. “During the years that Ogrish.com has been around, we have been able to establish a content network. This network consists of more than fifty people from all over the world working in a variety of professions — including law enforcement and medical personnel. In addition to this content network we also receive submissions on a daily basis from people who happen to come across certain scenes and capture it on camera. Ogrish owns the copyrights to much of the content that is displayed on the website. We often buy this content and have to make sure we are not breaking any privacy laws and that we have permission from the people who captured the images and/or are featured in certain images.”

Insight into the mindset of those visiting the website is gleaned from comments on the Ogrish forum. These posts appear to be unedited with many created for no reason but to cause offence. Some are laced with racist remarks, and only a few promote insightful or serious discussion. “It’s definitely not what we want,” say Ogrish. “Some people don’t take certain content seriously and laugh about images or videos. We’re going to restructure the forums in the upcoming month to try to turn them into something more educational/serious than they are now.” Reaction to shock content is deserving of discussion itself, not just in terms of Ogrish but as it appears online in general. Ogrish is one site that offers a shorthand by way of emoticons, through which visitors can express their feelings on a given video or image. These ‘smileys’ range from an animated vomiting head to a crouched figure furiously masturbating — hardly conducive to serious discussion. But Ogrish have more conventional aspirations. “Our goal is to become a respected media outlet for uncensored, unbiased news. This will take considerable time, contacts and funds. We would also like to add much more background and educational value to our content.”

The restructure came in October 2006, when Ogrish transformed again. Links to the familiar URL address now returned a website called LiveLeak. A note on the home page greeted visitors:

Dear Ogrish Viewer, Welcome to LiveLeak.com. Ogrish.com has been incorporated into LiveLeak to ensure you get all the uncensored media you are used to along with so much more. Feel free to sign up, comment, and upload media. If you are a member of the Ogrish.com forum you can sign into LiveLeak using your forum username and password or make an entirely new account. Thanks.

As of writing the Ogrish forum still lives, though it is restricted to existing members only. LiveLeak became Ogrish’s mainstream front to such an extent that in 2007 it was name-checked by then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, being one of the first sites to host mobile phone footage of the hanging of Saddam Hussein.

One factor common to Ogrish and most other shock sites is a direct link to pornography by way of click-throughs on their main pages. Rotten is partially funded by its own porn section, Pornopolis, which is accessed for a membership fee of $6.95 per month. In its pre-LiveLeak days Ogrish also relied on porn as a revenue source. “As soon as we find alternate ways to fund the incredible costs, we will eliminate the adult-oriented advertisements,” they stated. Hit rates on this route from death to explicit sexual content are supposedly extremely high. The desire to seek out explicit porn after viewing overt violence is not altogether alien. Georges Bataille pondered the conundrum in 1957. ‘In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation,’ he wrote in his book, Eroticism.

Not only do we find in the uneasy transitions of organisms engaged in reproduction the same basic violence which in physical eroticism leaves us gasping, but we also catch the inner meaning of that violence. What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? — a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?[5]

We see in the experience of human trauma and destruction the trigger for an instinctive hormonal response to procreate and replenish the lost stock. Conceivably, then, Ogrish’s masturbating icon has deeper significance than one of simple tactlessness.

These days Ogrish and Rotten have plenty of competition, some of it more outrageous and openly sexual. (Cute Dead Guys has threads devoted to ‘mortoboys’ and genuine autopsy images, with comments on how ‘hot’ they are.) Not all the young turks are able to last the distance, though. While Ogrish survived legal attempts to shut it down, less fortunate was NTFU aka nowthatsfuckedup.com. NTFU was a shock site forcibly closed in 2006, amid controversy that US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were submitting kill zone photographs in return for access to porn content. The owner of NTFU, Christopher Wilson, was arrested, charged with publishing obscene material, and banned from running a similar themed website for five years.[6] Wilson has replaced NTFU with documentingreality.com, a pay-to-register site with an Ogrish inspired banner that asks “can you handle reality?” and a forum whose inhabitants have names like fistfuckdeathgrip, Cunt Westwood and menstrualclots. Among other comparatively new shock sites is theYNC.com, a site that delivers a yin yang of hardcore porn video advertisements and gore. Bestgore.com describes itself as a reality news site and its content ‘bloody, gut wrenching, teeth grinding, offensive and upsetting. Just as the life itself.’ [sic] Operated by Mark Marek out of Vancouver, Bestgore is the usual graphic compote of video clips, photographs and requisite porno ads. However, an incident in May 2012 would link the website to a bizarre and shocking case that placed it into the international spotlight: The murder of student Lin Jun by male escort and one time gay porn actor Luka Magnotta, soon to be discussed.

HAPPY SLAPPING

Technology brought another cultural change and new fears when emerged the camera phone, a media capture device far more versatile and desirable than ‘lifestyle’ devices before it. The integration of the video camera with the mobile phone created potential movie makers on every corner, and while the dissemination of sexual imagery would soon create a fuss, much as had happened with 8mm loops, here cruelty was the theme adopted by many young filmmakers. What was described as a ‘craze’ or ‘fad’ came to the fore in early 2000. A person would walk up to a stranger and slap them across the face, with the supposedly comic incident filmed by an accomplice on a mobile phone. The resultant film clip would be shared on peer to peer networks or passed around the school playground. This was happy slapping. The BBC acknowledged it but questioned its existence. ‘Reports suggest a new craze in which young people slap strangers and film the assault on mobile phones is on the increase. But does this trend actually exist or is it the product of media hype?’[7] The craze was a reality, if not quite so widespread as some elements of the media would have us believe.

The slapping aspect turned more sinister when on October 30, 2004, David Morley was beaten to death by a gang of youths. Detective Chief Inspector Nick Skola said of the incident, “The attacks were carried out so they could be filmed on mobile phones and later played for the attackers’ pleasure.” The perpetrators, Reece Sargeant, Darren Case, David Blenman and Chelsea O’Mahoney, who had assaulted and robbed numerous victims on the night they killed Morley, were arrested, charged and finally sentenced to a total of forty-four years in prison. On March 2, 2006, Luke Salisbury was attacked by youths in his Surrey home. Salisbury, thirty, was stripped naked, thrown down stairs, beaten, kicked and stamped on. The attack was filmed and Salisbury died as a result of the assault. Seventeen-year-old Andrew Elvin was sentenced to twelve years and eighteen-year-old Caine Hallett received five years for killing Salisbury. Triston Christmas died after an assault in 2005. His killer, eighteen-year-old Gary Roper, was part of a gang that habitually assaulted people and filmed the attacks. Though the police found no footage showing the attack on Christmas they did discover fourteen other violent incidents stored on a mobile phone. Some of these videos were broadcast on news programmes in hope that victims might come forward to aid in prosecuting the arrested gang members. On October 10, 2006, forty-year-old Peter Ramsey was killed by two teenagers in a happy slap attack in Southampton. Although the objective had been to film it, another gang member refused to record the attack. “The event was made worse by an intention to record the attack on the telephone,” said Mr Justice Irwin in sentencing, “as if to boast of it rather than to be ashamed of it.” Twenty-nine-year-old Gavin Waterhouse was beaten to death in Keighley by two youths, Mark Masters and Sean Thompson, in September 2007. The assault was filmed by a fifteen-year-old girl who didn’t take part in the attack but was later charged with aiding and abetting manslaughter and jailed for two years. Judith Naylor, of West Yorkshire Crown Prosecution Service said, “It is believed that this is the first time a suspect in England and Wales has been successfully prosecuted for aiding and abetting murder or manslaughter, for the filming of an inaptly called, ‘happy slapping’ incident.”

At the height of the panic, any news report covering violent attack or a murder committed by a young assailant was augmented with the possibility that the act may have been filmed on a mobile phone. Over a six-month period the British press alone is said to have run over 500 stories on the violent phenomenon, with headlines in many major newspapers, most notably the Daily Mail.[8] “[T]he media ignore the fact that most GBH [grievous bodily harm] isn’t caused by happy slapping,” commented one youth on press culpability in the matter.[9] When thirteen-year-old Jamie Smith beat to death Stephen Croft and threw his body onto a bonfire on November 5, 2007, initial reports implied it was a happy slap incident despite no evidence to suggest this was the case. The press stated that “detectives are investigating rumours suggesting Mr Croft had been attacked earlier by yobs who filmed the assault on a mobile phone. So far no one has made a statement to police about the alleged ‘happy slapping’ although detectives have scoured Internet sites for clues.” Similarly, when Amar Aslam was murdered in an assault in a West Yorkshire park detectives were “trying to trace video footage of the incident which is reported to have also have been texted to another phone.” Reportage implied that video was a modular component to any violent youth-attributed crime. One online blog dedicated to the memory of Croft features a post that ascertains “No doubt the incident might well have been posted up on YouTube for the rest of the few hundred scum to gloat at.” The video footage is assumed to be out there, even though it may not exist.

Happy slapping was elevated from a series of isolated incidents to an integral part of UK yob culture and pilloried much like football hooliganism as an ‘English disease’; in short, a new cultural blemish caused by the uneducated lower classes. In the US the only reference to happy slapping concerned its pervasiveness in the UK.[10] France was no different, but troubled by the apparent rise and spread of happy slapping in Britain and its potentially contagious effects, proposed in 2007 the introduction of a law that made it an offence to recording and distribute acts of violence. Punishment for offenders was five years in prison or a £51,000 fine.

The trend of happy slapping is said to be derivative of reality television shows like Big Brother, Jackass TV and Dirty Sanchez, which make humiliation and the harm of others an acceptable comical norm. An advertisement for the soft drink Tango, in which an orange-coloured fat man sneaks up on an unsuspecting Tango drinker and double-slaps his face, is also alluded to as a potential imitative source. However, this is unlikely as the original Tango ad was banned in 1992, a good eight years before the first camera phone hybrid came on the market.

Attempts to localize the influence behind happy slapping may well be futile, in that no single point of reference exists. In researching happy slapping, Marek Palasinski noted that young people would often qualify their interest in creating and viewing such material by adopting the evasive strategies of convicted criminals; in other words they put the blame for their actions elsewhere and on others, i.e., parents, authorities, technology and/or culture as a cause in general.[11] If we provide aggressive individuals with a handy little camera, is it not conceivable that the tool will be abused? that actions on film take place with or without the means to film them? The irony is that through these actions comes an audience and consequently, with the Internet, a wider and greater platform of dissemination. On July 27, 2007, fifty-year-old Christina Lakinski collapsed in the doorway of her home in Hartlepool, northern England. Twenty-seven-year-old Anthony Anderson saw the suffering woman and approached her with two friends. But instead of using the mobile phone in their possession to call for an ambulance, it was switched to camera mode and Anderson was filmed as he urinated over the dying woman, boasting “this is YouTube material!” It is little wonder that in May 2014, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe conceded on daytime television that a new audio and visual recording device was being fitted to uniformed officers. This was a good thing for modern policing, said Hogan-Howe, because all too often “we find we’re the only people at an incident who don’t have a camera.”

There are no known cases of people being intentionally murdered in a happy slapping incident in the UK. Death is a consequence, not the design. But the camera phone has brought to light the barbaric attitudes of other cultures in distant lands, in which mobile technology is now an unfettered source for shocking images. Mobile phone footage that shows the intentional killing of a young girl has been widely available on the Internet for some years. Shot on April 7, 2007, in Bashiqa, near Mosul, Iraq, a mob of Yezidi men beat, kick and stamp on seventeen-year-old Du’a Khalil Aswad before crushing her skull with a concrete block. Not only do the crowding men struggle to kick the helpless girl but they also vie for the best shot of her suffering with their camera phones; a bizarre integration of 3G technology and medieval practice. Peer pressure, primitive tribal rage and sheer sadistic delight prevent anyone from assisting the victim. The murder would later be described as an ‘honour killing.’ Like happy slapping it is a befitting oxymoron.

DANIEL PEARL

A snuff tape is a low quality, Hollywood production of a murder. This is not a snuff tape, but rather one of the most effective and professionally produced pieces of anti-Semitic propaganda ever produced since Hitler’s regime.[12]

An American investigative reporter working in Pakistan was the unfortunate antecedent of a terrifying mode of propaganda in the wake of 9/11. Daniel Pearl was chasing a story about Islamic terrorists and failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid on his way to a supposed meeting with a militant leader. The date was January 23, 2002. Pearl never arrived at the appointment (had it been anything other than a ruse in the first place), but was intercepted and kidnapped by a radical group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. Accusing the journalist of being a Jewish spy, an email was sent to US officials threatening Pearl’s death unless demands were met. The demands included the immediate release of all terrorist suspects detained in Guantanamo Bay, the end of the US presence in Pakistan and the delivery of F-16 planes that had been paid for by the Pakistani government. An attached photograph of Pearl, chained and with a gun held to his head, made the front pages of the world press. Some days after his abduction Pearl was murdered by his captors, who, in the month that followed, released a disturbing video.

The video is titled The Slaughter of the Spy Journalist the Jew Daniel Pearl. In it only Pearl’s head is visible, while the background is matted out, probably to hide any incriminating feature that may identify the location. A montage of victims from the Palestine/ Israeli conflict is intercut with Pearl’s monologue. Pearl speaks to the camera in a seemingly calm manner and states that he is a Jewish American and gives his home address. He describes his father of Zionist descent and his mother Jewish,[13] likening then his present isolation and imprisonment to that of the captives in Guantanamo Bay. The final part of the speech is transparently scripted propaganda about American foreign policy and the occupation of Afghanistan. The next image of Pearl sees him bare-chested lying on a blanketed sofa, his arms tied behind his back with someone sawing into his neck until it is almost completely severed. This lasts only a few seconds, during which time Pearl exhibits no sign of life. A short sequence of still shots depict the various stages of decapitation. In one shot, Pearl is wearing a blood-soaked shirt with a hand visible pointing to the gash at the front of his throat. The sofa is heavily bloodstained and this appears the moment he was killed (some reports state that technical problems with the video camera prevented the actual kill being filmed properly). The film ends with Pearl’s severed head lifted by its hair, the photograph of the orange-suited inmates at Guantanamo Bay and the group’s repeated demands scrolling up the screen. “We asure [sic] Americans that they shall never be safe on the Muslim Land of Pakistan,” reads the threat in part. “And if our demands are not met this scene will be repeated again and again…”

The video was made available to American and Pakistani government officials before it was posted on the Internet by an Islamic group. A spokesman for the US government stated to the press that it looked as if Pearl was dead prior to decapitation and he appeared to have a chest wound, the implication being that Pearl was perhaps “humanely” shot. But the images, particularly the still photo of him still wearing his bloody shirt, indicate strongly that he was partially decapitated while alive. Indeed, some early reports of the video content spoke of a man stepping into shot behind the seated and very-much-alive Pearl and sawing into his neck. No such scene is in the Internet released video and is most likely apocryphal.

Broadcast by CBS was an edited version of the tape, justified by anchorman Dan Rather as a means of giving the viewers the right to see and judge for themselves “the kind of propaganda terrorists are using in their war against the United States.” Pearl’s widow, Mariane, made her feelings clear in an angry statement about the “heartless decision” to air the tape, although rumours of a lawsuit seemingly amounted to nothing.

Initially there was a concerted effort to prevent the full video being viewed by the public. One of the first western Internet sites to make the film available was Ogrish, hosted by Pro Hosters. Following a tip-off from Dow Jones — Pearl’s employers and owners of the Wall Street Journal — Pro Hosters was subject to FBI interest, with site owner, Ted Hickman, threatened on charges of obscenity unless the video was removed. The FBI also requested the identity of the owner of Ogrish.com. Thereafter the video was temporarily taken down. Only after support and advice from the American Civil Liberties Union did Pro Hosters restore the video, claiming the FBI had violated the First Amendment. Later the FBI dropped its threat of criminal charges and desisted in its attempt to prevent websites posting the video. Nevertheless, a spokesperson for Dow Jones stated that any Internet site showing the video would be reported to law enforcement agencies.

Rotten.com made an edited version of the video available with the disclaimer:

In consideration to the Pearl family, while recognizing the importance of bringing you an uncut version of this film, we have blocked out the graphic images of Pearl’s death, leaving the rest of the video intact.

In March 2002, several men were arrested and charged with the abduction and murder of Daniel Pearl. Some had been traced through the email address from which the initial ransom demand was sent. The man accused of masterminding the plot was British-born Omar Saeed Sheikh, who had also provided funds of over $100,000 to Mohammed Atta in the build up to the 9/11 attacks on America. Atta was the 9/11 ringleader, who, it was alleged, piloted the first airliner into the World Trade Center. In 2007, while in custody, al-Qaeda member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed admitted to decapitating Pearl. Other members of the gang revealed how they botched the filming of the actual decapitation and re-shot the scene with the already beheaded Pearl.

The video of Daniel Pearl was something new. It heralded a generation of propaganda snuff tapes that would leave nothing to the imagination.

NICK BERG

Nicholas Berg, a twenty-six-year-old American businessman, was in Iraq to seek out potential contracts for his company Prometheus Tower Services in order to help rebuild the country’s communication systems. For reasons unknown, on March 24, 2004, Berg was stopped by Iraqi police at a checkpoint and detained. (Some have speculated it was because Berg’s documents identified him as Jewish.) Over the following days there was confusion and contradiction as to Berg’s whereabouts. Both US officials and Iraqi police denied they held Berg. His parents meanwhile claimed to have received an email stating he was in fact in US custody and consequently they contacted the FBI. The story goes that Berg was eventually released on April 6 from Shirdta Iraqiyah station near Mosul, an Iraqi detention centre where, Berg would say, “the United States Military Police supervised and trained the Iraqi officers.” He last contacted his parents on April 9 and was in touch with US officials the following day. After this Nick Berg disappeared.

On May 8, 2004, Berg’s decapitated body was found hanging by its ankles from a Baghdad overpass. His head was nearby on the road. The discovery of Berg’s body was made public, but that he had been decapitated was withheld. On Tuesday, May 11, an Islamic website posted a video titled Abu Musa’b al-Zarqawi Slaughters an American.

The video opens with titles in Arabic then cuts to a man seated in a white plastic chair wearing what appears to be an orange jumpsuit similar to those worn by detainees in US custody. The time imprint on the film is 13.26.24. The man speaks. “My name is Nick Berg,” he says, “my father’s name is Michael.” There is a cut to a different camera as he states his mother’s and other family members’ names. The time on the second camera, which is static and probably tripod mounted, is 2.18.33. Cut to 2.40.32. Berg is now sitting on the floor of what appears to be the same room with his ankles bound and arms tied behind his back. Behind him stand five men, four of whom are armed with automatic weapons. All are masked. The central figure, believed to be militant Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,[14] reads from a document in Arabic for several minutes. He appears to have difficulty with the pages, turning them this way and that, folding them, flipping back to the start. At 2.44.16 he hands the document to the man on his left and produces a long knife from under his robes. Berg is grabbed by the hair, toppled to the floor and the knife is immediately put to the front of his throat and sawn rapidly. Screams are heard along with the frenzied shouts of “Allahu Akbar” (the sound on the video is out of synch and the screaming and chanting begins several seconds before the slaughter). Cut to a close-up from the second handheld camera timed at 13.45.47. Indistinct blurry images fill the frame before the shot settles to reveal Berg pinned to the ground by his legs and arms while the cutting continues. There is much blood and terrible sounds. At 13.47.47 the head is completely detached and held aloft by the hair.

When news broke that the video was online, there followed a mad scramble to view and download the file. The BBC, Fox News and CNN were among the quickest off the mark and, it appears, downloaded the video within one hour of its first appearance online. Within ninety minutes of the original upload, other news organizations were claiming the video was no longer to be found. It had evidently been duplicated, however, and would eventually appear on other websites. American news media broadcast the video on television up to the point where the killer pulls the knife. One news outlet froze the video at this same point but continued to broadcast the audio for the full duration. The website on which the video first appeared was al-ansar.biz, an Islamic website hosted by Acme Commerce, an Internet company in Malaysia.[15] But to add to the confusion, independent research concluded: “The location of the web server is reportedly in Malaysia. However, the addresses of the publishers for these sites are located in London, England and Nurnberg, Denmark…” Such is the tangled web of the web. The site was taken offline three days after it carried the video. Alfred Lim, business manager for Acme Commerce, stated the company was unaware of the video and didn’t know that the client who rented the web space may have had al-Qaeda connections. But the reason for closing the site was technical rather than one of concern over its hideous content: A server overload due to unprecedented traffic. Berg’s beheading became one of the most widely watched videos on the Internet, according to contemporary search engine analysis. The day after the video was released, images of Berg seated in front of his captors moments before death appeared on the front pages of most newspapers around the world.

The quality and duration of the video varies. Some copies are more compressed than others, resulting in an indistinct, highly pixelated image. Some lack Berg’s opening comments and reduce the length of al-Zarqawi’s rhetoric. The timecode indicates there is 1min 14secs of footage missing from the decapitation process, during which time al-Zarqawi allows a different person to complete the severing of the head. There are at least seven people present during the murder: The five men who stand behind Berg, the operator of the handheld camera and another person who partially enters the frame during the final moments. These points have led to the inevitable conspiracy theories, some stating that the victim isn’t Berg, or that he is already dead during the beheading process, noting how he doesn’t move while seated, screams are heard before the knife is applied (implying post dubbing) and he appears not to bleed when his throat is cut. But these observations only apply to the heavily compressed, washed-out video — in the better resolution version, Berg is clearly Berg and he is very much alive. It has further been postulated that US personnel carried out the killing in Abu Ghraib prison as a means of distracting attention from a politically embarrassing prisoner abuse scandal.[16] This theory is based on peripheral factors such as the type of chair on which Berg is seated, the colour of the wall in the background and the official detainee orange jump suit he wears, all matching photographs of Iraqi prisoners and the interior of Abu Ghraib. What Berg wears, however, is not a jumpsuit but orange silk pyjamas, which is clear in photographs showing Berg’s body strung from the bridge. The video has been purposefully manufactured to imitate images released by the media of Abu Ghraib.

Here follow Internet posts regarding the Berg video (sic throughout):

The bloke was dead when they cut his head off, as there is no blood. I’ve never cut off a persons head, but when slaughtering sheep for meat, you slit the throat because it is the best way. Blood spurts from the neck quite vigourously and a good distance (about 3-4 feet). Also, the bloke cutting off the head didn’t know what he was doing because it only takes about 4 seconds to have a head completely off with a knife.
/Harry

I, don’t think the video is even on this site. Every time I try to see it, they have to much traffic. Is that real or fake!!! I wonder?
/dross

That video is horrible, I don’t care who that is happing to, it is sickening that anyone would find pleasure in such an act- not to mention laugh during it. This war has gone too far, but whatever the end result, these people will burn in Hell and get what they deserve. My sincerest sorrow and sympathy goes out to Burg and his family, he will get his justice in the long run.
/American college student

I am getting tired of trying to download this video and can never get through. I know with today’s technology you can handle this “heavy traffic” better than this shit!
/pissed

I’ve never seen a live killing before. That guy was still screaming when his head was hanging by threads. I don’t ‘feel for the family’ when I see something like that, I feel for the poor guy being executed.
/John Yates

I watched the video a couple of weeks ago out of a morbid curiosity to see how vicious the beheading was. I had recently seen “The Last Samurai” and thought that maybe if it was done quickly it would have been not so horrible. But it was very horrible. Very vicious. Our country is at war with some lethal, bloodthirsty people. Americans, too, can be lethal, bloodthirsty people. Appalling video…
/anon.

Wonder when we get to see another beheading, this one is grtting old by the minute.
/John

Loved the video. Alwayz pleasing to see an amercian getting killed. The muthfukaz think they rule the world. Ha Ha justice of the blade aganist the opperssor.
/Funny

This stuff is better than holliwood! Fancy in future the best sort of entertainment will be live (or the closest thing to it) beheadings. Welcome back the days of Marie Antoinette! So much blood. Such a hard on! Viva.
/Ricobaysahi

These comments are fairly characteristic of those found on sites hosting such videos, a social-psychosomatic spectrum of those who are drawn to watch videos of beheadings. Not everyone is out to cause offence in their posts or elicit controversy, per the majority of the above. Medical practitioners viewed the Berg film in context of forensic curiosity, its content, the beheading of a living person, providing a unique opportunity for pathological study. Jonathan Hayes, a New York City Medical Examiner, says of the video. “I felt I needed to see it.” He writes of his experience:

I try to do the math: If someone’s heart stops immediately, he still has about fifteen seconds of consciousness as the brain burns off the last of its oxygen. Maybe, I think, he could have had an air embolus — when the large veins of the neck are cut, air can be sucked into the heart, where it’s whipped into a froth, which forms a vapor lock, and stops the heart from pumping blood. That, I tell myself, would kill him a few seconds faster. But I know that the notion is a distraction, the possibilities collapsing because you can hear him screaming, and if he’s screaming, his trachea hasn’t been cut through yet, and he’s in pain, and he’s alive, and he’s conscious.[17]

Iconic Time covers that carry the face of a US enemy crossed out: Adolf Hitler (May 7, 1945), Saddam Hussein (April 21, 2003), Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (June 13, 2006) and Osama Bin Laden (May 5, 2011).

Some doubted its authenticity and needed to see for themselves whether the video was what it purported to be. Even after viewing some still claimed the whole thing a fake. Others appeared to delight in its ghoulish content, and posted anonymous comments clearly aimed at causing offence or invoking a reaction. Internet trolls make a pastime of this sort of behaviour. One thing is sure, though, the beheading videos are extremely popular and, according to monitored activity, the files are viewed and downloaded in their millions. Those who pondered whether another video might appear didn’t have to wait long.

On Saturday, June 12, 2004, Paul Marshall Johnson, a forty-nine-year-old American helicopter engineer living in Saudi Arabia, was kidnapped in Riyadh by a group claiming to be affiliated to al-Qaeda. The militants, said to be headed by Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin, posted a video on the Internet on June 15 showing Johnson bound and blindfolded with tightly-wound packing tape. He wore an orange jump suit, its left sleeve removed to reveal a tattoo on his bicep clearly for the purpose of identification. The video, in which Johnson makes a personal statement, was broadcast on international television, along with appeals from Johnson’s wife. Typically, the demands from his captors included the release of terrorist prisoners detained within Saudi Arabia. The demands were not met and, on June 18, three photographs showing Johnson’s beheading appeared on the Internet followed later by a video of the act. As with Berg, Johnson was dressed in the orange jump suit for his beheading. The act was carried out in what appeared to be a domestic setting with Johnson pushed face down on a mattress while a masked man cut his head off with a knife. The head was placed on the back of the body and the knife propped up against the face. That same day al-Muqrin and three accomplices were killed in a shoot-out with police allegedly after they had disposed of Johnson’s body. One month later police discovered Johnson’s head in a fridge in an apartment in Riyadh.

On September 16, Americans Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley and Briton Kenneth Bigley were kidnapped by al-Zarqawi’s Jihad militants in a Baghdad suburb. All three were civil engineers working on reconstruction projects for the same company. The group that held them posted a video on the Internet showing the men seated in front of a Tawhid and Jihad banner. They were threatened with death if prisoners in Iraqi jails were not released. Four days after the abduction the first captive was beheaded in front of the camera.

Armstrong, wearing an orange jump suit, is seated on the floor of what seems an empty apartment. He is tied and blindfolded and he rocks back and forth in a clearly distressed state. To Armstrong’s left is a window through which sunlight shines and a curtain billows. He is sitting on sheets of clear polythene. Behind him, framed by the Tawhid banner, are five masked men. One is reading aloud a document, while the others clasp automatic weapons. The statement is finished and a knife replaces the document. The men move in on Armstrong. He is pushed to the floor as one man grabs his hair while the one with the knife pulls back his chin and cuts into his throat. The camera has moved in for a close-up. The whole process takes time and seems horribly prolonged. When the head is finally detached it is placed on the back of the body. A final shot shows one of the masked men holding the head by the hair in front of the banner.

Following the release of the video the CIA would again claim that voice analysis identifies the killer as al-Zarqawi, and again others would dispute this.

I will never forget watching Eugene Armstrong’s terrorizing screams which soon sounded like a pig being tortured. The sound of his death was as bad as the sight, and I had no idea it would take so damn long for somebody to die that way. al-Zarqawi definitely achieved his goal with me. I’m agnostic, but I was praying the next 3 nights for the sounds and images to go away.[18]

Within twenty-four hours of Armstrong’s murder Jack Hensley was placed before the camera.

Hensley is dressed in an orange jump suit and sitting bound and blindfolded on a green rug in what appears the same room his colleague was beheaded. Hensley seems less distraught than Armstrong as though reconciled to his impending fate. The banner is still on the wall and three armed and masked men stand before it. In front of them are two more masked men. One reads from a document as the other brings a large knife from beneath his clothing. Hensley is set upon and manages one scream as the blade is put to his throat. He is held down and his head forced back to make the cutting easier. Complete decapitation is quickly achieved, followed by shouts of “Allahu Akbar” when the murderer holds the head up and positions it in front of his own, as though posing for a trophy photograph. Islamic prayer music has been dubbed over the next sequence, which shows Hensley’s head placed on the back of his body. The final shot is of the Tahwid banner. As with Armstrong there is no time stamp on the video and there are clear edits during the killing process.

The group had one remaining hostage, Kenneth Bigley. He was filmed in a makeshift cage making pleas direct to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, implying that Blair was the only person who could save his life in complying with the demands of his captors. Bigley would remain alive for another two weeks before his fate was confirmed by the release of another video.

Bigley is sitting on the floor dressed in the hallmark orange suit. Behind him stand his armed captors. There are seven men, all ski-masked and all armed. One has a knife protruding from a belt. The location is different to where Bigley’s colleagues were murdered. The wall against which the men stand is a mustard-coloured brick. Hanging from it is the typical Islamic banner, and this too differs from the one displayed in the beheading of Armstrong and Hensley. Bigley makes a long statement pointing out that he is near the end of his life. He says that the only thing that can save him is the release of women prisoners from Abu Ghraib prison. When he stops talking one of the captors also makes a brief statement before drawing the knife and putting it to Bigley’s throat. Others move in to help hold Bigley down as his head is sawn off. Customarily at this stage, the men jump around in an excited manner screaming “Allahu Akbar” and holding the victim’s head aloft. The last shot is of the head placed on the back of the body. Unlike the killings of Armstrong and Hensley the camera does not move in for close-up shots; most of it occurs hidden behind the militants.

Western citizens aren’t the only targets. Korean translator Kim Sun-Il was beheaded before the camera in June 2004, his drawn-out, desperate pleas for mercy ignored. Many Iraqi civilians who co-operate or work with the coalition forces, interim government or police have also been beheaded. Most of these videos are filmed secretly indoors, yet many do occur in public areas. A video showing Margaret Hassan, an aid worker who had lived in Iraq for thirty years, blindfolded and dressed in orange and being shot in the head was made available to Al Jazeera television. There were unconfirmed rumours that her body was filmed being mutilated and dismembered. The video of her death was not released to the public. A Japanese man, Shosei Koda was kidnapped and beheaded over an American flag in October 2004. Turkish truck driver Dumrus Kumdereli was seized by the Tawhid and Jihad group and filmed during decapitation. Two Iraqi civilians who were accused by militants of working at the American base in Ramadi were dragged onto a street and beheaded with impunity in front of appalled onlookers. In a video confession the captives identified themselves as Ali Hussein Jassem Mohammad al-Zubaidi and Ahmad Alwan Hussein al-Mahmadawi, both residents of Sadr City. The video showing their murder was posted on the Internet on January 21, 2005. Many more people of various nationalities and religious faiths have been murdered in front of the camera, including Mohammed Mutawalli, an Egyptian “spy,” Bulgarian Georgi Lazov, and a man identified as an American CIA agent beheaded with a sword while seated in a chair. On June 3, 2006, in Baghdad, a car in which five Russian diplomats were travelling was stopped by armed insurgents. One man was killed at the scene and the other four were abducted. A video made by Mujahedeen Shura Council depicting the beheading of two of the men and the shooting of another was put online on June 25, 2006. The fourth diplomat was also reportedly killed, although this was not shown in the video.

New videos appeared online almost weekly. This alarming schedule continued until American forces stormed and took control of the city of Falluja, controlled up to that point by insurgent extremists. After many days of fire fighting in the streets and the use of heavy artillery Falluja was all but cleared of militants. On entering the city horribly mutilated bodies were discovered, some having had limbs hacked off and facial features carved away. One mutilated female torso, found wrapped in a carpet on a street, was at first thought to be the remains of Margaret Hassan. It proved not to be. Within apartments and disused workshops were rooms described as blood-soaked slaughter houses, where some of the beheading videos most likely had been made.

After the fall of Falluja videos still appeared, although far less frequently. Absurdly, they took on a more professional appearance with incongruous care put into their production. They opened with titles, logos, music, frantic cries of “Allahu Akbar” and dramatic sounds of thunder, then cut to the face of a terrified civilian making a final statement before being put to the knife.

Events edged closer to the west when a plot was thwarted in Britain in 2006. It involved a group of fanatical Muslims scheming to kidnap and behead a British soldier and film the decapitation. Nigel Rumfitt QC relayed the details of the plan. Had it come to fruition, the victim, he said, “would be taken to a lock-up garage and there he would be murdered by having his head cut off like a pig. This atrocity would be filmed…and the film released to cause panic and fear within the British armed forces and the wider public.” Thirty-sevenyear-old Parviz Kahn was sentenced to life for his lead role in the conspiracy.

On May 22, 2013, off-duty British soldier Lee Rigby was run down by a car near his barracks in Woolwich, England. Witnesses to the incident saw two men exit the vehicle and seemingly go to the aid of Rigby. However, it soon became apparent this was no accident. The men, later identified as Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, carried knives and a meat cleaver. Rigby, lying injured on the pavement, was repeatedly stabbed and an attempt was made to decapitate him. Rigby’s body was dragged into the middle of the road while the killers encouraged the gathered crowd to film them. To one camera, Adebolajo conveyed his radicalised Islamic ideals, gesturing with blood-gloved hands and gored tools. Phone cameras continued to roll as armed police arrived and both men were non-fatally shot. No footage of the killing of Lee Rigby has appeared in the public domain but amateur-video of the attackers made it to mainstream news channels, and CCTV footage of the attack was shown during the trial. Unlike most jihadist killings, it would appear that the killers chose to carry only weapons and no video camera, relying instead on passers-by and CCTV cameras to record the event.

The modern era of graphic decapitation began in the late 1990s during the conflicts in Chechnya and Afghanistan. Islamic militants on occasion beheaded captive Russian soldiers and “non-believers,” usually in fields or the cellars of derelict buildings. The grisly process was recorded, edited, and at times dubbed with Islamic prayer recitation. Videos depicting this mutilation and beheading were then transferred to CD and sold openly in market places, appearing on the Internet long before the Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg atrocities. (Much the same was video showing the beheading of Kenneth Bigley, confirmed by a BBC report dated September 21, 2004, to be on public sale in Baghdad.) The purpose of circulating such material is propagandist, being to terrorize the enemy, recruit jihadist supporters and encourage imitative acts. Journalist Eldin Hadzovic reports an incident in Sarajevo where a man had set up a stall outside Begova mosque and was selling the Koran and other Islamic items alongside beheading videos. He writes that “videos prohibited in the entire world and called snuff, by the way, were freely distributed in the inner centre of Sarajevo.”[19] Apparently, the seller was enthusing about the brutal content and the fact that one “sees everything.”

We can add another motivating factor behind the existence of such videos: Sadistic pleasure. Four telephone engineers — Britons Darren Hickey, Rudi Petschi, Peter Kennedy and New Zealander Stanley Shaw — seized in Chechnya in October 1998, were forced to watch decapitation videos before being decapitated themselves (this according to a survivor).[20] In November 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic extremist offended by Submission Part 1, Gogh’s short, stylised film on the subjugation of women under Islam. Mohammed Bouyeri, sentenced to life for van Gogh’s murder, was part of a wider group arrested with conspiracy to kill politicians. The group reportedly used knives to slaughter sheep in preparation for their attacks on people. The wife of one of the accused made a statement to police claiming that on their wedding night she was shown Islamic propaganda films. These included Chechen beheading videos.

Another aspect of these videos is instruction. One film shows the beheading of a young recruit, his head pinned to the ground by a booted foot as a knife is slowly and methodically forced to the hilt through the side of his neck. It is commonly referred to by Internet bloggers as chechclear. Another title for the film is Unknown Russian Soldier, while a print in circulation is without a title and said to depict an American soldier.[21] A film known as ofex shows a man dressed in civilian clothing sitting in a field. A second man, holding a pistol, is questioning him, while in the foreground crouches a third individual flicking a butterfly knife in a menacing way. Mid-question the captive is shot in the arm. In shock and considerable pain he is forced to remove his jacket, then an assailant takes a bayonet to his throat and slowly severs his head. The man struggles for a few moments, unable to grab the blade cutting into his neck before massive blood loss and shock take their toll. The face of the killer is heavily pixelated to thwart identification, and Islamic prayer music is dubbed onto the soundtrack. Other videos show men having their trigger fingers shot off, ears cut away and other non-fatal disfigurements inflicted. Many of these horrific scenes were edited to form a fifteen-minute compilation called Chechen Terrorists that was aired on Russian television. Parts of the film, it was later argued, didn’t depict Chechen fighters at all but gangsters holding people for ransom, misinformative propaganda in other words. On a similar note, on April 4, 2011, Al-Jazeera aired footage they alleged depicted the murder of citizens in Cote d’Ivoire by supporters of President Laurent Gbagbo. The footage is grainy but clearly shows people being beaten and burned alive by the side of a road. The video was under investigation by the UN and, shortly after the story broke, UN helicopters targeted Gbagbo army bases. However, the footage does not show Gbagbo supporters killing civilians in Cote d’Ivoire; the film was actually shot in Kisii Nyamataro, Kenya, in 2009, and is believed to show the murder of five villagers accused of practising witchcraft. The video circulated the Internet for two years prior to Al Jazeera appropriating it for their own cause.

During the genocidal war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the nineties, videotapes were in circulation that depicted hostilities recorded by Serbian soldiers. These were said to feature the rape, torture and murder of Croats and Muslims interned in concentration camps. (Atrocities on Mohajirs in Pakistan and Massacre in Bosnia & Croatia are two examples of such films.) Furthermore, the state sanctioned television station in Serbia regularly broadcast such material. As far back as July/August 1993, Ms. magazine was reporting on the use of graphic propaganda as news in Serbia, specifically atrocities meted out by its own people, but whose soundtrack suggested to the contrary.[22]

It was ‘a period when abnormality became quite normal,’ writes Dejan Ognjanović. ‘Images of slaughtered bodies,’ he continues,

were a staple of prime time in the notorious Additional News program, which featured detailed reports of various war crimes in the neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia. Those were political snuff films, whose main aim was to enrage the public and mobilize them for the war. Gruesome photos of Serbian heads cut off by the Moujahedeen, who fought for the Bosnian Muslims, and brief footage of Serbian paramilitaries executing Bosnian Muslims were widely publicized.[23]

This type of reportage evidently continued unabated, until the conflict was suddenly ended in 1999 with the intervention of NATO and the bombing of Belgrade. The Serbian state television network RTS was declared a legitimate target, and sixteen of its employees were killed in the air attacks. In May 2012, RTS published an apology for its biased and inflammatory reporting during the 1990s Balkans war.

Killing on camera is not exclusive to the battlefield and religious fanatics. One example of propaganda of a different persuasion is the film of a double homicide committed by neo-Nazis in Russia. In August 2007, a crude video appeared online titled Operation of the National-Socialist Party of Russia to Arrest and Execute Two Colonists From Dagestan and Tajikistan. The opening is a swastika against a red background, augmented with the sound of automatic weapon fire. Brief images of the countryside, in the tradition of a travelogue documentary, cut then to two bound men lying on the ground in a wooded area. In the next shot the men are kneeling before a Nazi banner, and mumble “Russian national-socialists have arrested us” from behind duct tape. One man is pushed to the ground and beheaded with a knife. The other is shot in the head while kneeling in an open grave. Two masked men stand in front of the banner and throw a Nazi salute. All of this takes place to a grating rock music soundtrack.

Clearly inspired by the videos created by Islamic radicals, the film was initially thought by Russian investigators to be to be a hoax. This line of inquiry was soon dropped and the victims identified as Shamil Odamanov, an immigrant worker from Dagestan, and Salakhetdin Azizov from Tajikistan. Twenty-three-year-old student Victor Milkov was arrested and sentenced to one year in prison for uploading the video. He claimed he had he received it from an anonymous source. As of writing, neither killers nor the victims’ bodies have been discovered, although Odamanov’s head was reportedly found.

Bizarre and occasionally surreal use of film as an agent of terror comes from North and South America, where criminals have effortlessly adopted propaganda videos for their own ends. Mexican drug cartels are pushing the limits of barbarity by utilizing prolonged and appalling torture prior to the kill. Many of these films are uploaded to YouTube, before their removal for an understandable violation of terms and conditions. Here are some scenarios:

Inside a room a bound and gagged man is beaten senseless with a baseball bat before dismemberment with an axe…

Shot in night-vision in a field, a woman saws off the head of a bound man. The severed head is defleshed with a knife. The camera operator gives instructions to take care and ensure the face, once removed, remains intact and recognizable…

A bound and blindfolded man lies on the concrete floor of a poorly lit cellar. An assailant strikes his shoeless feet with a length of wood. The victim doesn’t move or flinch (most likely in fear of even worse punishment should he do do). After several strikes both feet are broken and his socks are red with blood. Several other men are in the cellar milling about. One bends down and presses the point of a knife to the victim’s face and chest before cutting off an ear and putting it in the victim’s mouth. Someone steps up holding heavy-duty electric cables, the crocodile clips emitting sparks when struck together. The electrodes are applied to the man’s torso, causing him to writhe and yelp in agony. They are then put into his mouth against his teeth, emitting arcing blue flashes. Finally the man is stabbed in the throat and decapitated…

Tied upside down to a tree by the ankles, a naked man writhes as his genitals are sliced off, and his throat cut and blood drained into a cool box. The head is then detached and dropped into the box along with the castrated parts. A machete is employed to remove the limbs, all to an overdub of lively Mexican ranchero music…

These films are a major component in the Mexican cartel drug wars: A warning to rival gangs (perhaps also fellow gang members) for reasons of territory and honour. The films are then presented to the relevant parties, often in a tit-for-tat cycle of ugliness, prompting the next gang to be more vicious and inventive in their torture than the last.[24] Victims extend to interlopers for any perceived sleight, with cartels targeting judges and their families, media personnel and even bloggers who criticise the drug lords. In wider context, these “narcovideos” also maintain a grip of fear on the general populace, courtesy news agencies, social media, and a growing number of narcovideo websites. The coexistence of appalling death scenes with trending media is a juxtaposition of fearful potency. One might even glean a certain funereal humour on the part of the cartels in the matter.[25]

Illustrating the rivalry that breeds the videos is the war between the Gulf Cartel (CDG) and Los Zetas. A video shot on high definition video and illuminated by a spot light is released by CDG in March, 2013. It depicts the execution of a small group of men and women said to belong to Los Zetas. The group is blindfolded and kneeling in a field at night-time. The two women are naked, the three men are not. After brief interrogation the masked captors set about killing them with axes, machetes and knives. Heads are hacked off prior to bodily dismemberment, then dumped into a barrel of acid in a so-called ‘crime kitchen’ cooking process. The video was presented as an ‘Easter gift’ to Los Zetas. A couple of months later, in April, a group of Los Zetas members retaliated with a video showing the beheading of three CDG members in a small, cramped room. The three men are bound and questioned before decapitated in turn with a machete. The last man asks if he can shift allegiance to Los Zetas. His request is denied and he dies in the same manner as his associates.

Even the confines of prison walls cannot prevent access to cameras and the Internet. On September 11, 2006, in Maracaibo, Venezuela, self-confessed rapist Alberto Pocaterra, aged forty-five, was filmed being murdered and beheaded by fellow inmates. He was stabbed multiple times and had his right eye gouged out before decapitation with hand-made tools. The murderers kicked his head around like a football before uploading the video to the Internet.

Prior to their capture by a rival gang in 2011, Felix Gamez Garcia and his uncle Barnabas Gamez Castro worked for El Chapo, lord of the powerful Sinaloa cartel. In film of their death, the two men sit together shirtless with their hands bound behind their backs. Each man calmly answers questions put to them. When the talking ends another man enters the frame wearing military-style fatigues and carrying a petrol-driven chainsaw. He fires up the machine and moves on Barnabas. “Be my guest,” Barnabas presents his throat through gritted teeth. The machine stalls on contact, and the man wielding it steps back to restart it. Barnabas waits, still sitting upright and bleeding profusely through his open throat. His head is messily separated on the second attempt with the chainsaw. Felix then has his head slowly removed by a masked man who steps forward with a knife.

THE KINGDOM

The filming of the Chechen war crimes was the beginning of a trend for killing on camera. The release of the Daniel Pearl video brought the practice to the attention of the global media. But viewing the film was not altogether easy, as authorities quickly came down on any website hosting it. By contrast, the Nick Berg beheading required only a single upload without fanfare for it to become one of the most widely dispersed and watched videos online. The ritual of beheading a captive on camera has become a meme. Consequently, in the eyes of the public (and possibly the eyes of the subject) any hostage situation is shadowed by yet another film with another hapless starring role that results in a live decapitation. This cultural mindset is evident in Hollywood movies. In Peter Berg’s The Kingdom (2007), the audience instinctively knows what it means for a hostage to arrive at a room containing a tripod mounted video camera and a floor protected by a polythene sheet. Similar is Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008), in which the protagonist is put before the camera by Islamic captors. Unlike the real world, the subjects in the above movies are rescued in the nick of time.

As the decapitation videos became almost de rigueur and their grip on the media began to slip, the perpetrators sought to re-invent the shock and awe they’d achieved with Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg. The method was the introduction of minors, not as victims (as the exponential horror of the videos might lead one to anticipate), but as murderers.

Afghanistan, April 2007. Ghulam Nabi is accused by the Taliban of being a spy for the Americans. His captors claim he is guilty of supplying the American military with information that led to an air strike and the death of Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, a senior Taliban commander. Nabi is seen in a car on the move. He is speaking but his words are edited out, the original audio replaced with Islamic music. His accusers claim he is making a full confession. Upon a rubble-strewn waste-ground, Nabi is blindfolded and instructed to lie down. A group has gathered around him. Two women, or young girls, sit upon his legs while a man pulls on Nabi’s beard to expose the throat. A boy who looks to be around twelve years of age, his unmasked face clearly visible, speaks to the camera before commencing to hack through Nabi’s neck. The action is prolonged and clumsy. Occasionally the boy pauses and looks for guidance. A person off-camera points to exposed muscle and tissue with a stick, instructing the boy on how to facilitate full decapitation. The child finds it hard work and the whole process takes several minutes. In this instance the decapitator is as much a victim as the man being beheaded. A heavily edited version of the video was aired on the al-Arabiya television network. Another video showing a group of children beheading a Pakistani soldier surfaced in late 2008.

Although they have characteristics of a snuff movie — in that they depict the murder of a human being and the filming of that murder is integral to the creation of the video — the intent of the beheading videos is altogether different. As Joel Leyden said of the Daniel Pearl film, these are not snuff films per se. That is, they do not fit the full definition of a snuff film because they are manufactured not to entertain (although some viewers claim to find their content entertaining), but to instil terror or inveigle recruitment to an implausible cause. They are weapons of war, tools of propaganda and trophies of supremacy. These radical ideologies, to paraphrase WJT Mitchell, are made possible by new media.[26] The murderers in these films act with a sense of impunity, masking their identities and distributing the finished product anonymously. For the most part dissemination occurs virally over the Internet, although it is also true that some videos have been made commercially available. However, the open sale of CD-Rs in the market places of Baghdad and Bosnia is a far cry from the notion of snuff as underground commodity, circulating in secret for extortionate sums of money among a select few wealthy clients.

The shock video is a blow to the senses. It is incredibly difficult to watch these films in their entirety, despite the horror nominally lasting only a minute or less. Most people who choose to watch find themselves muting the sound or viewing incrementally with short breaks — the full impact of sound and vision creating an almost unbearable whole. The image after-effect is long term. No surprise that the majority of people regret their decision to view this sort of material. When blogger Robert Lindsay embedded the above mentioned Russian neo-Nazis murder footage on his Wordpress page,[27] he followed with a list of symptoms viewers claimed to have suffered:

Vomiting, loss of appetite, rage, sadness, nausea, dry heaves, stomach pains, nightmares, feeling suicidal, fear, shaking, trembling, rapid heartbeat, dizziness, chills, headaches, inability to move, spinal chills, churning stomach, anorexia (weight loss due to not eating), flashbacks, insomnia, crying, laughing and crying simultaneously, agoraphobia (inability to go outside), anxiety, depression, loss of consciousness (passing out), urinating on oneself or feeling one is about to urinate on oneself and inability to stop thinking of the video.

The psychological impact can be gauged by the following incident. In Glasgow, September 27, 2004, twenty-three-year-old Subhaan Younis showed hotel worker Charlotte McClay a video of a decapitation he had downloaded to his mobile phone. McClay was so disturbed by the video that the police were called and Younis was arrested, charged with breach of the peace and jailed for sixty days. The magistrate told Younis: “I struggle to understand why you had images on your phone entailing the death and degradation of another human being, regardless of their religion or race. Miss McClay was shocked, upset and distressed by the images. This is a serious offence and something she will remember for a long time, perhaps for the rest of her life.”

When a video allegedly showing the beheading of US photojournalist James Wright Foley by IS militants appeared online in August 2014, British nationals were warned off watching it by London Metropolitan Police. In a statement that month, police said the content of video was being investigated by MPS Counter Terrorism Command, and added, ‘We would like to remind the public that viewing, downloading or disseminating extremist material within the UK may constitute an offence under Terrorism legislation.’

When pressed as to what offence might be committed by watching the video, no clear answer was forthcoming. David Allen Green, former legal correspondent of the New Statesman and now writing for the Financial Times, pressed for clarification on the matter. When he got none, he accused police of publishing a false and alarmist statement (upon which police asked whether Green was in favour of the video). In the end, none the wiser, Green was told ‘the statement stands.’ The statement didn’t stand for long, and is now gone from the Met website.[28]

DNIPROPETROVSK MANIACS

In December 2008, a video appeared on the Internet that confounded viewers afresh with its mind-crippling content. One shock website, theYNC.com, removed it after thirty minutes, worried about what they were hosting. Investigating the video further they made it available again, tagging it with their strongest warning possible. The origins of the material was Dnipropetrovsk in east central Ukraine, the country’s third largest city, hitherto noted for its steel industry.

In the summer of 2007, Dnipropetrovsk was in fear of what the press called the Dnipropetrovsk Maniac. Bodies of children, women and elderly men were found in various isolated locations, having been tortured and mutilated, with death the result of massive blunt trauma to the skull. When police made arrests the community was shocked to discover the suspects were local teenagers Igor Suprunyuck and Viktor Sayenko.[29] Video footage and numerous photos were found on mobile phones and computers belonging to the pair. Commencing with the torture of animals, the boys had quickly moved to a greater target and were responsible for the murder of twenty-one people in the space of one month. Over 300 photos and two videos were shown to shocked jurors at the trial. One video was surreptitiously leaked, and it is this material that arrived at theYNC in its migration to the public domain.

Leaves and branches. Woodland sounds and the noise of passing vehicles on a close-by road. The camera moves unsteadily to a shallow embankment strewn with litter and rubbish. Lying down in the trash is a middle aged man. A broken cardboard box is across his chest. He feebly throws it off but makes no attempt to get up. He is semiconscious, weak or drunk. But a visible head wound indicates assault. A youth stands over him with a yellow object in his hand. He swings it repeatedly with force into the man’s unprotected face. The object is an engineer’s hammer wrapped in a plastic carrier bag. The man’s face is macerated. There is much blood but he is still alive, breathing awkwardly and moaning. The cameraman has a slim electrician’s screwdriver which he stabs into the bare belly of the man, twisting it deep. He then pokes at the flesh of the face and pushes the screwdriver through an eye to a depth that must penetrate the brain. Incredibly the victim regains consciousness and reaches up to protect his mangled face. The torture continues for several minutes, much to the delight of the attackers. The hammer wielder is clearly visible in one shot, proudly grinning at the camera before he performs the coup de grace: Three full-force hammer blows to the side of the man’s head. Believing him to be dead the boys return to their parked car, clearly delighted with their work, whereupon they wash the hammer with bottled water. As they return to their prey the camera shuts off.

The victim in the video is forty-eight-year-old Sergei Yatzenko. On July 12, 2007, he had gone to visit his son on his bicycle but failed to arrive. When his wife tried to contact him, she found Yatzenko’s mobile phone was switched off. Four days later, an abandoned bicycle in the woods led to the discovery of Yatzenko’s body.

The video evidence of the murder reveals no motive. This is no gangland revenge attack, no drug cartel warning video, no jihadist execution tape. It doesn’t make sense on those terms and reaction to the footage was unprecedented, even among seasoned consumers of hardcore shocks. Indeed, the shock site community was in an unprecedented flap. These from Ogrish:

OK, saw this 1 hour ago on another forum, it’s still in my mind and I think it will be for a couple of days. Fuck, I thought I was desensitized. I’m not. No hope for humanity. The end gotta be near. Please. The good thing is I feel like my quest is over.
/Qolton

This is the mother of all videos for me. I mean I know that there are worse things out there, but to see something actually happening.…jeez. I didn’t know what to do. Seriously. I just froze looking at it in slow motion. I was wishing with all I could that that man would no longer move, so it would stop, but they just kept going and going.
/cabrona

This has got to be worst violence I have ever seen. I could only stand about 2 minutes at the beginning, then I skipped to the end with the clean-up. I have seen videos of beheadings, of mangled accident victims etc. At first I couldn’t quite stomach the beheadings, because it is a bit much when you see it for the first time. But this hammer murder actually makes the Jihad terrorists look like disciplined and principled warriors: whenever they behead someone, they first read from the Koran, or otherwise give the justification, in their view, for the beheading. Then they “slaughter their animal” with a sharp knife (“do not discomfort your animal during the slaughter”). If you are the one being beheaded, you go through about 10 seconds of intense pain. But this hammer murder takes shit to a whole new, previously to me inconceivable level of violence. I wanted to weep, but I couldn’t. I was just broken inside. The images have haunted me for the last few days. Now I understand why people would want a “grief counselor” after some horrendous incident. I feel like I need a grief counselor. This is a whole new level. I don’t know what to say. I’m still in a daze. I’m a little disoriented. This is unbelievable.
/8698

I haven’t been able to get this video off my mind since watching it last Saturday. The sound of that man’s breathing and the laughter of those punks will haunt me. I thought I was a cold-blooded motherfucker when it came to watching these gore videos, but this one really got to me; like staring into the face of true evil.
/C.Redfield

It is interesting to compare these comments with those arising from the beheading videos earlier, notably the death of Nick Berg. Although in each instance they represent only a tiny fraction of posts, the tone of comment is fairly representative: The beheading videos elicit some flippant or wholly dismissive remarks, while the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs ring with foreclosure, a sense of finality. This in terms of what is physically manifest in the material under observation, murder for kicks, and for the observer a sense of their own place in seeking out such material in the first place. Perhaps one reason the jihadist and drug cartel execution tapes have elicited a different reaction is because they exist for a purpose and cause, however malformed. This makes them a ‘legitimate’ target for the antisocial Internet, which behaves at times like disaffected youth throwing two fingers up at authority. By contrast, there is no authority in the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs. The film represents only itself, with nothing in it that approximates a traditional enemy. The boys look very average, a little like us or maybe our neighbours. But their actions are terrifying. These are cold acts that observers of shock videos may be looking for but clearly hope never to find.

On the same forum, a debate on snuff semantics:

I suppose this is actually the one of the first clips that can actually be labelled as a genuine ‘snuff’ film.
/sickone

Fuck me. The most brutal shit i have ever seen!!!!!
/samorost

Is this the worlds first real snuff movie????
/ralucagymnast

I hate to say it, but this is not a snuff video. A snuff video is a video made with the intention of making a profit off of it. These assholes made this video as a trophy and to get off on later. However, if they made these videos and sold them to friends (or something like that) then that would be cosidered a snuff film. This is by far one of the closet you will get to a real snuff film though. There was one other instance like this with a serial killer, but his videos were for trophy as well. Either way, very sad.
/UltimaX

So is the holy Quest over ?
/Qolton

yep, we’ve found the holy grail. close the world
/EL NiNJoE

Worst Ive ever seen. I cant come back here after that. This is stops now. Bye.”
/loopedtrumtrack

OMG OMG I missed this and now the video has been removed! FUCK!
/Kristo[30]

Although the film was clearly intended for private viewing rather than (underworld) commercial distribution, there have been reports that the Dnipropetrovsk killers were in contact with a foreign website and under contract to produce forty snuff videos. The claims were made by a former girlfriend and later corroborated by a classmate of Suprunyuck. Regional security chief, Ivan Stupak, however, dismissed the snuff movie angle, having no evidence to support it.

Yatzenko died for the depraved gratification his killers took in his suffering. Igor Suprunyuck and Viktor Sayenko are clearly enjoying themselves in the video, and filming Yatzenko’s torment and slow demise is fundamental to the morbid process. Suprunyuck wields the hammer while Sayenko directs the action from behind the camera. At one point he instructs Suprunyuck to hold off with the hammer blows so he can get a closeup of Yatzenko’s smashed, blood-gushing face. Sayenko then joins in the torture and proceeds to stab repeatedly with the screwdriver, following each blow through the lens.

Predictably, apocrypha surrounds the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs, including the rumour of a second video in circulation that purportedly shows a foetus being cut from a pregnant woman and crushed to a pulp underfoot.[31] While one of the victims was indeed pregnant, no such film has surfaced. Without undermining the cruel reality of what transpired in Dnipropetrovsk, such stories are mere hearsay and not dissimilar to those surrounding other disturbing crime cases. The existence of one incriminating film record (or even the mere suggestion of it) leads to the assumption even greater film atrocities must also exist. Take Fred and Rose West, for example, and the snuff film racket some commentators projected onto the couple. The Dnipropetrovsk maniacs are bound within the idea of a greater conspiracy, a cabal that may or may not exist, shifting the guilty parties to the status of mere pawns in a world gone bad.

ONE LUNATIC ONE ICE PICK

In December 2010, an animal cruelty video was uploaded to YouTube under the title 1 Boy 2 Kittens. It opens with a young man sitting on a bed playing with two kittens. The seemingly innocent game turns sinister when the young man places the animals in a transparent plastic storage bag. With the kittens sealed inside, he attaches a vacuum cleaner hose and extracts the air. He focuses the camera on one kitten as it struggles to a corner of the bag and slowly suffocates. The video horrified YouTube users and was taken down for violating the terms of usage. Prior to its removal, however, the footage was duplicated and, two days after its appearance, came under the scrutiny of an action group formed with the sole intention of identifying the person in the video. The group created a Facebook account called For Great Justice. It was the start of a very strange, thankless affair for all concerned that would occupy a great deal of time and energy. The group believed only a very disturbed individual could have conjured up 1 Boy 2 Kittens. Far from over, the perpetrator uploaded even more grotesque material in a sick self-promotional exercise that ultimately became murder and the on-camera dismemberment of a body.

Two-hundred people signed up to For Great Justice on the day it went live; by the second day the figure had grown to 3,000. Frames from 1 Boy 2 Kittens were analyzed for clues. Within days, one subscriber to the group sent in a photo,[32] identifying the person in the video as a Canadian by the name of Luka Rocco Magnotta.

One original member of For Great Justice, based in Britain, explained to the authors how he came to be involved in the group and tracking the kitten killer. “I personally am not an Animal Rights activist,” says the pseudonymous Alex DeLarge. “However, I have a heart and what I saw in the initial kitten killing videos— I just thought, this is bad. I could sense something was a little bit different than just some guy swinging a cat around by its tail and filming it on a mobile phone in front of his friends. This was clearly premeditated.”

Luka Magnotta is a bizarre character and one difficult to investigate; not because of the dearth of information, but because of the abundance of it. Search engines throw up links to Magnotta blogs, YouTube, Facebook and other social media accounts, as well as numerous rabbit holes that often lead back to where one started. Despite the overwhelming online presence and his apparent legion of fans, it seemed no one really knew Magnotta. Prior to his arrest for murder, practically all that had been written about Magnotta — and it was a lot — was written by him. His profile has been constructed, elaborated, modified and manipulated over a period of years (at least seven). One can find stories of a supposed involvement with the Russian Mafia, as well as a purported romance with convicted killer Karla Homolka.[33] He was, to say the least, a thoroughly striking individual. So it seemed. But when the myriad biographical details were filtered and distilled, the real Magnotta emerged as something altogether contrary: A twenty-nine-year-old former gay porn actor, male escort, unsuccessful model and wannabe television personality.

With a name at hand and so much information on the Internet relating to it, an immense amount of data was soon flooding For Great Justice. It became necessary for the grassroots members to establish a secret offshoot group in order to maintain integrity in their search. This offshoot group is the Animal Beta Project (ABP). Says DeLarge, “Basically ABP was somewhere for the admins to take all the data that was coming in. You can imagine you’ve got 1,000 people very passionately Googling the shit out of a name, you’ve got a lot of data coming through, and Magnotta’s case was massive. The admins feed all the data through and realize you can only say so much in a public forum, so they set up ABP, a core group of about fifteen people of which I am one.” As for the component parts of ABP, DeLarge elaborates: “There are three or four people from England, three or four from America, Australia and Canada. There are about ten of what we call miners. I’m a miner, a data miner, and that’s all we do. Essentially everyday we Google, search and collect data, bearing in mind we are five years behind Magnotta and he’s putting up ten new profiles a day.”

As the group sought evidence against Magnotta, it couldn’t help but generate interest in him, too. Among those following the progress of For Great Justice was Magnotta himself, who registered under false names. Spotting these sockpuppet accounts wasn’t easy.[34] Says DeLarge, “I learned very quickly that Magnotta had in fact been in the Facebook group many times. There is only so much research you can do into a fake Facebook profile, so policy was to accept all requests. If it was found to be him, kick him out, or sometimes engage him to see if we could get new info. Or tell him to get help. They were the primary things I noticed when he turned up. People for the most part wanted him to get help. It was clearly evident something was not right within him.” But Magnotta wasn’t seeking help, only a wider audience and more attention. “Looking back this is what he wanted,” says DeLarge. “Three thousand people searching his name in Google — that pushes you up the rankings. Three thousand people looking at his photos. They may hate him but that is irrelevant, at least he is getting known.”

In November 2011, a second cruelty video, Python Christmas, was uploaded to YouTube. A young man wearing a Santa Claus hat is on a bed playing with a small cat. The cat is put into the hat which is then thrown toward the pillows, where an albino Burmese python lies in wait. The snake lunges, coils itself around the cat and slowly suffocates it before swallowing it. The soundtrack plays Little Drummer Boy[35] and the theme to Disney’s Aladdin, along with extraneous sounds that seem inconsistent with what is unfolding onscreen.

A few weeks after the appearance of Python Christmas a third video was uploaded. It went by the name Bathtime LOL. Continuing the theme of the previous efforts, this too depicts the torture and killing of a cat, which, in this instance, is taped to a broom handle and drowned in a bathtub.

ABP accumulated more and more images from various online sources relating to Magnotta. Many of his seemingly posed modelling shots were discovered to be nothing more than PhotoShop creations, with Magnotta’s head cut and pasted over someone else’s. Other photographs in which Magnotta appeared as part of a group were similarly manipulated, giving the false impression that Magnotta led an active social life or was in possession of luxury cars. Magnotta’s untouched original photographs provided the most crucial information. It was possible to extract data created by the camera and stored within the image. Not only did this information reveal the date and time of the shot, but in some cases the make, model and unique serial number of the camera itself. One identified camera was a pink Panasonic DMC-F3.[36] Another photo, taken on an Apple iPhone, revealed not only the time and date of its creation but also GPS data, which placed Magnotta in Toronto.

The evidence collated by ABP was submitted to police authorities. There was no arrest but the group remained active, anticipating the appearance of an anniversary video toward the end of 2012. Things went quiet for a time. Then the storm broke, shifting the social networking paradigm into a new place of darkness.

On May 25, 2012, a video carrying the title 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick debuted on shock sites Bestgore and theYNC almost simultaneously. The choice of title was telling. The person uploading the footage was aware of the powerful connotations of the numeric/noun moniker, consciously tapping into the furore of earlier shock videos, per the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs’ 3 Guys 1 Hammer and the perverse sex act of 2 Girls 1 Cup. The post was annotated with the claim that here was the sickest video ever to hit the Internet, no less a genuine bona fide snuff movie. It opens to a black screen with the title in stark contrast. A taste of what is to come is offered in the posed photo of an anonymous individual wearing a purple hoodie and holding an ice pick. Behind him on the wall is a poster for the 1942 movie Casablanca; on the soundtrack New Order’s True Faith is playing. The video begins.

In a bedroom where the Casablanca poster hangs on the wall, a naked man is lying on the bed. He is loosely tied to the bed frame and his face is covered. A second person is present, fully clothed and disguised behind a hoodie, who, for a moment, straddles the bound man before getting off the bed and going out of shot. The bound man moves around sluggishly, perhaps languid through drugs or alcohol or merely sleepy. The camera, hitherto static, is picked up and pans across the body of the naked man, revealing that he is gagged and blindfolded. Cut to show the man on the bed now motionless and the bindings no longer present. Several marks are visible on his stomach, one arm lies across his chest and what seems a black pillowcase is over his face. The person in the hoodie enters the frame and begins to repeatedly stab the abdominal area of the prone figure with an ice pick. The lack of any reaction indicates the victim is already dead. The assault continues for over one minute before the camera is lifted for a close-up of the wounds. The pillowcase is removed from the head to reveal the man’s face and the fact that his throat is cut. The camera moves down the body, where a kitchen knife is used to make cuts across the right thigh. It returns to inflict cuts in the arm and then more slashes to the left thigh. Pausing upon the dead man’s face, the camera then sweeps to the Casablanca poster. Cut to the face on the bloodstained pillow and a brief pan along the body, followed by a jump cut to the floor of a bathroom and upon it the head, now completely detached, being moved around. Cut back to the bedroom where the headless body has been turned on its stomach. The right arm is being severed at the shoulder with the kitchen knife and a few sweeping slashes are made to the flesh of the back. Another cut. The detached limb is picked up and the hand is rubbed against the camera operator’s genitals. Cut to a shot of the body on the bed. It is now lying on its back and both arms and one leg have been cut away. The left leg is partially severed and work on its removal continues. Cut to the limbless trunk now on its stomach and a brief shot of the buttocks being spread, then a static camera shot of the hoodie appearing to sodomise the torso. (The person in the hoodie remains clothed.) At this point a dog is heard barking and other posters lining the walls are visible, although their identity is unclear. Cut to a full frame static shot of the torso on the bed. Using both hands and knife and fork the hoodie cuts a chunk of flesh from the left buttock (a ring is visible on the middle finger of his right hand, and the fingernails look varnished). The music has stopped. A dog is lifted onto the bed, a small black and white puppy that begins to feed on the raw muscle of the thigh stump. The camera pans round for a clearer shot. A person sneezes twice. Cut to a static close shot of the mangled buttocks. A bottle is inserted into the dead anus and thrust in and out rapidly for a short duration. Cut to a shot of the hoodie, now-naked, lying on the bed masturbating with the severed arm. A few brief still shots follow, drawing the video to a close. These include the puppy chewing at the torso, the head and limbs lying in a bathtub, an arm in a fridge freezer compartment, the partially de-limbed body on the bed, the severed head in the bathroom, the cut-throat body on the bed and finally the same posed photo that opened the video.

People watching 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick were baffled by its audacious content and couldn’t decide whether it was real or fake. Speculation filled the forums of those sites hosting the video. Some typical comments follow:

What the heck did I just watched ? It’s the worst thing I saw here…Man…If this is real I really hope the police will find the son of a bitch.

This is the best special effects i ever seen since The Transformer

I say fake…some of the cuts just look like rubber or…I dunno, just not real human flesh…would love to know one way or the other tho.…

are you sure? for me is true real

its real. seen enough of this awfull crap to know when somthings fake. is there any background on this? have they caught him?

i say this is sickest thing i ever seen at all. what a crazy motherfucker.

think this would be on the news if it was real.…

I’ve been a regular of this site and this is the first time I was like shocked by what I saw. Yes, if anyone knows at least the victim please call authorities. This dude has serious issues and well, I dunno but judging by this video he might be aiming for Asians and other minority groups. Please do anything! :’(

I mean yeah with the other vids I get enjoyment but this is REALLY DISTURBING. GUY’S GOT ISSUES! :O

The acts depicted in the video are certainly real. The anatomical detail in the mutilation process is verification enough, and its the full horror tempered only by the fact the actual kill isn’t shown. The video differs from previous atrocity footage, like 3 Guys 1 Hammer and Mexican drug cartel chainsaw decapitations, in a number of ways. It was evidently made with audience approval in mind. Furthermore, there is rudimentary technical flair behind it as opposed to being just another slice of single-take, hastily uploaded raw footage. For instance, it is edited together, exhibits an onscreen title and features a music track.[37] The video is edited down to around ten minutes, the process of killing and dismemberment most likely having taken several hours. The result is a Grand Guignol showreel created by a real life psychopath, a grotesque form of performance art evidently intended to be ‘interactive’ and engage the audience from the outset. DeLarge recalls the moment he first watched 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick. “It changed my life!,” he says. “There was life before that video and now I am living with life after that video. I held my hand over the screen and [initially] could not watch. John Green [ABP founder] was doing the same in America. We were communicating via Facebook in real-time. I typed messages like ‘I CANNOT WATCH THIS SHIT.’ We decided to Skype so we could talk to each other as we watched it. We were blown away like you would not believe. I said to John I really don’t wanna watch it. He said ‘We have to determine if it is his [Magnotta’s] face in the video.’ I took a deep breath and hit play.” DeLarge continues, “We were watching in disgust and paused bits and made notes of times. We both thought it was fake. I convinced myself it was fake and John Green felt the same way, so it was easier to watch over and over. We broke it down scene by scene. I was certain it was fake and to prove my point I contacted a makeup artist I know who does special effects for army and SAS training videos, how to deal with amputations etc. She got back to me to say it was either an incredibly well made cadaver or real. She said there were too many points she couldn’t work out, i.e., the oesophagus in the neck slit shot, the anus, the way the skin puckered when comparing it with foam latex, etc.”

The day after 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick hosted on Bestgore, the site published an article that identified the person dismembering the man in the video. The individual responsible, alleged the article, was kitten killer Luka Rocco Magnotta. The prominent clue was the Casablanca film poster, which is important enough for the video maker to focus upon more than once. Indeed, among Magnotta’s numerous online photo albums one can find a picture that looks to have been taken in the same room adorned with the same poster. Posing against it is Magnotta.[38] Other clues pointing toward Magnotta include clothing, a ring visible on the right hand, and a brief profile shot that is comparable to some shots in the kitten killer videos. However, there is no single clear frame that unequivocally validates the identity of Magnotta in 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick.

Pursuing the Magnotta angle, Toronto police were advised by US based lawyer Roger Renville as to the video’s content on May 27. But they took no action, dismissing it without viewing as a hoax.[39] The video continued to be ignored by authorities until it, and its maker, impacted on the real world, demanding attention. On May 29, four days after the video debut, two political parties in Canada were the recipients of unwelcome trophies: A severed left foot was found in a package sent to the Conservative party office and a severed left hand was discovered in mail destined for the Liberal party. At about the same time, a discarded suitcase containing a decomposing torso was located in a Montreal neighbourhood. Police entered a nearby apartment to find in one room a bloodstained mattress and other signs of violence. The vacant apartment belonged to Luka Magnotta, who immediately became the subject of a nationwide warrant. To paraphrase one commentator online, the proverbial shit hit the fan.

“We heard there was a press conference at 2pm Montreal time,” recalls DeLarge. “When I left work, I logged onto Facebook and there were 142 comments in my inbox, including one message from a [APB] group member that said ‘Fuck, it’s him!’ I then checked my text messages — one from my partner saying ‘It’s Luka Magnotta’. I nearly fucking collapsed. I had witnessed a murder ten times over, in slow motion, in real-time. I ‘knew’ the suspect. For a while I just couldn’t talk. I had a half-hour cab journey to get home and just sat in silence. I got home and went online. The group was in a panic but gathering all the evidence it could. We were all in complete shock but we are an awesome fucking team, and, with lots of pep talk amongst lots of tears, we gathered everything we could find and started looking for links.”

On May 30, the victim in the video was identified as Lin Jun, a thirty-three-yearold Chinese student last seen by friends on May 24 and reported missing on May 29. When the prime suspect Luka Magnotta fled the country, he was placed at the top of Interpol’s wanted list. News of 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick hit the mainstream. Bestgore ground to a virtual halt as journalists around the world tried to access the shock site and see the video. The police became interested in site owner, Mark Marek, wanting to know how he came about the video in the first place and ordering him to remove it. Eventually Marek complied and the video was deleted. But it didn’t prevent Marek from being bombarded by journalists requesting interviews. Nor did it save him from arrest in June 2013, charged with corrupting morals, a rarely used law relating to the publication of obscene material. A similar official request was also made to theYNC website, who likewise complied and deleted the footage.[40] Despite these formal attempts to eradicate 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick, they ultimately proved ineffectual: As quickly as the video was taken off one site it surfaced again on another. “I don’t understand how people could be interested in watching that,” commented Montreal Police Cmdr. Ian Lafrenière. “This is so frickin’ horrible. It’s not an actor. It’s someone getting killed and mutilated.”[41] But many people did want to see the video and for the very reason that so upset Lafrenière.

The fugitive Magnotta continued to use the Internet, his online presence being closely monitored by amateur sleuths and the law enforcement agencies that hitherto were nonplussed about the business of kill videos. The cyber crimes division of Toronto joined ABP to assess the information the group had collected over the years. Magnotta was known to have flown from Montreal to Paris, and social media sites along with YouTube and Craigslist were perused for any clue on his whereabouts. These attempts to locate Magnotta and second guess his moves led to confusion and paranoia. Anyone on the web could be him and flawed presumptions and wrong turns hindered the investigation. Some members of the group Websleuth postulated the idea that Mark Marek of Bestgore may be an accomplice, simply because Marek had fallen quiet while Magnotta was on the lam. (The hiatus was likely due to police intervention and the sluggish condition of an overworked website.) Meanwhile, frame grabs from security footage at Montreal Trudeau airport showed Magnotta having passed through checkout in a wig and Mickey Mouse T-shirt.

One of the stranger tangents in an altogether bizarre sequence of events was the appearance of a video on YouTube called The James Dean Killer — 1 Man 1 Icon — Luka Rocco Magnotta. The video comprised a slideshow of photographs of Magnotta and various family members. It had been uploaded by HollywoodLoveLetters, a newly created account, which was immediately flagged as Magnotta and monitored. The account provided links to news report videos of the murder of one Hervey Medellin, whose dismembered body had been found dumped behind the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles in January 2012. It appeared that Magnotta was confessing to a previous dismemberment murder. Data was trawled for anything that would place Magnotta in Hollywood at the time of Medellin’s killing, and Los Angeles police adjusted the tack of that particular murder investigation to accommodate the new lead. However, HollywoodLoveLetters would prove a red herring. The account was created by animal rights group Last Chance For Animals, jumping on the bandwagon. The intention, claimed the group, was to lure Magnotta into the open. Few approved of the time-wasting tactic.

Possible sightings of Magnotta were reported to French police. But police were unable to pin down his exact location, despite triangulating positions through the occasional use of his mobile phone. The press reported he had been spotted with a companion, a large man described as ‘La Colosse’ — The Colossus. Probably an innocent pickup from a bar (if indeed he existed), some speculated on whether the Colossus might be a contact in the snuff film underworld to whom Magnotta was delivering a complete, unedited Ice Pick video. There was also theory that Magnotta may be headed for Casablanca, tracing the route at the opening of the classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. After all, he seemed a fan and was now in Paris, the first station on the map.[42]

Casablanca as a destination proved false. On June 4, Magnotta was arrested at Helin Internet Spatkauf, an Internet café located in Berlin. He was monitoring the global interest building around him when police arrived to take him away. Cmdr. Lafrenière said on hearing the news of Magnotta’s arrest, “The web had been used by him to glorify himself and we believe the web brought him down, also.” On June 5, body parts of Lin Jun were delivered in the mail to elementary schools in Vancouver: The right hand to False Creek and the right foot to St George’s School. His head would remain missing until July 1, when it was discovered by a lake in a park close to Magnotta’s apartment.

Montreal police reported they had accessed the raw footage that was edited down to make 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick. Without disclosing much, they confirmed the film in this state runs several minutes longer and has its original audio track.

THE LIVES OF LUKA MAGNOTTA

So who exactly is Luka Magnotta? A Google search for 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick returns many hits that seem to fall outside the time frame of the Magnotta narrative. Hints at the existence of the video were made several days before the video actually appeared anywhere on the Internet, indeed before Lin Jun had even died. This clues us into the murder being a premeditated act, and that the murderer was making a concerted effort to become famous. The video first appeared on May 25, 2012. Over a week prior to this, on May 15, a YouTube user named alexisvaloranreich[43] uploaded something of a teaser called 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick Video (Non Graphic) Discussion Only and wrote “There is apparently a video circulating around the deep web called ‘One Lunatic One Ice Pick’ Video. Does anyone have a copy of it?” The video consisted of a single photographic image, the same one that would open Ice Pick. A second video uploaded by alexisvaloranreich is almost identical, differing only in that the person with the ice pick is striking a different pose (he is standing almost upright as opposed to crouching down). The same 1.24 min video was posted on Vimeo around the same date. The user in this instance was named Angela Downs, who asked, “Do you know this man?”

The photo appeared next on a blog (also created on May 15) calling itself 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick Video. The anonymous blogger wrote of

a video floating around the deep web, it shows a boy wearing a purple hoodie jacket holding an ice pick killing somebody. I have not actually seen the video but I hear it is pretty disturbing and depicts acts of necrophillia, cannibalisim and other sickening acts. If you are on Tor (The Deep Net) and happen to come across this video, please give more information. The video is apparently shot in San Fransisco and the boys identity is not known. These videos are reportedly filmed to sell on the black market for HUGE amounts of money. I would like anyone who has seen it or anybody who has a copy to get in touch, I am very curious and this is the only photo that I could find online of the video.

References to Tor and the deep net begin to appear in various suspect comments at around this time. An anonymous post on Yahoo! Answers (again May 15) asked “Does Anybody Know Where I Can Watch the ‘1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick Video’? There is a video circulating Tor (The Deep Web) all I know is it was shot in San Fransisco [sic], I have been trying to find it for weeks.” The same question appeared that same day on Answerbag, this time courtesy of Aiden-V. Still on May 15, briankinney556[44] forewarned neoseeker.com, “This is not a graphic post and im [sic] not posting links, im [sic] just curious to know what you guys think about people who film their crimes? Do you believe they belong to the masons cult or sell their videos on the black market or Tor / deep web for high amounts of cash? What sort of mentality would somebody like this likely have?” The title of this particular thread is The 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick Video.

On May 16, a person using the name anonymousgirl33 uploaded both of the still-image Ice Pick videos to the hosting site Dailymotion, asking whether the individual might be identified. That same day, anonymousgirl4 appeared on psychforums.com with the following post (sic throughout):

Firstly, dont worry I am NOT posting graphic details or links to the video, I am just curious as to what would possess somebody to do this type of crime? There is a video of a guy around aged 20 from San Fransisco, he apparently made real snuff films that depict cannabilisim and necrophilia along with the murder. I am doing research on this and I would VERY much appreciate any and all the advice and help you could give me. Is he a psychopath or Anti Social or what? I know we dont have a lot of details but based on the crime its self. Thanks in advance.

One member asked whether Anonymousgirl33 might know the person in question. Anonymousgirl33 responded thusly:

Thank you for responding, firstly no, I dont know who he is, I dont believe he has ever been arrested or caught. I am assuming ‘my theory’, is that he makes these videos for paying clients around the world who pay big money to watch. I dont know how many of these videos he has made but I was on Tor (The Deep Web) I dont know if any are familiar? Its a separate deep Internet separate from the regular Internet. So I saw the video and many people down there in the deep web were commenting, all I saw was comments saying he was from San Fransisco and was turning 20? He was paid a six figure sum according to the comments, but then I went back to try and copy the video and I couldnt find my way, its very confusing in the deep web so now im trying to do some research to figure this out. If somebody murders, dismembers, canabalisim, necrophilia and puts it on film I would assume they were demented in some way? I will try to find more details and post here, but its going to be an uphill battle for me. Thanks for any advice and help.

Another regular contributor to the site posted a comment that frightened off Anonymousgirl33. “Are you law enforcement?” the post asked. “A profiler? A private investigator? Or the 20 year old who did the deed and now wants to know if the cats [sic] out the bag?” Anonymousgirl33 was gone from the site but babydollLW swiftly took their place. Two days after the release of the Ice Pick dismemberment video, on May 27, a contributor to psychforums using the name babydollLW wrote of

rumors that there are two more video. One of him with his aunt Andrea Yourkin Loschiavo who died in 2010 mysteriously of pills being forced down her throat (or drugged). Someone said she was laying on a pink sofa dead while Luka was performing oral sex on her????? Did he kill her because she found out about his crimes? And apparently another video where he kills a homeless man? I cant believe all this? Also Does anyone think there is a connection to the Long Island Serial Killer? He spent alot of time living in New York?? Or the mysterious Vancouver hands and feet popping up on the shore? I have a feeling somebody who does this sort of henious crime, its not his first time.

The reference to severed hands and feet is telling, pre-dating by two days the discovery of Lin Jun’s appendages. The username babydollLW also offers another inroad for the Magnotta sleuth: The initials LW may be interpreted as Linda Williams, believed to be yet another Magnotta sockpuppet. Indeed, Linda Williams can be found posting on YouTube at around the same time, divesting more rumours, such as the killer having supposedly

murdered his aunt Andrea in 2010. Apparently she was found with pills forced down her throat. Maybe she found out about the animal killings? There was mention that he also killed a homeless man?? Fucked up for sure. I read there is a video of a woman being orally licked while dead on a sofa…maybe it was his aunt? I would not be surprised.…WARPED!!!!

Another comment on YouTube, this one from genisismaster, added to the conceit that there existed multiple ghoulish videos created by the anonymous killer. “Apparently there is another video besides the ‘1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick’ video of the same guy performing oral sex on a dead woman laying on a sofa? and killing a homeless man? I am still trying to find more information on all this. Very strange.” A favourite video of genisismaster was a snake eating a rat.

It is safe to conclude that all of these posts belong to one and the same person, an attempt to generate interest in the Ice Pick video prior to actually making it, and aggrandizing its mythology post release. The teasing questions, clues, usernames and grammatical errors all match Magnotta’s known profile and narcissistic style. If they are all Magnotta personas it shows he had premeditated the manufacture of a snuff film. What was described on May 15 became a reality on May 24. Lin Jun was an unfortunate participant in a film evidently scripted some time ago. Signs went back even further: A blog titled Necrophilia Serial Killer Luka Magnotta was posted on March 16, 2012, by Anonymous, and on April 22, 2012, Rita VanVolkenberg uploaded a video to YouTube titled Cannibal Serial Killer — Luka Magnotta. The same three-minute video reappeared with the title translated into five different languages. It consists of a slideshow of Magnotta’s modelling photos accompanied by a soundtrack of New Order’s True Faith. VanVolkenberg’s favourite movie is To Die For. On another blog, nine photos of Magnotta feature alongside the Nine Satanic Statements, lifted from Anton LaVey’s book, The Satanic Bible. Yet another blog is Myra Hindley Transcripts. Here, transcript of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s audio recording of the abuse of Lesley Ann Downey is interspersed with photos of Magnotta, which is in keeping with his desire to formulate kinship with notorious characters.[45]

Using the name River Starke, Magnotta had written a typically plagiarised article, ‘The Mind of A Psychopath.’ Published online at Orato.com in 2008 it read, “Are you involved with a psychopath? You may not know because they can be very charming and friendly until you get close and disappoint them.” He also wrote, “They always maintain a belief that they can outwit those who pursue them and that they will never be caught.” In the light of later events, the words are accurately prophetic. River Starke’s bio ran, “Born in Kentucky, I enjoy talking about celebrities and models. My favourites are James Dean, River Phoenix, Luka Magnotta and Montgomry [sic] Cliffe. In my spare time I write.” The photo in the profile is one of Magnotta.

He failed as a model, was unsuccessful in the porn industry and fared no better becoming a reality television star. However, through the Internet and social media, Magnotta discovered a world that was not so harsh to conquer. It suited him. The truth here was no longer relevant and he manufactured with impunity a self-image altogether at odds with real life. But this too proved to be a misfire and the only people online who took an active interest in Magnotta was Magnotta. He was indeed his own greatest fan.

The creation of disagreeable animal cruelty videos illuminated the way for Magnotta. He saw how the videos thrust him incorrigibly to the centre of attention; the fact that the attention was one of condemnation and universal hatred didn’t really matter to him. There was so much material about him online that some argued it couldn’t all have come from one person working alone. But Magnotta was nothing if not efficacious in his pursuit of the limelight, labouring behind a vast army of alter egos. Although an attempt was made to distance himself from the videos and deny involvement, he did not venture to dismiss his participation entirely. He couldn’t bare to. One colourful notion circulated by Magnotta was that he had been the innocent victim of a stalker. The charade that a stalker or impersonator might be involved served to reinforce his self-induced celebrity status, if nothing else. Truth told, no one knew the name Luka Magnotta until the killing started, and few were any wiser about his identity once the killing was done.

Following his arrest in Berlin in an Internet café (no more fitting a place for his arrest than that), Magnotta was extradited to Canada to stand trial. In December 2014, he was found guilty of first degree murder and other charges, and given a mandatory life sentence of twenty-five years. His defence of diminished responsibility due to a mental disorder failed to sway the jury. Luka Magnotta ceased to be. Locked away, his access to the Internet and social media removed, the online world he made and populated was suddenly yesterday’s news.

THE DEEP WEB

Earlier we heard references to Tor and the deep net, as propagated by Luka Magnotta in his continued promotion of the self. Magnotta at some point had become aware of the existence of an Internet different to the regular Internet, inasmuch as it’s not indexed and regular search engines like Google do not work there. This is the deep web. Access is only possible using a deep web browser, of which Tor is the most popular. The stigma attached to the deep web — a term often confused with dark web — is that it’s simply a melting pot for criminal ideas and transactions. There is some of that, but snuff films aren’t a part of them. Take, for example, this exchange in a thread called Necro/Snuff:

1 Tue Mar 22 03:05:27 2011
What’s with the general lack of any Necro or Snuff on Tor? You’d think more people would share that shit.

2 Thu Mar 24 02:33:45 2011
Stuff like that is all over the regular internet, which you can access through Tor. There’s no need to use hidden services for that because there are plenty of places where it’s completely legal.

3 Sat Nov 5 05:19:53 2011
You people are sick!

4 Mon Nov 7 00:24:15 2011
Well I don’t know about Necro but you can definitely find snuff in the Clearnet. 3 Guys 1 Hammer is all over the Clearnet and it’s probably the disgusting snuff film ever made (except for those alleged ones of infants and toddlers being raped to death.)

5 Thu Dec 15 00:54:19 2011
I find your lack of necro and snuff disturbing…

9 Mon Dec 26 06:03:16 2011
I don’t know what compelled me to go find that shit, but it makes me feel pretty sick. At least I know that a solid week of murdering people in Skyrim doesn’t make me a fucking sociopath. Ugh.

11 Sat Jan 28 21:12:04 2012 where can i find some satanic stuff?

12 Mon Mar 12 05:14:56 2012 try clearnet lol

13 Mon Nov 12 18:39:16 2012 I am wondering about *female* snuff. All of the suggestions feature men. I can’t believe there isn’t any female snuff available.

14 Tue Nov 13 18:19:43 2012 Yeah. OK. Pedophiles want to see pics or vids of naked and fucking kids. You want pics or vids of murder, butchery, suffering, blood, gore, intestines, inhumanity and sounds of humans suffering the worst shit any human could ever suffer. And the pedophiles are considered sick? Pics of naked kids are illegal, but that shit isn’t? You’re all completely deranged. No wonder this world is so totally fucked.

15 Sat Nov 17 23:40:24 2012 You’re all very interesting and everything, but I’ve never found real snuff anywhere. Or at least snuff involving only humans.

17 Mon Nov 26 02:41:04 2012 you must be pretty fucking stoopid if you can’t find snuff and gore. you made it here so you at least know how to work a computer and a search engine. snuff like what? actual beheadings accidents murders and carnage is all over clearnet and tor. if you can’t find it you should burn your computer and network connection cause you aint very bright.

19 Fri Dec 7 05:03:40 2012
A while back a video was posted depicting a woman with her hands tied behind her back. It was being taped in a ware house that had a three foot drop off before the floor continued. The woman had a noose around her neck and it was tied at such an angle that she had to force her self to stay balanced right on the edge of the drop off. After 30 seconds some fat white guy with a hood enters and begins to rape her while she screams and cries. This continues for a good portion of 5 minutes before he finishes and then pushes her off the edge. The noose, being incorrectly tightened behind her neck, doesn’t snap her neck but instead causes her to convulse and thrash about. The man walks off screen and about 30 seconds later the woman stops moving. A minute passes and then the camera is lifted up (off a tripod or some shit) and a brief glimpse of a black BMW is seen before the tape shuts off.
If you don’t have the patience to sit in front of your computer and search for something you know is hard to find then why do you think you will be randomly rewarded from people that have spent hours looking for disturbing, depraved, desensitizing shit.

20 Mon Feb 11 04:52:46 2013
Girls or women raped and tortured to death is what I like most. Trades welcome.

21 Tue Feb 26 23:10:44 2013
some people just don’t know where to start looking.

[…]

25 Tue Mar 26 22:13:34 2013
write me, i have some sides with really good stuff :)
***@tormail.org

Hereafter the thread descends into the ubiquitous name calling. The forum itself isn’t identified, and its parent lost. It was one of a small handful of hits returned in a search of the deep web through Tor (lengthy numerical URLs make identification and navigation difficult, and at times impossible). Not dissimilar to the regular Internet, sites come and go on the deep web. Tor was conceived as a means of allowing persons in hostile climates to communicate and freely navigate the Internet without fear of reprisal. It provides a cloak for the user, hiding his or her location.

“A way of combating the ever-encroaching surveillance society,” is how Julian Petley defines the deep web.[46] The professor of Screen Media and Journalism continues: “For those who want to make it more difficult for the authorities to subject them to electronic surveillance, software such as Tor is obviously very useful. However, it isn’t entirely surveillance proof. But the real problem is that those who are discovered, by surveillance of course, to be using software such as Tor are likely to be regarded with considerable suspicion by the authorities, and possibly fingered as child abusers or terrorists. They may thus make themselves targets for even more surveillance, and possibly harassment of one kind or another.”

Tor is considered to be only one stage in this anonymous environment. Other levels of the Internet exist that are supposedly even deeper and harder for the layman to find, containing data that is progressively more sensitive and dangerous.[47] According to the Source Digit website, the majority of content on the World Wide Web is hidden (approximately ninety-sex per cent) and cannot be accessed via search engines. The general picture is that of an iceberg with a tiny tip visible above water, its thunderous mass beneath the surface supposedly concealing sex tourism, covert government experiments, child pornography, serial killer communities, hit men, the trade in narcotics, alternative energy resources, snuff films and more. One can see why Magnotta was attracted to it.

There may be other reasons why the anonymous web would have a place in the world, beyond that of dodgy dealings. In light of renewed efforts by the British government to crack down on Internet privacy, ostensibly in its fight against terrorism, recording artist Aphex Twin made the decision to launch his long awaited new album through the anonymous web, meaning that access to it would not be possible without first installing the (free) Tor browser bundle.[48] Some might consider this a curiously intangible marketing gimmick, one that alienates a large percentage of the potential audience; others view it as a legitimate attempt to change the general perception of Tor and in a sense decriminalize it.

As the World Web Web slips further into the tight claw of a powerful few, it is inevitable there should be a backlash. Propagating the image of the anonymous web as something ungodly makes a lot more sense when one considers its failure to parlay with the usual commercial factions. Tor enables us to dip beneath the data mining radar, where the likes of Google, Facebook and Wikipedia presently have no control. Consequently the Internet bubble is less of a confined space and, for those wielding power, not so welcome.

REACTIONS AND REACTION VIDEOS

In Michael Powell’s 1960 feature film, Peeping Tom, a killer stabs his victims to death while filming the act with a camera. Attached to the camera are both knife and a mirror, permitting the terrified victims a long, last look at themselves as they die. There is no mirror present in the murders committed by Luka Magnotta or the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs. But their shocking videos have helped instigate a recent social trend that nonetheless offers us a reflection of sorts. The ‘reaction video’ is the eccentric model of the protagonist in Powell’s movie, the titular peeping tom, driven to observe the observed. The so-called reaction video differs in that the mirror is metaphorical, capturing not our own death image, but rather our reaction to other people’s deaths. These reactions are in turn captured on film, giving a second audience, indeed no end of audiences, an opportunity to watch; observer and observed as one.

Footage of the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs was known online long before many people actually got a chance to see it. It was a hot item, and countless forums and message boards debated its content in tones that bordered on the holistic. Early on, the footage was landed with the impromptu title 3 Guys 1 Hammer, under which it became a challenging rite of passage and the popular choice in the practice of reaction videos. Many approached 3 Guys 1 Hammer with trepidation. They turned a webcam upon themselves and offered a running commentary of what was unfolding onscreen. One might be forgiven for thinking that this was a noble undertaking, that the courageous few were observing so that others may be spared the terrible job. Not so.

The actual title 3 Guys 1 Hammer is a curious one. But it makes sense in context of other notoriously unpleasant Internet videos, examples of which include 2 Girls 1 Cup and 2 Guys 1 Horse. And, of course, little later on, 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick. These titles are a colloquial meme, shorthand for ‘unwatchable’ content.[49]

Acknowledged as having started the trend of reaction videos, 2 Girls 1 Cup was released in 2007. It is a short clip that depicts two women engaged in sexual acts of coprophagy and vomiting.[50] It is no more extreme than much other material online. But the ‘appeal’ of 2 Girls 1 Cup wasn’t sex, it was the shared experience. It became a gag factor barometer. Soon enough, countless viewers found themselves the unwitting subject of their own video clip, their shocked and sickened reactions to their footage filmed and uploaded by friends and family. Or, in one instance, fellow US marines. One example of a 2 Girls 1 Cup reaction video on YouTube is the self-explanatory 2 girls 1 cup Grandma reaction! Grandma Marlene. There are many others.

A close second to 2 Girls 1 Cup is 2 Guys 1 Horse, a video recording of zoophile Kenneth Pinyan. He died from internal injuries in a Washington state emergency room shortly after the film was made. Known online to fellow zoophiles as Mr Hands, Pinyan took his obsession too far in July 2005 and is seen in the clip giving a yelp when his colon is punctured by the vicious anal thrust of an aroused Arabian stallion.

Comparison with the Dnipropetrovsk Maniacs video is in some ways erroneous. The parties in both Cup and Horse are consenting. Regardless of how depraved and stomach-churning the paraphilia may appear, the participants voluntarily partake in them. Subsequently the films are lacking the impact of Sergei Yatzenko’s death in 3 Guys 1 Hammer, which is about as far from voluntary as it can get.

Reaction videos for 3 Guys 1 Hammer are fairly typical of the genus. The source material itself, the footage prompting the reaction in the unsuspecting viewer, is hidden from us (if not the soundtrack). What we see instead is a gamut of emotions etched onto the viewer’s face as the film runs its gruelling course. The observer in the Yatzenko reaction videos will grimace, moan, perhaps laugh, burst into tears, and often turn away. The background audio is a suggestion of crushing hammer blows, gurgling, gasping broken breathing, and the giggles of the teenage killers. This is Powell’s über-voyeurism made flesh.

The 3 Guys 1 Hammer reaction videos can occasionally be preachy and self aggrandizing in tone, per one clip called I Beg Of You Don’t Watch 3 Guys 1 Hammer I Warned You One Time, which is exactly what the title implies. For some people, watching Yatzenko’s murder is a communal undertaking peppered with howls of disbelief, outrage and not a little levity at times. Many others view it alone. One solo viewer, a schoolboy no less, sits in front of his monitor and starts his observation thus: “I’ve seen other people’s reactions. It looks worse than 2 Girls 1 Cup.” The boy then confides, “I’m gonna watch it, and I’m scared.”

In the tradition of the reaction video, the boy is the focus throughout; the film under review as tradition dictates is unseen to us. “Who would do such a thing,” he groans as he watches the film play. He tries to articulate into words what is unfolding before his eyes, stunned into occasional silence and throwing his gaze elsewhere (perhaps to the door, lest his mother walk in). “That is minging,” is just one understated account of the horror. The boy draws on the limited cultural references known to him, as evident in this outburst:

That’s like Hitler… Is it a bear?… It’s his brain!… Who would do that?… They are laughing!… My God, seriously… Get off him, you psychos… He’s like Chewbacca… Oh, no. They’re cutting his eye out… Stop. Stop… This is worse than E.T.… What are they doing, the stupid murderers?

The boy, thirteen years old, has given part of his YouTube account over to relative innocuous activities such as video gaming, and another part to tomfoolery around the home. Mostly, however, the account is devoted to his filmed reactions to some altogether unpleasant clips. The material under observation is not always comprehensible to the juvenile, who occasionally misinterprets the outrage taking place and attributes a wholly innocent analysis. It is a baptism of fire. Our boy is gonna watch the film, he says at the start of 3 Guys 1 Hammer, before admitting to being scared of it. And when it’s over: “I hate that video. Why is it not porn? But still, it’s murder.”

He is evidently not alone in his juvenile dilemma. It is easy to see a situation that is much as it was two decades ago, when, say, Faces of Death was doing the rounds in the schoolyard. The videocassette had once been the physical means of transmission (and before it, the pulp novel and comic book), changing hands within shadows for the promise of a prurient kick. In the age of the Internet, the physical medium of the videocassette is arcane. The shadows themselves are now the medium, accessible to all people at all times.

1First comment posted on Woman Films Herself Watching Her First Beheading. September 2008. LiveLeak.

2Ogrish email to the authors, January 2006.

3Denial of Service (DoS) is the term used to describe the bombardment of a network resource with external communications requests, to an extent that the resource cannot respond to legitimate traffic.

4Level 3 is a communications services company which operates one of the largest Internet backbones in the world.

5Georges Bataille (translated from the French by Mary Dalwood), Eroticism.

6The website URL was temporarily maintained by the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, responsible for the initial arrest of the owner. For some time, a search for nowthatsfuckedup.com returned a web page belonging to Polk County police and an image of three smiling police officers and a puppy.

7Alexis Akwagyiram, ‘Does “happy slapping” exist?’ BBC News online, May 12, 2005.

8Robert Saunders, ‘Happy slapping: transatlantic contagion or home-grown, mass-mediated nihilism?’ Static issue 1, London Consortium 2005.

9‘Adam’ quoted in Marek Palasinski, ‘Turning Assault into a “Harmless Prank” — Teenage Perspectives on Happy Slapping,’ Journal of Interpersonal Violence online, May 23, 2013.

10Robert Saunders, Ibid.

11Ibid.

12Joel Leyden, Israeli journalist, on the Daniel Pearl video.

13Pearl’s repeated acknowledgement of his Jewish status is clearly important to his Islamic captors.

14Real name understood to be Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh. Whether the man wielding the knife that kills Berg is al-Zarqawi, a native of Jordan, is debatable. Reference has been made to CIA voice analysis proving it to be him, while counterclaims posit that the accent does not belong to a Jordanian. One Islamic militant website reported al-Zarqawi was killed in 2003, but this proved false when he appeared live and well in a video released on the Internet on April 25, 2006. Some claim al-Zarqawi has a prosthetic leg, while the man in the Berg video does seem to have difficulty bending and allows an accomplice to finish the job. The death of al-Zarqawi was finally confirmed following an air raid on a house in Iraq on June 7, 2006 (prompting the father of Nicholas Berg to comment, “I see more death coming out of al-Zarqawi’s death…”). The autopsy revealed that both his legs were intact, although one of them had at some time been broken.

15Eerily, Malaysia is the implied location of the snuff film broadcast in David Cronenberg’s movie, Videodrome.

16See chapter eleven. THE EVIL EYE.

17Jonathan Hayes, ‘Second Opinion,’ New York online, May 21, 2005.

18Comment online relating to the Armstrong video.

19Eldin Hadzovic: ‘Multimedia Invitation to Jihad.’ Dani, January 14, 2005.

20The four men were killed in a disused factory near Grozny and their heads dumped in a sack by the side of a road. It is possible that the murders were undertaken in a hasty manner to prevent any impending rescue attempt; the lack of video evidence suggests the killings weren’t done for the camera. However, it is alleged that Osama Bin Laden thwarted any ransom negotiation and paid the militants to behead the men. Should this be true, it is feasible that a video for private view was made that has yet to surface.

21The victim was subsequently identified as Russian conscript Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Rodionov (though some dispute this) and the man carrying out the decapitation was Salautdin Temirbulatov who was arrested and charged with the murder in March 2000.

22Catharine A MacKinnon, ‘Turning Rape Into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide.’ Ms. vol IV no 1 (July/ August 1993).

23Dejan Ognjanović, ‘The Art of Atrocity: A Serbian Film,’ article and interview with Srðan Spasojević, Rue Morgue no. 106.

24One idea put to the authors as a possible reason for the incline of this video violence is the so-called torture porn cycle of horror movies, like Saw, being an influencing factor.

25Not all narcovideos are uploaded by the cartels. Footage that appeared on YouTube on June 15, 2015, was made available by the newspaper Reforma, who acquired it following a clash between members of the New Generation Jalisco Cartel (CJNG) and state police. Cellphones confiscated at the scene contained media of rival gang members being tortured and murdered by CJNG. One kill-method, a first by all accounts, shows a man with dynamite strapped to his chest being blown to smithereens. This is the footage that appears online, along with brief shots of a young boy with dynamite fastened to his neck. The fate of the child isn’t shown, but, according to Reforma, the dynamite is detonated and he is also killed.

26WJT Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War Images of 9/11 to the Present.

27The video has since been taken down.

28David Allen Green twitter feed dated August 20, 2014. ‘“Viewing” illegal? Call with Met press office about “viewing” offence.’

29A third individual was linked to the case. Alexander Hanzha was charged for his part in two armed robberies undertaken alongside Suprunyuck and Sayenko prior to the murders, but not the murders themselves.

30Ogrish forum, ‘Man *Brutally* Murdered with a Screwdriver and Hammer.’

31The Chilean television channel Red Televisiva Megavisión aired a documentary about the case in 2010. Entitled Los maníacos del martillo (The Hammer Maniacs), the programme stated that at least five further murder videos exist. Heavily pixelated video of a new murder victim was shown, along with more footage of the attack on Yatzenko.

32The photo showed what appeared to be the same individual from the video with the same kittens on the same bed.

33See chapter nine: PAUL BERNARDO AND KARLA HOMOLKA.

34When DeLarge initially joined the Facebook group the admin team suspected that he was Magnotta for a time.

35This is likely an allusion to the audiocassette that Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley made while torturing Lesley Ann Downey. The tape included a recording of Ray Conniff’s Little Drummer Boy.

36The make and model was corroborated when a photograph was discovered that showed Magnotta sitting in a car. Captured in the reflection in the vehicle’s half-open window is the person taking the picture and the pink Panasonic DMC-F3.

37For reasons unknown, 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick appears to have been re-recorded from a computer monitor or television screen. Peripheral sounds, such as the sneezing and footsteps (which some people believe indicates the presence of a third person in the room), were probably picked up during this secondary recording stage.

38There is evidence of subtle differences between the poster in the photograph and the poster in the video. This may be a deliberate defacement intended to create an element of doubt, or it may mean nothing at all.

39Ironically, the assumption that the film was a hoax might perhaps stem from the long term investigation into snuff films by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, which ultimately yielded nothing. See chapter six: THE INVESTIGATION OF PORNOPHILES.

40The authors contacted Marek and theYNC owner. Both agreed to be interviewed but became hesitant as the Magnotta story developed and ultimately they declined.

41National Post, June 1, 2012.

42The significance of Casablanca may go even deeper. At the beginning of the movie, as the animated map unfolds and the African continent comes into view, the letters ROCCO are in frame before opening up to reveal MOROCCO. Was this the source of Magnotta’s assumed middle name? Or further superfluous conjecture?

43Alexis Valoran Reich (formerly John Mark Karr) is a paedophile who falsely confessed to the murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey in 2006.

44The name again seems pertinent. Brian Kinney is a fictitious character in the television series Queer As Folk played by Gale Harold. Briankinney2 was a name used to edit a Wikipedia article about Karla Homolka. The article has been repeatedly edited to imply that Homolka had a relationship with Luka Magnotta. On the same track, YouTube user Amanda Grace stated, “Did you know Gale [Harold] and Luka Magnotta are cousins. I just figured it out, and they look remarkeably [sic] alike.” On April 10, Grace would post on another forum thread about Gale Harold: “He looks exactly like Luka Magnotta, I read they were cousins.”

45YouTube user alexisvaloranreich selected videos that featured the Moors Murderers as his favourites. Vimeo username Angela Downs could be a take on the name of Moors victim Lesley Anne Downey. YouTube username Emily Williams, under which the Magnotta promotional video was re-uploaded on May 26 along with the addition of links to the full Ice Pick video, could be a reference to Emlyn Williams, author of Beyond Belief: The Moors Murderers: The Story of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.

46Julian Petley email correspondence with the authors, September 4, 2013.

47An Internet shielded from immediate view that offers access to a veritable landscape of even more secretive doorways makes for a compelling image. But given the sort of materials presently available through Tor and the ‘vanilla’ web, there would hardly appear a necessity to travel much deeper, if indeed deeper exists. Dialogue on the matter of yet further reaches of information seems not a little apocryphal at this point.

48Released in 2014, Syro, the album in question, has since been made available via the regular channels.

49Not all video grotesqueries share the number-noun title format. Falling ouside the pattern are BME Pain Olympics and spankwire, two clips of extreme, self-inflicted genital mutilation that have generated reaction videos.

50The clip is believed to be a trailer for a feature-length Brazilian hardcore fetish film called Hungry Bitches.

The Manson Family is rumoured to have filmed their activities. This is what those films may have looked like.

So begins Family Movies (1984) aka Manson Family Movies, an estranged recreation of the events that led to murder in the summer of 1969. Shot in Regular-8 without synchronized sound and no script, friends of writer-director John Aes-Nihil play members of the Manson Family and their victims.[1] The Family laze around their California desert home, the Spahn Movie Ranch, where Charles Manson encourages the girls to take off their clothes. Sharon Tate and associates are murdered at the Polanski house and blood is daubed on the walls. Hand painted intertitles convey information such as ‘Sharon is transmuted with fear’, as the soundtrack alternates between the music of the Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, the Beatles’ ‘White Album’, and Manson dialogue taken from interviews. Aes-Nihil has said of Family Movies, ‘I know it has little continuity but it is supposed to be The Film The Family made of themselves. And they weren’t filmmakers either.’[2]

‘No, we don’t get to see the snuff footage everyone’s heard whispers about,’ said CrimeBeat magazine of another film, Robert Hendrickson’s documentary Manson (1973).[3] The magazine is dated March 1993. In an unrelated report the following month, Fortean Times, the magazine of strange phenomenon, observed ‘there were unsubstantiated rumours, current at the time, that such “satanic” groupings as the Manson Family were performing blood sacrifices of animals and making snuff movies.’[4] These stories return and keep returning, oftentimes rediscovered by new generations, or precipitated by certain news events, or nothing much at all. The year cited in the above examples — 1993 — has no great significance other than it’s the year the authors were working on the first edition of this book. But, case in point, before the year was out, Manson’s son (Charles Manson, Jr.) committed suicide, parole hearings of Family members Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel took place, two new record albums of Manson material appeared,[5] and rock band Guns N’ Roses courted controversy with a cover of a Manson song on their newest album. The hidden track, Look At Your Game, Girl, concludes with singer Axl Rose thanking Chas.[6] With very little effort it is easy to find topical Manson related stories, and connections such as these trigger horrors anew.

THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

Horror is very much key in an article that appeared in the Australian free film zine Trash Confidential (issues dated March and April 1999). Written by Jack Orff (probably not his real name), ‘Suffer Little Children’ promised to deliver the Polanski, Tate, Manson and snuff connection. The first part summarizes events in the lives of the main players, as we know and understand them. The second part delivers an entirely speculative scenario using the same authoritative voice, without provision for corroborative evidence or sources. Orff is of the opinion that Sharon Tate was chosen to die because of certain films in her possession. Manson and his Family were effectively hired killers, and Helter Skelter and race were simply a smokescreen. The brew is one of Satanic cults as a front for drug smuggling and child trafficking. On top of this, linking nefarious operations on the East Coast to Latin America, was Hollywood producer Roy Radin, described here as ‘the snuff king’. The story posits that Roman Polanski’s indictment for the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl in 1977, validates a link to these shady individuals as well as to international paedophilia organizations. Another non sequitur is that snuff king Radin (murdered in 1980) allegedly possessed numerous celebrity sex tapes, the conjecture then jumping to three reels of 8mm film supposedly hidden at the Polanski Cielo Drive home in Los Angeles. A lot of people had a vested interest in obtaining or destroying these films, Orff deliberates,

For these short films contained Sharon in some of her most enthusiastic roles. Two of these films were grainy recordings of orgies involving many of the men who circulated within the groups mentioned previously, plus some solo spots from Sharon featuring her ‘performing’ with a Great Dane, a goat, and another astonishing scene involving a bucket of large rare African eels. But it was the third film that was the most incriminating.

None of the films have ever been located.

This callous description seems more in keeping with rumour and imagination than any sense of reality. And what of the third film in the Polanski household, described by Orff as the most incriminating? It’s a snuff film. We cut to Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor in the Tate-LaBianca case, who is said to have been interested in a film offered to him by an anonymous woman on the phone. Bugliosi is told the film is about thirty minutes duration and contains ‘some really heavy shit’ involving ‘children, two men, and a well-known blonde woman’. Convinced the deal is no ruse, but unable to raise the money demanded for the trade, the film ultimately slips Bugliosi by. (There is no reference to it being offered elsewhere.) It is highly likely, speculates Orff, hammering the pieces into place, that the blonde woman in the film

was Tate, and one of the two men mentioned was Roman Polanski. He had never hidden his love for young girls and was heavily involved in paedophilia rackets in Europe. It seems only a natural progression that he would form similar contacts in the States. It is also reasonable to assume that he was the cameraman on the first two films as they were said to show the interior of the house on Cielo Drive.

Casting a tutored eye over Orff’s tale, one might recognize a number of speculative ideas that have grown around the myth of Manson (and other notorious murder cases). Descriptions of the films, ever short and grainy, have a lilt disapproving of Polanski and Tate, more so Tate, onto whom all sorts of dehumanizing perversions are projected by the author. As was the case with some contemporaneous reports about the massacre, the media taking a biased attitude toward the victims. Sharon Tate and other unfortunate members of her household were chided in a manner that the LaBiancas were not. Leno and Rosemary Bianca were older, everyday working folk, whereas Tate was blessed with youth, looks, money and an extravagant lifestyle. An article in Modern Screen magazine (Nov 1969), strangely titled ‘Sharon Tate’s Horrible Death’, was written prior to the apprehension of any suspects. But Ruth Waterbury proposed that the killer was a lone male and the murders likely took place because of drugs, if only because the victims were part of ‘the slimy underbelly of Hollywood, its small coterie of film people who crawl at night into those shrubbery-hidden homes in the hills and smoke pot, have their “fixes”, dream their crazy, mad dreams induced by hallucinatory drugs’.

Columnist JD Russell wasn’t impressed with Roman Polanski’s press conference speech following the murder of his wife and friends. In The Beautiful People, a collection of his newspaper articles published in 1970, Russell’s pen drips with venom. His focus isn’t Manson but Tate as some kind of deserving victim, a sacrificial lamb for media slaughter. He reflects on Polanski’s eulogy to his dead wife and accuses him of underplaying the use of drugs. ‘Who is he kidding?’ snaps Russell, because

In spite of the his protestations, the Polanski home was notorious in the underground as a palace of offbeat roistering, often with monstrous sexual deviations perpetrated by the guests under the influence of exotic drugs.[7]

Much of the initial conjecture that has built around the case emanated from Russell’s muckraking book, specifically the chapter titled ‘Sharon Tate… The Murder of the Cult of the Kinky’. This information, the publisher boasts, is appearing in print for the first time. Manson was still on trial at the time of publication and motives in the case were not known. Russell is therefore obliged to change tack and his attention evidently defaults to Sharon Tate. At one point he discusses videotapes and photographic albums that were unearthed following a police search of 10050 Cielo Drive and the home of fellow victims Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski. Russell considers Frykowski an avid amateur photographer with a penchant for documenting the various parties the couple attended. Consequently, cites Russell, many celebrities chose to ‘leave town rather than face a questioning that might be embarrassing when their faces turn up on the Frokowsky [sic] orgy tapes’. Should this be the case and embarrassment was all that celebrities feared, the content of the tapes would hardly likely be unduly incriminating, certainly nothing approximating murder or a snuff film, which were unshakeable facets of the rumour mill in years to come.

Genesis magazine (March 1976) is another case in point. An article called ‘Tracking the Slashers: Murder on Film,’ by Lionel C. Bascom, begins with Cielo Drive on the fated night, before it ponders whether the murder of Sharon Tate and guests were recorded on film. Bascom hears from a film industry insider that a snuff film called ‘Rough Cut’ (with a script ‘written by two men’) was maybe shown at parties in Palm Springs at the time of Manson’s trial in 1970.

‘They could have been filmed,’ Bascom ventures of the Tate murders. Indeed they could. Perhaps they weren’t.

The Manson non-films run a parallel with the then current spate of snuff film rumours, and Bascom draws on a scene supposedly belonging to one such film. It features, apparently, a man and a woman getting turned on, when all of a sudden weirdness ensues: The man slashes the woman repeatedly with a knife and kills her on camera, before proceeding to dismember her body.

It isn’t clear whether the scene described is something Bascom has himself witnessed or merely hearsay. But either way the description sounds a bit like the end of Snuff, which had premiered in January that year and was already in New York by the time the article appeared in print. But Bascom makes no reference to Shackleton’s movie and does not even seem to be aware of it.

A similar scenario pops up again in articles elsewhere: Uncorroborated reports of snuffers in circulation and the vagaries of a brutal final act by way of example. References to Manson and the Family provide a misplaced sense of purpose and value to these tales, creating a phantasmagorical landscape that reappears time and again over the years, more recently as the so-called Satanic panic.

The original print of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising is rumoured to be buried in Death Valley,[8] while whispers of Manson-snuff can be traced to Ed Sanders’ The Family, which describes members of the Family having stolen an NBC-TV truck loaded with film equipment in summer 1969. The truck was subsequently dumped and most of the film given away. But Manson took one of the NBC cameras with him to Death Valley in September. The Family were also in possession of three Super 8 cameras, on which it is alleged they shot porn movies and other things. Among these films, determines Sanders, was ‘the Barker Ranch chop-stab dance, where they [the Family] danced in a circle, then pretended to go into slash-frenzies — attacking trees, rocks and one another with knives.’ He adds, ‘God knows what else they shot with their stolen NBC camera.’ (Our emphasis.)

In the chapter ‘Getting the Fear’, Sanders claims the Family would sometimes rent four or five battery powered 8mm projectors and show films at night, often several at once. The films are said to have included the knife dance, as well as porn, animal sacrifices and human sacrifices. Speaking with an anonymous one time member of the Family, Sanders learns of a ‘short movie depicting a female victim dead on a beach’.

ANON: I, I, I knew, I know, I only know about one snuff movie. I, uh, you know—
SANDERS: Which snuff movie do you know about?
ANON: I just know like a young chick maybe about twenty-seven, short hair… yeah… and chopped her head off, that was…

After deliberating on where the film could have been shot, and noting the hooded outfits worn by the protagonists, the interview continues.

SANDERS: What did the girl look like? What was the scenario?
ANON: What was what?
SANDERS: What was the scenario? Was she tied up? Did she look willing?
ANON: She was dead. She was just lying there.
SANDERS: She was already dead?
ANON: Yeah. Legs spread, uh. She was nude but nobody was fucking her. They said her head was just chopped off and she was just laying there.

The interviewee acknowledges he hasn’t actually seen the film but is merely relating a story he has heard, as had been the case with Bugliosi’s former Family associate. Indeed, they might be one and the same person.

Sanders: What was the rest of the movie like?
Anon: I didn’t see it. I just, you know—

An insinuation made in early editions of The Family, fleshed out in the most recent update, is one concerning the sex tapes of Hollywood celebrities, which Sanders says were in circulation at the time of the Tate/LaBianca murders. The rumour surfaced shortly after the Manson case broke (per JD Russell in The Beautiful People). It is claimed that police took possession of a videotape (video being a rare commodity in those days) of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate making love, later returning it to Polanski. It may or may not be the same film that Polanski supposedly shot in his Cielo Drive home, an orgy in which Tate is said to have taken part.

When the Spahn ranch was raided on October 10, 1969, and Manson apprehended, police seized the last of the stolen NBC film equipment. This consisted of a camera loaded with unexposed film; Bill Vance, a Family member, supposedly made off with some of the Death Valley footage. (If anything had been shot on the stolen television camera, it is worth considering whether the Family had the means to screen it.) Other information put forward in The Family relates to a supposed note written to a reporter by a person named Chuck, claiming possession of films of ‘Malibu and San Francisco axe murders’, and a Los Angeles dope dealer who allegedly sold ‘a film depicting the ritual murder of a woman to a famous New York artist whose name will not be mentioned here’.

Vincent Bugliosi, in his book The Manson Murders, relates the hearsay of one former Family associate on the matter of ‘two boys and a girl buried about eight feet deep behind Barker Ranch’ whose bodies are never found. Elsewhere, the jurisprudent Bugliosi concedes that belief is not evidence, and yet clearly even he isn’t averse to presenting speculative ideas such as this in relation to the Family’s shared madness. The stories that pepper the rumour mill are formed from an uneasy alliance of fact and fallacy. Thus the orgy tape that is returned to Polanski by police, transmutes, in the hands of Jack Orff, to a bestial free for all involving kiddie snuff.

Manson ended the sixties, literally and figuratively. Truth told, the hippy ideal was already clawing for breath anyway, the summer of love drowned in rampant poverty, heavy drug use and STD. The crazy little man with the wild, staring eyes became all things all at once. To middle America, he was the mutant fallout of liberated sex and drugs. Conversely, the hippies saw him as a reactionary figure in the face of Vietnam and their parents’ bad politics, a kind of loathsome martyr as it were.[9] But the hippies didn’t want to see Manson take the ship down. Some still had hope. Ed Sanders, according to Stuart Swezey, was some kind of hippy champion in this respect, arriving at The Family with a preordained agenda. ‘By valiantly wading into the “sleaze” around the deadly fringes of Hollywood,’ writes Swezey, ‘he [Sanders] would attempt to restore the good name of peace-loving flower children around the world from the stain of guilt by association.’[10] Commenting on his snuff film interview in later editions of The Family, Sanders acknowledges that no such films or their alleged victims have ever surfaced.

SNUFF DOCUMENTARY

Confessions of a Blue Movie Star is a rather unremarkable film documentary that purports to look behind the scenes of sex film production in Germany. It focuses on the director Robert Furch (a genuine filmmaker), whose latest production he refers to as a modern interpretation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. There are interviews with Furch and his cast and crew. But much of this appears fabrication. Of interest is the fact that Confessions of a Blue Movie Star eventually became known as The Evolution of Snuff, undergoing some remodelling in order to cash-in on news events.

From what can be surmised, Confessions of a Blue Movie Star dates back to 1974. It appears to have been adapted shortly thereafter to exploit the death of adult actress Claudia Fielers, who can be seen in the film. In 1975, at age twenty-three, Fielers committed suicide. The eulogies that open and close the picture suggest she died during production or soon after (according to the narrator, “in an English garden,” no less). This was the first repackage for Confessions of a Blue Movie Star. Later on, the bias of the film changed once again, taking as its inspiration in this instance Shackleton’s Snuff. A new opening and ending were added that bore the legend The Evolution of Snuff, proposing that the film was an investigation into death on camera. In this state it was released in 1978. The director is credited as Karl Martine. But Andrzej Kostenko may have actually filmed the snuff wraparound segments.

A more accurate title now would be The Evolution of Snuff: Confessions of a Blue Movie Star as both appear on the print at various junctures. The new opening has brief talking head commentary from a variety of people, and for a coda an interview with an individual supposedly involved in the production of a snuff film. This wraparound material attempts to deliver an existential bond between the suicide of Claudia Fielers and the existence of snuff, and thus unify the two films. The German novelist Carl Amery helped originate this new snuff element, and no doubt scripted penned the idioms on death of the body and death of the soul, which are peppered throughout. But he seems sincere enough, going so far as to provide a mission statement. The film, says Amery,

is a reportage, but more than this it’s a horror film and it is an indictment of a society which permits its young men and women, with their simple human abilities, to be desecrated and commercialised…This film is a warning, a political warning.[11]

An abstraction of snuff is provided by Roman Polanski, who is shown talking in archive footage. “Art is a mirror of the world,” he says. The Evolution of Snuff then cuts to Confessions of a Blue Movie Star, the main feature. A short tagged-on ending eventually returns us to the theme of the opening preamble: Snuff. The screen goes red and a woman’s screams are heard. An announcement is made that the two clips that follow were received moments after the actual documentary was completed. These clips are currently under investigation, we are informed, but they must be shown. An interview with a masked man takes place, who admits to being involved in the production of a snuff film. Interspersed with this interview are fleeting glimpses of the footage in question. The whole thing is clearly a charade. Indeed, the interview is laughable, no small thanks to the subject’s disguise, which is a paper carrier bag over the head with eye and mouth holes cut out. His supposed snuff clips are identifiable as belonging to Wes Craven’s horror movie The Last House on the Left (1972).[12]

The anonymous source gives little away. He makes a reference to newsreels being full of death and even mentions death in mondo films.[13] Of his own material, he claims to have been under the influence of drugs when it was shot, but insinuates it is of South American origin — or, rather, a country that practices Macumba and Candomblé.

Similar in format is a film from J-sploitation director Daisuke Yamanouchi. Its title a reference to the bloody woodcuts produced in Edo era Japan,[14] Mu zan e (1995) purports to be an investigation into pornography and perversion, conducted by a female reporter who speaks direct to camera from the street and from the aisle of a sex shop. Footage is shown from some of the material under discussion, which includes a porn shoot, rough sex, tampon play and even darker material in the form of found snuff footage. The snuff material, preceded by a warning onscreen, shows a woman abducted by a group of masked men, tied to a chair and stabbed to death with a knife. Her guts are ripped out. Our inquisitive reporter endeavours to find out more about the film. She eventually locates the scene of the crime, an isolated shack, only to fall victim herself. Masked killers tie her up, proceed to molest her and mutilate her with a knife. Suddenly, the television reporter breaks out of character and everyone stops in their tracks. We discover that the shack is merely a studio set and the investigative documentary simply a fabrication. It’s the familiar film-within-a-film ruse. This might not come as a great surprise to the viewer, as the subterfuge is somewhat predictable from the onset. But then comes the sucker punch. The actress playing the television presenter is revealed to be a prima donna and simply won’t stop moaning. She decides at this point that she no longer wants to participate in the shoot any further, whereupon the frayed director goes quite berserk and stabs her for ‘real’ in the neck. Panic on the set. Freeze-frame. The end.

It’s effectively a step up from Allan Shackleton’s ending in Snuff: The director of a fake snuff documentary killing his actress for real.[15] The word ‘SAMPLE’ appears onscreen throughout, impressing that this may not be a legitimate commercial product; that perhaps it has been leaked or stolen. While it’s unlikely viewers will be convinced by Mu zan e and its double whammy tactics, they may choose to applaud director Yamanouchi for his perseverance.

SNUFF LITERATURE

Snuff doesn’t stop at the uncorroborated facts and suspect footage of some extraordinary movies, but has permeated to other media. Before investigating the continued manifestation of snuff in the world press and via various campaigning bodies, we shall note how the entertainment industry, outside of film, has helped propagate the myth. With the movie industry now somewhat complacent with the idea of death on celluloid, it is interesting how snuff continues to be incorporated in novels and television drama as a horrifying aberration.

Death as entertainment was the subject of William Harrison’s 1973 science fiction short story ‘Roller Ball Murder’, on which the movie starring James Caan was based. Powerful corporations control the masses with a violent team game, adored by millions of avid fans. Armour-protected players risk injury or death in rollerderby tournaments geared toward blood spectacle. ‘Most deaths in a single contest,’ we are informed is nine, courtesy ‘Rome vs. Chicago, December 4, 2012’.

The movie adaptation of Harrison’s story, directed by Norman Jewison and released as Rollerball, spawned its own literary cash-ins. At least one anyway. Killerbowl (Sphere, 1975) is by Gary K. Wolf, an author who would find greater fame as the creator of Roger Rabbit. Twenty-first century gladiators are pitted in bloodbath battles of death. In this instance the game is a form of street football where knives, clubs and guns are as integral to the play as the jockstrap. Superbowl XX between the San Francisco Prospectors and the New England Minutemen on Saturday, January 2, 2010, concludes on a nail biting finish. In the home stretch, on Boston’s Van Ness Street, the Prospector’s Fred Gradington races under the ball for an easy catch. But the novice lifts his whole head up as opposed to just his eyes, which a more seasoned player would have done. The Minutemen’s hidden safety takes advantage of the situation, firing his rifle at the exposed Adam’s apple under Gradington’s bulletproof helmet. A deodorant commercial precedes a television playback of the incident. We then join a scene typical of households all over a thrilled America:

Their eyes wide, their mouths full of pretzels, living colour splashing death on their faces, Dreddie and Marda watch again the last five minutes of Fred Gradington’s life.

Geoffrey Wolff’s book The Sightseer (Hamish Hamilton, 1974) is altogether different. It opens to a dead Vermont village, deserted except for ‘a drive-in movie theatre where a few drivers and their dates sit idling, heat full on, waiting for the winter light to fall and Gimme Shelter to begin’. It’s an existential novel about a filmmaker, Caleb Sharrow, who is amoral and not really likeable. ‘Death Watch’, his first film, is an award winning twenty-five minutes study of his dying father. His brother accuses Caleb, “You’d blow up the world to film its end. Wouldn’t you?” To which he replies, “No, but if it were coming to an end, I’d like to spend my last few seconds shooting the event, and imposing some sense of beauty on it.” In the end, Caleb is commissioned to make a film for a government agency. Alongside the official version, he endeavours to make a second, more personal interpretation, one in which he ultimately oversees the death of his main actor.

Another book is Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline (Collins; 1978), in part inspired by the rumours of snuff films circulating at the time of its publication in the seventies. It certainly tries hard enough with stuffy references to pop culture and morality. Nevertheless, along with The Sightseer, it stands apart from the other early uses of snuff in fiction, which tended to take the form of a movie tie-in. One example of this is Sam Hedrin’s novelisation of Network (Sphere; 1977); another is Jack Martin’s Videodrome (New English Library; 1983). The plot of Bloodline concerns family and big business across Europe. But the book’s maguffin is a man in need of psychiatric evaluation, who is engineering a series of snuff films as a sick catharsis for a painful lost relationship. The films all feature beautiful young women wearing nothing but a vivid red ribbon around her neck. She first has sex with a male participant and then is strangled. The police get wind of the nefarious operation when a courier for one such film is knocked down and killed in a traffic accident.

Sidney Sheldon was a veteran writer of television and movie screenplays, as well as a series of best-selling novels. He would have been perfectly placed for news of Shackleton’s Snuff, and we can see here the spirit of its exploitation. Despite a downbeat climax (and use of the words ‘tumescent’ and ‘detumescent’ to describe the state of the phallus), it is an altogether unassuming potboiler that was turned into a rather shabby self titled movie, Bloodline (1979), directed by Terence Young. It starred Audrey Hepburn, out of retirement, and James Mason as the titular psychopath.

Less Than Zero (Picador; 1986) is the debut novel of Bret Easton Ellis,[16] and plays on the motifs by now expected to constitute a snuff film. That is, poor quality video of bound victims, tortured and murdered by unknown assailants. One of the book’s protagonists, Clay, sees the footage idly playing on a monitor at a Beverly Hills party. A nude girl, possibly fifteen-years-old, is tied spread-eagled to a bed covered in newspaper. ‘The film’s in black and white and scratchy… The camera cuts quickly to a young, thin, nude, scared-looking boy, sixteen, maybe seventeen, being pushed into the room by this fat black guy, who’s also naked and who’s got this huge hard on. The boy stares into the camera for an uncomfortably long time, this panicked expression on his face.’ Clay ponders on the presence of a chainsaw in the video. The fat black guy has sex with the boy and girl, then wanders out of shot to return carrying a toolbox. Clay abandons the film when the fat black guy tries to push a nail into the girl’s neck.

Dennis Cooper’s Frisk (Serpent’s Tail, 1991) draws its inspiration from Ellis’ Less Than Zero and another of that author’s novels, American Psycho. The fragmentary Beat-like prose of the former; the vile excess of the latter. Frisk concerns Dennis. As a child, Dennis is shown photographs of a dead boy whose anus is badly mutilated. The image plagues him. As a young man, following a succession of homosexual affairs, Dennis meets the boy from the photos who tells him it was all special effects work. The disillusioned Dennis moves to Holland and lives in a windmill. With the help of two Germans he meets there, he abducts and murders several young boys from a nearby town. At one point, a boy explains to Dennis how a rich old guy he knew shot a snuff film with a cute Asian boy as the victim. The boy deliberates on his decision not to watch the film. “After that,” he says, “you’d never be the same person again, I’m positive. Imagine it.” Cooper’s novel was made into a film in 1995. Directed by Tod Verow and with Michael Gunther playing the role of Dennis, it was submitted to the BBFC and summarily rejected outright on June 27, 1998.

With Jerk (Artspace, 1993), Cooper again utilizes the snuff film idea, but in this instance it is combined with real characters and real events. The setting for Jerk is the basement of Dean Corll’s home where he and Wayne Henley murdered several young boys in the early seventies. But now a Super 8 camera is on hand to record the crimes:

David’s really hunched over now, wincing, watching the film out of the corner of his eye.

Onscreen, Wayne is cutting off the boy’s fingers with pliers. Dean has one fist in the boy’s butt, the other hand around the boy’s throat, and he’s sucking the boy’s limp cock like they’re in love.

In Raymond Thompson and Treve Daly’s The Number To Call Is… (Souvenir Press, 1979) a television studio broadcasting a live charity telethon is overrun by terrorists. Barricading themselves inside the studio, they torture and murder hostages, insisting that everything must be transmitted on air. While law enforcement agencies negotiate with the group the studio executives see an opportunity for massive viewing figures. Frederic, the group leader, is quick to take control and let the authorities know he means business.

“…I give you this warning… you have thirty minutes… and then I will contact you with our demands. I have never been patient in the face of bureaucracy and I will not make an exception now! Should our demands not be met then we shall execute —” there was a murmur of alarm from the area of the stage, and Frederic lifted his voice — “execute — live on television — before the people of the world, these hostages!”

To ensure the threats are taken seriously, Frederic pours hot coffee over the head of a disabled girl having instructed the cameraman to get a tight close-up. Viewing figures increase in anticipation of greater atrocities, with the promise that the building is rigged with explosives and ready to be brought down on everyone inside.

James Cohen’s Through a Lens Darkly (Warner Books, 1993) sees the director of ‘Raw Death’ rig the cameras to record his own suicide. His partner decides to use the footage for ‘Raw Death 2’. Snuff films also lie at the heart of Robert Campbell’s superior detective novel, In La-La Land We Trust (Mysterious Press, 1987). Detective Burke is the anti-hero creation of novelist, child rights campaigner and attorney Andrew Vachss. In Flood (William Collins & Sons, 1986), Burke sits through a snuff film. He returns in Blossom (Pan Books, 1991), spitting his customary venom and loathing for human scum, although five novels of hate has shaved his dialogue to monosyllables:

Them. Humans who kill for love. Torture for fun. They set fires to watch the flames. Black-glove rapists. Snuff film directors. Trophy-takers. Baby-fuckers. Pain turns on the switch. Blood lubricates the machinery. Then the power rush comes. And they do too. It’s not sex. Castrate the freaks and they use broomsticks or Coke bottles.

Staying with detectives, it was inevitable that the prolific Nora Roberts would eventually get around to the concept of celluloid murder. With over 200 novels to her name and still counting, she must be able to write faster than Ed Wood Jr. Nightshade (Silhouette, 1993) is the unlikely pairing of Althea Grayson (police lieutenant) and Colt Nightshade (secretive bigshot) on the trail of a young runaway who has fallen in with a gang of ruthless SM filmmakers. Our heroes fear the runaway may become the victim of onscreen brutality and possibly even murder. But the gang are an easy catch, sending one of their videotapes to the wrong address along with a cryptic cover note. Truth told, the book is more interested in the steamy love affair between Grayson and Nightshade, coming over as a kind of Mills & Boon with the shadow of snuff hanging over it.

Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is one of the few men untouched by corruption working Bangkok’s District 8. In John Burdett’s Bangkok Haunts (Bantam, 2007), Jitpleecheep is on a case involving a snuff film and people in high places. The victim in the film is an old flame of his. But it’s somewhat incidental next to the cultural trappings of the place in which the novel is set, as observed by a farang (Caucasian) author.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff (Jonathon Cape, 2008) is a meditation on masculinity and the porn business told from the set of the latest biggest gang bang in the world. We might simply summarize this one with a quote from the Independent, whose reviewer describes the book as ‘a Chernobyl of taboos’.[17]

Marcos Fábio Katudjian is the author of Snuff Movie: After the End of the World, a 2002 novel set in São Paulo. A young couple, Flavio and Fernanda, fall in with a group of snuff filmmakers. The book had a limited release in Brazil (publisher unknown).

Hank Kirton’s Conservatory of Death (AQC, 2012) is focused on the mechanics of consumerism to tell a story of snuff interwoven with pop and underground culture. The tale for the most part is that of Swatt Winston, who is responsible for a VHS death film compilation series called ‘Conservatory of Death’. These he compiles, duplicates and sells from his apartment through esoteric magazines and Mexican death tabloids. When he starts to include hitherto unseen murder material on the tapes, supposedly emanating from the ‘Satanic underground’, sales take a turn for the better. Because, prior to that,

Depressing towers of unsold videotapes sat stacked against the wall: Conservatory of Death Volume 3. Ninety minutes of grainy autopsy footage, Nazi concentration camps, Middle East executions; a Japanese businessman jumping from a skyscraper, splat.

Death on top of death followed by death. And then layered with a little more death. But it was old footage. Stuff he’d cribbed from other (mostly Japanese) death tapes.

Complementing the scene is the host for the films, Mistress Euphoria Mori, whose schlock narration is suitably asinine. Thus the book is somewhat unique in its viewpoint: The snuff film consumer and distributor at its core, as opposed to the usual suspects of manufacturer, victim and detective, hot on the tail. It sweeps through the underground, referencing sources that are by measure clear and covert. There are, for instance, elements of Kenneth ‘Mad Dog’ MacKenna, Factory 2000 and Natural Born Losers. Conservatory of Death is in a very different world to those novels mentioned above, for which snuff exists as a criminal abstract. Here it is almost parody, signposted for those who know how to read the signs.

Similar in its geeky vernacular but less fun is Nicholas Royle’s The Director’s Cut (Abacus, 2001), a novel about a dead filmmaker of ‘uncertain talent’ and the mythologies surrounding his controversial work. Set in London (you’d be hard pressed to forget it), the story spirals out from the discovery of a body wrapped in celluloid (a print of Nic Roeg’s Bad Timing) and touches on experimental film collectives, film spaces, abandoned cinemas, films shot in morgues, until reaching some kind of resolution that involves a short 8mm film of a suicide.

On occasion comics, too, have tackled the concept of death on film. The first and possibly only issue of Grass Green’s The Decorator (Eros Comix, 1992), has the nymphomaniac wife of a time travelling superhero being murdered by burglars when she makes fun of their ‘fuckn fucking’. The incident is recorded on a film camera, which the victim had intended for home-porn production. An issue of the horror anthology, Terror Tales (Eerie Publications, 1972), has a strip titled ‘Demons and Vampires’, where Gilman, artist and murderer, films the subterranean monsters he coaxes out of hiding. The scheme ultimately backfires and Gilman’s fate is discovered in a last reel of film, torn apart by those he observed. The most controversial use of snuff in a comic book appears in the erotic horror anthology series, Verotika (Glenn Danzig, 1995). ‘A Taste of Cherry’ in issue four tells an explicit tale that is about as brutal as it can get. A girl on her way to high school cheerleader practice, is abducted, raped, tortured and murdered on film. The individual responsible, having paid a hit squad, sits masturbating to the film of the deed. He is revealed in the twist ending as the girl’s own father. Written by Christian Moore and Hart D Fisher, with art by James Daley, the strip resulted in a ban for Verotika no 4 in one US state. Copies filtered through to Britain. But it is believed that shipments may have been impounded by customs.[18]

SNUFF TELEVISION

The snuff theme turned up on television in the whimsical British secret agent series, The Avengers. The episode ‘Epic’, originally broadcast in 1967, sees agent Mrs Peel (Diana Rigg) kidnapped by mad filmmaker Z.Z. von Schnerk (Kenneth J. Warren) and forced to star in his newest production, The Destruction of Emma Peel. Every life-threatening situation is recorded on film before finally the unwitting star faces imminent death by rotary saw. “It will pack out the arthouses!” von Schnerk cries. His production is thwarted at the last minute with the arrival of Peel’s associate John Steed (Patrick Mcnee).

Von Schnerk’s sentiment predates Allan Shackleton by a decade, although it’s fair to say that Shackleton wasn’t anticipating the art house for Snuff; the honest to goodness grindhouse would suffice. Nevertheless, Snuff impacted on popular television shows of the day, notably The Rookies and Police Story, which had similar plots and were aired within weeks of each other in 1976.[19] Both are cop shows, and, much like the novels discussed earlier, it is in this particular genre that the small screen has best embraced snuff. In more than one episode of the long-running Columbo, television’s most famous detective (played by Peter Falk) encountered technology of which he had little grasp and solved a murder that had been captured on camera.[20]

In April 1994, British comedy duo Gareth Hale and Norman Pace turned to straight acting for the three-part television drama, A Pinch of Snuff. Playing Dalziel and Pascoe, detectives whose personalities and methods clash, the pair find themselves trying to get to the bottom of a snuff film racket that is masquerading behind a small Yorkshire town cine club. The controversial and confrontational theme is in keeping with the ‘outrageous’ comedy the duo were noted for, but somehow the show manages to reduce the shocking premise to mere soap opera. It seems it didn’t impress Reginald Hill, on whose eponymous 1978 novel the show was based. Detectives Dalziel and Pascoe were the subject of many of Hill’s books and it would be a number of years before they returned to television screens, this time played by two different actors on a rival network.

The long-running forensic crime series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation eventually turned to the now familiar topic. One of the plot strands in an episode titled ‘Snuff’ (air date November 21, 2002) focuses on a case involving an anonymous 16mm film and the murder of a woman who features in it.

But traditional values don’t cut it anymore. The line that divides the good guys from the bad is in a state of flux, propogating postmodern irony for the many new champions of ‘quality’ television drama. Here most anything is permitted so long as the smirk goes unchallenged. The hit series Dexter presents a morally ambiguous world of serial killer as anti-hero. The titular Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) is a bad guy, but a bad guy surrounded by even greater evils. He does what the police cannot and what righteous folk would like to. A typical, less benevolent adversary is the Ice Truck Killer. In one episode (‘Truth Be Told,’ air date December 10, 2006), the Ice Truck Killer taunts the Miami police department — and by extension Dexter’s pernicious sensibilities and our own — with a VHS videocassette that features snuff.

‘I Need Light,’ the premiere episode of the BBC drama Ripper Street, was aired on December 30, 2012. Set in London’s East End in 1889, a mutilated woman is found in an alleyway and fears abound that Jack the Ripper has returned. Intent on quashing the rumours Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) investigates the case from a different angle, and finds himself on a trail to a newspaper photographer with a sideline in pornographic imagery. Further exploration reveals that the suspect possesses a radical new invention, a camera that captures the moving image, and is caught manufacturing a snuff movie for a rich client. The esteemed Sir Arthur Donaldson (Mark Dexter) plays a leading role in the prototype movies, strangling women to death.

While Ripper Street is a series hit and miss, the conceit of this debut episode is priceless: The first moving pictures are snuff films. Not only does Donaldson’s proto audience have to get its head round the alchemic-like marvel presented to them, but what’s more, it is a marvel incontrovertibly linked with perversion and death. Here we see cinema tainted in the womb, deformed at birth. ‘However “authentic” the image,’ to borrow Amos Vogel, cinema ‘remains a distortion of life.’[21]

IAN GABB AND LEONARD WALKLEY

Foremost in propagating the myth of the snuff film is the news media. Everything else, television drama, comic books, novels, et al, is simply dressing. In September 1990, building worker Ian Gabb visited his fifty-eight-year-old homosexual associate Leonard Walkley.[22] This visit, however, was no social call. On entering Walkley’s flat in Brixton, thirty-eight-year-old Gabb attacked and bound his paramour to a chair using lengths of steel chain. He secured his victim with a padlock, connected a length of wiring cable to a mains socket, and proceeded to torture Walkley with jolts of electricity.

Gabb was later arrested on a charge of attempted murder. He explained to police that he tortured Walkley so that he might retrieve vital information he believed the man possessed: The source of an underground distribution network of pornographic snuff movies. The case was linked to the murder of fourteen-year-old Jason Swift and five-yearold Barry Lewis, victims of a paedophile gang in the eighties. During time in prison for rape, Gabb had acted as police informer, gleaning information from his planted cell mates who were members of the group.

It was suspected but never proven that the children were filmed being sexually abused and murdered. Detectives attended Gabb’s trial hoping to acquire information on the possible international distribution of snuff movies. The Daily Star had no doubts, however, and ran the front page headline ‘10 KIDS DIE ON VIDEOS’ (July 27, 1990). Returning to the case some years later, the News of the World (October 25, 1992) wrote, ‘One theory advanced is that the deaths of Barry [Lewis], Jason [Swift] and Mark Tildesley were filmed for “snuff” videos.’ The newspaper determined that ‘the repulsive films — showing real child murders — are prized by paedophiles who are willing to pay thousands of pounds for each video’.[23]

The implication of snuff movies in the Gabb case was derived from a speculative column in the Mail on Sunday in July 1990. There was no evidence of any kind found at the crime scenes to point to filming, nor was snuff mentioned by any of the perpetrators. Indeed, the murders of the children were not believed to have been premeditated. The Mail on Sunday article augmented the suffering of the parents with unfounded rumour, callously implying that the rape and murder of the victims were now being circulated as video entertainment.

Comparable is a US case several years earlier, located in the small midwest town of Jordan, Minnesota. It was reported that the FBI was searching for the bodies of six children thought to have been murdered after participating in pornographic filmmaking.[24] In September 1983, Christine E. Brown told authorities that James John Rud, twice convicted of molesting children, had abused her nine-year-old daughter. Following his arrest on October 1, Rud confessed to molesting the children of several unmarried women he had met at local AA meetings (a crime for which he would ultimately receive a forty-year prison sentence). That same month, a ten-year-old boy confided how he had not only been molested by Rud but by other people as well — all of whom ‘looked like Elvis’ — and told how his abuse had been filmed and photographed. Over the course of eight months, twenty-five of Jordan’s 2,700 residents were charged with sexually molesting dozens of children, including their own. The first case came to trial and ended in an acquittal on September 19, 1984. A month later, charges against all remaining defendants were dropped in lieu of more devastating claims: Six of the children had talked about incidents involving murder.

In the October 16 edition of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, an unidentified source is quoted as saying, “We’re looking for dead bodies of kids… We may have gotten into this too deep but we’re looking for bodies.” R. Kathleen Morris, the prosecutor who led the investigation, declined to comment on the article. Instead, she issued a statement saying she had dismissed all the sex abuse charges to prevent the district court from having to disclose 126 pages of sealed police notes. “Sensitive documents,” she said, that could “compromise an active criminal investigation of great magnitude.” However, Dan Anderson, the FBI agent responsible for investigating the interstate commerce of pornography, told the New York Times that he was not aware of any such investigation. It wasn’t until October 17 that the FBI joined the state in an inquiry into a supposed child pornography ring. R. Kathleen Morris was accused of conducting ‘a witch hunt’ and some Jordan townsfolk saw the whole thing as an attempt on her part to begin a political career. On October 18, she resigned from the case saying that her controversial role detracted from justice.

Rumours were quick to circulate that the ‘sensitive documents’ contained accounts of children having been murdered and buried in Jordan by child pornographers. Some of the perpetrators were said to include those previously facing molestation charges. In interview, children explained that the bodies of other children were buried in the woods and at the back of a former defendant’s home. One youngster was quoted as having said that people at a party took a boy “and hung him over a tub until he bled out enough to be wrapped in a canvas tarp. Then he was put into a truck and never seen again”. Other children were forced to eat a pet gerbil named Snowball and a stray tomcat.

The County Sheriff’s Department went public with the fact that no reports of missing children had been received in the last few years, nor had the local high school any record of missing children. The Minnesota River was dragged but this yielded no evidence, either. “I don’t think the sheriff ever believed that the kids were telling the truth,” an unidentified police official told the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. Indeed not. In November 1984, three boys admitted to having lied to authorities about slain children and the murder investigation was summarily dropped. Nevertheless, there remains a stigma attached to Jordan, as evidenced in Bizarre Sex (Grafton, 1989), a book in which author Dr Roy Eskapa ascertains that in this town ‘Children aged between four and thirteen had been murdered in what may be termed “kiddie snuff films” ’.

The lack of evidence continues to mount, particularly in emotive cases such as this one, often to the point that snuff becomes the case. We will see this happen throughout the rest of this chapter. In February 19, 1995, a journalist for the News of the World wrote of how he had infiltrated a paedophile group, winning the confidence of the group’s leader, a fifty-year-old David Forrest. (This he does, apparently, by showing him ‘soft porn material gathered during another investigation in Bangkok’.) An unwitting Forrest tells the undercover reporter that photos and videos are not a problem. “How much do you want to spend?” he is then said to ask. “You want action pictures? You can have almost anything you want. In fact you can have anything you can imagine. The only thing I won’t touch are snuff movies.”

SATANIC PANIC

Although widely discredited today, in the eighties a notion took hold that defied rational thought to become the subject of intense widespread investigation. Infants around the world, the story goes, were victim to attacks carried out by secret cabals. Mutilation and murder were said to be taking place on a grand scale over a period of many years, the perpetrators outwardly respectable and otherwise quite ordinary, but belonging to tightly knit shadow communities. Many such groups existed, apparently. They operated independent of one another, in common pursuit of devil worship and ritual abuse.

Dead children numbered in the many hundreds. No evidence supported the claims, only unfounded rumour and the vested interests of religious and political organizations, and persons with a commercial incentive. More shocking than these sorry revelations was the way in which the whole phantasmagoria was trumpeted as given fact, no small thanks to the media. Figures of authority and government institutions reacted blindly in the interests of the children. The crimes came to be known collectively as Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), bringing a whiff of credibility to stories that didn’t add up or make much sense. The result was a twentieth-century witch hunt, barely discernable from the persecutions of an arguably less enlightened period in time.

Some of the alleged murders of children were said to have been recorded on videotape. In his book, Children for the Devil (Methuen. 1991), Tim Tate refers to the Miami County Walk Babysitting Service case, an instance of supposed ritual abuse that came to trial in 1985. Statements made by children in the care of Frank and Ileana Fuster claimed that acts of degradation and abuse and the sacrifice of animals had been filmed. Halfway through the trial, Ileana Fuster changed her plea to guilty, affirmed that the children were telling the truth and accused her husband, Frank, of making videotapes. No tapes were found. ‘Had US law enforcement taken the trouble to study the manuscripts of Ileana Fuster’s evidence,’ Tate writes, ‘they would have found a possible explanation for the missing tapes — quite simply that a fellow-cult member removed them.’

‘In case after subsequent case,’ Tate ventures, ‘children would be disbelieved about allegations of ritual abuse because they refused to retract claims that the ceremonies had been videotaped when none where found.’ Putting aside Ileana Fuster’s plea-bargaining evidence, it seems not a little fortuitous that ‘in case after subsequent case’, cult members should be one step ahead of the law every step of the way. In Britain, an inquiry into the Orkney child abuse case saw how social workers had interpreted childrens’ descriptions of the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles as disclosures of ritual abuse. Allegations of ritual abuse in other British cities, notably Cleveland and Rochdale, were also revealed as unfounded, driven instead by overzealous social workers.

America in the 1980s fell under the spell of SRA following publication of an allegedly true book titled Michelle Remembers (Congdon and Lattes, 1980). Debunked in due course, its author was Dr Lawrence Pazder and its subject a patient by the name of Michelle Smith.[25] Dr Pazder became an authority on SRA and his perceived expertise was used on the popular investigative series 20/20 in an episode titled ‘The Devil Worshippers’ which aired in May 1985. “The problem is we’re getting the stories but we don’t have the victims,” said one sceptical police officer interviewed for the programme. Despite the lack of real victims, ‘satanism’ — thanks to sensationalist journalism, fundamental Christians, conspiracy theorists and television shows like this one — spread like wildfire.

The existence of the ‘Satanic snuff movie’ was proposed in Maury Terry’s book The Ultimate Evil (Doubleday, 1987), an examination of the crimes of David Berkowitz aka Son of Sam, who terrorized New York City with a string of gun murders in the mid seventies. Although Terry hinted at the manufacture of snuff films as a byproduct of the international conspiracy he had uncovered, he failed to come up with any substantial evidence. Eventually he retracted the proposal altogether and claimed the notion derived from confusion over Francis Ford Coppola’s feature film, The Cotton Club (1984), and the murder of Roy Radin. Notwithstanding, when Terry updated the book in the nineties he acquired a new witness and the snuff premise was revisited. Incarcerated bank robber Jesse Turner claimed to be associated with members of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a long-disbanded Scientology-inspired group that Terry tenuously linked to the Son of Sam murders. He informed Terry he had been approached by controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and asked to retrieve several snuff films that belonged to the Process but were in the possession of a drug dealer named Ronald Sisman. Turner stated he recruited two hitmen who summarily murdered Sisman and his partner in 1981 and took back the videos, one of which supposedly showed the killing of Stacy Moskowitz, the final Son of Sam victim. When police investigated Turner’s claims they came to nothing and the murder of Sisman remains unsolved.

Not one to shy away from controversy, popular American talk show host Geraldo Rivera amplified the spin and in 1988 flooded the airwaves with ‘Devil Worship — Exposing Satan’s Underground,’ one of The Gerlado Riviera Specials. Rivera opened the show by informing the American people of an estimated one million practising satanists carrying out child abduction and sacrificial murder.[26] “The odds are that this is happening in your town,” he warned. Unchallenged evidence-lacking statistics were provided by numerous speakers, including Ted Gunderson, private investigator, former FBI agent and dedicated proponent of the SRA myth.[27] Ironically the only guest speaking commonsense was Michael Aquino, disciple of Anton LaVey and founder of the Church of Set.[28] Ted Gunderson later appeared in Pact with the Devil, a 2003 documentary for the American cable station TLC.[29] “Gunderson claims he has undeniable proof to support his theory [of ritual Satanic sacrifice],” says the show narrator. He is said to have in his possession “a piece of evidence which was entrusted to him years ago”. Gunderson himself then explains that while “People say there’s no evidence of satanic human sacrifice — this is evidence that was given to me by an informant”. He enters a darkened room and securely locks the door behind him. On the floor is a small safe which he opens, its only content a brown envelope. Gunderson extracts a videocassette from the envelope, slips it into a VHS player and proceeds to view the footage. The ‘evidence’ actually comprises material from two widely available films in the Faces of Death series: the Immortality Cult cannibalism sequence from volume one, spliced together with the FBI raid on a Satanic cult from volume four.[30] Both are fake sequences in any case. But Dr Dawn Perlmutter also endorses the video’s content, stating it is “very consistent with Satanic ritual homicide. The fact that he [the film’s ‘victim’] was attacked and stabbed and eviscerated is unfortunately standard techniques in ritual homicide”. Perlmutter claims to be an expert on ritual murder and helps train law enforcement agencies how to identify satanic crimes.[31]

On May 13, 1994, a documentary titled Conspiracy of Silence, made by Yorkshire Television and commissioned by Discovery Channel, was scheduled to air. At the last moment the programme was withdrawn and all copies supposedly destroyed — the rights purchased by person(s) unknown.[32] The documentary reported the investigation of financial malpractice at the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, a Nebraska financial institution. The probe led to the arrest of Lawrence King, a former Franklin general manager and one-time leader of the National Black Republican Council. King was charged and found guilty of multimillion dollar fraud and sentenced to a fifteen-year prison term. The investigation into King, however, opened up a secondary enquiry into an alleged child prostitution ring involving influential business men and high-level politicians.

A charitable organization founded in 1917 to support disadvantaged children, Boy’s Town held its accounts with the Franklin Credit Union. Here King made ties with the establishment and regularly employed youngsters from the institution. One boy engaged by King was Paul Bonacci, whose illicit duties allegedly involved recruiting other boys into a sex ring controlled by King. These claims were scrutinized by the Nebraskan State Government in November 1988 and a professional investigator Gary Caradori. Caradori tracked down Bonacci and two other alleged victims, Alisha Owen and Troy Boner. All testified under oath in videotaped interviews and named high ranking people who had sexually abused them. Alisha Owen’s claims were not believed in court and she was sentenced to nine- to twenty-seven years for perjury after refusing to recant her evidence. Boner retracted his claims for fear of a similar conviction. On July 11, 1990, Caradori died along with his son when his light aircraft disintegrated in flight. According to photographer Russel Nelson, an employee of Lawrence King, many vital documents and incriminating photographs connected to the Franklin case had been on board the plane. The seemingly suspicious death of Caradori and the unusually severe sentence given to Owen piqued Troy Boner’s conscience and he spoke openly on the Yorkshire Television documentary. Boner states,

I got those scars on my arm one night at a party where Larry King wanted to see how strong a man we were… he’d have us push our arms together and light cigarettes and as soon as he’d got them burning he’d drop them down between your arms and, you know, like let it burn. He’d make us stand there naked and touch each other by holding our arms together… it’s on film someplace…[33]

In February 2003, Troy Boner entered Abilene Medical Regional Center allegedly waving a book around and screaming, “They’re after me because of this book.” Boner was taken into care, sedated and the next day he was found dead in his private room.

The book Boner was said to be waving around was John W. Decamp’s The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism and Murder in Nebraska (AWT Inc., 1992).[34] In it Paul Bonacci relates in graphic detail a snuff movie in which he participated. In July 1984,[35] Bonacci and another boy, ‘Nicholas,’ of around twelve years of age, were driven to a wooded area near Sacramento. In the secluded spot there was a cage that contained a naked boy. Describing in detail how he and Nicholas were forced at gunpoint to rape the boy for around thirty minutes, all the while being filmed, Bonacci then recalls the arrival of a well-endowed man. The man also sodomizes the boy before blowing his brains out with a gun. Says Bonacci (sic throughout):

The boys blood was all over me and I started yelling and crying. The men grabbed Nicholas and I and forced us to lie down. They put the boy on top of Nicholas who was crying and they were putting Nicholas hands on the boys ass. They put the boy on top of me and did the same thing. They then forced me to [fuck] the dead boy up his ass and also Nicholas they put a gun to our heads to make us do it. His blood was all over us. They made us kiss the boys lips and to eat him out. Then they made me do something I don’t want to even write so I won’t. After that the men grabbed Nicholas and drug him off screaming they put me up against a tree and put a gun to my head but fired into the air. I heard another shot from somewhere. I then saw the man who killed the boy drag him like a toy. Everything including when the men put the boy in a trunk was filmed.[36]

After the ordeal Bonacci and Nicholas are cleaned up and taken to a house. Playing in a room inhabited by several men is the film made earlier.

As the men watched they passed Nicholas and I around as if we were toys and sexually abused us. They made Nicholas and I screw each other and one of the men put the dead boy’s penis in mine and Nicholas’ mouth. I didn’t want to write this because the man forced me to bite the boys’ penis and balls off. It was gross and I saw the film where it happened and started freaking out remembering what they made us do afterwards to the boy. They showed us doing everything to the boy. I was there for about five days attending parties but only recall cutting my wrist which is why I stayed two days in a hospital under a name I can’t recall.

Even more remarkable in an already bizarre story is that Bonacci named the director of the snuff film as ‘Hunter Thompson’, whom they had picked up in Las Vegas — ‘the same name as a well-known sleaze-culture figure’, notes DeCamp, clearly referring to the gonzo journalist and author best known for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.[37] What is also extraordinary is that Bonacci makes no reference to this snuff movie in his interviews for Conspiracy of Silence. It is possible that such claims may have been made and edited out. But more damning, no reference is made to it in court, when Bonacci is giving evidence for a claim for damages against Larry King.

To assess the psychological and physical trauma that Bonacci had suffered, Judge Warren Urbon requested he describe some instances of his abuse. Bonacci testified that two or three guys, King included, had kicked and badly beaten him, broken his fingers and burned him with hot instruments. They had, Bonacci continued, placed “objects inside of me… almost like what I call a cattle prod, or something…; he [King] had me hung out of the airplane with a rope by my ankles.”[38] There is no mention of witnessing a murder, nor being forced at gunpoint to bite off the genitals of a child while King supposedly observed laughing. Much is made of the $1 million lawsuit awarded to Bonacci following the court case, although it should be noted that neither King nor any representative of King was present at the hearing. Therefore, the evidence, outrageous and sometimes implausible, went unchallenged and the case by default went against King.

In an initial 1990 hearing, the child prostitution ring was established to be a ‘carefully crafted hoax’, although the source of the hoax was never verified. It has been noted, however, that many advocates and peddlers of the paedophile/Satanic/snuff conspiracy are supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, a US political extremist, one time presidential candidate and avid patriot.[39] On December 16, 1988, Larouche was convicted of mail fraud and tax evasion in what his faction claimed to be politically motivated concocted charges. It may be mere coincidence that the first report linking child abuse to Larry King and subsequently to White House officials appeared only two days later, in the New York Times (December 18, 1988), under the heading ‘A Lurid, Mysterious Scandal Begins Taking Shape in Omaha’.

In 1990, Reverend James Bevel moved to Omaha to lead the Citizens Fact-Finding Commission to Investigate Human Rights Violations of Children in Nebraska. The commission was set up by Larouchian think-tank the Schiller Institute.[40] These same sex abuse and satanic cult allegations are also covered in the disparaging George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (Executive Intelligence Review, 1992). Here, authors Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin,[41] reveal that ‘Bush also had a special interest in the Atlanta murders of black children, which were reaching their peak during the first months of 1981… These murders were clearly connected to satanic cults operating in the Atlanta area… Naturally an alumnus of Skull and Bones knew all about satanism’. And of Lawrence King, ‘he ran a national child prostitution ring that serviced the political and business elite of both Republican and Democratic parties.’ In what is likely a reference to the snuff movie claims made by Bonacci to Gary Caradori, the authors add that ‘Child victims of King’s operations charged him with participation in at least one satanic ritual murder of a child several years ago’.

The Franklin case has been resurrected recently, without the satanic aspect, in a book by Nick Bryant called The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal (TrineDay, 2008). It comes from a publisher specializing in conspiracy theory, and includes excerpts from Tarperly and Chaitkin’s aforementioned unauthorized biography of George Bush.

Cathy O’Brien and Mark Philips’ riotously outré Trance Formation of America (Reality Marketing, 1995) follows a similar theme. Claiming to be a victim of a CIA mind control programme since childhood, O’Brien reels off a checklist of famous names, both in politics and music, and indicts them as paedophile Satanists. ‘I was supposed to be burned alive in a snuff pornography film,’ she bemoans, while citing Ronald Reagan as the individual calling for her demise on film. O’Brien’s outlandish claims and the superhuman recall of conversations she had as a child, which she transcribes verbatim in the book, have pretty much established the affair as a ruse.

O’Brien was likely motivated by The Franklin Cover-Up and Michelle Remembers. Books which, by now, are well on their way to establishing a whole new oeuvre. Not unlike LaRouche, O’Brien considers herself a patriot. And not unlike Bonacci, she claims to be a victim of Project Monarch — an alleged sub-programme of the CIA’s top secret Project MKULTRA, which operated from 1953 to 1973. Bonacci referenced Project Monarch in a video interview with Ted Gunderson in February 1993. Monarch resurfaced in an article penned by Anton Chaitkin of the LaRouche movement. Titled ‘Franklin Case Witnesses Implicate FBI and US Elites in Child-Torture and Murder,’ the article saw print in the LaRouche newspaper The New Federalist (December 13, 1993), and was referenced again by Chaitkin for an article in the later edition of Decamp’s book The Franklin Cover-Up. (It is absent from the first edition of the book.)

Project Monarch is also featured in an article by Fritz Springmeier. ‘Use Of Monarch Mind Control Methodology For Programming Manchurian Candidates For Social Violence In US Society’ was originally published in A Newsletter from a Christian Ministry, also December 1993. Here, Springmeier posits, ‘Bear in mind that “snuff” films and other gross things are being made daily and Monarch slaves can help with this type stuff.’ The article reached a new audience when edited and reprinted in Cult Rapture (Feral House, 1995), a book collecting unconventional ideas. Working under a new title, ‘Project Monarch: How the US Creates Slaves for Satan,’ Springmeier elucidates,

The Monarch Slave’s primary duty is to perpetuate the secrecy surrounding the Illuminati’s satanic activities. Due to his or her programming, the Monarch slave lacks even the instinct of self-preservation or human empathy. They are thus ideal candidates to carry out such things as snuff films and other inhuman acts.

Springmeier describes himself as a Christian Patriot. He is also a suspected member of Army of God, the anti-abortion terrorist organization, and, in 2003, was sentenced to nine years in prison for his involvement in an armed bank robbery. (He was released in March 2011.) In his book Bloodlines of the Illuminati (Ambassador House, 1999), Springmeier broadens his line of inquiry into the ancient secret society that threatens the world. He writes this of Walt Disney: ‘A victim remembers that he was sadistic and enjoyed snuff porn films… Behind Disney’s good front lies hard porn, snuff films, white slavery, Illuminati mind control, and the seduction of several generations into witchcraft.’

Thus we see a new decade with a new spin on snuff. Circulating among rich pornophiles in the seventies and eighties, in the nineties snuff is a powerplay for politics and the government. Thus we turn briefly to a letter that appeared in the pages of Film Threat Video Guide. It’s not unfair to say that some of the letters in the LA based film magazine were incendiary and muck-raking, possibly altogether bogus. The legitimacy of this particular piece of correspondence — penned by ‘Smarty’ — is similarly open to question. The letter appears in Film Threat no 7, an issue dated 1993, the tail end of the satanic panic. It makes passing reference to the CIA, itself basis enough for a conspiracy theory. This is what Smarty writes:

For the other reader who asked if snuff films are real. Gunther Ruethbach(er) (I’m not sure of the spelling) — a CIA spooks in prison on trumped-up charges — has reported that the producers of kiddie porn routinely kill their captives on video when they are too old to pass for children and that the government seeks out these producers through various means and kills them with extreme prejudice in order to keep the public ignorant of just how widespread this industry is. Needless to say, if these videos do exist, they are illegal to own and probably have very bad production values.

Much as Cult Rapture would provide a platform for Fritz Springmeier, here a comparatively mainstream publication divests snuff of its more common attributes. The onus falls less on pornographers and pornography, and more on supposed ties with powerful and influential people. It becomes political and emotional propaganda, with outlandish accusations designed to cause maximum damage: It is difficult to imagine a more impressive arsenal than kiddie porn, murder and snuff. Targetted organizations and individuals neglect to counter such claims. For the most part, how? and why bother? What would be the point and who would benefit?

SATANIC PANIC REDUX

Forefront in stimulating the threat of a satanic underground was Dr Corydon Hammond. Psychologist and President of the International Society for Neurofeedback with over 175 published works, Hammond added a twist and augmented the Satanic peril with a dash of Nazism. He revealed that at the end of WWII the US government recruited a group of Nazi Satanists who had developed mind control techniques, plus a teenage Jewish turncoat who aided them in their experiments in the death camps. His name was Greenbaum. He changed his name to Green and in time acquired an MD degree, becoming a physician and applying himself to the self-styled art of programming the minds of thousands of children.[42] During a lecture at the Fourth Annual Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple Personality in 1992, Hammond set about disseminating his ideas. He made clear from the outset that those who don’t believe him are akin to Holocaust deniers, or implied that they are probably active members of the very Satanic cult they refute. A menacing and familiar tactic used to thwart debate and silence sceptics.

According to Hammond, this Satanic group infiltrated the CIA and other American establishments. It was his aim to seek out methods to de-programme alleged victims. During the course of his unconventional therapy sessions, Hammond learned that the Greek alphabet held coded references, specifically

Betas appear to be sexual programs. For example, how to perform oral sex in a certain way, how to perform sex in rituals, having to do with producing child pornography, directing child pornography, prostitution. Deltas are killers trained in how to kill in ceremonies.

The list continues. Thetas are programmed psychic killers, while stablemate Zetas maintain “the production of snuff films”. As for the intention of this alleged Satanic network, Hammond paints a pretty bleak picture. “My best guess is that the purpose of it is that they want an army of Manchurian Candidates,” he explained, “tens of thousands of mental robots who will do prostitution, do child pornography, smuggle drugs, engage in international arms smuggling, do snuff films, all sorts of very lucrative things and do their bidding and eventually the megalomaniacs at the top believe they’ll create a Satanic Order that will rule the world.”

Evidence of the heinous network and its activities are summarily volunteered.

Remember the Process Church? Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, was killed by the Manson Family who were associated with the Process Church? A lot of prominent people in Hollywood were associated and then they went underground, the books say, in about seventy-eight and vanished? Well, they’re alive and well in southern Utah. We have a thick file in the Utah Department of Public Safety documenting that they moved to southern Utah, north of Monument Valley, bought a movie ranch in the desert, renovated it, expanded it, built a bunch of buildings there, carefully monitored so that very few people go out of there and no one can get in and changed their name.

It’s all suitably vague and fathomless. If nothing else, there is some comfort in that Hammond’s hypothesis has a certain symmetry to it, leading us back once again to rumours of Charles Manson and his ranch in the desert.

Hammond told the audience that his outspokenness on the subject made him fear for his life. He explained that he “as well as a few others that I’ve shared it with, were hedging out of concern and out of personal threats and out of death threats. I finally decided to hell with them. If they’re going to kill me, they’re going to kill me”. Nothing came of the illusory threat, as nothing came of his predicted incursion of Manchurian robot snuff film makers. Hammond still lives and still practices therapy and has distanced himself from the Greenbaum speech. Perhaps the most alarming thing about the lecture, moreso than Hammond or the subject itself, is the unquestioning support from some members of the audience. At one point, a voice calls out, “Does anyone want to join us for a standing ovation for this material? It’s wonderful.”[43]

In 1992, the BBC news programme Panorama devoted one episode to a damning investigation of the Satanic panic.[44] The episode, ‘In the Name of Satan?’, revealed that individuals and organizations had built a multimillion dollar industry selling the Satanic scare. Many books and videos had been produced to warn the public of the dangers, and provide fantastical, prurient accounts of ritual abuse. One FBI agent interviewed for the programme contested allegations that some 50,000 human sacrifices were taking place each year in the US. “It’s not as easy as these people think to get rid of a human body. No matter how much the average person cleans it up, there are gonna be traces left behind. In these cases it’s not only a matter of no bodies but no evidence of these murders taking place.” The programme also featured extracts from Lauren Stratford’s bestselling book, Satan’s Underground (Harvest House Publishers, 1988). In it, the author alleges that by the time she was eight-years-old, she had been sexually abused, forced to engage in bestiality and appeared in child pornography. On leaving home, she became involved with Satanists and bore three children. Two of the children, she says, were killed in snuff films. A third, Joey, was murdered in a Satanic ritual. However, no one can corroborate that she was ever pregnant. The Panorama presenter[45] questions Lauren Stratford:

PANORAMA: It’s been impossible to find anybody who can verify that you were pregnant on any of the three occasions that you describe.

LAUREN STRATFORD: Yes, I’ll agree with that. I mean, I don’t know. I just have to take whatever…

PANORAMA: So, were you telling the truth about that incident?

STRATFORD: Yes, I was.

PANORAMA: Yet, you’re not able to substantiate the fact that you were pregnant three times.

STRATFORD: The first two times, I can’t really tell you a lot about yet…

PANORAMA: Do you understand the problem that people would have with this?

STRATFORD: Oh, of course! If I were in your shoes right now, I would say, ‘Gosh. That sure sounds silly to me. I don’t think I believe it.’

PANORAMA: I put it to you that you’re not telling the truth.

STRATFORD: Well, I don’t know what to say to you.

PANORAMA: You could admit you weren’t.

STRATFORD: That wouldn’t be the truth.

PANORAMA: But as yet, there’s no evidence.

STRATFORD: There isn’t any evidence for a lot of these cases.

PANORAMA: But your sister has said that she lived with you throughout that period, and doesn’t recall anything like what you’ve described.

STRATFORD: That may be true and that may not be true.

Satan’s Underground sold an estimated 130,000 copies. When Stratford’s story was sufficiently proven to be fabricated the publisher withdrew the title in 1990. Stratford then moved on and perpetrated another hoax by changing her name to Laura Grabowski and claiming to be a Holocaust survivor and one-time inmate of Auschwitz.

Christian Fundamentalist Andrew Boyd imported the formulaic brand of Satanic abuse into the United Kingdom. His book, Blasphemous Rumours (Fount, 1991), chronicled an apparent spread of ritual murder and Black Mass Tupperware parties throughout British suburbia. Using ‘victims’ cloaked behind pseudonyms, Boyd took rumour and conjecture to a new level to further his own cause. Here’s one excerpt.

She [‘Janet’] says snuff videos would be screened in front of the children while they played at the farm in Cumbria… she believes the snuff videos were recordings of actual killings: “People being tied round trees and being whipped, a bit cut off here and a bit cut off there. You know it’s true, because it’s impossible to make it twitch, an arm, as though it hadn’t been done. I’ve seen them go in with ordinary hacksaws and just chop an arm off.”

The videos had a home-made look to them: “You could tell, because on the telly you see it as clear as day, but on these you’ve got the lines and a shudder and a bit of movement that you wouldn’t get off a professional.”

Boyd goes on to say how Janet ‘described one occult shop in the north of England where snuff movies were available’, the tapes selling for between £2,000 and £3,000.

More alarming was the broadcast of a documentary presented by Boyd on February 19, 1992, the day before publication of his book. Aired as part of Channel 4’s Dispatches series, Boyd’s ‘Beyond Belief’ also featured an alleged ‘survivor,’ shown only in silhouette under the false name ‘Jennifer’. Said Boyd, ‘Jennifer claims that she was made to take part in the sacrifice of children, including one of her own.’ Following a lengthy account of the killing of her child, Boyd claims her statement to be actual evidence of Satanic abuse. The programme then played its trump card, screening — so it claimed — a discovered video depicting an actual Satanic ritual. The blurry tape proved to be excerpts from First Transmission, a performance art and kink film made by TOPY a decade earlier.[46] Jennifer claimed she was part of the Satanic group responsible for the video, insisting she recognized the room in which the ritual was occurring. Asked to describe at one point what was happening onscreen, courtesy of a freeze-frame, she said a foetus was being aborted. A spokesman for TOPY told the Independent on Sunday that the woman in the film wasn’t pregnant, just fat, and an item described as obstetric grips were, in fact, coal tongs.

Boyd claimed his book was the culmination of two years research, yet it took another newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, less than two weeks to discover the true identity of Jennifer. Her real name is Louise Errington. She told reporters that in 1990 she had spent some months in a Christian healing and deliverance centre. “They told me I was possessed by demons… They prayed over me in tongues and taught me to face my own guilt.” It transpired that the notion of child sacrifice arose from a vision seen by one of the centre’s lay preachers; nothing to do with TOPY at all.

In hindsight Dispatches seems very much part of a broader, ongoing case against Genesis P-Orridge, founder of TOPY, regarded by authority figures as something of an undesirable, conspiring to undermine family values. P-Orridge has described TOPY as ‘built almost as an anti-cult’. But in light of the Boyd documentary he admits to having ‘underestimated the outrage that inclusion of sexuality’ would arise from such an exercise.[47] A sensationalist full-page article in the People newspaper[48] certainly didn’t help matters. ‘This vile man corrupts kids’ ran the headline, while the article went on to make specific reference to First Transmission.[49]

Repercussions from the Dispatches programme meant that many members abandoned TOPY, a group whose aim was the promotion of ideas, individuality and spiritual truth through various means and media, including demystified magick. A few days before the programme aired, P-Orridge had his home invaded by Scotland Yard detectives. They took away art, archive materials and personal artefacts. At the time of the raid the P-Orridge family were out of the country and subsequently took self-imposed exile in America, fearing for many years arrest and persecution should they return to Britain.[50]

The SRA scare railroaded manpower and resources into ephemeral matters more suited to an era of terrifyingly naïve superstition. Police were not altogether convinced by the tasks expected of them. High ranking officers of at least one British police force sought expert advice from within the occult community, and as a consequence greater losses were curtailed on the Satanic scare frontline.[51]

In April 1994, the British government acknowledged that Satanic abuse does not exist. Following a three-year investigation, commissioned shortly after high profile cases in Orkney and Rochdale (met at a cost of £12 million by the tax payer), it was determined that of eighty-four cases of alleged Satanic abuse, no evidence was found to corroborate the claims. In conclusion, the research showed that children were often railroaded in interviews and their statements misquoted, misunderstood, or simply contaminated by the media. As for spreading the panic in the first place, cited at the top of the list were the Evangelical Christian movement and professional ‘specialists’.[52] Their influence is powerful and their claims and qualifications rarely put into question, as evidenced by the fact that SRA remains very much a threat to this day. Although shunned by most mainstream professionals, a recent survey found that one in six clinical psychologists and hypnotherapists in the UK believed that recovered memories in patients are usually or always accurate.[53] Not that many people would be comfortable arguing to the contrary with people like Linda Blood around. Author of The New Satanists, Blood says there is good reason why a person would want to denounce the existence of satanic and ritual abuse: ‘there are those who harbour a secret fondness for child pornography and are afraid that more vigorous prosecution of paedophiles will restrict their access to this guilty pleasure. Such adults prefer to blame the victims and their defenders.’ Militant feminist Gloria Steinem, who once railed against snuff films, takes much the same stance these days in support of SRA.

One person to have crossed paths with Steinem is psychologist Richard Noll, speaking out against SRA and the role of American psychiatry in its dissemination. Some of his peers, Noll believes, had unwittingly fed the panic in pursuit of their own pet theories (such as multiple personality disorder), while the profession as a whole had veered toward the province of the supernatural in its irrational assessment of the situation. Noll’s observations are not welcome. Licensed mental health professionals at a 1990 conference considered him ‘a witch or a member of a Satanic cult who was there to spread disinformation’.[54] Also in attendance was Steinem, who suggested literature to Noll that might help him change his mind. More recently, an article of his for Psychiatric Times caused ripples enough to be pulled from publication amid controversy. The article, ‘When Psychiatry Battled the Devil,’ considered the history of SRA from Noll’s personal standpoint within American psychiatry. The whole deal, lamented Noll, has been swept under the carpet as an embarrassment to the profession and its mistakes therefore are destined to go unheeded.[55]

HAND OF DEATH

More transparent than SRA were the increasingly grand assertions attributed to an individual known as Kenneth ‘Mad Dog’ MacKenna. Incarcerated in Florida State Prison, serving a mandatory 150-year sentence, MacKenna is a self-confirmed ‘Fourth Prince of the Hand of Death’, a rumoured Satanic cult supposedly involved in drugs, human sacrifices and snuff movie production on a Mexican ranch. He is also a sex industry executive, racketeer, drug trafficker and white slave trader — or rather he is according to Gerard John Schaefer. Convicted serial killer G J Schaefer was already incarcerated in Florida State Prison when Killer Fiction, a collection of his stories and fantasies appeared in print. The book, first published in June 1989, was branded ‘pornographic filth’ by Schaefer’s prison guards.[56] Schaefer continued to write. Shortly before his death in 1995, stabbed by a fellow inmate, he had turned his hand to nonfiction and conducted interviews with fellow inmates. A run of this work appeared in the pages of the Australian film zine, Fatal Visions, as did his interviews with Kenneth ‘Mad Dog’ MacKenna. It is telling that Schaefer’s supposed nonfiction reads every bit like his fiction. He brings a lip smacking relish to descriptions of the nauseating and extreme, and elements have the habit of recurring in different articles. For instance, notorious figures such as Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling are invariably mentioned at the beginning of each interview — presumably in an attempt to establish a factual substructure for the rest of the piece.

Here ‘Mad Dog’ MacKenna talks about his involvement in “Kiddie Snuff’”:

I don’t approve of people who victimize children. I distributed kiddie snuff strictly for the money. The money was great. I’d say that I pulled down a hundred grand each distributing ‘Snake Feast’ and ‘Gator Bait Ten’.[57] Those were the last twoggies that I handled.

The films are said to have come out of South America, “Amazonia somewhere.”

I don’t see why anyone would shell out big bucks to watch a twenty-foot anaconda snake eat a ten-year-old girl. That’s sick. Sicker yet is seeing ten young girls ripped apart by huge starving alligators.

According to Schaefer, MacKenna had never before allowed a media interview; only because he regarded Schaefer’s Killer Fiction so highly did he agree to this one.

The interview with Mad Dog quoted here appeared in Fatal Visions issue fourteen. Two issues later another Schaefer interview appeared, this one with ‘Betsy Blood’, bondage model, said to have been conducted by mail over a several-month period. She too liked Killer Fiction. Schaefer claims to have made contact after being intrigued by an ad in the back of Screw that read, ‘Panty Slave Wanted’. He wrote off. Betsy wrote back.

GJS: Have you ever been involved in snuff films? What can you tell us about that rather shady business?

BB: I stay away from things that are against the law. I do good replica snuff stills. I did purchase a private collection of quality snuff films in 1989 but sold them earlier this year. I had a full reel of ‘Paris Terror’. The beheading was by guillotine and simply the best I’ve seen. I was drawn to it by the blood. There were thirteen women beheaded. Blood everywhere. A basket of severed heads, nude corpses in a pile. It was terrible… but fascinating. I had ‘Snake Feast’. In that one girls are squeezed and eaten by snakes. That was interesting. The jaw of the giant snake unhinges somehow and the snake swallows the girls whole. ‘Punar’ was naked women being shot by firing squads. I think it may have gotten made in Chile or Eastern Europe… and ‘Gator Bait Ten’ was ten women thrown into a crocodile pit. That was a bloody one.

When asked where readers might be able to obtain “weird films”, Betsy provides several names. (Which is awfully trusting of Betsy for a postal acquaintance, and awfully brave; by her own admission, “these guys are major players in things illegal and nasty.”) One of the names is familiar from the MacKenna interview. Another is MacKenna himself. Betsy accuses Mad Dog of being a monster, a no good rotter. She also says he is responsible for the ‘Bagman’ series. This is a set of sixteen film loops, each loop featuring a girl aged one to sixteen, respectively, placed in bondage gear and suffocated with a plastic bag over her head. Betsy recalls having seen No.6 and No.14 and being thoroughly disgusted. She also knows of the Hand of Death but doesn’t want to talk about it. If nothing else, Schaefer’s interviews make for a blistering read. William Hierens, aka the Lipstick Killer, a genuine killer, is quoted as having said that, through his stories, Schaefer was trying to be a modern-day Brother Grimm.[58]

But what of Kenneth ‘Mad Dog’ MacKenna? Research reveals a felon incarcerated in Florida by the name of Kenneth McKenna, a sexual offender who has been serving time since the late eighties. According to David Nolte, self-professed death row correspondent and true crime groupie, MacKenna and McKenna are one and the same. Or, more importantly, McKenna was the springboard for another one of Schaefer’s fantasies, in which McKenna, inglorious true-life child abductor, became ‘Mad Dog’ MacKenna, compelling hitman and satanist snuff film dealer. Nolte wrote for Fatal Visions and corresponded with both Schaefer and, to a lesser extent, McKenna. This is what Nolte told the authors: “McKenna is a real person. I had some contact with him back in the day… he even sent me a letter to let me know that Schaefer had been murdered. That is the same McKenna in the link you sent me. I have a couple of letters here from McKenna including the one notifying me of Gerard’s death. Gerard was one of my favourite serial killer penpals ever… I miss him. I mean, he immortalized me in one of his short stories, as the ridiculously well-endowed morgue worker. No higher praise could one ask for.”[59]

Nolte had better insight into Schaefer’s interview technique than most people, having worked with him on an earlier piece for Fatal Visions. ‘What’s Inside a Ghoul?’ appeared in issue thirteen and was said to be an interview with a convicted necrophile. Nolte sent questions to Schaefer, and Schaefer supposedly relayed these to ‘Bernie,’ the necrophile in question, while supplying graphic theories of his own on the nature and menace of sex ghoulism. Nolte says that Schaefer “was prone to indulging in his own fantasies in his literature — the interview he did for me with ‘Bernie the necrophile’ is a good example of this”.[60] Nolte has little doubt that the aforementioned bondage model Betsy Blood, who spills the beans on Mad Dog and his ‘Bagman’ enterprise, was another Schaefer creation.

The serial killer component of Fatal Visions would have been very thin without David Nolte, recalls editor-publisher Michael Helms. “The one fact I remember about the Mad Dog piece,” Helms told the authors, “was that it was the only article that Fatal Visions ever actually paid for. I vaguely recall sending two US $20 notes as token payment to Media Queen, who, by the early nineties, had positioned herself into being some sort of agent for a select pack of serial killers. That gained us serious notoriety that never panned out into major media interest (but then again the rantings of someone expressing delight in killing another human being, especially if they were writing from their jail cell, is something that is unlikely to be acceptable anywhere at anytime). But not long after publication, when copies had been sent to Schaefer, he responded by mentioning that he had a jail buddy who had some tales to tell that he thought we might be interested in.”

Helms continues: “Schaefer was right. When I finally received Mad Dog’s story I was blown away by his discussion of snuff films, coming as they were from the perspective of an alleged producer of such material. Frankly, I’d never read anything like it before and haven’t since. I didn’t really care that this might’ve just been the unsubstantiated delusions of a long term inmate, but they did have a certain sort of credibility swirling around them that would at least stimulate some discussion. In some ways the publication of the Mad Dog piece stigmatized Fatal Visions and, as late as last year, could still turn a rowdy workplace into a mausoleum of hushed whispers (‘that’s the serial killer guy ’).”[61]

MISBEGOTTEN SONS

Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas claimed on several occasions that he, not unlike ‘Mad Dog’ MacKenna, was a member of the Hand of Death. Allegedly, Lucas was introduced to this group sometime between 1978 and May 1981, by his partner in crime Ottis Toole. Lucas had a penchant for confessing to most anything (even delivering poison to the Peoples Temple in Guyana), and told police that some of his crimes were committed under the command of the cult. In September 1984, during a recorded interview for a radio programme, Lucas told evangelist Bob Larsen that he had killed 360 people. However, he phoned Larsen prior to the broadcast of the tape and retracted this statement, convinced the Hand of Death — which no one in law enforcement has been able to prove exists — would kill him otherwise. In an interview for Fatal Visions (issue twelve), Ottis Toole (speaking with Gerard Schaefer) said of the cult: “The rituals are secret for members only but I can tell you we did throat cutting, blood drinking and hearts were taken from the bodies of virgins… We’d eat them. The livers too. The blood was drank from a big cup.”

Though officially never credited, the story of secret cults, satanism, and claims of human sacrifice have led some reporters to suggest that Lucas and Toole were also involved in making snuff films.

On Monday, July 27, 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh was kidnapped from a shopping centre in Florida. Two weeks later his severed head was retrieved from a canal in Vero Beach. Due to the nature of the mutilation, the crime was categorised by some as a ‘Satanic sacrifice’. In 1983, Ottis Toole confessed to the murder. That same year, Adam, a TV movie, chronicled the aftermath of the case, notably that of Walsh’s parents and their plight to open the FBI national crime computer for the benefit of the parents of other missing children. The public outrage over the Walsh murder resulted in the establishment of the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center. The boy’s father, John Walsh, became the host of the television programme America’s Most Wanted.

In his book Enslaved (Bantam Press, 1990), Gordon Thomas describes a conference where Susan Davidson, Executive Director of the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, spoke about snuff movies. Her clear goal is to shock the patrons into donating money to Center funds, and she is quoted as having said, “Maybe their concern will add an extra zero to their cheque if I tell them about the snuffs.” Writes Thomas, ‘She [Davidson] explained how the term had been coined in 1976 by a New York Times writer to try and describe reports of murder occurring during sexual activities during which the victims were filmed.’ Davidson continues her address. “At first it was claimed the movies were produced in Argentina,” she says, before informing the audience that snuff films are now being made in California, while the exact location of their manufacture is a secret place known only as the ‘Ranch’ out in the desert. Without a doubt, Davidson is regurgitating the familiar polemic surrounding Allan Shackleton’s movie Snuff and rumours pertaining to Charles Manson, whose commune was based at one point at the Spahn Movie Ranch in Los Angeles, California.

Everything Davidson says is familiar, predictable and clichéd. But one can appreciate how shocking it might sound to a naïve audience of middle-class, middle-aged Americans. Davidson goes on to describe a film shot in Bangkok in which a twelve-yearold girl is raped and murdered. She doesn’t indicate whether she has actually viewed the film or is basing her claim on uncorroborated hearsay. She says that the film was mass produced in Holland, then distributed internationally. Demand for snuff movies is particularly great in California, Davidson believes.

Zodiac (Berkley,1987) is a best-selling book about the elusive serial killer who stalked San Francisco and the Bay Area in the seventies. Author Robert Graysmith, who was a staff member at the San Francisco Chronicle during the crime spree, writes that on August 9, 1978, he received an anonymous telephone call. “I can tell you who the Zodiac is,” the voice on the line said. “He’s so full of movies he has a record of his activities on film.” The tip-off sends Graysmith chasing the ‘best suspect in the case’, a film buff. In several of his taunting letters to police and the press, the Zodiac killer made references to movies, specifically The Exorcist, Badlands and The Most Dangerous Game. It now seemed plausible that the killer’s sign-off mark — a circle with a cross through it — thought by many to represent a rifle sight — was in fact the projectionist symbol found at the beginning of film reels.[62]

Upon further investigation, Graysmith is told of incriminating evidence hidden in a film canister labelled ‘Do Not Open, Nitrate Film, Danger’. Primed to explode if tampered with, the canister is alleged to contain sets of car keys, bloodied shreds of clothing, and film of one of the murders. Graysmith goes after the canister, but gets the run-around. He discovers that the suspect has off-loaded it to a friend for safe-keeping. By the time Graysmith locates this friend (who, incidentally, acts very suspiciously), it has been returned back to the initial suspect. By the time Graysmith eventually locates the suspect, he no longer considers him to be the Zodiac, and the mysterious, roving, booby-trapped can of film — the subject of witness reports and so much speculation — is not mentioned again. Graysmith’s expanded follow-up book some years later, Zodiac Unmasked (Berkley, 2002), plays out a little differently. Without much ado the film canister suspect is not their man.

In August 1992, True Detective magazine ran a feature which claimed to reveal the possible identity of another elusive serial slayer: Washington’s Green River Killer. In a piece entitled ‘After Ten Years — Is The Mystery Solved? Was The Snuff Movie Maker The Green River Killer?’ author Barry Benedict links a forty-five-year-old ‘narcotics manufacturer and “snuff” pornographer’ by the name of Richard Allen Sanders with the notorious murder case. Benedict states that in the summer months of 1988, an unnamed prostitute and drug addict told detectives she had information about the man killing all those prostitutes. She said that her supplier, Richard Sanders, had played for her a video — not one of his usual sex films, but a snuff film. The tape, she said, showed two children being killed on camera. “What do you think?” Sanders is supposed to have asked, boasting he had made the film himself. “There is lots of money in this stuff.”

The woman said that Sanders had other snuff tapes in his collection, and that she recognized some of the victims as street girls who worked El Cajon Boulevard.

In January 1989, police put Sanders under surveillance. He was arrested soon after for ramming his Corvette into a cop car tailing him. A slip in his wallet led police to a storage locker in El Cajon, from which they removed x-rated tapes and photographs, drug paraphernalia, weapons and sex toys. Meanwhile, Sanders raised the $14,000 bail and disappeared. He was found on March 10, 1989, shot dead by an acquaintance to whom he owed money.

No snuff films had been found among those items removed from the locker in El Cajon. Of the ‘snuff pornographer’ himself, Barry Benedict concludes in his piece: ‘Sanders had plenty of time after bailing out of jail to dispose of the incriminating material, assuming it ever existed.’[63]

Working on Trail of Blood (1995), a film adaptation of the Green River Killer, director Ari Roussimoff told the authors of this book, “The snuff movie angle is something I have never ever heard before in regards to the Green River Killer, and I am certainly very familiar with the case.” [64]

Last but by no means least, The Misbegotten Son (Delacorte Press, 1993) is author Jack Olsen’s definitive account of multiple murderer and self-confessed cannibal Arthur Shawcross, aka the Genesee River Killer. After his parole for the assault and murder of two children in the early seventies, Shawcross quickly went on to kill again and was eventually tried and found guilty in 1990 for the murder of eleven prostitutes in Rochester, New York (the actual figure was estimated to be higher). At one point in his book, Olsen tells of the search of a suspect’s vehicle, which reveals ‘pornie videos and a snuff film’. There is no further elaboration.[65]

ENOUGH ROPE

In Great Britain on April 25, 1986, forty-nine-year-old unemployed bachelor Geoffrey Jones was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of seventeen-year-old Marion Terry. An amateur filmmaker, Jones scripted, produced and then screened his endeavours to friends at his Birmingham home, occasionally hiring a girl to act as usherette and sell ices. It was during the making of one such feature — Enough Rope — that Marion Terry died. In court, a witness by the name of Christina Attner, twenty-six, described how she starred in an earlier Jones production called Safety Last. Scenes had called for her to simulate being run over by a bus, being run over by a train and finally being hanged. For the latter, Attner begrudgingly placed a noose around her neck and leaned her head to one side as if her neck was broken. Jones then asked her to hold onto a ledge with her fingers so that he could film her legs dangling in mid-air, completing the illusion.

Christina Attner was among the twenty-or-so people attending the Safety Last premiere at Jones’ home, along with her mother and husband. She told the court she got in touch with Jones through an ad she saw in the window of a local newsagent shop, requesting models. Another witness, Dawn Chambers, twenty-five, said that she had worked on a Jones production entitled Ten Little Beauty Queens. This film also had scenes of simulated death, and, as Christina, she too had received a fee of £2 per hour and free tickets for family and friends.

Not dissimilar, Marion Terry had replied to one of Jones’ ads on April 18, 1985. It read:

WANTED
YOUNG LADY FOR PART-TIME
MODELLING
EXPERIENCE NOT NECESSARY

At the bottom of the ad was Jones’ contacts details. Marion phoned Jones and was informed the modelling work was in relation to a film he had scripted, Enough Rope, and that she would be paid £10 per hour and £50 on completion of the film. Marion agreed and arranged to meet Jones at his home, wearing ‘something black’ as requested. Only after she arrived did Jones tell her the script called for a young girl to hang herself. In his attic studio was a video camera and a piano-stool over which a noose was hung from the ceiling. When she was in position, he kicked the stool away. Jones denied the charge of murder, saying the girl was perfectly willing to put her head through the noose for a ‘mock hanging’ scene. Her demise, he said, was an accident.

Discovering Terry was dead, Jones attempted suicide. He swallowed an overdose of aspirin and called his girlfriend to say he had killed someone and now himself deserved to die. Jones was taken into police custody after his stomach was pumped at a local hospital.

Neighbours said they had seen Jones driving from his house on the day of the murder, taking a small package with him. Detective Chief Inspector Barry McKay is quoted as saying, “I am convinced Jones continued to film [Marion Terry] as she was hanging there. Afterwards I think he went to conceal the film, the intention being to retrieve it after his eventual release.” According to Georgina Lloyd in her book, Murders Unspeakable (Bantam, 1993), Jones may have been going to dispose of the videotape ‘either by post or by leaving it in the custody of a trusted associate’. The interception and scrutiny of Jones’ mail by police following his arrest offered no clues on the whereabouts of the film.

Are we to believe a snuff cabal openly advertised for victims in a newsagent shop window in suburbia? That the snuff film maker himself, living just round the corner, furnished the ad with nothing less than his actual name, address and telephone number? Readers of Murders Unspeakable learn that

Many sick perverts will go to any lengths to see their sexual fantasies on film. There is a thriving trade in video nasties to cater for their revolting proclivities. In some cases, these mentally disturbed persons enjoy watching simulated killings on film.

Some filmmakers dispense with the simulation altogether, continues Lloyd. This, apparently, is ‘the cult of the so-called snuff movie’. When word gets around on the grapevine, then such movies are sought out by ‘sick individuals who have the financial resources available’. Needless to say, snuff films are very hard to come by, ‘for obvious reasons.’

Geoffrey Jones was found guilty of murder because the jury couldn’t accept his motive was to film a simulated hanging. Interestingly, John Landis and Steven Spielberg didn’t have this problem with the Twilight Zone movie, when Vic Morrow and two child actors were killed while shooting in a simulated war zone. If nothing else, Jones anticipated the veritable explosion of such interests via the Internet; had he waited another couple of years he would have undoubtedly found his audience and many simulated death scenes online, much as the ones he himself tried to create.[66] However, it is unlikely Jones would have been viewed any less suspiciously in such company. A Texas man, church leader Patrick Anthony Russo, was found guilty of the murder of Diane Holik in November 2001, the fact that Russo was a subscriber to Necrobabes being used in court as evidence against him. Jones, as it stands, was an aberration and his passion flummoxed the jury at his trial, for whom the make-believe death scene was evidently a notion too far.

Yet, musing upon Georgina Lloyd’s book, one might perceive the contrary manner in which the true crime author presents the slop of human nature as populist entertainment, from the Murders Unspeakable cover, which is a photographic reconstruction depicting the blood spattered aftermath of a fatal attack on a person, to the book’s fifteen lurid murder cases, described collectively as ‘the most horrific and gruesome’ of this century. The contents promise ‘A Dustbin Full of Guts’, ‘A Head Behind the Cooker,’ as well as ‘The Snuff Movie Murder’ and so on.

KILLER COUPLES AND KILLER FLICKS

In 1982, Fred Douglas and Richard Hernandez murdered Beth Jones and Margaret Krueger. Reports suggest that the two girls believed they were being recruited to appear in well-paying porn movies. Douglas and Hernandez took the girls to a ‘secret ranch’ in the California desert and murdered them ‘on camera’. Although the two men were arrested and charged with the murders, the notion of manufacturing a snuff film was a supposition derived from witness testimony. Witness Kathy Philips was a friend of Hernandez who was introduced to Douglas in 1979. She stated that Douglas asked her to help him in making bondage and sadism films that involved the killing of women. She claimed that Douglas planned to bury the bodies in the desert to eliminate evidence and sell the films in Las Vegas. Witness Pamela Williams testified that in 1977 Douglas picked her up while hitchhiking and asked if she would assist him in producing films that involved the torture and murder of young women. Hernandez testified in court that he and Douglas took Jones and Krueger to the desert on the pretext of a porno photoshoot. The girls were instructed to strip and Douglas went to the car and returned with a rifle saying, “here is the camera.” Following forced sex Douglas cut Jones’ throat and strangled Krueger.

In an unrelated incident on June 2, 1985, San Francisco police officers arrested a man named Leonard T. Lake for possession of a handgun fitted with a silencer. The weapon was discovered in his car after police had been called to the scene of a theft. Earlier, Lake had approached a shopkeeper to plead on behalf of his Asian accomplice, Charles Chitat Ng, who had been caught attempting to steal a $75 vice. Lake was taken into custody to make a statement. Ng, meanwhile, disappeared. An extraordinary story commenced.

During questioning Lake gave the officers several aliases, while the name on his driver’s licence proved to be that of a missing person. In a holding-room at the police station, Lake requested a glass of water. Unobserved, he took a pill from the buckle of his belt and slipped it into his mouth. He gave his true identity seconds before he slumped unconscious in his chair. Attempts to revive him proved ineffective, and Lake died in hospital four days later. During his autopsy, remnants of the capsule were found in his digestive tract. Several identical pills were discovered in his car, each containing cyanide.

Inquiries led police to Lake’s ex-wife, Claralyn Balazs. Helping with their investigations (in return for immunity from prosecution), she directed officers to a secluded cabin in Wisleyville, California, owned by her parents. In the woods surrounding the lodge police unearthed 45lbs of human bones. During the search of the cabin and outbuildings detectives discovered a handwritten book entitled, ‘The Diary of Leonard Lake — 1984’. Also found were two videotapes.[67]

When officers played one of the cassettes, it showed a young white woman — who was later identified as Kathy Allen — handcuffed in a chair. It was evident she was situated within one of the rooms in the cabin where the tape was discovered. A voice, offscreen, informed the captive woman:

You’re going to co-operate and in approximately thirty days — if you want a date, you can write in your calendar the fifteenth of May — we will either drug you, blindfold you, or in some way or other make sure you don’t know where you are and where you’re going, and take you to the city and let you go… My name you don’t know. His name is Charlie… While you’re here you’ll wash for us, you’ll clean for us, you’ll fuck for us. That’s your choice in a nutshell. It’s not much of a choice unless you have a death wish…

Moments later Leonard Lake enters the frame and manacles the woman’s legs. Her hands are uncuffed and she is ordered to undress. Reluctantly, she does so. When she is naked, an Asian man steps into shot. It is Charles Ng. He takes the woman and forces her to shower with him. The sequence ends. Cut to another sequence with a different woman, one Brenda O’Connor, in a similar situation. The same instructions are given offscreen. O’Connor begs her captors to return her baby. But is informed the child is dead. Ng approaches and cuts away her clothing with a bayonet.

The remains of Kathy Allen and Brenda O’Connor, along with those of approximately nineteen other people, were discovered in the grounds surrounding the cabin. Ng, still at large, was placed on the FBI’s most wanted list. He was eventually arrested in Canada after shooting and wounding a security guard in an attempted robbery. The FBI requested his extradition to stand trial for multiple murder. The Canadian authorities at first refused but eventually surrendered Ng.

When investigators were able to question him about the murders at the cabin, Ng stated that Lake was solely responsible and that his only role was the degradation and sexual abuse of the women, as evidenced in the video recordings.[68] Had any of these tapes shown the act of murder, this line of defence would be futile. Initial police reports on the content of the videos suggested sexual assault, humiliation and torture. When the press became aware of a case in which videotapes and murders were involved, in spite of there being no direct correlation between the two, snuff was too tempting a hypothesis to ignore. The reports animated rumours among the citizens of Wisleyville that Ng had been shipping the tapes back to his native Hong Kong. This, perversely, served to ‘corroborate’ what the press had been saying all along.

PAUL BERNADO AND KARLA HOMOLKA

Nicknamed Ken and Barbie by the press, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were the youthful, good looking, seemingly happy couple at the centre of one of the most reviled and high profile criminal cases in Canadian history — indeed, ‘the crime of the century’ proposed the media. And, because of the way it was handled by police, the case was also controversial for some very different reasons.

For several years Bernardo terrorized Scarborough, near to Toronto, abusing and raping women. Following a move to St Catherines, Ontario, both he and Homolka kidnapped, abused and murdered two young girls,[69] and were responsible for the manslaughter of Homolka’s younger sister. Much of it captured on videotape.

On December 23, 1990, at the home of the Homolkas, while the rest of the house was asleep, fourteen-year-old Tammy Homolka was plied with alcohol laced with Halcion and anaesthetised with a cloth soaked in halothane — drugs stolen by Homolka from the veterinary clinic where she worked. The subsequent abuse and rape was captured on Bernardo’s new video camera by Homolka, who had the camcorder turned on herself when instructed to participate. Homolka’s understanding of the drugs was rudimentary. Indeed, the alcohol combined with Halcion, and the continued use of halothane, proved a fatal combination: Tammy threw up and choked to death, despite attempts by Homolka to revive her. The autopsy showed no evidence of foul play, however, and the death was recorded as accidental.

On June 14, 1991, Bernardo picked up fourteen-year-old Lesley Mahaffy. She was taken to the couple’s home and used as a sex slave, the assault again being videotaped. When the couple tired of her, Mahaffy was killed and dismembered in the basement. Her body parts, encased in cement, were discovered in a lake two weeks later.[70]

On April 16, 1992, the couple abducted fifteen-year-old Kristen French. She suffered a similar fate to the previous victim and her body was discovered dumped in woodland on April 30.

Homolka left her husband in January 1993 following a severe beating. Bernardo was arrested in February when DNA linked him to crime scenes, although a search of their home revealed little further evidence. Homolka agreed to plea bargain and testify against Bernardo in a trial that was controversially denied any media coverage.[71] In May of that year Bernardo instructed his lawyer, Ken Murray, to go to his home and retrieve six 8mm video tapes that were hidden in a light fixture in the bathroom. Murray kept the tapes for several months before deciding he could no longer represent Bernardo. He handed the tapes to Bernardo’s new lawyer, John Rosen, who passed them over to police. The videos showed the rape and torture of several women including Tammy Homolka, Mahaffy and French. The videos did not show the deaths of the victims but they did reveal that Karla Homolka was a willing participant in the torture, thus disproving her claims to the contrary. In spite of the damning video evidence, Homolka’s plea bargain stood and she received a twelve-year prison sentence for two counts of manslaughter. Tammy Homolka’s body was exhumed and given a second autopsy which revealed evidence suggesting murder. Bernardo was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to life without possibility of parole. Homolka was released in June of 2005. (Seven years later her name would be attached by rumour to further snuff movie allegations in a different case entirely.[72]) As for the videotapes, a judge’s order restricted all access and required that the tapes should be destroyed when they were no longer required for legal purposes. His reason was to prevent the ongoing suffering of the victims and families.

One person who acted against this request is Stephen Williams, author of Invisible Darkness (Little Brown & Co, 1996), perhaps the definitive account of the crimes of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Williams was arrested two years after the publication of his book on the grounds that certain details in it could only have come from his viewing the tapes, a criminal offence. Williams was acquitted in 2000. Bernardo’s original lawyer Ken Murray, having failed to hand the videos to police in the first place, was arrested for withholding evidence and possessing child pornography. He too was acquitted.

The videotapes were finally destroyed in December, 2001. However, footage that featured Tammy Homolka, on the evening prior to her murder, appeared in edited form in the HBO series Autopsy,[73] which indicates that copies of some tapes had been made.

The videotapes had not shown any scenes of murder, but this fact did not prevent them being classified as snuff movies in some quarters. Conspiracy theorist Henry Makow writes, ‘What the Bernardo trial covered up and the newspaper ignored, is that Bernardo’s murders were satanic in nature. They were so horrific that the trial proceedings were made secret. Bernardo and his wife Karla Homolka filmed the murders as snuff films for the entertainment of a network of elite Illuminati Satanists. This is the real reason the trial was hit with a publication ban.’ David Hawkins, writing on his Abel Danger website, attempted to establish a link between Bernardo and convicted killers Col. Russell Williams and Robert Pickton under the header ‘Col. Williams and Paul Bernardo were “pals”; sex, snuff films and initiation ceremonies.’[74]

In 2010, Williams was found guilty of two counts of murder, his victims being Cpl. Marie-France Comeau and Jessica Lloyd, and multiple home invasions, assaults and rapes. Williams was a fetishist and photographed himself wearing underwear stolen from his victims. He also photographed and filmed some of his rapes and assaults. According to Hawkins, ‘It has been reported that Williams would bring a camera on a tripod and in some cases, filmed himself raping and possibly even killing his victims.’ However, during his confession, asked if he filmed the moment he suffocated Marie-France with duct tape, he answered in the negative. Of Bernardo and Homolka, Hawkins speculates that the ‘videotaping of their activities then extended into the sexual murders of their victims producing “snuff films” for the underground porno trade.’

This alleged trade, Hawkins implied, has something to do with the Piggy Palace Good Times Society. A registered charity established in 1996 by pig farmer Robert Pickton and his brother, David, here is another story with a familiar Hawkins cadence. The oddly named society operated out of a converted pig shed on the Pickton property in Port Coquitlam, Vancouver, promising wild parties, live music, alcohol and prostitutes. Robert Pickton was eventually arrested for a firearms violation in February 2002, while a subsequent search of his farm revealed the personal effects belonging to known missing women, articles of blood-soaked clothing and fragmented human remains. He is presently in prison and officially listed as Canada’s most prolific serial killer. Hawkins reports on the matter:

It should also be recollected that the Piggy Palace has been implicated in producing snuff films in a studio on the property and possibly ‘back hauled’ to a location where they are archived. After these snuff films have been archived they are then used to extort powerful people including people like Russell Williams.

Typically, the tangible evidence is lacking and the snuff films exist only in assumption. Nevertheless, posits Hawkins, as do so many others, ‘Where did these snuff films go and who has access to them and are they being used for extortion and blackmail?’

FREDERICK AND ROSEMARY WEST

When police started to excavate an otherwise unassuming end terrace house at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England, there soon emerged the promise of a story foul and inhuman that rallied the news media. Crash barriers were erected to keep the daily vigil in check, which had secured every available vantage point and become a flurry of activity whenever anyone was seen to enter or exit the property. On some days, however, nothing much happened and so reporters qualified their presence with theory and supposition. Ultimately, snuff movies might be involved.

It began on the afternoon of February 24, 1994, when police arrived at the home of Frederick and Rosemary West with a warrant to search the rear garden. The search was in relation to Heather West, the couple’s eldest daughter, missing since 1987. The following day, Fred and Rose were arrested for the girl’s murder. It soon emerged that the couple were responsible for a horror spanning decades, with many other young victims. Excavating the garden police also unearthed the remains of Shirley Robinson who was heavily pregnant with Fred West’s child when she disappeared in 1978. By the time they had finished with the three-storey property, a total of nine bodies had been recovered by police: three in the garden beneath the patio, five in the basement, and one under the bathroom. Another three bodies were discovered in locations away from the house, including stepdaughter Charmaine West in nearby 25 Midland Road, a previous address for the West family, and Rena West, Fred’s ex-wife.

Among the other victims were women and children who Fred and Rose had met on the streets, luring them back to the Cromwell Street house. Here they became the object of the couple’s sadistic sexual desires and met their fate.

Fred West was charged with twelve counts of murder but was found hanged in his prison cell on January 1, 1995, before coming to trial. Upon hearing the news, Rose West, who maintained she was innocent, said “Now there is no one left to hate”. However, she was found guilty on ten counts of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment on November 22, 1995.

Fred and Rose West were not outwardly the misfit type. They were working class and had mates, it seemed. Fred for certain was funny and amiable. Rose put on a good show. They had a reputation for being kinky, with Rose a known prostitute and having lesbian lovers. Sex parties at 25 Cromwell Street were common knowledge, so too Fred’s predilection for home-made sex films featuring his wife, which he showed to their guests.

Gloucester police came under much criticism for their handling of the West case. In hindsight there was more evidence than suspicion that something had long been amiss on Cromwell Street. Prior to the excavations and the discovery of any bodies, the property at number twenty-five was flagged a number of times in relation to drugs, theft and abuse. Fred West was himself acquitted for a sexual offence on a young girl as early as 1961, while both Fred and Rose were convicted of indecent assault on a young woman in 1973. A case in 1992 involving the rape and sodomy of a minor fell through when two witnesses refused to testify.

Possibly the most lamentable oversight was said to involve snuff films, as highlighted in a news item on British television following Fred West’s suicide. It revealed how police had failed to act on a tip-off in the early eighties that West was offering to supply snuff films. A woman, who wished to remain anonymous, had come forward to tell the story to the press and it was her audio statement that aired on the programme. She recounts how her family ran a video rental store and a disturbing conversation she had with Fred West back in 1982, which unsettled her enough to contact police. West had supposedly asked the woman first about the video shop and the type of movies it stocked. He then asked about blue movies, to which the woman admitted she stocked the Electric Blue series of erotica, common to most any UK rental shop at the time. She recounts West saying he could get hold of the real thing, that he boasted of actually making them in his house. “Sex videos and lesbian romps and things like that,” the woman recalls of the conversation, some involving his daughters.

Then West moved on to the subject of snuff films. The woman tells West that she stocks a film in the shop called Snuff.[75] West is apparently aware of this film and of the fact it’s a fabrication. Paraphrasing West again, the woman says, “no, he could get hold of the real thing, actual real snuff movies where they actually done it.”

The next morning the anonymous informant calls the police to make a complaint and report her conversation with West. She is informed that the matter will be investigated. But she hears nothing more about it. When the murder charges against Fred and Rose West come to light some twelve years later, she contacts the police again, eventually reiterating the story to Detective Constable Hazel Savage, the interviewing officer. Savage apparently goes quiet when snuff is mentioned.

There is no question that West had a movie camera and that he made home movies. There exists footage showing the Wests on family days out, and so too material of a pornographic nature that West shot of his wife at Cromwell Street. This includes footage of Rose servicing clients in a room at the top of the house, filmed through a hole in the wall without the knowledge of the men who feature in them. (Elements of these have been shown on television.) West had VCRs rigged together for the duplication and supply of pornographic videotapes to friends and acquaintances. It is rumoured that West may have extended this particular monetary sideline to local video rental shops, and made his sex tapes available for distribution under-the-counter. Perhaps this was the reason behind Fred’s interest in the anonymous woman quoted above and her video rental shop: An economic opportunity to broaden his cottage industry of video manufacture and duplication. There is no physical evidence to corroborate the suggestion that he filmed the murders of any victims, or that he was ever in possession of snuff films.

As for West’s own remarks on the subject of snuff films, it ought to be noted that among his many defective traits West was an habitual liar and fantasist. He frequently said things for effect, especially where women were concerned. Even in police custody he provided far-fetched and inconsistent accounts, seemingly as much an attempt to impress the questioning officers as baffle and mislead them. With Fred and Rose taking pains to bury the bodies of many victims under their very own feet at Cromwell Street, the clever concealment of certain videotapes, should they exist, seems almost out of character for this oddest of couples. They were hardly discrete. Rose was certainly not adverse to parading around in clothing belonging to the victims, in one instance answering the door to the mother of the missing Lynda Gough, while wearing the dead girl’s slippers and drying her clothes on the washing line.

Author Geoffrey Wansell refers to Fred West and snuff films in his book An Evil Love: The Life of Frederick West.[76] Wansell was privy to sensitive material of a type (and in a quantity) generally denied the true crime biographer, which seems to have included some of the Cromwell Street sex tapes. These tapes featured Rose with other men, masturbating with various objects, and showing her semen stained underwear after a night on the tiles.[77] There was no snuff material among the tapes. However, Wansell makes a case for its existence based on supposition, commenting that ‘there must at least be every possibility that he [Fred West] created what later were to become known as “snuff movies” — films of the deaths of his victims.’ It’s not wholly illogical in light of the charges brought against the Wests but lacking in proof all the same. Later, he has a wilder suspicion that West ‘well aware of the commercial potential of “snuff movies” ’ may have chosen to profit from his murders with the manufacture of such material.

Wansell further considers that incriminating tapes may have been removed from 25 Cromwell Street by a family member on the pretext of carrying out domestic repairs, while Fred and Rose where in police custody. Others have suggested that the police themselves destroyed the tapes, never having fully examined their content. This seems unlikely, and is not the impression Wansell gives in his book in relation to the police procedural.[78] The haul of pornographic videotapes was enormous, says Wansell, but one police officer was given the duty of watching them, a task that lasted a fortnight. None of the videotapes revealed the abuse of any of the West children, and none the women murdered by the Wests or snuff films.

NEO-TOKYO IS ABOUT THE EXPLODE

In Britain, in the early months of 1992, a man was prosecuted for ‘importing a snuff video’. The tape, Southwark Crown Court heard, depicted a young Asian female tied to a bed and dismembered by a man dressed in a Samurai warrior’s outfit. “It falls into the category of a snuff video,” said the prosecution, adding, “This is not an Asian girl alive being murdered, but something that is so well simulated that that is the impression it creates.” The film was Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood.[79]

Imported from New York, Customs officers had seized the video at a postal depot and carried out a controlled delivery at the defendant’s home. When Christopher Berthoud, aged twenty-six, accepted the package, he was arrested. A search of his home revealed video and audio documentaries on the subject of mass murderers, a collection of stuffed birds and animals, and small quantities of illegal drugs.

The court heard how the ‘snuff’ tape also included The Killing of America[80] and two short medical films, Infant Brain Surgery and The Faces of Dissection. Berthoud admitted to the offence because, he said, he wanted to spare the jury the anxiety of having to watch the shocking footage. Experts who analyzed the film determined it to be a clever simulation.[81] Nevertheless, Berthoud was reproached and fined £600. The case, in the view of the court, was “a very serious matter which would normally attract a sentence of imprisonment”.

Many were fooled. In an interview with Melody Maker in May 1988, Canadian industrial band Skinny Puppy spoke about the Guinea Pig 2 film. It would inspire one track, The Mourn,[82] the music video for which features scenes from the film, and would also be incorporated into their stage act. Skinny Puppy initially considered Guinea Pig to be a genuine snuff film, as did the audience at their live shows, who cheered the band’s trademark shock theatrics but were numbed by what it sensed was real gore. Adding to the Guinea Pig mythos, Skinny Puppy frontman Nivek Ogre explained to the Melody Maker that

Apparently the people that [made the film] sent four copies to the government and the newspapers. They’ve never been traced nor has the body been found. It isn’t done for money and that’s the scary philosophy — there are people out there who don’t just want to do that [murder], they want to film it as well. That’s as close as I ever want to come to it.[83]

In August 1989, Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested in Japan for the mutilation murders of four little girls. The unassuming, bespectacled young man — impotent and a paedophile — turned out to be the ‘vampire’ that had been stalking Tokyo suburbs. There followed a media blitz and the case was subject to weeks of coverage on Japanese TV. Much was made of the fact that Miyazaki was an avid film collector, having something approximating 6,000 videocassettes. Among them was a copy of Flower of Flesh and Blood — a fact reiterated often in the news reports. Prior to the case, video was accessible to all ages in Japan no matter what the content. Afterwards, restrictions were made relegating more extreme material to persons aged eighteen or over. Videocassettes became the focus of another murder case in Japan some years later. When solid leads failed to materialize, the murder-mutilation of a schoolboy in Kobe in May 1997 was said to have similarities to various horror movies, leading investigators to request that video store owners divulge the names of customers who regularly rented splatter movies. A fourteen-year-old schoolboy confessed to the murder of Jun Hase, age eleven, as well as the murder of Ayaka Yamashita, age ten, in March that year.[84] It isn’t known whether the juvenile killer was a member of a video store or a particular fan of horror movies. Nonetheless, sources generally focused on this aspect of the case and not the history of abuse toward classmates, animal mutilation or deeper societal and psychological issues, stating instead the boy owned ‘thousands’ of manga comics and violent pornographic videos, as well as a copy of Friday the 13th (one of ten movies flagged by police on a list circulated among video stores).

A very different set of circumstances surrounds the case of Lucie Blackman. In June 2000, the twenty-one-year-old went missing in Tokyo, having left Britain for a job there. The incident would unearth a fantastical account of serial rape and abuse spanning many years, the crimes meticulously documented by the perpetrator in notebooks, photographs and on videotape. Joji Obara was a wealthy property owner of Korean parentage, who had a penchant for the glamorous Western girls working the hostess bars of Tokyo’s Roppongi district. These bars are a perfectly acceptable staple of Japanese culture, where men may talk openly of sex to hostesses whose job it is to chat and flirt (in order to keep clients buying drinks). There is no physical contact as such but the girls are encouraged to seek out dinner dates (dohan), which makes for a lucrative bonus and is something of a necessity should they wish to remain in the employment of the clubs. It was in one such bar that Lucie Blackman worked.

Joji Obara had entertained a long succession of hostesses, as well as Japanese women, quite often drugging and then raping them while they were unconscious. His victims rarely had any idea of what had happened when they came round, or if they did they were either too embarrassed or afraid to go to the authorities. In some instances, the encounters had even more of a dire consequence. Lucie Blackman accompanied Obara to one of his apartments on the pretext of the gift of a mobile phone. Her body was discovered years later caked in cement and buried in a cave. The case went international when the extent of the evidence mounted against the reclusive middle aged millionaire, and the likelihood of many more victims became apparent. Obara was found guilty in April 2007 and sentenced to life for eight counts of rape and one charge of rape and murder in relation to Australian hostess, Carita Ridgway. She had died in hospital after an evening with Obara. He was acquitted of the charges against Lucie Blackman, but this was overturned on appeal in December 2008, and Obara was found guilty of her abduction, drugging, attempted rape, dismemberment and disposal.

Obara had maintained his innocence, refusing to confess to the crimes and instead parading some baffling excuses before the High Court. He stated that the hostess girls were all prostitutes and drug addicts, and that the rape was ‘sex play’ and consensual. He suggested some flighty other persons were responsible for the deaths, and even called on Carlos Santana as a character witness, having met the musician at least once as evidenced in a fan photo. Obara had no friends to vouch for him, and Santana failed to respond to the request. Perhaps the most damning evidence was the videotapes, whose number — anywhere from forty to 4,800 depending on the source — dated back to the eighties. Each tape was labelled with the name of the victim, often opening with a girl laughing and joking before suddenly cutting to her unconscious and tied to a bed. Typically, Obara appears, usually masked and sporting an erection. He abuses the girl over a period of hours, while periodically administering chloroform. The camera is static and likely mounted on a tripod. The room is well lit and the picture clear. On the tapes, Obara observes his situation as it plays out on a monitor; a second monitor plays a pornographic film. No tape was found of Lucie Blackman.[85]

In the USA, shortly after the Miyazaki case but from all accounts unrelated to it, Flower of Flesh and Blood came under investigation by the FBI. Earlier we noted how actor Charlie Sheen contacted authorities after watching it.[86] The film in this instance was part of a videotape composed of gore scenes from horror movies, a so-called ‘party tape’ that was traced back to horror aficionado Chas. Balun, writer-publisher of Deep Red magazine and several books on ‘splatter’ cinema. Balun had compiled the tape for a friend; a birthday treat for a fellow Deep Red scribe[87] who had requested of Balun ‘“the most disgusting” video I could assemble’. The collection, never intended for general distribution, included Flower of Flesh and Blood. ‘NO real-life atrocity stuff,’ Balun recollects for Ultra Violent magazine,[88] ‘I HATE that shit.’ It was sent via UPS to the home of his friend in time for the party weekend, when it was screened and proved a howling success. ‘Later, I learned the tape was making the East Coast rounds, viewed by assorted dorks, poseurs, spineless squids and clueless assbags who thought it was real.’ Balun was forewarned that the tape was being investigated by the FBI as a snuff film and that he should expect a call. Says Balun: ‘NEVER got a call. EVER.’

Flower of Flesh and Blood was available in the US some years before Chas. Balun inadvertently put it into circulation. Its presentation as part of the Skinny Puppy live show undoubtedly brought it to the attention of many people who may not have otherwise come into contact with it. The reminiscence of fans who witnessed the band’s 1990 American Too Dark Park tour supports this idea. The comments on a Skinny Puppy fan site refer specifically to this footage, which was played intermittently throughout a show that was generally extreme. ‘A sedating effect,’ noted one fan of the film’s impact on the audience, claiming to be able to remember the material vividly ten years on. Said another: ‘The “snuff” films looked very real, and the footage of suicides backing Reclamation certainly were. I suspect there are very strong legal reasons this tour was not videotaped.’[89]

The source for the film in the US may well have been the New Jersey based Vidimax, whose Macabre Video Underground was discussed.[90] Vidimax originally released the film as Slow Death: The Dismemberment back in the mid to late eighties. Speaking about how his company came to acquire the film, Louis Ferriol told the B-Movie Dumpster website (sic throughout):

Ah, yes, the notorious Guinea Pig. As I remember, I got a call from a Mr. Hi (add joke here) in Osala, Japan, but I couldn’t understand one word he said. A few days later, I get this huge 1″ broadcast format video reel in the mail and couldn’t play it because, hey, we weren’t CBS. (The box & reel label read Slow Death in Japanese… that I had translated) So I took the thing over to a Jersey UHF station and paid the tech $100 to play it. He gets excited believing it was a ‘snuff’ film and said “Get it outta here!!!!” I asked him if he’d make a ¾;″ format duplicating master, he yelped “Hell, no” until I gave him another hundred bucks. By Special Delivery, I get a document in the mail that read ‘licensing agreement’ and since a lawyer buddy mentioned “Yakuzza,” damn straight we paid the royalties on time. A few years later a Florida video mail order company claimed they had the rights to Guinea Pig: Flowers Of Flesh & Bood — the title a video company, NEK, in Japan released it under. Then, everybody began selling it and you know the story… every gorey vid coming out of Tokyo was labeled ‘Guinea Pig series’.

Nowadays, the Guinea Pig series of films is available on digital media; clear, pristine prints available from Amazon et al that are missing the vitality of a once clandestine distribution on washed-out videocassette. It is difficult to equate these colourful new factory sealed products with the shock of a grubby videotape bearing a handwritten scrawl of a label. But back in the day controversy surrounded Guinea Pig 2 wherever it surfaced, and repercussions were no greater than in Britain following the Berthoud case — or rather, ‘Death craze man’s snuff movie shame’ as the tabloid press reported it.[91]

In May 1992, extensive television and press coverage was given over to news that trading standards officers had smashed a nationwide network dealing in illicit videos. ‘In the largest operation of its kind,’ said the Guardian,[92] ‘council investigators, supported by police, seized almost 3,000 videos depicting scenes including torture, mutilation and cannibalism… It is claimed that some videos depict real life footage from autopsies and medical surgery.’ The film titles most cited by the press were Cannibal Holocaust (1979), Blood Sucking Freaks (1977), The Driller Killer (1979), Human Experiments (1979), A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) and Blood Bath (1971). During one television report a camera panned across a stack of the seized titles, and the lurid nature of the confiscated material epitomised in a brief excerpt from Joe D’Amato’s altogether plodding horror movie Anthropophagous the Beast.

A total of nine raids were carried out in cities across the country, hitting Liverpool, Leicester, Cardiff, Redruth in Cornwall, Solihull, Kettering and Rochester in Kent. The operation was the culmination of six months of undercover work by investigators who had infiltrated a mail order network via the classified ads of a popular newsstand horror magazine. It was said that children as young as twelve were trading the videos, and they were fetching anything up to £90 each. Some reporters flipped ‘snuff’ into the equation. The Manchester Evening News claimed that the ring ‘earned millions of pounds by duplicating and marketing under-the-counter snuff movies’. Defective journalism was put into perspective by Peter Mawdsley, Liverpool’s Chief Trading Standards Officer. He doubted that the haul contained any actual snuff films. “Some are billed as snuff videos,” he said, “but I believe it is more a matter of marketing because most of the people in them are easily identifiable.”

Still, that didn’t stop the Daily Telegraph. The newspaper claimed that part of the haul included ‘so-called snuff movies, in which murders are supposedly carried out on camera’. But added, ‘If evidence emerged that the snuff movies portrayed real murders they would be handed to the police.’ Needless to say, if the films didn’t contain real murders (which they didn’t) then they couldn’t be classed as snuff movies in the first place. The article turned on its heel. ‘All of those seized so far have been fakes,’ it said, and then concluded cheerlessly ‘police in Britain believe snuff movies do exist’. The snuff movie haul, a categorical fact to begin with, was reduced in three column inches to a befuddled supposition. The Daily Star went a step further in somehow managing to link news of the raids with Jason Swift, a schoolboy murdered several years earlier. Their headline? ‘SNUFFED OUT.’

The late eighties and early 1990s were a particularly gruelling time for horror film fans and collectors of videotapes. Police raids on video stores and the homes of individuals were fairly commonplace. The epithet ‘video nasties’ was attributed to a small selection of movies, predominantly horror, that were deemed obscene by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).[93] Sale or distribution might lead to a court hearing, heavy fine or even imprisonment.[94] Zealots like James Anderton, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, self-proclaimed ‘God’s cop’, went so far as to make it a personal crusade to confiscate ‘video nasties’ and anything else that might be remotely construed as obscene or in bad taste. There was a a general prejudice toward the new medium — video — and the tabloid media often questioned the mindset of persons who might collect such a thing. Discussing the above raids, for instance, television presenters made clear their disgust and disbelief upon hearing that some of the videos confiscated depicted real autopsies. Three days before the raids took place, the BBC aired a documentary presenting the work of a South American pathologist, a fair portion of which was given over to the detailed and lengthy evisceration of a child. Over in Birmingham, the Independent (April 6, 1993) reported that trading standards officers had ‘seized copies of a snuff video at a children’s fair in Birmingham’. An exceptional piece of emotive copy, the ‘children’s fair’ was in actual fact a weekend comic mart at a city centre hotel, and the snuff film none other than Cannibal Holocaust.[95] The article credits the incident as the first known confiscation of a snuff film in Birmingham. If the Independent really believed this was the case, would it be so impartial to the seizure of the first snuff video anywhere ever (at a ‘children’s fair’ in Birmingham, no less) to a mere footnote of a report on page three? Only a few months earlier they had deduced that a genuine snuff movie had yet to be found.

Further video raids were carried out in February 1994, this time targeting twenty towns across Britain. A spokesperson for trading standards said on television that snuff films had been included in the haul.

So indiscriminate is the use of the word ‘snuff’ that Victor Davis, writing for the Mail on Sunday,[96] can admit to actually having viewed a snuff movie with no fear of anyone so much as raising an eyebrow let alone an investigation. Reviewing the latest movie releases, Davis claimed that Falling Down (1993), a crime drama starring Michael Douglas, was ‘without doubt the most odious I have seen since someone showed me a South American snuff film’.

Snuff was definitely in the air. In the early months of 1995, Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad was reported to have launched an investigation into claims of snuff film manufacture in the north of England. The Independent[97] stated that several murders ‘in the Merseyside area may have been filmed to make snuff movies’. The Guardian carried the same report, adding that the body of Nigel Bostock, eighteen, a homosexual, was found mutilated in a bath. Merseyside police were not returning telephone calls on the matter and no other information ever materialized.

Some months later, still in the north of England but unrelated outside of its sense of inescapable familiarity, the threat of snuff reared its ugly head once again. ‘SNUFF VIDEO IS FOUND IN SCHOOL’ screamed the headline on the front page of the Manchester Evening News (April 8, 1995).[98] ‘Sick film of deaths passed around the playground.’ According to the report, an horrific video featuring murders, satanic sacrifice and gruesome fatal accidents had been discovered circulating in a Manchester school. The film, said to be called ‘The Face of Death’ — in all probability Faces of Death IV from the description of its content — eventually ended up in the hands of one fifteen-year-old girl who was so distressed that she handed the tape to her parents. They, in turn, handed it, not to the school board or the police, but an inter-denominational Christian group called Maranatha. Maranatha contacted the newspaper. The leader of the group, a Dennis Wrigley, pictured on the front page holding a videocassette, is quoted as saying, “It is the most obscene and corrupting thing I have ever seen.”

From one institution to another: A couple of years later, a Mirror exclusive reported not on snuff movies in school, but in Broadmoor, the same high security psychiatric prison in which Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was incarcerated (a picture of him illustrates the short article). ‘There’s no way we can stop these videos coming in,’ one anonymous source supposedly told the reporter, the videos then being duplicated and distributed among offenders and killers throughout the complex.[99]

‘Snuff movies by the backdoor.’ This is how one child psychiatrist described Night Trap to the Daily Express (April 28, 1993). The Sega game, the newspaper commented, showed ‘real-life actresses, not cartoon characters,’ being hung upside down with blood draining from their neck into bottles. ‘Ban evil snuff movie video game, says MPs’, was the headline. (Three weeks later, Night Trap was again featured in the Daily Express, only this time in a suspiciously positive piece headed ‘Out of this world, Mega CD puts life on screen’. A ‘horror spoof’ the paper now called it.)[100]

Such insinuations are not new. We see in the aforementioned Christian group Maranatha, and its use of snuff panic in the Manchester Evening News, a facsimile of what happened in US in the mid 1970s with CDL. For their own interests, CDL created the myth of the snuff film and railroaded the public into supporting their cause to fight it. The story of how film distributor Allan Shackleton then appropriated the myth for himself is by now familiar. The media gave snuff its big break, documenting how one such film was rumoured to have made its way into the US from South America. Of course, when the New York Times ascertained in March, 1976, that the source for this story looked to be fraudulent, it was too late. The death trip was rolling, thanks in no small part to Shackleton, giddily stirring up publicity for his latest release. The ideas he planted in promoting the feature film known as Snuff are still held today as factual basis for the existence of snuff films. When Snuff eventually disappeared from theatres and was made available for home entertainment, the ambiguity surrounding the production was exploited anew.

The release of Snuff on videocassette did nothing to stem the growing backlash against film violence and ‘video nasties’ in the early eighties, which had footing on both sides of the Atlantic.[101] If anything, it fanned the flames. Cult Video in the US was consistent with Shackleton’s vision. Their jacket blurb for Snuff stated that this was

the movie they said no producer could make, no distributor would release, and no audience could stomach. This is the one and only original legendary atrocity shot by Monarch Films in South America and New York, where human life is cheap! The mystery and controversy surrounding this vicious and violent venture remains clouded to this day. Many of the actors and actresses who dedicated their lives to making this film were never seen or heard from again… Are the killings in this film real? You be the judge!

In the UK, Snuff established itself as one of the more notorious of the ‘video nasties’ and was among those titles regularly cited in the media as being representative of ‘evil’ videocassettes.[102] Video trade papers were no more immune than the mainstream press and often succumbed to the hype with the rest of them. But there was a poetic irony about Snuff in Britain, in keeping with the ambiguity that had surrounded the film’s production and content: No one was clear who exactly was distributing it. Astra Video of Croydon scheduled its release on video for May 1982. “There’s no censorship laws on video at all,” Astra managing director Mike Behr told a circumspect Sunday Times[103] “What can they do about it?” But Behr and Astra quickly repudiated. The following week, the newspaper was reporting on the tightening noose for unclassified videocassettes with a new classification system on the horizon, as well as the possibility of prosecution under obscenity laws for the ‘nasties’. Astra Video was said to have suddenly ‘severed all connections’ with Snuff since the previous week’s story. ‘No copies had been released, despite high orders.’[104] Whatever the situation, copies of Snuff did make it into circulation in Britain, the videocassettes being professionally packaged if lacking evidence of a distributor. Astra denied it was their doing.[105]

In 2003, Snuff appeared on DVD in the US. The cult movie label Blue Underground[106] was responsible, keeping with the tradition of the film by blanketing its digital release in mystery, which, by this time, was stretched pretty thin. The review by one frankenberry on Amazon sums it up nicely:

This hilariously marketed ‘limited edition’ disc from Blue Underground is as bare-bones as you can get. The keepcase is a replica of a crinkled paper bag. No mention of actors, cast, crew or Blue Underground. Just a UPC code and the limited edition # printed on the back. Insert the disc and the movie starts playing automatically — there’s no menu screen at all and the movie is not divided into any chapter stops. Full frame presentation looks and sounds OK overall. Don’t think there was much ‘remastering’ done, but it’s probably as good as it’s ever going to look. There’s also no mention of Blue Underground on the disc itself and no insert card. Makes you feel like you’re really getting something ‘taboo’ from the underground (blue?). Of course, once the movie actually starts and you hear the atrocious dubbing and see the ridiculous action, all that scary reality is blown out the window. This is anything but real.

Since there are no extras and the movie itself seems to alienate most horror fans looking for gore or horrific thrills, this disc is really only for diehard exploitation fans especially considering it’s high retail price. Life is cheap but this DVD ain’t.

AGES OF SEX CRIME

Fresh concerns over screen violence were awoken in the early eighties. Britain was in the grip of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, a series of brutal sex slayings of women in the north of England. Peter Sutcliffe had yet to be identified as the murderer in what had become the biggest manhunt in British history. Amid an angry backlash against the Yorkshire police, viewed as incompetent, a popular subgenre of horror movie began to draw negative press and galvanize public attention. Stalk and slash movies, or ‘slashers’ as they were sometimes known, had plot lines that featured young people, notably women, in peril. A deranged assailant exhibiting an almost supernatural prowess for controlled carnage was out to kill and often would in gory ways. Some quarters questioned whether horror movies such as Halloween (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980), He Knows You’re Alone (1980) and The Shining (1980) might not be an influencing factor on the crimes of the Yorkshire Ripper and other murder cases.[107]

The mid seventies saw an increased awareness of women’s rights on both sides of the Atlantic and in particular the issue of violence toward women. In America, the focus was sex in advertising and Allan Shackleton’s movie Snuff, while in Britain the prime concern was domestic violence; in this respect, feminist pressure helped to shape government legislation in the Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act, 1976. Come the early eighties, living in fear of the Yorkshire Ripper, women’s groups in the north of England marched on cinemas. Could the killers of Jackie Hill and Jenny Ronaldson, remonstrated a weary Liz Gill in a report for the Sun newspaper,[108] have been aroused by the anti-women sentiment in modern horror cinema? For five years the Ripper roamed his killing grounds and evaded police, his identity no more than a series of sinister identikit pictures. The Ripper was a malign spectral presence. Horror movies on the other hand were a tangible presence that could be targetted in a climate of shadow and fear.

Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) organized its first UK conference in Leeds, November 1980, the month 500 women took to the streets of the city with torches and stormed the Odeon cinema. They were incensed by the suggestion that women remain home after dark because of the Ripper, as if that was any kind of logical solution, and questioned men in the street on their whereabouts the night Jackie Hill was murdered. The movie showing at the Odeon was Dressed to Kill, a bloody thriller in the Psycho mould. The inspiration for the WAVAW itself lies with another movie in another country.

As seen earlier,[109] publicity for Shackleton’s Snuff intensified after it came under the auspices of the feminist movement. Women’s groups campaigned against the film and picketed theatres. However, the relationship between protesters and the protested isn’t as altruistic as might first appear: Snuff was responsible for kick-starting active feminism in the first place and the motivating factor behind the formation of WAVAW. Founded in Los Angeles in 1976 by Marcia Womongold, the WAVAW directive was to rally women and confront screenings of the movie in Southern California. An internal memo clarifies:

The issue of Snuff and porn-violence appears to be a good organizing tool to bring together the larger community with regards to the issues of brutality against women, rape, and the exploitation of these. It appears to be a way of raising the consciousness in a larger sector of the population than has been possible before now.[110]

This is how it started. March 1976: Following reports on a local radio station, women’s groups in the Los Angeles area are alerted to the imminent arrival of Snuff.[111] Galvanized by the Feminist Women’s Health Center (FWHC), these groups[112] learn through contacts at KFWB radio that Allan Shackleton has held a press conference to announce the movie, and a campaign to halt its screening is set in motion. The hotel in which Shackleton is staying, Hyatt House, becomes one subject of the ensuing campaign. But Shackleton has already left by the time a small group arrives to make his presence less desirable at the establishment. An attempt is made to prevent publication of an ad for Snuff in the LA Free Press, followed then by telephone calls to theatre managers, the movie’s distributor, ad company, the LAPD and DA, and the Argentinian Embassy (alerting them to the movie’s racist overtones).[113]

Snuff is scheduled to open on March 17. A delegation from the women’s community (includes three lawyers) visits the Mann Corporation offices, the national chain handling the movie, requesting they pull Snuff. Mann refuse, but arrange for two women from the group to attend a pre-release screening, organized for LAPD vice. The invitation is rescinded when the theatre comes under attack shortly before the engagement.

On the day the movie opens at the Hollywood theatre, Hollywood Boulevard, a demonstration greets it. Between the hours of 4pm and 9pm, approximately seventy pickets line the building, chanting, carrying signs and distributing flyers. The demonstration comprises members of the women’s community and other organizations, such as the AFAA, Latin America and Christian groups, all with reason to ban the movie. Among them is a photographer, who dissuades patronage by snapping the pictures of ticket holders entering the theatre. Passers-by are handed copies of a cease and desist letter, deploring ‘the violence and utter disrespect for human life epitomized’ in the movie being screened. ‘Studies have shown that movies like this encourage and foster similar behaviour and acts of atrocities in reality.’ The melee becomes a carnival when the Hollywood theatre manager pops over to the arcade next door to pitch tickets to its clientele.

Inspired by the protest in Hollywood, similar events take place the following day across LA. The Chicano area, San Fernando Valley, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara and Westwood-liberal near UCLA all have cinemas targeted by women’s groups. Some communication takes place among these various factions working different locations, with pickets outside theatres numbering as many as forty. But by and large they operate independently. This soon changes. In Westwood, a boycott of all Mann theatres is instigated by WAVAW, regardless whether they are showing Snuff or not. An estimated one third of the prospective audience is lost among those Mann theatres in the area. Hereafter, WAVAW effectively head the fight against Snuff in LA and elsewhere, becoming the fulcrum for all other groups. At the prestigious Filmex film festival, they orchestrate a leafleting campaign and debate cinema violence against women. The result is a higher profile case against Snuff and many signatures petitioning its immediate withdrawal from theatres.

The campaign to thwart Snuff meets with swift success in Southern California. Theatres withdraw it voluntarily, which happens with Mann and other small theatres, or they are forced to do so with a permanent injunction, brought about by WAVAW, as happens in Orange County. Of the twenty theatres where Snuff opened, none are playing the movie the following week. In LA the cry is victorious: ‘NO MORE “SNUFF”’!

Working in conjunction with other feminist groups, WAVAW distributed newsletters, created fact sheets, form letters, flyers, and guided its members in picketing strategies. Slideshows and slideshow scripts (in English and Spanish), as well as workshops and training packs, were available to the various national chapters of WAVAW and women’s groups in general. The Filmex film festival mentioned above not only provided a good opportunity to reach a wider and more influential audience, with film industry connections, it also gave WAVAW practice in the art of dealing with people and articulating their point in a live environment. Leafleting etiquette and procedure was paramount, and members were primed to deal with potential questions and the sorts of encounters they might face. They were also conscious of certain legal ramifications to their actions (although some members clearly transgressed the law in respect of wilfull damage to property). One target in their fight against Snuff was theatre management. When it came to their attention that sometimes children were present during screenings of Snuff, WAVAW considered pursuing a case of irresponsibility on the part of theatre management. But this was a potential minefield and members were largely warned against such a tactic.[114]

The primary concern of WAVAW was the media portrayal of sex and violence and negative representation of women, specifically in respect to causes that generated much publicity. The first action, Snuff, set the standard for campaigns to follow. A good deal of time was spent collecting information and soliciting organizations and persons who might be sympathetic to a particular concern. Demonstrations and picketing often followed, which led to new links being created. Flyers distributed outside theatres offered key telephone numbers for complaint, including local figures of authority, theatres screening Snuff, and even the office of Allan Shackleton.

Early on, feminist groups established that Snuff wasn’t actual real. In a letter dated March 12, 1976, FWHC notes how the movie is a staged act of murder, then volunteer that snuff films do exist and Snuff ‘is only a fake of the original… rumour has it that if you have enough money — $200.00 — you can see the real thing.’[115] What happens is that Shackleton’s movie provides the catalyst and becomes a justifiable whipping post for a number of societal concerns. ‘This film is not an isolated phenomenon,’ a flyer produced for the DC area illuminates.

Porno-violence comes to us in many forms. Violence for sexual pleasure is portrayed in crime magazines, tv police shows, slick publications such as Playboy and Penthouse. ‘Snuff’ films are a missing link between media violence against women and the violence that women experience daily.

We see our actions in terms of self-defense, with the long-range goal being elimination of acts against women — everywhere.

With Snuff closed down in Southern California, the first action of WAVAW was chalked up as a success and followed almost immediately by another campaign. The target this time was the Rolling Stones’ album Black and Blue, specifically the billboard on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, which featured the image of a bound woman covered in bruises, her legs wide, and the wording ‘I’m ‘Black and Blue’ from the Rolling Stones — and I love it!’ The result was another victory, resulting in the removal of the offensive billboard by Atlantic Records, and, over time, a change in advertising policy at WCI, the parent company of several major record labels.[116]

WAVAW would find varying degrees of success in future campaigns, targeting Playboy, Hustler, rock band WASP, pornographic video games,[117] media representation of the Hillside Strangler case, outré photographic exhibitions, and other contentious movies besides Snuff, such as Lipstick (1976), Tattoo (1981) and Pieces (1983). But to snuff feminists invariably returned. Snuff was, after all, where it started; the ultimate in woman-hating.[118] The result was outrage long after the movie had run its natural course, with the image of the movie synonymous with the act. Snuff begat snuff, a byword whose origins are lost and confused. ‘Snuff is the porn term for killing a woman for sexual pleasure,’ wrote Gloria Steinem in 1977. ‘There is not even the seriousness of a word like murder.’[119]

Laura Lederer conducts an interview with a former nude model, a pseudonymous ‘Jane Jones’. Jones is said to have entered the business in 1967 and retired in 1970. ‘Were there ‘snuff’ films back then?’ asks Lederer. The reply:

I heard about snuff films right after I stopped modelling. Stories came down the grapevine. One agency in Los Angeles sent a woman out on an assignment with a man who killed her and took pictures of how he tortured her. The business just froze. Models went to work with their boyfriends, and some stopped coming in altogether. Everyone was terrified. That didn’t last long though. People need money in order to live. My agency told me that that man had come to them, and that they had checked out his credentials and found they were false. Obviously the murdered woman’s agency didn’t check. We valued ourselves so little.[120]

Factual basis is never volunteered. Use of the word ‘snuff’ is always curt, as if reiteration and definition is validation enough that it exists. Gloria Steinem says, ‘snuff movies in which real women were eviscerated and finally killed have been driven underground (in part because the graves of many murdered women were discovered around the shack of one filmmaker).’[121] Associating snuff with right-wing factions also lends credence to the argument. Charlotte Bunch argues:

If a Ku Klux Klansman says that he gets off at the sight of a lynching or a burning cross, do we therefore label his reaction as sexual rather than violent or racist? Do we ‘tolerate’ it simply as ‘freedom of sexual expression’? I hope not. Yet that is precisely what ‘snuff’ and thousands of other forms of pornography do regularly to women.[122]

Much the same, Steinem wants to ‘treat even friends and family members who support [pornography] as seriously as we would treat someone who supported and enjoyed Nazi literature or the teachings of the Klan’.[123]

In The Age of Sex Crime (The Women’s Press, 1988), award winning author Jane Caputi tackles serial sex murder from the vantage of gender and cultural politics. At one point she reproduces a passage from another book, which she describes as ‘a book on sex crime written largely for police investigators’:

One large law enforcement agency now has in its possession a new film reportedly made in a foreign country that looks extremely realistic. The death scene shows a nude woman lifted several feet off the ground by ropes tied to her wrists. While suspended, her intestines are ripped out through her vagina and then she hangs there bleeding to death while another woman dances underneath her, drinking some of the blood that flows out. Whether or not this is a real snuff film, it is important to keep in mind the kind of sadistic personality that will be buying copies of this film.[124]

Caputi’s source for the quote is Sex, Motivation, and the Criminal Offender (Charles C. Thomas 1980), by Morneau and Rockwell. The paragraph immediately preceding the one Caputi quotes, she ignores. It reads:

We know of no case of a person actually being killed in this manner [for a snuff film] in the United States. Where one allegation was made, a search failed to locate bodies, so it appears the scene showing death, although realistic, was the work of a skilled photographer and film editor.

The scene described may be a compounded distortion of the primitive abortion sequence in Cannibal Holocaust, which depicts a pregnant woman suspended by her wrists while another woman tears out the foetus and bites through the umbilical cord. Caputi’s response to the passage is fairly typical of her book, and this line of feminist debate in general. ‘Amidst the incomprehensibility of the horror itself,’ writes Caputi, ‘is yet another incomprehensible factor. There seems to be no sure way to discern on film what is a faked murder and what is a real one, which is a ‘symbolic annihilation’ and which is an actual one.’ It is indeed problematic. By Caputi’s own definition, John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor (1985), a comedy drama starring Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner, is ‘a snuff movie for intellectuals and film connoisseurs’.

There are no divisions in Only Words (Harvard University Press, 1993). Here feminist lawyer and theorist Catharine MacKinnon argues that pornography is a tangible force and it equals murder. The consumer masturbates to pornography, she states, ‘replays it in his head and onto the bodies of women he encounters or has sex with, lives it out on the women and children around him. Are the victims of snuff films fantasised to death?’

The horror fantasy behind all of this apprehension and fear is manifest in the closing pages of Susan G. Cole’s book, Pornography and the Sex Crisis (Amantia, 1989). Cole establishes that ‘snuff films are advertised as showing the actual murder of women; this is meant to be the ultimate sexual turn-on.’ She continues, ‘Although the original film (Snuff) was believed to be a hoax, the term still applies to the genre, and there is no evidence that snuff films do not exist.’ (Our emphasis.)

In Pornography (Perigree, 1981), Andrea Dworkin writes that, in 1975, organized crime provided the porn industry with snuff films. In Child Pornography: An Investigation (Methuen, 1990), Tim Tate states that snuff films were around in the 1940s. We find more ambiguous pieces to the puzzle with Roy Eskapa, who claims that these films ‘fetch thousands of dollars apiece on the black market once they reach their destination’.[125] Michael Newton notes that a private screening may cost ‘$200 a head’,[126] whereas Susan Davidson pegs the price at ‘$750 per rental, and up to $10,000 each to purchase’.[127] Of course, revelations like these are rarely, if ever, expanded upon. The regularity with which these stories crop up and the paucity of details is consistent with the apocryphal tale, those morbidly entertaining tales of unlikely truths: Vanishing hitchhikers, Kentucky fried cats, poison dresses, movie stars and their gerbils, and so on.

GODS OF DEATH

‘Around the world, behind closed doors, operates an ultra secret business of sex and death.’ This statement appears on the jacket of Gods of Death, a book published by Simon & Shuster in 1997. The author Yaron Svoray claims to been inspired to write Gods of Death after infiltrating the neo-Nazi underground in Germany (which had been the subject of his earlier book, In Hitler’s Shadow) and witnessing a film that has haunted him since. Screened to a select audience of far right extremists, the film is said to have featured the rape and murder of a little girl. Years later, he is still waking at night to its terrible image and the only way he feels he might exercise the demon is by proving to the world the existence of snuff films. Gods of Death is the result.

Svoray’s book is the only documented instance of a journalist stating categorically for the record that they have seen a snuff film. And yet it reads every inch like a dime novel. It abounds in cliché and cliffhangers, with a preamble that imbues little confidence in the reader. The story, we are informed from the outset, ‘is essentially a true one.’ What’s more, details in the investigation have been changed for the sake of a ‘cohesive narrative’.

The opening leg of Svoray’s search for snuff films takes the former paratrooper and detective to Bangkok, where he cashes in a favour with an old acquaintance so that he might meet his first lead, a dodgy geezer running a bar. But the trail goes nowhere and Svoray returns to his home in Israel where he next meets a Russian arms dealer who has a chain of porn shops.[128] Svoray then travels to Germany, to England, from one country to the next with nothing to show but a string of empty promises and a wife and family pleading for him to return home.

But Danger is Yaron Svoray’s middle name, and he is not averse to the hard man act. In an attempt to infiltrate the snuff underground, Svoray poses first as a buyer of snuff movies and, when that doesn’t work, as a dealer. Most everyone he speaks with claims to be able to get hold of such films, or can put him in touch with somebody who can. Svoray is under no illusion that the people with whom he is dealing are lowlife scum, willing to do and say anything for a quick buck. Still, he accepts all their false promises at face value and considers himself on the right track. There is, he believes, an industry peddling murder on tape for sexual gratification.

Svoray eventually locates the venue where a screening of a snuff film is going to take place. He pays an exorbitant entrance fee ($1,500) and joins the select audience of middle aged males to watch a film of two men cutting a woman’s throat while she is being fucked. But Svoray needs more, he needs a physical copy of a snuff film.

Gods of Death features a cavalcade of gangsters and murders, clandestine meetings and even a sting on a Mr Big, which, all told, appear more grounded in the world of fantasy than they do reality. Svoray talks of film rights during the course of the book and contemplates at one point who might best portray him on the big screen. With the reader’s credulity and patience stretched pretty thin, the book then suddenly takes an unexpected turn when Svoray enlists the help of superstar actor Robert DeNiro.

When the opportunity arises — as we know it must — and Svoray is in a position to buy a snuff film, the asking price of $50,000 puts it completely out of his reach. However, a fortuitous set of circumstances enables Svoray to call on DeNiro for help, who agrees to pose as the rich client for whom Svoray claims to be working. The plan is that the actor will watch the film and go public that snuff films exist. With DeNiro’s name attached, the world press would fall all over the story. But things don’t go to plan. Svoray claims he and DeNiro attended a private screening of a snuff film, and yet DeNiro has failed to make the announcement. Svoray is robbed at every turn by a truth forever in shadow.

DeNiro’s name lends credibility to the story. But the actor, whose aversion to publicity is almost as legendary as his film performances, has never spoken on Gods of Death or about snuff movies. Svoray claims the actor’s interest arose from a script he was reading that dealt with the subject of snuff,[129] paying Svoray $10,000 to cover his expenses. The private screening, which DeNiro supposedly attended with a friend, is said to have taken place in a Parisian hotel room in 1995. DeNiro confides to Svoray that he believes the killing is genuine and asks whether Svoray has access to more snuff films. When Svoray says no, the actor jumps back on a plane for New York. In a press release for Gods of Death, Svoray makes plain his dismay at the reaction of DeNiro and friend to the screening:

They asked questions, but not the right ones. They didn’t ask how what they had seen could’ve been allowed to happen, or what they could do about it… Although I knew Robert and his friend had been affected by what they had seen, they were still Hollywood. They were interested in motivation… the psychology of what we had done. They did not seem interested in the fact that they had just witnessed murder.

Gods of Death follows closely on the heels of Svoray’s other book, In Hitler’s Shadow. Co-written with Nick Taylor and published in 1995, this work describes an earlier adventure for Svoray, which pits him against a rising tide of fascism and hate crime in Germany. Gods of Death and In Hitler’s Shadow are crafted much the same, with a narrative and dramatic progression that are interchangeable. Posing as Ron Furey, an Australian journalist sympathetic to their cause, Svoray infiltrates various neo-Nazi groups in an attempt to deny them the spokesperson that might unify the fascists and put fascism into the mainstream political arena. Svoray may not be working alongside Robert DeNiro in this instance, but he does have the backing and credibility of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who provide cover for the investigation as well as a bogus millionaire front man.

It is early in the book when Svoray (as Furey) encounters his first snuff film. Having made the acquaintance and won the trust of a man called Charlie Müller, a Nazi sympathiser and film buff, Svoray is taken one night to an office complex in Frankfurt where a screening is scheduled — of what he doesn’t yet know. Price of entry is 1,000 deutschmarks. The clientele aren’t the well dressed professionals that Svoray encounters later in Gods of Death, but for the most part are dressed in quasi military garb, some with armbands bearing fascist insignia. Svoray observes from the back of the room as the men take their seats in high backed chairs facing a screen, ready with tissues. A passage from Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries is the musical prelude. Then follows the film, which is scratchy and black and white. There are no titles or soundtrack, but Svoray pins the location as ‘someplace in the South American desert’. It depicts masked men in motorcycle jackets sodomising and raping a little girl, and then killing her. Tagged onto the end of the film are scenes from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Adolf Hitler is shown delivering a fervent speech before an adoring crowd, while images of the Nazi flag elicit approval from the present audience. Müller informs Svoray that the snuff film is on loan for one night only. He boasts that he is responsible for the tagged on end scenes from Triumph of the Will, which he says is his favourite film.

In Hitler’s Shadow became the subject of a CNN documentary and was also adapted into an HBO movie, The Infiltrator (1995). The snuff film sequence here follows closely the one described in the book, albeit changing the means by which Svoray arrives at it and other small details.[130] Svoray also spent some time peddling Gods of Death to Hollywood prior to its publication. Indeed, film director Joel Schumacher obviously got wind of it and makes reference to Svoray in a discussion about his own movie 8MM, an otherwise unrelated snuff detective story starring Nicolas Cage. Schumacher begins by talking about the research undertaken by 8MM writer Andrew Kevin Walker. Walker

worked in a video store for part of his youth, and he says he’s never seen one [a snuff film]. I’ve never seen one, don’t want to ever see one, and hope they don’t exist. There is a book that James Gandolfini gave me just before shooting began called Gods of Death. It was written by an Israeli named Yaron Svoray, who exposed that neo-Nazi ring in Berlin. In Gods of Death, he decided to go out and see if there was actually such a thing as snuff, and in it, claims to have seen things that are much worse than you could ever dream. He claims that there’s a group of people who get young soldiers in Bosnia, or wherever there’s wars and atrocities, to take a camera and film when they’re raping and killing people. There’s a market for that.[131]

As snuff film detectives go, one could certainly do worse than Yaron Svoray. But readers would be better served by, say, Blossom and In La-La Land We Trust, works of fiction with no aspiration to get to the ‘truth.’

Not disimilar to Svoray’s quest for the snuff film and pre-dating it by four years is another book, Hoe Kom Ik Van De Grond? (How Do I Get Off the Ground?) (Loempia, 1993), said to be a guide to the porn shops and sex clubs of Belgium. Its author, Jean-Pierre van Rossem, a controversial Belgian scholar and socialite, relates how he gained the trust of certain sex shop owners by requesting increasingly extreme material. After receiving paedophile magazines and films he offers good money in an attempt to access something harder, notably a video in which a girl is killed. Within a week van Rossem claims to have been provided with such a tape at a cost of €5,000.

The tape showed how the girl was brought into an empty room by a man with a hood over his head. She was handcuffed… The man cut the clothes from her body with a knife. She had scratches and bruises all over her body. He hit her in the face with his hand. After that she was thrown to the ground by the same man and anally raped. When he was done with this, he threw the girl against a wall and began to beat and kick her over her whole body. When she slid to the ground, he went to stand with one foot on all her limbs and broke with both hands her arms and legs. Then for some time he slowly worked on her with a knife, and stabbed her 32 times in total, mainly in the chest and abdomen. Finally, he cut her throat, again slowly. After that, he slowly labored on the girls’ [sic] body, from the feet to her head, with great attention to the bloody details. It was perfectly clear that the girl was already dead by then. The whole movie had lasted 57 minutes and had not been edited.[132]

Possessing the videotape still doesn’t satisfy van Rossem. He next requests to be in attendance at the making of a snuff movie, and, after some consideration and a background check, is granted his wish. The price is €45,000 to watch, while €75,000 will permit him to engage in the raping and killing. At this point van Rossem goes no further and claims he deposited his accumulated evidence (presumably including the snuff video) in the mailbox of the Supreme Court of Breda, Netherlands. And then… nothing happens. Much like Svoray’s dramatic account, the evidence (if ever it existed) is one day gone. A final visit for van Rossem to the snuff videocassette supplier reveals that the shop proprietor has changed and the shop does not deal in illegal material.[133]

Let’s play Devil’s Advocate and imagine that Rossem’s tale of snuff is true. Does he stop to think that the videocassette featuring the torture-murder of a little girl might only come into existence because of his request? In other words, does van Rossem effectively commission a hit on a child by fronting the money in the first place?

Some commentators are sceptical of van Rossem. ‘His narrative of the whole adventure,’ states author Joël van der Reijden, ‘reads like a somewhat more hardcore version of the 1999 movie 8MM with Nicolas Cage.’ As we have seen, 8MM is the movie to have drawn inspiration in part from another questionable ‘true-life’ action adventure yarn, Gods of Death by Yaron Svoray. Collectively, this little triptych of snuff for the 1990s — Svoray, van Rossem, and 8MM — represents not merely the propagation of a myth, but a wholesale refurbishment of it. The self serving motivations of Jean-Pierre van Rossem and Yaron Svoray are barely removed from the fundraising campaigns of CDL a decade and a half previous, if a lot less industrious. Their goal it appears is one of personal glory and a stab at the Hollywood big time. In return, Schumacher’s 8MM feeds to us their dark and troubling dream.

JEW KIDDIE SNUFF PORN

The interception of materials by British Customs in September 2000 resulted in a sting operation in Russia. A car mechanic by the name of Dmitri Vladimirovich Kuznetsov was arrested in a Moscow suburb for producing and distributing child porn videos. The films were produced in Kuznetsov’s flat and the finished videos were sold to customers around the world. Reports stated that children were lured from orphanages and subjected to appalling sexual cruelty in the videos. It was claimed that 3,000 videos shipped to clients in Italy were seized by Italian police. Some of these, it was alleged, showed scenes of children being raped and murdered, and purportedly categorised by Kuznetsov as ‘Necro Pedo’. In Paul Von Stoetzel’s documentary Snuff: a documentary about killing on camera (2008) Mark L Rosen (the film’s producer) discusses the Kuznetsov case. Rosen has no information beyond what is reported in the media, but nonetheless clearly believes that children were murdered on camera. He qualifies his commentary with an arch show of emotion. However, a transcript of an alleged email exchange between Kuznetsov and a customer implies that the snuff element was lacking:

“Promise me you’re not ripping me off,” says the Italian.
“Relax, I can assure you this one really dies,” the Russian responds.
“The last time I paid and I didn’t get what I wanted.”
“What do you want?”
“To see them die.”[134]

The response of the buyer in the above exchange clearly indicates that earlier video acquisitions hadn’t contained snuff. The disgruntled client, however, is hardly at liberty to inform the authorities about this shortcoming. Equally, it is unlikely that the supplier, kiddie porn peddler Kuznetsov, would have felt any obligation to make good on the deal, offering customer satisfaction and slaughtering a child on camera at the request of an anonymous punter. The fact that accomplices of Kuznetsov reputedly served brief prison sentences, while Kuznetsov himself was given an amnesty and early release, suggests that no actual murders took place.

The story was embroidered again for a wholly different agenda, courtesy of holocaust denier James Stenzel, who reported it on his ‘Jew Watch’ website under the inflammatory headline:

Jewish Gangsters Raped, Killed Children As Young As 2 On Film.
jewish child porn / snuff film ring discovered.

Stenzel’s modification of the story continues (sic throughout):

Subject: Jew Kiddie Snuff Porn
Date: Fri, Oct 13, 2000, 12:24am
Italian and Russian Police Brake Up Child Snuff Porn Ring
Mon Oct 9 17:39:53 2000

Rome, Italy – Italian and Russian police, working together, broke up a ring of Jewish gangsters who had been involved in the manufacture of child rape and snuff pornography.

Three Russian Jews and eight Italian Jews were arrested after police discovered they had been kidnapping non-Jewish children between the ages of two and five years old from Russian orphanges, raping the children, and then murdering them on film. Mostly non-Jewish customers, including 1700 nationwide, 600 in Italy, and unknown number in the United States, paid as much as $20,000 per film to watch little children being raped and murdered.[135]

How Stenzel managed to discover the religious ethnicity of the arrested men, the supposedly deceased orphans and the unnamed clients is not explained.

More of the same was offered by conspiracy theorist Texe Marrs. Marrs was of the opinion that Jewish officials had gone ‘berserk’ following broadcast on prime time Italian television of ‘the arrests of the snuff film perverts’. Amid claims of blood libel, these officials demanded that ‘the Jewish elite who sat on the board of directors of the Italian TV network punish those responsible for allowing this news to surface’. According to Marrs, ‘it was done. The TV executives were fired.’[136]

Half-baked, outlandish and plain scary opinion isn’t the sole reserve of idiosyncratic commentators like Texe Marrs and James Stenzel. Respected British writer Brian Masters, author of Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen (Jonathan Cape, 1985) and The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993), altogether ‘best known for his biographies of mass murderers’ (Wikipedia), was being interviewed by John Lyttle for the Independent. It was May 7, 1992, the day trading standards officers made public their biggest and most productive sweep of unclassified and pirate videocassettes. Masters stopped Lyttle in his tracks to comment that the radio had just announced the seizure of hundreds of snuff movies. “You want to know why these things are so popular?” said Masters. “Because there are a lot of sick people out there.”

As so often is the case, alarmist media stories become a catchment for a whole variety of fears. Reports, such as those above, are augmented by factions sometimes hypocritical and bent on exercising agendas of their own. Thus a massive operation involving a haul of unclassified videocassettes — the altogether innocuous ‘video nasties’ — is legitimized by a threat far deeper that is said to involve snuff films. In the case of Dmitri Vladimirovich Kuznetsov, child pornography alone isn’t crime enough and it becomes embroiled soon enough in murder and the mantle of anti-Semitism.

Much of what has been witnessed in this chapter is driven by the omnipresent spectre of these greater evils. Whether SRA, the New World Order,[137] the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,[138] or class and culture divide, the threat remains the other; those ‘sick people out there’. The counterculture got it in the neck when Charles Manson was made an illegitimate figurehead of hippies and the young idea. The Jewish people still answer to an inflammatory fiction created more than a century ago. Topical at the time of writing is Operation Yewtree. Following the death of British television legend Jimmy Savile rumours and allegations arose that he was a predatory sex offender. His status, it was said, offered a form of protection and he was able to abuse adults and children with impunity. An ITV documentary Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, aired on October 2, 2012, prompted a flood of confirmations from other alleged victims of Savile. On October 9 the Metropolitan Police announced they were to set up Operation Yewtree in order to investigate these claims against Savile. As Yewtree rolled out, a pattern soon emerged. Television and radio personalities, all familiar household names, were suddenly dragged into the media spotlight accused of decades-old sex offences. This coverage as well as requests made by police that victims should come forward caused the accusations to snowball. (Anonymity was provided to the accusers but not to the accused.) Most of those arrested and taken to court were acquitted. As anecdotal evidence mounted and jurors dismissed it, Yewtree was generally perceived as an over-enthusiastic witch hunt. It harkened back to the Satanic panic days of the 1980s and indeed, one accuser stated that Savile was part of a devil worshipping cult and had abused her during an organized Satanic ritual in the basement of Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire. Others have claimed that Savile was involved with Sidney Cooke, notorious British paedophile currently serving a life sentence, and the manufacture of snuff movies. Time will tell but presently evidence is lacking.

1John Aes-Nihil continues to operate a mail order resource for Manson related media and other underground materials. It was formerly known as the Archives of Aesthetic Nihilism.

2Letter from John Aes-Nihil printed in Shock Xpress vol 2 no 4 (Summer 1988).

3Maitland McDonagh, ‘Where’s Charlie?’ CrimeBeat: The Newsmagazine of Crime, March 1993.

4Paul Sieveking, ‘Tales of Madness and Mutilation,’ Fortean Times, April/May 1993.

5Live At San Quentin and KALX Interview 1985. As most Manson albums, both are limited, small label releases (on TPOS and Grey Matter in the case of these two particular albums).

6The Guns N’ Roses album in question, “The Spaghetti Incident?” (1993) is comprised entirely of cover versions. Rose later told the press he believed the song had been written by Beach Boy Dennis Wilson.

7The full title of the book is a bit of a mouthful: JD Russell’s Inside Scoop on the Beautiful People: The Pacesetters of the New Morality. As well as Sharon Tate, other beautiful pacesetters awarded chapters are Aristottle Onassis, Jackie Kennedy and Peter Fonda.

8See chapter one: MANSON IS POWER.

9‘What failure of the human condition could produce a Charlie Manson?’ was the rhetorical question posed by Life (December 19, 1969). At the other end of the spectrum, the counterculture represented by Rolling Stone (June 25, 1970) lay the Biblical affectation pretty thick, calling Manson’s numerous homes and stopping points across LA ‘the Stations of the Cross.’

10Stuart Swezey, publisher’s foreword to John Gilmore and Ron Kenner’s Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and The Family.

11Possibly Amery is making a veiled reference to current militant activism in Germany, such as the Baader Meinhof Gang. Furch’s fictitious remake of the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata in Confessions of a Blue Movie Star also dabbles in proletarian revolution.

12In his book, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, David A Szulkin states that this material consists of out-takes that do not appear in any existing version of Craven’s movie. The presence of this footage is the reason some sources credit Craven with the phoney interview. In actual fact, The Last House of the Left and Confessions of a Blue Movie Star shared the same distributor in Germany (Atlas International), which might suggest how the footage was obtained in the first place. It is also worth noting that the footage plays out pretty quickly, being snippets of only a few seconds duration. By way of compensation, a recent re-release of Confessions of a Blue Movie Star (possibly a bootleg) slowed these segments down.

13The interviewee is evidently making reference to Africa Addio and Savage Man…Savage Beast. (See reviews in chapter five.) Prior to the interview, a voice-over imparts a typically dithering mondo style introduction: “The exhibition of these film clips should not be construed to suggest or deny the existence of any act or intent on the part of the people involved which might amount to the commission of a crime.”

14Not all the woodcuts produced in this era (1600–1867) were bloody, but subjects were populist and, according to Carol Gnojewski & Davis Bromwell in Decadence: 300 Years of Japanese Fetish Art, ‘often based on Edo’s lowest characters such as thieves and murderers’. Example: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s series 28 Famous Murders (1867); ‘The sensationalism of bondage and murder made for grisly yet best selling printmaking subjects.’

15Otherwise the plot of Mu zan e is a re-run of Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap, where a television reporter is also drawn to investigate a snuff film, becoming then the next victim. See chapter three: DEFINING THE BAD GUYS.

16For the movie adaptation of Ellis’ novel, see chapter three: DEFINING THE BAD GUYS.

17Johann Hari, ‘Porn, but not as we know it,’ Independent online, August 8, 2008.

18See also appendix: guro.

19Jay Lynch, ‘The Facts About the Snuff-Film Rumors: The Body Count is Still Zero.’ Oui, July 1976. From what can be deduced, the episodes appear to be The Rookies: ‘Blue, Movie, Blue Death’ (air date February 24, 1976) and Police Story: ‘Open City’ (March 12, 1976). The episode summary for the latter states, ‘The filming of actual murders becomes a new development in the pornography business.’

20Another cop show utilizing the theme is Miami Vice. See chapter three: MAD AND UNSCRUPULOUS ARTISTS.

21Amos Vogel, introduction, Film as a Subversive Art.

22Walkley was reported in the press as being the chairman of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, which is incorrect.

23Leslie Bailey, imprisoned for the strangulation murder of Barry Lewis, was found strangled himself in his prison cell in October 1993.

24The London Standard (October 25, 1984).

25Pazder and Smith subsequently married. They earned over $300,000 in advance royalties from the title but failed to gain further money from a film deal which was foiled due to the threat of legal action from Smith’s father, outraged over the libellous content.

26Clips of Charles Manson, subject of an earlier Riviera special, perhaps his most famous one, are shoe-horned into ‘Devil Worship — Exposing Satan’s Underground.’ Riviera calls Manson “today’s top satanic celebrity”.

27Prior to his death in 2011 Ted Gunderson was a familiar face in the field of conspiracy theories. As well as promoting Ritual Abuse he endorsed the notion of chemtrails (the use of commercial aircraft jet exhaust to poison populations) and the US government being responsible for the Oklahoma bombing and 9/11. He died of cancer at age eighty-two. Many of his supporters believed he had been ‘silenced’.

28Aquino himself has since been on the receiving end of accusations of SRA. Despite the charge leading nowhere, Internet conspiracy chat continues to defame Aquino to this day.

29TLC, formerly The Learning Channel, is responsible for other controversial programmes, such as Toddlers & Tiaras, a long-running series that features child beauty contests.

30See Faces of Death and Faces of Death IV film reviews in chapter five.

31A couple of snuff movie tip-offs in the original research for this book back in the early nineties led no further than videocassettes of Faces of Death, the purported ‘real thing’ being in actuality the shockumentary by John Alan Schwartz.

32A ‘rough edited copy’ of Conspiracy of Silence is available on YouTube, having been ‘sent anonymously to Nebraska Attorney John DeCamp one year after all copies supposedly were destroyed!’ according to the closing scrawl.

33Conspiracy of Silence. Yorkshire Television.

34The only known source of Boner’s paranoid remarks regarding The Franklin Cover-Up is an updated and revised edition of the very same book.

35Bonacci claims the date is September 1985 in his video interview with Gary Caradori.

36The Franklin Cover-Up.

37Bonacci tells Caradori the film producer was ‘Italian’ but gives no name.

38Paul A. Bonacci vs. Lawrence E. King. United States District Court for the District of Nebraska. February 5, 1999.

39Various sources link both Ted Gunderson and John DeCamp to LaRouche and militia and patriot groups.

40Ironically, years later, the Reverend James Bevel was convicted of having sexual intercourse with his daughter when she was twelve-years-old and jailed for fifteen years in 2008, shortly before his death.

41Anton Chaitkin is a founding member of the LaRouche movement. Executive Intelligence Review is Lyndon Larouche’s publishing house.

42A further embellishment for the incongruous saga arose when self-proclaimed victims identified Dr Green/Greenbaum as being none other than SS officer and physician Josef Mengele.

43The Greenbaum Speech. FMS Foundation Newsletter. Vol 2 No. 9 (October 1, 1993).

44A note on the BFI film and television database states that a court injunction stopped broadcast. If this was ever the case, the injunction was evidently lifted.

45The reporter in the programme is Martin Bashir. He would himself court controversy years later in another documentary, Living with Michael Jackson (2003).

46First Transmission is made up of several videos, with nods to Antony Balch’s collaborations with William Burroughs and Hermann Nitsch’s actionist events. It opens with a monologue from the respected filmmaker Derek Jarman, who is introduced as a spokesman for Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth.

47Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, ‘The Process is The Product,’ Reality Sandwich website.

48July 24, 1988.

49See appendix: MEXICAN DOCTOR.

50Boyd’s programme is not the first time Dispatches has met with criticism. ‘The Committee’, an episode aired in October 1991, was heralded as the ‘scoop of the year’, purporting to reveal the existence of an official conspiracy to murder republicans in Northern Ireland. In order to protect the identity of ‘Source A’, the anonymous central witness in the film, Channel 4 were prepared to go to court. However, in May 1993, Source A, the individual whose identity the station sought to protect, claimed the programme to be a hoax and that he was promised £5,000 to recite a prepared script.

51Greater Manchester Police in the early nineties travelled across the county border to Yorkshire for an informal (and hitherto undocumented) meeting with occult expert Stephen Sennitt for a balanced view of occult practise, coming away, in Sennitt’s opinion, a lot more sympathetic to the scene. (Stephen Sennitt conversation with the authors.)

52For the full research findings see Professor J.S. La Fontaine, The Extent and Nature of Organized Ritual Abuse. HMSO, 1994.

53Clare Wilson, ‘Danger of “false” memories return,’ New Scientist, October 10, 2015.

54Richard Noll, ‘When Psychiatry Battled the Devil,’ Psychiatry Times website. Accessed January 2014.

55‘When Psychiatry Battled the Devil’ was first published online at Psychiatry Times on December 6, 2013. It was taken down a week later, and the scheduled publication in the print edition of the magazine unceremoniously dropped. The online article later reappeared. Further details and some of the correspondence between Noll and the publisher (who cite ‘potential liability issues’ as one reason for the article’s disappearance) can be found in a post on the Gary Greenberg Blog dated December 30, 2013.

56The first edition of Killer Fiction was published by Media Queen Enterprises and available mail order only. It became widely available when published as a special edition by Feral House in 1997. Media Queen Enterprises was Sondra London, who had dated Schaefer in high school and established contact again following his incarceration. Schaefer wrote a number of the stories in the book for London, and she later worked with other serial killers to help bring their stories into print. The association led some to comment that London was the queen of serial killer groupies.

57Not to be confused with ’Gator Bait, a 1974 thriller directed by Beverly and Ferd Sebastian, starring Claudia Jennings.

58Quote on the jacket of the 1997 Feral House edition of Killer Fiction.

59Email to the authors from David Nolte, dated November 6, 2012.

60Ibid

61Email to the authors from Michael Helms, dated November 5, 2012.

62The symbol is just one part of the Zodiac case that has been the subject of conjecture over the years. It helped some observers formulate a link with satanism, and Anton LaVey’s name crops up a number of times in the investigation: Not as a legitimate suspect, more in terms of speculation and ideas. It is interesting, however, that some of the killer’s favourite movies, notably classics like The Most Dangerous Game, were also favourites of LaVey’s. In time the symbol would be appropriated by white supremacists, and some have drawn a comparison between the Zodiac’s disguise, a hood and loose fitting top, with the outfit worn by the Ku Klux Klan.

63Our emphasis.

64Letter to the authors dated May, 27, 1993.

65Another book on the case, pre-dating Olsen, is by Joel Norris. This book came complete with an audiocassette boasting ‘the live confessions of Arthur Shawcross and his hideous crimes!’ Somewhat surprisingly, given the extent of the Shawcross criminal legacy, it was a very short tape.

66See chapter seven: NECROBABES AND THE RISE OF DEATH PORN.

67It later transpired that Balazs had removed a dozen videotapes from the premises the day before. But they were found to contain no material of a criminal nature.

68The videos, in part, aired on television in news bulletins when the case was current, and are now viewable on the Internet. They are known as the M-Ladies tapes or Miranda Tapes, the name deriving from John Fowles’ novel The Collector. Lake was inspired by the premise of the classic book and its central character, the victim Miranda.

69The body count is speculatively higher.

70Blow by blow details of the abuse of each of the girls suffered at the hands of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, evidently drawn from the videotapes themselves, can be found in the book Lethal Marriage (Ballantine, 1996) by reporter Nick Pron. Published in 1996, several months after Bernardo’s trial and conviction, the book is full of salacious incident but omits some pertinent facts that wouldn’t come to light until later. Pron’s text is sometimes jarring in its insensitivity, as in the brutalisation of Lesley Mahaffy, which is described in graphic detail before jumping abruptly to Lesley’s mother and the discovery that her daughter is missing.

71The Canadian courts ordered a media blackout for the trial of Karla Homolka, lest coverage influence the jurors. Of course such a decision held no sway outside of Canada, and news of the case filtered back through to Canadians via Internet newsgroups and the world press. For a period, Canadian customs were requesting that travellers declare newspapers and confiscated any being brought into the country. The ban became a newsworthy item in itself.

72The rumour was manufactured by Luka Magnotta. See chapter ten: ONE LUNATIC ONE ICEPICK.

73Autopsy 8: Dead Giveaway. Segment entitled ‘Pure Evil: The Story of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. 2002.’

74Some sources state that Williams and Bernardo were friends because they both attended University of Toronto Scarborough campus and graduated in 1987.

75The film Snuff to which the interviewee refers is undoubtedly the Allan Shackleton motion picture. It received a patchy release on videocassette in the UK in 1982, ending up a ‘video nasty’. See chapter one and also later this chapter: NEO-TOKYO IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE.

76Published by Headline in 1996, An Evil Love was itself surrounded by controversy. It had been commissioned by Peter Harris, Official Solicitor to the Supreme Court, who was looking after the financial interests of the five West children following the death of their father. Through Harris, Wansell had access to documents, statements, taped interviews and West’s own handwritten memoirs. Reading Wansell’s preface it would seem that financial gain did not play a part in writing the book; its value instead, according to Wansell, a balanced portrait of dad for the West children.

77There was commercial porn in the video haul, too. The most outrageous of this, according to Wansell, depicted a woman being fed mice into her vagina through a plastic tube. This scene corresponds with the notorious H.O.M Productions/Videorama mail order release, Kilroy was Here.

78Following examination by police a large volume of household effects were destroyed in controlled conditions to prevent souvenir hunters acquiring them. This extended to the Cromwell Street house itself, which was demolished and its bricks incinerated. Some items evidently escaped detection, however. The Crime Through Time museum in Littledean, Gloucester, for instance, has within its display cabinets a corset belonging to Rose West and a pair of wellington boots once belonging to Fred.

79See also chapter seven: THE GUINEA PIG SERIES.

80See The Killing of America film review in chapter five.

81British forensics reported that the mutilation was performed on a dummy. Arguably not wholly correct. A further statement, however, which determined that the dummy had a superimposed image of a real girl’s face, is strictly not true. More bizarrely, the Daily Mirror deduced that the victim was ‘a clever fake with an actress’ head superimposed on a corpse’.

82The Mourn appears on the 1987 album Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate.

83Guinea Pig 2 isn’t mentioned by title in the interview, but it is clearly this to which Ogre refers when he says the film “came from Japan and consists of this woman walking home from work. She gets chloroformed by the four guys. Up until then you can tell she’s acting. Then suddenly the film cuts to a laboratory and there’s this guy dressed in full Samurai costume”.

84Being a minor, the killer’s identity remains a secret.

85The full story of the Lucie Blackman case is recounted in a fascinating book by Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness.

86Chapter seven: THE GUINEA PIG SERIES.

87The tape was made for Dennis Daniel. It was a birthday party success, following which, claims Balun, it got passed to Film Threat editor Chris Gore, who in turn passed it to Charlie Sheen and/or (director, producer, actor, writer) Adam Rifkin. Balun claims his own original source was someone who copied it from a Japanese laserdisc. (Chas. Balun interview in Shade Rupe’s Dark Stars Rising: Conversations from the Outer Realms.)

88No 6.

89The film tape used for the Skinny Puppy Too Dark Park back projection eventually found its way into fan circles. This was, however, apparently lacking the Guinea Pig 2 footage.

90Chapter seven.

91In 2014, director Stephen Biro released a new Guinea Pig film, the first of mooted series. American Guinea Pig: Bouquet of Guts and Gore (2014) expands on the legend of a found snuff film, while the pathological destruction of two female captives is more extreme than that of the original film and the makeup effects more convincing. Revenue was generated through a highly successful campaign on the fundraiser website, IndieGoGo.

92May 8, 1992.

93The DPP never officially made the list public.

94The Video Recordings Act 1984 (VRA) was introduced to curb the new medium of videocassette. Consequently, all videos under the new bill had to be submitted to the BBFC for classification (much the same as theatrical releases, but a more stringent classification given that videos are for use in the home and might be viewed by children). This killed the ‘nasties,’ although by now they had effectively been driven off the shelves anyway. Coined in 1982, the term ‘video nasties’ does not refer to a generic type of movie, nor does it appear in the bill itself. Its definition in Video Violence and Children (Geoffrey Barlow and Alison Hill), refers to ‘those feature films that contain scenes of such violence and sadism involving either human beings or animals that they would not be granted a certificate by the BBFC for general release for public exhibition in Britain’. It is a problematic definition for a problematic bill. In any case, the term ‘video nasties’ remains with us today, even if unclassified videos do not, having become a media aphorism for screen violence in general.

95It is claimed by the Independent that a man was drugged and murdered on camera in a sequence then edited into a full length feature film (Cannibal Holocaust). Public health chairman, Dr. Mike Hilburn, is quoted as saying he had no doubt the killing was authentic. Alas, the sequence that duped Hilburn involved actor Perry Pirkanen, who was alive and well enough to appear in Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox (1981) the following year. Another newspaper report on the Birmingham raid, this time courtesy the Daily Sport (April 6, 1993), embellished the details in as far as ‘the doomed “actor” is thought to have been drugged before being decapitated and disembowelled with a jungle knife’.

96May 23, 1993.

97January 16, 1995.

98The authors heard from a reporter working at the Manchester Evening News at the time, who claimed to have pointed out prior to publication that use of the word ‘snuff’ in this context was inaccurate. It made no difference.

99Author not cited, ‘Snuff Movies at Broadmoor,’ the Mirror, February 17, 1997.

100For more on video games, see appendix: ryona.

101One of the people to make something of a career in trashing Hollywood was author, film critic and right wing political commentator Michael Medved, whose book Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values signposts cultural wrongs as he sees them. (Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover (1989) is key to his argument about the corrupting influence of Hollywood. But since when has the artsy-craftsy Greenaway, CBE, been a typical representation of Hollywood?) It was the same Michael Medved who, years earlier, made a name for himself championing the concept of bad movies as entertainment. Not without irony, his book The Golden Turkey Awards (co-written with his brother Harry) and others like it, along with festivals and a television show, helped turn a generation onto movie trash.

102Along with illegal recordings, the ‘video nasties’ were perceived as one of the two ‘great evils’ threatening cinema in the early eighties. Anthony Haywood, ‘The Story of the Cinema’s Biggest Threat — Video’ in F. Maurice Speed’s Film Review 1984–5.

103Peter Chippindale, ‘How High Street horror is invading the home,’ the Sunday Times, May 23, 1982.

104Peter Chippindale, ‘Watchdog is unleashed on video horror,’ the Sunday Times, May 30, 1982.

105For more on the UK release of Snuff and ‘video nasties’ hysteria, refer to David Kerekes and David Slater’s See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy.

106Blue Underground evidently intended to release Snuff on both sides of the Atlantic. It was submitted to the BBFC and passed without cuts in May 2003, but the film has yet to see official UK distribution.

107Summing up The Shining in her review for The Leveller (October 29–November 11, 1980), Jane Root said it ‘contributes to the ritualisation of subordination at least as much as snuff movies and sadomasochistic pornography.’ Quoted in dusty rhodes & Sandra McNeill (ed.), Women Against Violence Against Women. The book collects ideas and debates within the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain in the early 1980s.

108Liz Gill, ‘Scandal of the X-Cert Rippers,’ The Sun. This report from the authors’ files is undated, but would seem to be sometime late 1980. Jackie Hill was the most recent victim of the Yorkshire Ripper; Jenny Ronaldson, a nineteen-year-old nurse found dead in the Thames, was not. Ronaldson has, however, recently been linked to multiple rapist-murder couple John Duff and David Mulcahy.

109Chapter one: SNUFF KILLS WOMEN — ZAP IT.

110Author not identified, ‘Comments and Miscellaneous Strategies,’ c. March 1976.

111Some women’s groups in other parts of the country had evidently learned of Snuff already. According to the library database at UCLA, a publication by the name of Big Mama Rag out of Denver, Colorado, had reported on Snuff in its November 1975 issue. This seems unlikely but isn’t altogether impossible (Snuff’s release was still some months away at this point). Other women’s magazines to cover the movie include Her-Self (May 1976), New Women Times (December 1976) and Sister Courage (April 1976). The latter, self-proclaimed Greater Boston’s Independent Feminist News Journal, was not only critical of Snuff, but also the boycotting strategies adopted by some sisters.

112Among them the Outraged Citizens of Fullerton.

113The letter is dated March 12, 1976, and is directed to the LA office of the Argentinian Embassy. It opens with, ‘To those it concerns: We have information of the most regrettable nature to share with you.’ Details of Snuff’s LA premiere follow, along with a definition of terminology. ‘“Snuff is an American slang word referring to books, movies, etc. which depicts men getting sexual gratification from brutalizing women.’ It continues, ‘Snuff is about an Argentine woman who, having participated in sexual acts with several men, is dismembered alive.’ For promoting such atrocity and making money from it, FWHC wish Allan Shackleton not ‘to have a moment’s peace’. The group encourages the embassy to do everything in its power to try to stop him and possibly prosecute him and many others.

114In LA if not elsewhere, the names of the children would first need to be obtained in order to file a complaint against management. But in order to obtain the name of a child, a police officer had to be present to ask the question. Otherwise, the person making the complaint might themselves face a lawsuit.

115FWHC letter to the Argentinean Embassy.

116See ‘June Mazer Lesbian Archives: WAVAW’ at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women blog. UCLA Library Specials Collection.

117Among the video games were two on the Atari 2600 platform from 1982. Custer’s Revenge is a Cowboys and Indians rape game, while players of Beat ’em & Eat ’em scored points for successfully manoeuvring nude women beneath the ejaculate of a masturbating man atop a high-rise. This idea, incidentally, has extended beyond video gaming to become a bona fide Japanese porn reality. See also appendix: ryona.

118Beverly LaBelle, ‘Snuff—The Ultimate in Woman-Hating,’ essay in Laura Lederer (ed.) Take Back the Night.

119Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.

120Laura Lederer (ed.), Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography.

121Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.

122Charlotte Bunch, ‘Lesbianism and Erotica in Pornographic America,’ in Laura Lederer (ed.), Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography.

123Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.

124Robert H. Morneau, Jr. and Robert R. Rockwell. Sex, Motivation, and the Criminal Offender.

125Bizarre Sex (Quartet, 1987).

126Raising Hell: An A-Z of the Occult/Satanic Underworld.

127Davidson quoted in Gordon Thomas’ Enslaved.

128The author ruminates that some of the girls in legit porn look young and are likely not of legal age. One suspects this might become the theme of a future Svoray investigation.

129Perhaps the script was for John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes (2001). In this movie DeNiro plays a cop who is murdered on camera by criminals intent on selling the footage to television. The footage is screened to interested parties in a hotel room, much as it had been in Svoray’s book. See chapter three: FOUND FOOTAGE.

130Unlike the book, the snuff footage in the HBO dramatization is in colour. It may be a minor consideration. But if nothing else the switch to colour serves to implicate snuff as a ‘new’ evil, an extension of the old evil, i.e., Adolf Hitler, who forever remains black and white.

131Alex Simon, ‘Joel Schumacher: Safe In The Dark.’ The Hollywood Interview website, reprinted from Venice Magazine February 1999.

132Beyond the Dutroux Affair. Joël van der Reijden. 2007, quoted from ‘Hoe Kom Ik Van De Grond?’ Jean-Pierre van Rossem, 1993

133Sex shops are liable to play by many rules in order to part punters from their cash. At least one sex shop in London’s Soho district in the nineties, since closed or relocated, kept a well-thumbed notebook under the counter. The notebook contained handwritten lists of ‘specialist’ videos and would be thrust into the hand of a likely rube with a nod and a wink. Subject matter of these films included bestiality, scat, heavy SM, incest and teen. No snuff. Suspicious that it was all a con and that none of these videos actually existed, our source nevertheless opted for the most vile and unlikely title he could find in the pages of the little red book. The guy behind the counter told our man to wait a minute, departed the shop momentarily and reappeared with a videocassette in hand. The freshly scrawled title on the label approximated the thing that had been requested. No surprise, it proved to be a con. The film turned out to be standard off-the-shelf porn bearing no relation to anything suggested by the notebook. The price of the hapless mark’s inquisitiveness was £5 more than any other videocassettes for sale in the shop.

134Jason Burke, ‘British Link To “Snuff” Videos’, the Observer (October 1, 2000). The transcript was published in the Italian newspaper Il Mattino, and is quoted by Rosen. Although reported in the press to be sourced from an email, Rosen claims it to be an MI5 wiretap.

135Source: jewwatch.com

136Source: rense.com

137The New World Order (NWO) is an alleged political system that is ordained to enslave mankind. It is a persistent favoured expression of the conspiracy theorists who warn of a sinister global government that will usurp all democratically elected governments. Proponents of the theory use the one dollar bill as an example of evidence. On its reverse is the Great Seal of the United States which carries the Latin term novus ordo seclorum. It translates as ‘new order of the ages’ which is close enough to augment the NWO conspiracy. Further, political figures sometimes use the term in their speeches, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, George H. W. Bush and Gordon Brown are some examples. Videos of the speeches, edited to alter the context, can be found in amateur conspiracy documentaries that populate the Internet. Generally, those who favour and propagate the premise tend to be of an American right-wing militia type. The term filtered into popular culture when it was used in William Guy Carr’s hugely popular Luciferian conspiracy opus Pawns in the Game, published in 1955. A Google search will now throw up two billion references in less than half a second.

138The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a false document purporting to reveal a Jewish plot to take over political control of the world. It was first published in Russia in 1903 and revealed as a fake seventeen years later when some of the plagiarised source was discovered. Many paragraphs, or protocols, were lifted almost verbatim from nineteenth-century fiction. Though long discredited the Protocols are still published as genuine by contemporary anti-Semites.

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.[1]

TThe decades have failed to arrest the impact of the Shackleton pledge: Filmed in South America where life is cheap. If anything the tagline has greater vibrancy today, thanks to Mexican drug cartels and the seemingly bottomless wish fulfilment fantasy of the media. Truth told, South America is a euphemism, it is everywhere; a neo-geographical location confined to nowhere specific other than the place where the bad things happen. The arrival of the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs shifted the locus once again. ‘This hammer murder,’ posited one commentator online, ‘actually makes the jihad terrorists look like disciplined and principled warriors.’ The stakes, such as they are, were elevated.

It doesn’t take ‘evidence’ to corroborate snuff. Say it often enough, regularly enough, and the myth asserts itself. Suggest once a given location for the manufacture of such films, and that place will be reiterated indefinitely, through racism and xenophobia as well as plagiarism. Much as the Jordan child abuse case in Minnesota, snuff may be attributed to some factual occurrence, but compounded with misinformation and scaremongering it becomes the story, even after the initial accounts of celluloid slayings have been retracted.

Snuff is the ultimate debase, a monster that must exist because it cannot be proven not to exist. And as a monster it must be slain. It is exploited in the fights against Satan, pornography, ‘video nasties’ and whatever other societal bugbear just so happens to be topical. It is a manipulative tool for bureaucrats seeking publicity and for those fundraising bodies rallying for a secular cause (need we be reminded of the additional noughts Susan Davidson anticipated on cheques once she uttered the crucial word snuff?). It is what the public must fear and what these bodies pledge to protect the public from. Namedropping lends much needed credibility to the stories, per Robert DeNiro and his appearance in Gods of Death, the self servicing action adventure investigation by Yaron Svoray. None of these celebrities we might remember has volunteered any authorised comment one way or the other.

Parallels to this methodology of the snuff legend can be seen in the 2003 war on Iraq. The hostilities started on a fabricated myth that implied the West was the target of weapons of mass destruction and as a consequence a mere forty-five-minutes away from death. Not unlike Andrea Dworkin insisting ‘There are snuff films’,[2] Donald Rumsfeld, then United States Secretary of Defense and high profile propagator of the WMD myth, stated of the nonexistent weapons, “We know where they are.” The conflict was decreed a success, an outcome somewhat qualified in the airing of video footage of a humiliated, bedraggled Saddam Hussein having his teeth examined and the subsequent release of shaky, grainy video showing his death by hanging and further glimpses of his broke-neck body in the morgue.[3] History repeated itself with the NATO supported Libyan Revolution in 2011, a brief war that terminated with the release of video footage of a humiliated, blood-soaked Muammar Gaddafi and later mockery of his corpse in the mortuary.

Snuff took root in the sensationalist blending of fact, fiction and rumour that was Ed Sanders’ The Family. Arcane myths enveloped Charles Manson prior to this (we can look to JD Russell and The Beautiful People for much of these). But Sanders’ book brought them all together and awarded the overarching story credibility and cool. The years since have seen a stockpile of falsehoods. One might speculate that the films allegedly shot by the Manson Family in and around the Spahn ranch, should they now be discovered, would not so easily surpass the scenes of horror and cruelty presently available online.

Our gaze is one of complete peripheral vision. New death videos appear one after another on a daily basis, and we look to them fitfully in search of a pattern; be it a point of reference for meaning to a greater plan, perhaps, or at the very least a little something — anything — that leaps out from the mundane. Now and then a film will arrive of such outrage that it galvanizes an audience. Just when shockvideo saturation appears to have been reached, the likes of Nick Berg, Dnipropetrovsk maniacs and Luka Magnotta come along to wake us all up again and reignite some semblance of humanity in our digital rabbit hole.

The reaction videos discussed earlier can be regarded as a collective self awareness in this respect, the manifestation of community in a detached world, like WWII bringing people together. In a culture of sanitised popular entertainment and celebrity nobodies, we can recognize in the shock website a form of antithesis. Some of the camaraderie among regular visitors to one particular shock site lies not in comment or opinion, such as it is, but in images of self harm. Pictures defined as fansigns on Bestgore show deliberate self-inflicted wounds undertaken by visitors to the site. The subjects — male, female, in their late teens or twenty-something — exhibit a deep cut or scars and very often the name of the website itself carved into their flesh: Bestgore or BG for short. These fansigns are an ugly shared experience worthy of further investigation, but suffice it to say for now that some compelling notions pertaining to suffering and empathy spring from these images. For instance, how do self harm visitors perceive themselves and their place in the shock video canon? Are these videos or the sites that host them an influence or do they offer a cathartic outlet? The latter — the cathartic outlet — brings to this chapter a strange, compelling pull, as we shall see.

NEWS FROM THE FUTURE

To listen to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, our Facebook user profile is our life. “People feel an intense ownership over their profile,” Zuckerberg said in his keynote address at the F8 developers conference 2011. “Millions of people have invested a ton of their time in telling the story of their life on their profile,” he continued, “it’s a really personal product. And our job is to make this product the best way for you to share everything that you want, and the best way for you to express who you are.” It is difficult to argue much with Zuckerberg in light of the phenomenon that is social media, although who actually owns your uploaded personal profile data — your life — is debatable.[4]

Thanks to Facebook’s progressive integration with various media apps, everyone can know what everyone else is reading, buying, watching and listening to at any given time. The online edition of a major Chilean newspaper has for years headlined content favoured by its readers. The newsworthiness of a story is dependent on the number of hits it receives. Consequently, world affairs for the readers of Las Últimas Noticias, the newspaper in question, rarely extends beyond the newest reality game show, disposable celebritydom and football. But one need not necessarily look to Chile for news outlets that operate in this way. Most newspapers are now consumed online. In his book The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser writes about channelling the news in this way and how the Internet is effectively shaping the world for us.[5] Rather than opening up a bigger picture, Pariser makes the case that the Internet is having the adverse effect, presenting a world that effectively recognizes and reinforces the things we already know and believe in. While this may help to navigate the mass of information with which we are faced daily, the technology that is personalising the medium is also directing the individual to consume more of what he, she or they believes it wants. News can be delivered using the same fundamental principles of a retail or entertainment site, making recommendations based on that which we have already clicked on, and delineated in the manner of, say, favourite movies and Netflix, drawing us to stories like others we have already seen.

A programme titled The Real Blair Witch screened on Channel 4 in April 2003. Modelled after the successful independent horror movie, this entirely forgettable drama was presented as a documentary about a group of teenagers said to have filmed the kidnap and murder of an acquaintance in Flint, Michigan. The film apparently had led to the arrest of members of the group. But is it real or fake? baited the programme makers. Within the first few minutes of The Real Blair Witch, the sham was obvious: The documentary was not ‘real’, but simply a drama with actors following a script.

Dramas masquerading as fact are hardly new to television,[6] while the ‘found footage’ narrative has become of late a tireless conceit in movies.[7] The Channel 4 schedule on the evening of April 15 was in poor taste, almost de rigueur for the station that introduced Big Brother to Britain as well as countless basement celebrity reality shows. In the slot immediately prior to The Real Blair Witch was The Hunt for Jill Dando’s Killer, a genuine documentary in this instance about the murder of an amiable British television presenter. Effectively, a broadcast about a genuine fatality screened back to back with a mock-up purporting to be genuine (involving a murder committed to film, no less). Such incongruous programming might be construed as a scathing indictment of the media, but this was unlikely the design. It was surely inconsequential at the time, but hindsight allows us to see it now as a portent of an age where news and entertainment have become but a mouse click apart. And often not even that.

As of writing, Facebook does not allow nudity but does allow beheading videos, if they are presented in a ‘legitimate’ context. Such videos may be programmed to play automatically upon visiting the host timeline, whether one opts to watch or not. Atrocity imagery has also infiltrated other social platforms, too. Small talk about a Spielberg movie on Twitter might jump suddenly (as it did one morning in July 2014) to the traumatic sight of dead children in Gaza laid out in a row.

It is difficult to reconcile how genuine news will sit in a future driven by social apps, which is how Facebook foresees the way forward. As a collective individual, we are steered by social media into a preoccupation to share in other peoples’ lives; a world where news coexists with tittle-tattle. Our twenty-first century circle of friends can number in the several hundreds, far in excess of the traditional social construct, which in ‘real life’ may only be a handful. This interaction pools many potentially interesting elements together, from which we may learn any number of great things, but the greater likelihood is that we are inundated with banal small talk, thereby reducing the news pool to stagnancy.

Facebook is our life, and if we don’t join in — that is, conform — it may well spell trouble. According to some researchers, a person not on Facebook is to be viewed with suspicion. Avoiding social media may suggest abnormal qualities in an individual, so we are told. What does the job applicant or the new boyfriend have to hide in online absentia? German magazine Der Taggspiegel takes the theory to an illogical conclusion when it throws homicidal killers into the argument. Mass murderers James ‘Joker’ Holmes and Norwegian militant Anders Behring Breivik, qualifies the article, were not on Facebook and they ended up killing people.[8] This may be true. But the argument falls down when one considers the Facebook presence of Peter Coonan,[9] formerly Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and the fact that Luka Magnotta was a prolific Facebook user with seventy Facebook accounts and perhaps more. Then there is the Slenderman, a totally fictitious character with an active Facebook account that boasts more than one million likes. He’s blamed for a near homicide, more of which later.

The inordinate drive for social optimisation opens the user to all sorts of potential risks. Some are obvious, such as security issues at a base level. Some are not so obvious. It was revealed in 2014 that users of Facebook are often the unwitting guinea pigs of psychological experiments conducted by the company. These tests are run often, according to an inside source, but the case most cited in the media dates back to 2012, when the division known as Facebook Data Science (a name with a disturbingly casual cadence) manipulated the news feeds of nearly 700,000 Facebook users.[10] Increasing the positive or negative posts that featured in a feed, the study found that users would react accordingly and create posts of their own in a more positive or negative vein. One might speculate on the broader implications of such tests, and indeed whether there might be an impact on real world behavioural patterns.

Short of the colourful idea of a full-blown Manchurian candidate, tweaked by Facebook to kill, we have more pertinent ramifications, such as the voyeur born of social media. The intimidating antics of the happy slapper we have already seen.[11] What we might construe as an extension to happy slapping, the phenomenon that never really was, we now have a variety of apps that allow for conduct unbecoming, similar to happy slapping if in a manner more civilised. This is happy slapping without the slapping. Sneaky Shot, Blind Shot and Hidden Camera are just some of the apps that enable camera phones to operate incognito, granting the user the opportunity to snap pictures and video unwitting subjects while appearing predisposed and doing anything but. Of course, this subterfuge isn’t necessary for those individuals who consider the mobile phone part of a culture of impunity, its ubiquitous presence lending itself to behaviour that might otherwise be deemed unacceptable. Take for instance Women Who Eat On Tubes, a Facebook page that encouraged the observation of females snacking on London’s underground and the subterraneous public transport systems of other cities; ‘Then take a picture and post it here.’[12] These types of image are known as ‘creepshots’, predatory pictures taken without the subject’s knowledge or consent. The ersatz photographers of Women Who Eat On Tubes aren’t all creepy men as the backlash insinuated (creepshots in general being a male dominated world); the anonymous posts in this instance came from a cross section of the public that included women.

Location based mobile phone services pinpoint in real-time the whereabouts of people with whom the user may have something in common, or indeed nothing in common whatsoever. One app called Girls Around Me was hurriedly removed from download following much criticism.[13] Law expert Elizabeth Stark described it as a ‘let’s stalk women app’. Linked to Facebook, the Girls Around Me user was given a map revealing the precise location of girls (or women or men) in the near vicinity, with profile details such as relationship status should their Facebook privacy settings allow it.[14] More transparent in its designated purpose is another app, Stalker, while at the other end of the social spectrum are RastiMane, GPS Messenger and Am Here, apps through which the user may opt to share their geo-social information with the world at large.

‘Super log off’ is a buzz phrase among young cyber socialites attributed to the closing down of a Facebook account permanently. It’s not heard often. Breaking the cycle is not easy and evidently frowned upon altogether. As the social sharing app blahgua determines: ‘It’s not who you are, it’s what you share!’

THE EVIL EYE

World events become increasingly a visual mnemonic, a photographic spectacle redefining ‘legitimate’ spectacle. Take for instance 9/11, of people and towers falling out of the sky trapped in the moment. We see metaphors for 9/11 everywhere, whether intentional or otherwise. Even when the inspiration behind an image or series of images is not so well-known, we still draw upon the collective consciousness to help try to define and contain them; the photograph is a gateway to infinity, in and of itself.

‘Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission,’ wrote biologist Richard Dawkins of memes.[15] Dawkins was speaking many years in advance of the World Wide Web, but, having adopted his fundamental concept, the Internet is host to viral patterns all of its own: A picture, phrase or word might spread quickly across cyberspace, leaping from person to person on the backs of image boards and social networks, with few clues as to its precise origin or meaning. This is where we stand with the final chapter of this book.

Photographs of British service men posing with a dead Taliban fighter caused controversy when they appeared recently on the LiveLeak website. A report in the Times[16] said that two members of the No 51 Squadron RAF Regiment had been withdrawn from frontline duty pending an investigation. The photographs consist of individual shots of soldiers kneeling besides a corpse and giving the thumbs up sign in the aftermath of an attack on Camp Bastion, Iraq. Part of the investigation revolves around whether there has been a breach of military rules in taking photographic equipment into an operational environment, and whether taking these pictures constitutes an offence in itself. Pictorial souvenirs from combat zones are commonplace (we have witnessed them elsewhere in this book). But the notion of the photograph and its distribution as both meme and the locus of the crime is worthy of further investigation, the most noteworthy example being the Abu Ghraib archives.

For many years Abu Ghraib in Baghdad was the feared location of a gulag. Here, enemies of Saddam Hussein, or those merely unfortunate, were incarcerated, tortured and murdered. Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, it fell into the hands of the US, who didn’t destroy the prison but put it to similar use.

The Abu Ghraib file contains many hundreds of photographs and videos, revealing the extent of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners — ‘enemy combatants’ — under their US charges. Among those made public, the most disturbing are pictures that look much like holiday snaps, albeit from Hell, showing soldiers smiling and having a good time at the expense of the detainees, who are hooded, naked and abused. (The most arresting image is that of the hooded man in a crucifixion pose, becoming a meme in its own right.) Prisoners at Abu Ghraib were subject to torture, sexual assault and mock execution. In some instances death ensued. But even in death, as evidenced in the photos, there was the indignity of a gloating military presence with the ubiquitous cheery thumbs up salute.

The outcome of the court hearings into Abu Ghraib resulted in some jail sentences but found no single individual guilty of the deaths that had taken place. The most important aspect was the photographic evidence, without which the case would not have come to public attention when it did. These pictures became the crux of the problem, as evidenced in the trial of Army Reserve Spc. Sabrina Harman, convicted on May 16, 2005, for conspiracy, dereliction of duty and maltreatment of subordinates. The young female soldier took, and appeared in, a number of the Abu Ghraib photographs, and as a consequence was something of a poster girl for the scandal. In one picture she cheerily shares the company of a rotting corpse, her demeanour a mockery of wholesomeness. During Harman’s trial, the prosecution drew heavily on the photographs, proposing that they are a mirror on the moment, and called on an expert witness to present an Abu Ghraib photography timeline. Harman’s defence countered that there was more to the Abu Ghraib case than a bunch of photographs.[17]

Photographs had been at the fore of an interview Harman gave to 20/20 in January 2005. Not yet stripped of her rank, the soldier told the ABC reporter that the photographs had been a way to document her concern over what was taking place at Abu Ghraib, although she didn’t feel there was anyone she could turn to about it. She confided that the pictures were not a secret among US personnel at the prison, being used in some instances as computer screen savers. But Harman couldn’t explain why she posed in the pictures. “I was never having fun,” she told the reporter. “You can only be there for so long without having — you go numb. That’s all I can say, is that you completely detach your reality from everything that’s going on.”[18]

These images of abuse have defined Abu Ghraib. The shots of Harman and her consorts are unsettling, not because they appear intimidating, angry or hostile — quite the contrary. They are unsettling because Harman and her cohorts appear oblivious to the chaos of which they are a part. Indeed they are beaming like children anticipating ice cream. The self-same air of detachment appears again, elsewhere. It can be found in film footage of Russian serial killer Anatoly Yelemianovich Slivko, for instance, discussed later, and also in photographs of a murder that took place in a basement apartment in Detroit, Michigan. Here, a man and woman took turns to pose nude with a naked male corpse before proceeding to dismember it and then toying with the body parts. The victim, Robert Beckowitz, was shot dead by James Edward Glover at Beckowitz’s home on July 14, 1982. Also present was Beckowitz’s former lover, Jeannine Lynn Clark. Photographs recovered by police from a camera at the scene were admitted as evidence in court. Stabbed a total of forty-eight times after death, Beckowitz was then cut into fourteen pieces. In one picture, a grinning Clark sits alongside the corpse while holding a hacksaw to its neck. In another, a smiling Glover feeds a severed penis into the dead mouth. Jeannine Clark was found guilty of mutilating a corpse.[19] James Glover confessed to murder. “It’s a big puzzle,” he later said of the incident. Glover, like Sabrina Harman, couldn’t figure his own actions.

Labelled in the press as a three-and-a-half day orgy of drugs and sex, Clark and Glover became known as the ‘Natural Born Losers’ in online discussions of the case. This epithet and the photos themselves went public on the website Dan’s Gallery of the Grotesque sometime in 1999.[20] A precursor to the shock and atrocity sites that are fairly commonplace today, Dan specialized in forensic imagery, including scenes of trauma and war. The Natural Born Losers section comprised an apocryphal summation of the case,[21] followed by twelve of the photographs presented in court along with ‘witty’ captions. (Flip commentary has become common parlance for shock sites.) A shot that appears to show Clark about to decapitate Beckowitz, for instance, carries the remark: ‘…and this cut is for that cheap birthday present you gave me last year.’

The Natural Born Losers reappeared in 1999 on Preg. org, a website that offered atrocity material, political satire and porno cartoons. It also gave a sensible evaluation of the NBL case, as well as a clue that the pictures had perhaps come into the public domain through newsgroups, such as alt.binaries.pictures.grotesque, the social media of old.[22]

Discussing atrocity images of a different sort, but perhaps giving us a flicker of insight into the NBK and Abu Ghraib mindset, newsreel cameraman Ronnie Noble was in Belgium in 1940 documenting its fall to Germany. At one point he is at a roadside filming refugees travelling past when suddenly Messerschmitt appear overhead and open fire. The young Noble considers the carnage a ‘scoop’. The following day he is torn and sickened. But nonetheless his place in helping the poor souls, he ultimately deduces, has been in documenting the atrocities that befall them.[23] The dilemma is more profound for photojournalists Creg Marinovich and João Silva many years later, further illuminating the confusion of those whose job it is to witness and record atrocities.[24] In famine and war ravaged Uganda in the nineties, a photographer colleague of theirs has something of a moral meltdown. The catalyst is a small child that looks like he may die. The photographer in question, a veteran accustomed to atrocity, does nothing to help the child but takes a photograph that ultimately wins him prestige and an award. Presently, however, he fears that the episode has been a test of his humanity and he has failed it miserably. He thinks the child is dead because he did nothing to help. The conundrum leads the other photographers to ponder some uncomfortable questions, which eventually lead them to reassess the role they play. The outcome is a compromise on future shots: A self-imposed sixty-second window whenever faced with wounded civilians, whereby they do their job and then step in to provide assistance. It’s a nice idea. But the profession of photographer is not that of a medic or peace envoy. In the end, state Marinovich and Silva, it is all about taking good pictures.

EATERS OF SOUL

A comment appeared online recently that queried the age of the Internet, specifically whether online forums existed before 2000. ‘I just wanna know what the internet was like in times before I was even born?’ asked TheEaterofSouls, ‘about 1-2 decades would be neat.’[25]

The impact of the Internet is absolute and evolving. Some semblance of immediacy can be drawn from the evolution of this book itself. The present chapter and the previous one are entirely new to this particular edition of Killing for Culture, dealing as they do with the World Wide Web. From its first publication in 1994, through an update and numerous reprints, Killing for Culture in the nineties was without reference to the Internet or WWW. The online dissemination of information was a lot less tactile then, and a far cry from what we today consider to be social media.[26] The Internet through the nineties was a fledgling phenomenon and hardly more than a novelty. There was no Wikipedia, no Google, no Amazon, no Wowcher, in fact there was hardly any of the stuff we now take for granted whenever we boot up. But then, the very notion of booting up and logging on are close to an archaism. The computer as a standalone tool is replaced by our utter dependency on the virtual; our second life and lives infinitum are linked to the real world (whatever that has become) in a vortex of digital networking. So it comes as little surprise TheEaterofSouls was very much alive when the World Wide Web as we know it came into being. Progress has been that rapid.

The authors of this book recall that an online search for snuff films back in the mid nineties brought up only a handful of hits, none of them extending beyond faux snuff,[27] nor offering anything new to the rumour mill. Back then there were more hits pertaining to snuff boxes than to snuff films.

In the mid nineties we saw the dawn of the shock site, beginning with Dan’s Gallery of the Grotesque and continuing through to the present with Ogrish, Bestgore, theYNC et al. These sites predated social media (Facebook officially launched in 2004 in a somewhat restrictive format), but would soon come to exist in tandem. From the hybrid emerges the cinematography of beheading videos and Mexican drug cartels, motiveless camera killings and reaction videos. This is what constitutes the spark of originality in a new genus.

Discussing the history of terrorism, Matthew Carr notes that the Munich Olympic games in September 1972 raised the bar. Members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September used the games as a platform for their cause, taking a number of Israeli athletes hostage on an international stage. The hostage situation ended in a two-hour siege that left many dead. The overriding image of the entire incident is that of a Palestinian insurgent crouched on the balcony of an apartment in the Olympic village, his face masked. ‘The eye sockets are completely black,’ writes Carr, ‘adding to his inhuman freakish appearance, the very image of the terrorist as hosti generis humani — the enemy of mankind.’[28]

The outcome that Black September had hoped to achieve in Berlin was not met. But their actions hit the media so hard that they effectively rewrote the entire rulebook on terrorism and its promotion. Isolated incidents of terrorism hereafter, in the eyes of government and expert authors, became the act of a single nefarious entity, a tangible common enemy that could be quantified: The international terrorist. Thus evil had a face, an unseen evil face that was liable to parade itself in all other aspects of insurgency and dark mythos. Among these we include the snuff film. In the obscene basements of the snuff filmmaker operates The Machine Man, as we have termed him, the unknown masked entity who is working to the whim of unknown employers and enforcing their dark cinematic wiles. He is the face that must exist because it must be destroyed. Thus, the Machine Man and the international terrorist are one and the same, emerging at a similar point in time to serve the same galvanizing purpose.

ISLAMIC STATE

The Machine Man as terrorist would appear again in August of 2014. Clad in black clothing and wearing a balaclava through which only the eyes were visible, an Islamic extremist shared the final moments of American photojournalist James Foley with the world. It was the first decapitation of a Westerner in many years and the first to be perpetrated seemingly by a British citizen, a convert to the cause. Produced by the terror group known as IS (Islamic State), aka ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Sham), aka ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), the video follows the formula of the Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg murders. That is to say, the hostage, under evident duress, is seen espousing anti-American propaganda, with a statement from the killer along the same lines, followed by the death of the hostage. Although the actual murder is not shown in the case of Foley (instead there is a still image of his headless corpse), the video is shot with greater sophistication than its predecessors. Two high definition cameras are used and the victim wears a clip-on mic. It is almost a professional outdoor news broadcast.

IS have been an out of control force for some time, taking advantage of the chaos in war torn Syria and failed states Iraq and Libya. The promotional videos produced by the group are unusual, exhibiting slick production values and often bamboozling the viewer with a succession of post-production camera tricks. One feature-length IS production opens with satellite imagery, the camera then descending from Earth’s orbit to hover fifty feet above a battalion of armed men in an unknown Iraqi town. The drone-mounted camera rotates and spins into a blur, then segues into scenes of destruction and murder.

Filmed in high definition, drive-by killings perpetrated by kill-happy members of the group will pause, rewind and proceed in ultra-slow motion to show each bullet impact. The jihadist recruitment video has gone the way of Hollywood.

The death of James Foley was followed in the coming weeks by Steven Sotloff and David Haines. USIsraeli journalist Sotloff was kidnapped near to the city of Aleppo on August 4, 2013; his fate was documented in a video released the following year, on September 2. British aid worker Haines was kidnapped close to the Atmeh refugee camp near the Turkish border in March 2013. His execution appeared shortly after Sotloff’s, on September 13, 2014.

The world didn’t have long to wait before British civilian Alan Henning became the next victim in the ongoing IS campaign of video terror. Henning, a forty-seven-year-old taxi driver from Greater Manchester, was on a mission of mercy to Syria when he was kidnapped on Boxing Day 2013. Almost ten months later he was callously executed for the camera and the film uploaded on Friday, October 3, 2014. Unlike Foley, Sotloff and Haines, however, in this instance the media made a concerted effort to turn its gaze away from the appalling sight.

The scenario in which Henning is bound is much as before. A cog in a long-standing hostage situation, he became number four in a series of executions conducted over a period of little more than six weeks. From the testimonials in the press, Henning’s life was good and noble. But individual design was swallowed by the bombastic rhetoric of what he, and those before him, had become: The collective subject of an IS beheading video; another life reduced to the grim horrorshow of its final terrifying moments.

The media for the most part took stock of the situation and abjured all images in the immediate aftermath of this latest shock video. Henning was too much.

Decreed the front page of the Independent on Sunday (October 5, 2014):

On Friday a decent, caring human being was murdered in cold blood. Our thoughts are with his family.

He was killed, on camera, for the sole purpose of propaganda.

Here is the news, not the propaganda.

The editorial that same issue surmised that it was no longer acceptable to indiscriminately hand terrorists what they wanted, which was publicity. It only helped their cause. ‘Giving publicity to IS,’ the editorial stated, ‘is like paying ransom to more conventional hostage takers.’

Unlike Foley, Sotloff and Haines, stills from the Henning video were not shown. Appeals from the public for restraint via social media may have been an influencing factor, or it may have had something to do with the police backlash following the Foley video. In any case, not everyone in the press complied. The Daily Mail and the Daily Star in Britain, for instance, wasted no time in posting an image online of the orange clothed Henning facing the camera, executioner by his side. (The Daily Star removed the image from their online edition shortly after it appeared.) In the US, the New York Post was singled out by the Independent as being particularly callous, having printed a picture of Henning on his knees along with a ‘ludicrously graphic description of the video’s content’.

The call for decorum was admittedly better late than never, although why the press had taken so long to reach so obvious a conclusion is a mystery. The most effective recourse to IS would not be to jump when they shouted jump, but simply ignore them, as the parent of every petulant child knows. Whatever the case, images of Henning facing the inevitability of his own demise were gone for the most part, as were links to the video, which had been the case with James Foley and the Sun online. It was a new found sensibility, a new dawn for reason, although not reason enough to swerve the tabloids from their usual bout of tub thumping. The tabloid press resorted to calling out the enemy with a bit of verbal, a stance completely without fear of consequence when the enemy and its vast, senseless shadow armies are cauterised into a single solitary figure: ‘Jihadi John.’ This is the name given to the black garbed hooded militant holding the blade, the Machine Man, who in the next frame, would that frame be shown, slaughters Henning and holds his head aloft. It is believed that this same individual also slaughtered Foley, Sotloff and Haines. He speaks with the same British accent.[29]

A month after the Henning video was released, the fate of American aid worker Peter Kassig was made known. A bewildering fifteen-minute video filled with characteristic propaganda and atrocity was released by IS’s media arm on November 16, 2014. The tech-savvy stylized film features the synchronized mass beheading of a group of captured Syrian soldiers. Sixteen men with hands tied behind their backs are walked in procession past a station of knives. Each captive is guided by an IS combatant and Jihadi John leads the line. A knife is plucked from a container as they pass by. The men are aligned with Jihadi John in the centre. He utters his garbled oratory, then the men are pushed to the ground and beheaded simultaneously. Unlike previous videos this one revels in the gore, giving Jihadi John, prominent the whole time, the opportunity to slyly cock an eye at the camera as he slashes his victim’s throat. The video culminates with Jihadi John in a different desert location. He addresses the camera while at his feet lies the severed head of Peter Kassig. “Peter… doesn’t have much to say,” he mocks, then threatens the world with doom. Care and attention has been taken in making the video. The crystal clear imagery, multiple camera angles, jump-cuts and sound effects render it a troubling, if also surreal work. But while the death of Kassig made the mainstream media, little was said of the mass beheadings of the soldiers. Not so the next IS release, which would galvanize all.

Muath al-Kasasbeh, a Jordanian pilot, was taken prisoner by IS after his fighter jet came down in Syria. Video was shown of his capture, while negotiations for prisoner exchange came to nothing. On February 3, 2015, a video depicting his death was released. Using the format and tropes of other videos, rhetoric segues into the murder of the prisoner. Amid bombed-out ruins is a steel cage containing al-Kasasbeh. Several IS militants stand nearby. The pilot, dressed in orange, paces about the cage before standing motionless as a militant ignites a trail of petrol. Al-Kasasbeh is engulfed in fire. He fights the flames for some time before being overwhelmed. Shortly afterwards, a bulldozer drops a bucket-load of masonry that crushes the cage and al-Kasasbeh’s incinerated remains. The murder, utterly cruel and barbaric, sees al-Kasasbeh clearly under instruction and being made to ‘perform’ for the camera in his final minutes. Taking direction from someone unseen, he manoeuvres about the cage, a cast member in his own death. At one moment he stands with his head bowed, then dramatically raises his face to stare directly into the camera. A large X is cut into the cage floor, a stage spike on which he must stand.

Condemnation of the atrocity was universal, although a small number of IS sympathisers attempted to justify and Islamify the killing via Twitter and other social networks. Israeli media Yediot Aharonot described it as ‘evil distilled in a snuff film’. Fox News website showed the video in its entirety.[30] On February 15, a further video was released. Five minutes in duration, A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross depicts the mass beheading of twenty Egyptian Coptic Christians. It is shot on the shores of Libya with a backdrop of the Mediterranean sea. (The filming techniques and ‘narrative’ duplicate those of the mass killing of sixteen Syrian soldiers.) A spokesman, nicknamed ‘Jihadi Joseph’[31] by the media, provides shrill rhetoric before the victims are pushed to the sand and decapitated en masse. The video ends with Jihadi Joseph pointing out to sea with his knife and threatening the fall of Rome.

The motivating factor behind IS is mired in the apocrypha of religious belief. As such it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to those outside it, but nonetheless their goal is childishly simple: Death to those who stand in the way of Islam (or, at the very least a tax on those who refuse to convert). This simple programme is not an original one among the terror groups of Western Asia, a perversion of the Muslim tenet to practice religion in the face of oppression and persecution. Nonetheless the Islamists are far from a homogeneous movement. As Matthew Carr points out in his book The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism, ‘the differences between the various factions became even more apparent as the violence spiralled and several groups competed with each other for leadership of the jihad.’

Carr is speaking at a time prior to the arrival of IS. But the key between IS and al-Qaeda, and other extremist groups before them, such as Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), is one of competition. Each group considers itself ‘right’ and the service of this righteousness leads with sad inevitability to greater acts of barbarism. None more barbaric than those committed by the most recent group of all, however, IS, whose actions appal even its peers.

The video depicting the demise of Alan Henning was released on the day of Arafah, a religious day in the Muslim calendar that signifies mercy, forgiveness and hope. It’s clearly no coincidence. A spokesperson for the Muslim Council of Britain pointed out ‘we have to dissociate Islamic and State. There is nothing Islamic about these individuals, nor is it a state.’[32] Writer Graeme Wood calls IS a strange enemy, ‘fierce and unyielding but also scholarly and predictable.’ Their self-image is meticulously cultivated.

The defining element of IS is the propaganda video. Someone within the group is evidently taking notes on how the world watches and reacts. With the Foley video, the nationalities of the participants prompted as much outrage as the act itself. Previous videos depicting mass killings of Syrians and Iraqis drew comparatively little attention. But Foley prompted British Prime Minister David Cameron to cut short his holiday and return to Downing Street to view it. While attempts were still being made to identify the killer, UK police announced that not only was distributing the video a potential criminal offence but so was linking to it and viewing it.[33] This led to lots of biting comments online about MPs telling the public it couldn’t watch the video, but the Prime Minister could.

It’s not relevant which newspaper first came up with the pet name Jihadi John,[34] because in tabloidland the names happen sooner rather than later (in diametric opposition to the slow-burning reserve of the ‘quality’ press, one might say). Thus, the sensitive and complex business of Islamo-fascism and the IS snuff protocol becomes a single-minded fancy: Jihadi John, a lone target pictured standing in a desert. The figure is rather small in this empty landscape, a man without space or time. But that’s the point: He is the (hooded) face of the enemy, with nothing on the horizon to save him but sky. Geoffrey Robertson QC, on the subject of bringing British jihadis to justice, describes IS fighters as, per Matthew Carr, ‘hostis humanis generis, the enemies of all mankind’.[35]

In his article, Robertson supplies a legitimate riposte to the many untenable suggestions on what to do with home-grown war criminals, specifically those recruited by IS. (Prosecute them. No new laws are needed to do it.)

But there is a reason why ‘Jihadi John’ — to borrow the parlance — was singled out by IS and chosen to deliver Henning to his death. Jihadi John is one of them and he is one of us; the enemy within. He speaks English (as opposed to a language alien to the West). No subtitles are required. John speaks with an accent that suggests he may have been brought up in north London. He is perhaps an old neighbour of ours.[36]

IS aggressively recruits from all over the world using films that are unique. Recruitment itself is not an original concept, but these films are. Whatever else they do, the films make a concerted effort to appeal to a specific male mindset, with lots of audio/video action and firing of weapons. A musical soundtrack plays. Onscreen, much like a first-person shooter videogame, victims are seen to fall under a hail of bullets, rendered remote and meaningless as individuals. Such scenes are filmed from behind the weapons fired, ipso facto those who fall are your enemy. The victims are invariably taken by surprise. They are strolling down a street when they are mowed down, or observed at a distance when an incendiary device blows them to smithereens. In some cases, men who have surrendered are shot point-blank in the head.

Anyone with a little training can edit together a film with this degree of professionalism. What the films suggest is that IS has decent computer equipment, industry standard film editing software and persons who know how to use it. (We might care to assume IS ripped the software off rather than bought it legitimately.) At some point, someone in the group made the decision to elevate its game with a new level of video sophistication, one that is so acutely focused on the act of killing and destruction that it becomes a pornographic relish. A blood frenzy. The results are then uploaded for all to see via dedicated web spaces, where it is made clear that recruits, when they come, will be expected to carry out executions of their own.

This alone sets IS apart from the militant groups that have gone before.

THE EXTENSIONS OF MAN

Do we want to be horrified? This was the lead question in a BBC Radio talk show in 2014.[37] The debate wasn’t directly about IS or terrorism, but dark tourism, the attraction of old sites of death and atrocity. One guest, a former journalist, divulged that news of a major calamity would galvanize the newsroom into excitement for the day. (He cited the Dunblane school massacre in 1996 as an exception.) The underlying consensus in the radio programme was that we are drawn to the darkness in our lives, “both real and imagined.” The dark is there to balance one’s moral compass.

Back in 1964, Marshall McLuhan was considering such dichotomies. Written prior to the invention of the web, his book, Understanding Media, addresses the cultural mashup at which we have arrived. ‘Electric speed,’ McLulan writes,

mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with semiliterate and the postliterate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation.[38]

The online persona might be seen as a conditioned schizophrenic response, we as individuals being in more than one place at the same time (real and unreal). Furthermore, this persona might behave in ways that it would not offline, saying and doing things otherwise regrettable; a proxy or many proxies that serve as an excuse for the individual operating them. Occasionally, no one is listening or watching, and the audience — should it exist — is perhaps entirely manufactured, as with Magnotta; a legion of one communicating with itself.

Much the same, the culture of individual expression online is pitiful; an overwhelming intumescent selfie of short words and pictures in a search for collective self awareness. ‘Earth holds breath as cat pictures dry up for 30 minutes’ is how one newspaper headline reported a brief period of Facebook downtime (nevertheless a newsworthy item).[39]

More marginalized would seem the self harm fansigns of Bestgore, but all told these remain wannabe memes and hardly removed from the above; the manifestation of what constitutes community in a detached world. The same goes for picture forums, Pinterest and Photobucket et al, where our lives are channelled through images of us, and those selective images that represent us or our moods (such as cat pictures), so that other users might empathize. Facebook, we learn, is wont to railroad the psychological states of its users. When all is said and done is it really that surprising when emerging from the social melting pot we are confronted with the absolute antithesis of us? The Dnipropetrovsk maniacs, Luka Magnotta, and other demons that escape?

‘The Roman state, just like all states,’ wrote the poet Virgil, ‘is doomed to die.’ Long ago one of the most advanced of civilisations devoured itself with licentious abandon. Some might consider evidence is mounting for a new fall, a circus maximus prefacing twenty-first century man as it did the Romans.

Happy slapping was perceived as a sign that society was coming apart at the seams. On the back of camera phone technology, several isolated and comparatively minor incidents were suddenly afforded an unsettling degree of media exposure in the British press and pilloried to the point of pandemic. But all new technology, as we have seen, is met with cynicism, particularly technology that serves entertainment and media, be it populist theatre, comic books, 8MM film or videocassette. When technology brings the freedom of creativity to the user, the criticism is increased exponentially because the creative outpouring is not necessarily on good form. For every cute kitten seen banging the keyboard of a miniature piano (one of many video memes recently appropriated by a major communications company as part of its advertising drive), there is the unsavoury counterpoint lurking on the web. A recent mailshot from Photobucket promoted the GIF as a new step in the social collective, offering a tutorial on how to create one’s own short photo animations on the mobile phone.[40] These quirky visual specimens (not confined to Photobucket) are a loop infinitum; they are vignettes that are alternately clever, dumb, arty, rude, cute, creepy, obscene or horrific, as well as compelling and impossible to avoid once they catch the eye. The biological impact on users of the mobile phone was once a topic of concern (as it had been with other mediums). Minors were particularly at risk, according to research conducted by scientists into microwaves and small heads. Aggressive behaviour was cited as one possible side effect of extended mobile phone use for young people. British youth, according to the British press, were particularly susceptible to the new technology and consequently were running riot slapping one another silly and sharing the results on their phones. Happy slapping today is an archaic expression, having been appropriated by commerce and turned into a friendly sounding acronymn. This is no longer the stuff of isolated yobs, but rather the GIF. Little vignettes of graphic war crimes (and other stuff) appear across social networks, sometimes posted in earnest by outwardly concerned citizens as a rallying cry, but whose reach invariably catches cyber friends unawares. “I had to unfriend him. It made me sick every time I saw it,” is how one anonymous source reacted to a graphic throat cutting one morning, courtesy of a friend’s Facebook post concerning a news item. The death image reduced to brief manageable bytes for all to see, looping ceaselessly among the cute kittens with the onus upon those who choose not to see.

Nicholas Wade, writing in the Spectator[41] is of the opinion that settling down and putting a roof over one’s head is an obvious evolutionary consideration. But it took the human race 185,000 years to figure it out. The reason, posits Wade, probably lies not with man ‘perceiving the benefits of settled life, but of evolving the necessary social behaviours’. Apply this rationale to the pattern of online media and the generation of TheEaterofSouls, our progress as a race is about due an overhaul. Making a simple analogy, the GIF and Infographic offer greater degrees of social appropriation.

We are already a short lifetime removed from the screeching dial up modem, when going online was a frustrating (and noisy) game of chance. Hard to imagine, but once upon a time it was necessary to contemplate something as basic as the computer on/ off switch and the nature of its purpose, the hardware so alien. Our children by contrast are born into a world of online intelligence, where they are able to drag up a favourite Disney movie on iPad long before they can pull up their own socks or even speak.

So, what of the next generation of computer literacy and those generations thereafter? The essential skills of the future, according to Jonathan Grudih at Microsoft Research, “will be those of rapidly searching, browsing, accessing quality and synthesising the vast quantities of information.”[42] Richard M. Satava, Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington, believes that the video gamer and digital physician are one and the same; that is to say, kids “for whom it is natural to look at a video image as a real object and who can use a joy-stick as a pair of scissors”.[43]

Unlike traditional media, the Internet does not progress in a linear fashion. Discussing its remove from broadcast media, WJT Mitchell observes that social media presents contemporary events — war, for instance — in real-time, ‘immediately represented in audio-visual-textual images [and] transmitted globally.’ The shaping of perceptions of history, he adds, is no longer the reserve of historians and poets.[44] All information is available to view immediately; be it past, present and future, it’s all uniformly accessible at a click of a button. One can hope to jump and land in the right places in pursuit of knowledge, but there is no guarantee of a chronological sequence of events, or that it’s accurate. Yesterday’s news coexists with today’s news, and so too the supposition, satire and misinformation created around it. News sites capitulate to social media, encouraging each reader to don the editor’s hat in order to feed into the ‘fun’ distribution network. The public is no longer the passive observer of a decade past, but part of the newsfeed itself. And in some instances — witness Luka Magnotta — a bewildered and desperate part.

Our own massacres may be infinitely greater but they often take place by remote control and at a distance; in comparison with the great pitched battles of the past, they seem almost abstract.

This is how A. Alvarez perceived the changing face of war when he wrote his book The Savage God.[45] All things have become equal thanks to new media. Alvarez is speaking specifically of television, ‘the eye of God,’ through which real atrocities and fantasy are effectively rendered one and the same.

Abstraction today is far in excess of what it was in 1971, when The Savage God first appeared. The future that once promised exciting sci-fi gadgetry has, in fact, suddenly arrived but is incapable of any greater technological surprises because all our haughty predictions are spent. Instead of the mooted flying cars racing through the sky we have superfast broadband, something we can’t even see. This is our lot, limitless data at our fingertips, far in excess of all the accumulated data of past generations put together. Might the next obvious step not bring a greater synthesis of man and data, specifically man and the process of social networking? Zuckerberg believes that his job is to make “this product [Facebook; social media] the best way for you to share everything that you want, and the best way for you to express who you are”. It’s a conundrum — everyone the artist. Perhaps we will witness next the Internet as a profound level of human consciousness, a hive mind of selfies and the mundane expression of so many ordinary lives. We are already witness to the cathartic anti-agents of the future (shock videos), aberrations that hint at a society in a deeply transitional stage. If Magnotta and the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs are unnecessary, they are by that same token unavoidable. And they are far from alone. In the same light stands the ‘accidental’ murderer Slivko and so-called squish videos, as we will see next. This is not to endorse the videos or their manufacture, but rather acknowledge an underlying sense of their improbable purpose.

SQUISH AND SLIVKO

In the 1990s, a curious type of video emerged that was a combination of sexual fetish and animal cruelty. On the surface it seemed a progression on the theme of female domination, but in reality was not at all the same and indeed wholly unpleasant. Squish or crush videos might depict close-up shots of worms and insects being squashed beneath women’s feet. When bugs were replaced with higher life forms, such as rodents and kittens, the activity drew the attention of animal rights campaigners and a horrified news media. Thomas Capriola of Long Island, New York, was apprehended in May 1998 for marketing videotapes that showed the torture and death of small creatures in this fashion. Investigators on the case were aware that such films had been in circulation for a few years. “It’s a foot-fetish kind of thing,” said detective Adam Gross. “They [the perpetrators] kill animals by stamping on them in boots, high-heeled shoes, whatever your kink in footwear is.” Thus the squish punter achieved sexual gratification. The Observer turned to London’s Soho district for embellishment, where they were informed by one anonymous source, “the idea is that you ejaculate at the moment when the animal dies.”[46] The newspaper then ran a full account of a squish film:

It begins with a close-up of a guinea pig lying spread-eagled on the floor, each of its tiny legs fastened in place by sticky tape. The camera slowly pulls back to show that a woman, seen only from the knees down, is pacing around the stricken creature in bright red stilettos. Her voice is soft and low: “You are my victim. Are you frightened, little man? You know that your destiny is under my heels…” Squeals of pain ring out as the sharp point of one stiletto is brought down on each leg in turn, shattering the bones. Next, the creature’s back is crushed under a toe, cigarettes are stubbed out on its fur and hip and shoulder bones are systematically trampled and broken until, finally, the woman kills it by driving her heel through its skull. The torture has lasted almost 30 minutes.[47]

Some months later, in November 2002, two British men and three women were jailed for their part in squish. Following the arrest of twenty-sevenyear-old filmmaker Craig Chapman, detectives on the case extracted enough evidence to warrant a raid on forty-seven-year-old Brian McCann’s pub, Rosie McCann’s, in King’s Cross. Police searched McCann’s computer and found numerous photographs, video clips, and films depicting animal torture, along with emails confirming contact with Chapman. McCann had requested and paid £1,500 for a crush video. The footage, according to the Independent,

included a scene in which a kitten was glued to the floor and killed by a woman with her stiletto heels…[48]

McCann was jailed for nine months and Chapman was sent down for two years. Chapman’s three female accomplices, Christine Besford, twenty-six, Sarah Cooke, twenty-one, and Tharaza Smallwood, twenty-two, were also jailed. Hollywood legend Mickey Rooney headed a campaign to get squish banned. “Put a stop, won’t you, to crush videos,” he demanded. Jeff Vilencia, who directed Smush (1993), a black and white short film depicting the crushing of earthworms, argued to the contrary, “What about the fur industry, what about fishermen, what about the cattle industry? The concern is you can kill anything you want, basically, in any manner you want if it’s for food or for sport or for fashion, but you cross the line when you do it for sexual gratification.” Vilencia’s film was comparatively mild, in that its victims were invertebrates. Nevertheless, he stated that he would cease production until the controversy was resolved.[49]

The conscientious Vilencia had an associate by the name of Bryan Loudermilk, another producer of crush videos, whose own films extended to the trampling of rabbits. In what some might consider an example of divine retribution, Loudermilk suffered a strange fate beneath the wheels of his own car where he evidently lay trapped for some time. When the vehicle was removed he was found to be lying in a shallow trench with a plank of wood and a cushion on his abdomen. It was clear that his presence under the car was intentional. It is not known precisely how long Loudermilk had been beneath the vehicle, suffice it to say that it was long enough for the blood trapped in his legs to become contaminated with toxins. Once the pressure of the vehicle was removed, normal blood flow resumed and the toxins surged throughout his circulatory system. He died in hospital within hours. Videos and photographs that were later discovered identified Loudermilk as an extreme foot fetishist. In some of the materials he is seen beneath stiletto clad feet, while other evidence depicted the trampling to death of animals.[50] This isn’t to say that animal cruelty in itself is a signal of the future. The nature of what these films represent may well be.

Many years earlier, Anatoly Slivko filmed young boys partaking in hanging experiments. Children in his care would voluntarily be hung, following Slivko’s persuasion, and lapse into unconsciousness on the promise of revival. However, the experiments were nothing more than Slivko’s fetish gratification and he would pose the unconscious boys and masturbate over them before reviving them. Over the course of many years he hung more than forty boys, mostly members of a Young Pioneers scout troupe. Of this number Slivko was allegedly unable to revive seven victims and their bodies were dismembered or burned and buried. He was arrested in 1985, found guilty of sexual abuse, necrophilia and murder, and executed in 1989.

Footage shot by Slivko is available on the Internet, the original source for which is likely a Russian documentary about the case. The footage has been artificially aged with scratches and overdubbed with the sound of a projector (presumably by the documentary makers), but otherwise is silent. Several sequences have been spliced together, most showing the hanging and revival of some of the boys. Slivko focuses much attention on the shoes of his young victims. Even when lifting and carrying their unconscious bodies, he ensures that feet are held for a moment before the camera. It gets stranger. One scene shows a boy’s feet aflame (still in his shoes), having been doused with a flammable liquid. In another scene, a carpenter’s saw is used to cut a boy’s foot in half (again in the shoe). Yet another shows the amputation of a leg below the child’s knee with an axe. Lying on a picnic blanket, one boy has been decapitated and, rather prosaically, a photographer’s developing tray is used to collect the blood.

The hanging scenes in the film are clearly authentic. Nevertheless, the mutilation and burning sequences have a surreal attitude that on any other day might be suited to a schlock-horror movie. A scene where Slivko removes a boy’s leg, for instance, is akin to the work of low-budget auteur Andy Milligan, whose cheap movie melodramas (such as The Ghastly Ones [1968], Bloodthirsty Butchers [1970] and Torture Dungeon [1970]) include altogether unsophisticated special effects that look much like this. The amputation is achieved with a single blow of Slivko’s hatchet, with the limb then pulled effortlessly out from the trouser leg. Another sequence shows a boy clinging to a rocky outcrop before leaping comfortably out of the frame. The scene then shifts to the body of the boy lying in a heap covered with bloody cuts.

It’s impossible to tell what is going on with Slivko. The victim in the latter example looks to all intents and purposes to be dead, but he may easily be unconscious or merely play acting. Slivko confounds us because he is playing a game unlike any we have ever seen. Ultimately, however, detached and impartial, there is no reason to doubt the veracity of what is unfolding simply because it is a game or looks much like a bad movie. Most death on film in fact looks like a bad movie. Vox pop interviews conducted on the back of a calamitous event invariably sees comparisons drawn between the event itself and Hollywood. Historian Susan A. Crane reflects on the validity of using visual records of atrocity as an aid to understanding history.[51] Atrocity images are widely regarded as necessary in that they represent ‘evidence’ — in Crane’s example the evidence is that of Nazi war crimes. But this was not always the case. At one time the public viewed such images with suspicion. Primed by the propaganda campaigns of the Great War before it, the public of WWII was more resistant to what it perceived as sensationalism or exaggeration. Accordingly, atrocity images pertaining to the Holocaust were, notes Crane, ‘presumed to be fakes until proven otherwise’.

By extension we have a modern conundrum whereby the photographic evidence throws into question the reality of the event itself. Conspiracy theorists look for a hint of subterfuge in visual records and decode from them the truth as they see it. Low quality, highly compressed and pixelated videos often take precedence over ground level eyewitness accounts. It is a way of seeing that has generated many diverse theories of varying degrees of credibility, ranging from accidental gunmen in the JFK assassination[52] through to the conspiracy defining twin monolith of 9/11. Let’s take one of the more extreme visual interpretations of the latter. The no-planes premise, promulgated by ex-MI5 officer David Shayler, posits that no aircraft were used in the 9/11 attacks. Rather, what we see in video footage are missiles transformed into aircraft by holographic technology. Shayler and others like him categorise themselves as ‘Truthers’. Improbable as some of these ideas appear, the interesting thing is how the visual record can be commodified in this way, becoming something else with duplicitous meaning.

The inability to determine the veracity of the Slivko imagery is largely due to the nature of the editing and also their dissemination over the Internet. As happened with the Magnotta film, the initial reaction was that of a fake. Alex DeLarge of ABP observed that there is some element of self-preservation in thinking this way when confronted with the unimaginable. “I convinced myself it was fake,” he said of 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick, “so it was easier to watch over and over.”

The sequences in Slivko are brief and spliced out of context, which doesn’t tally with the impression we have of reality as something hectic but uncut. This is the idea of truth as it derives from the shockumentaries of the seventies and eighties, but commonplace now in found footage movies and reality television. There is also the question of the strange, ethereal nature of the images themselves. The focus upon shoes in the Slivko film brings to it a quality removed from any other discussed in this book. Shoes are sawn in half and shoes are set on fire in a ritual absurdity at odds with any notion of a rational explanation. But to look deeper, we see in all of the films of this chapter a unique character that alienates them absolutely from our understanding. The images that make them are as bizarre as they are shocking. In the case of Slivko, one might wish to consider the imagery as the pure manifestation of a soul troubled and black, the explosive blast of damned lapses into creativity. The truth.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

The stand alternative culture takes on the matter of atrocity material is occasionally unexpected. Take for instance a feature film from Toe Tag Pictures. Murder Collection (2009) is inspired by online atrocity material with a nod to shock sites as well as shockumentaries of the nineties.[53] Its director, Fred Vogel, is best known for the low-budget ultra gore trilogy, August Underground,[54] part of the found footage canon and itself based upon the idea of snuff films. Murder Collection on the other hand purports to be a showcase of death clips culled from a website said to have since been closed down by the authorities. It is a fabrication with no attempt to illuminate the subterfuge. The material ranges from a prank gone horribly awry through to a beheading in a war zone, all captured and presented in a variety of formats that include CCTV, videotape (nth generation) and web cam. To a backdrop of industrial music, and with his voice heavily distorted, the host of the fictitious shock site — Balan — volunteers why a person might want to watch such material. Is it a need to be shocked? Or to witness something human eyes shouldn’t perhaps see? Whatever the case, our integrity, says Balan, may be open to question as a consequence of having sat and watched.

The authors asked Fred Vogel how Murder Collection came about. The answer was not altogether surprising. “I always knew I would make a movie like this,” says Vogel. “I just needed the right inspiration and I got that when someone on the Toe Tag forums contacted me and told me about these boys in Europe killing a man with a hammer and screwdriver. I believe it’s called ‘3 Guys and 1 Hammer’. I watched the video and was disgusted by what I saw, and thought it is too easy to watch real violence and death on the Internet. I knew that I could create videos that looked 100 per cent authentic, but the viewer could walk away without carrying the guilt of watching real murder. I also wanted the host, Balan, to let you develop your own opinion of what and why you are watching. This was a very important element for me.”

There is no indication as to the actual nature or origin of the content of Murder Collection. There is every chance that some viewers may consider it genuine, in which case might they be disappointed or relieved to discover the truth? Vogel is of the opinion that however real and convincing the gore, it is still worlds apart from real atrocity and suffering. He was repulsed by 3 Guys 1 Hammer and says he “would rather watch movies with rubber monsters and fake blood than someone being killed or dying on camera. I hate seeing real blood.”

This is a refrain common to those who enjoy violent entertainment, whose horrors are make-believe and applauded as such. These are after all movies and video games and comic books and the things in them are not real. Alas, it is not an argument that holds water with everyone. Take for instance the case of Rémy Couture.

Before its forced closure, Inner Depravity was a web showcase for Canadian makeup artist and filmmaker Rémy Couture, its content being short films and photo sets pertaining to a fictitious serial killer and his victims. Acting on a complaint, Interpol contacted authorities in Montreal and Couture was arrested in 2009. While no one laboured under the illusion that the work (while shocking) was anything but fictive, it was lacking artistic value, according to police, and said to promote violence. Confronting Couture was a statute in Canadian law that made specific reference to the publication, distribution and circulation of crime comics — fallout from the 1950s panic that equated comics with juvenile delinquency — and the possibility of two years in prison. He was found not guilty of obscenity in December 2012. Couture had made a fictional two-part short film called Inner Depravity. Perhaps the great irony is that the law enforcement authority responsible for his arrest was the same one that chose to ignore Luka Magnotta after being tipped off about a genuine atrocity video. They reasoned that 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick was probably only special effects.

‘One of the principles governing murder reports [in the press],’ observes John Taylor, ‘is that the normal is supposed to be entirely separated from the deviant.’ He continues:

Murder is a dangerous area because it satisfies as well as repels; it is a dangerous area because it becomes the focal point of so much investigation — legal, medical, moral and inquisitive.[55]

True crime magazines, available on the high street, have always been something of a bugbear in this respect. A relatively new arrival on the UK high street, Crime Confidential magazine goes so far as to present true stories of rape and murder in a desirably snazzy mass consumer way, its front cover in keeping with the colourful hyperbole of a celebrity gossip type publication or the soaps.

The barriers of taste and acceptance are slowly debilitated. One need only scroll through the website of the Daily Mail for a regular fix of atrocity imagery, increasingly to the accompaniment of video feeds. Here lie the victims of gang warfare and horrific, limb shredding accidents, predominantly foreign, their indignant resting place being far away streets in other lands or distant shores. Legitimate news sources and the nebulous conceit of ‘wholesome’ entertainment therefore encroaches on gore sites like Bestgore and theYNC, shameless and unapologetic. With typical bias the Daily Mail laments an instance of a near fatal road accident in the East Midlands of Britain because it prompts a succession of passing motorists to snap photos on their phones. Reads the headline: ‘Police shame eighty ghouls who slowed down to take pictures of wreckage on motorway after smash left woman, twenty-one, fighting for life.’ The hypocrisy is clearly lost on the Mail; earlier that same morning,[56] the newspaper reported another road accident, this time a fatal one in China. The case of a moped commuter killed beneath a spilled mass of boiling tar was illustrated by a suitably ghoulish photo, showing what remained visible of the victim protruding from his black grave.

The British news media uses xenophobia to bolster its own sense of self importance. The same goes for blogs such as Women Who Eat On Tubes and the people who post to them. Collectively they present photographic subjects as objects to tantalize, shock and/or laugh at. The news media does this discriminately, portraying foreigners as a subclass whose dead may be freely paraded without shame or undue stress and sadness on the viewer; certainly no inkling of ghoulishness. There is less discrimination when it comes to women eating on the tube, but these are a damnable class in the eyes of the smug just the same.

Not long ago, strict producer guidelines kept certain material off our television screens. Today this same material is accessible to all, online and elsewhere — the cautionary tales that met the early reality television shows proving apt and prophetic. Reality in this case is not the television novelty it once was and is decidedly the norm. Clips culled from YouTube are given a primetime spot on television, care of shows like Channel 4’s Rude Tube, featuring bizarre and supposedly hilarious moments of accident and trauma, and people of zero talent becoming ersatz celebrities for behaving stupidly. Men unable to fire a rifle properly are seen firing a rifle, and so on. Cue the laughter track. Debatably it’s Candid Camera for a new age, but it’s something altogether callous and cynical as well, gorging upon the hand that feeds it.

Diverse popular culture continues to collide on the Internet and produce alarming hybrid specimens of entertainment, while the world in a lab coat potters about the cyber lab playing catch-up. Would such cultural mutations such as 3 Guys 1 Hammer or Luka Magnotta exist without the Internet or social media? Commentators have noted that al-Qaeda could not exist without the Internet because it is more an idea than a tangible organization. And yet al-Qaeda wields devastating power and has virtual life with real world consequence that is tantamount to a living and breathing entity. So, too, the undue suffering of the victims of Mexican drug cartels. What may once have been a quick single bullet execution has transformed into a pantomime of prolonged suffering and bloodletting utilizing machetes, axes and chainsaws. The Internet disseminates the terror, so the terror has become more visually sophisticated, more terrible in effect. ‘The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror,’ said the novelist Gustave Flaubert. The remarkable technology behind digital media and its distribution has brought to us the ‘future’. But conversely culture has regressed several hundred years to an age of public execution, where a cyber crowd gathers in its millions to watch.

The snuff film has become a discussion of semantics. That is to say, comparing the idea of the snuff film as it was in the early nineties, when Killing for Culture first appeared, with what it is now, the lines are blurred. Snuff films then didn’t exist; snuff films now don’t exist. But murder on camera certainly does, as witnessed many times in this book.

In August 1994, a journalist associate of the authors approached Scotland Yard on the matter of snuff videos. He tried to secure an interview with an officer from the Obscene Publications Squad. Weeks later, our contact informed us that the interview “hasn’t come about yet because the police were very keen to suss me out first. I’ve had to fax my NUJ card number and details of my employers to Scotland Yard. However, I’ve now been told that it’s ‘on’, and I’m waiting for a time and date.” Later still, the reporter was told the interview was off, and, significantly, that the police had never confiscated a snuff video.[57]

When Magnotta and 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick came to light, there was the customary media flap but noticeable reservation in the actual use of the term ‘snuff film’. Journalists well-disposed to a spot of sensationalism, seemed in this instance to avoid the emotive connotations that arise with the term snuff. Did they consider the term redundant? Had the myth exploded? A few days into the story, one author of this book was asked by a reporter his opinion on atrocity footage online, and how it differed from the idea of a snuff film, if at all. Indeed, wasn’t the film associated with Magnotta a snuff film?

The myth of the elusive snuff film — came the reply — is a romantic notion, much like the mystery of Loch Ness. The journalist thought ‘romantic’ was an odd choice of word. Likely it is. But then the matter turned to Anatoly Slivko and the journalist listened and took pause. Exhibiting unusual candour for one of his profession, he said: “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but this conversation is really beginning to depress me.”

The traditional idea of the snuff film is that a murder is perpetrated on film for commercial gain. It is a notion that has failed to dissipate with the passing of time. The victim is anonymous, perhaps a runaway who is harbouring thoughts of fame and fortune as a model. Equally anonymous is the killer — although he is invariably male and grotesque. The setting for this film may be dank and horrible, a basement or a warehouse, inclusive of suspicious tools and fetish paraphernalia, but otherwise a room without time or place. Such films are thought to be floating around the ether, where they find the hands of the inordinately rich and occasionally the famous. These are the types of people jaundiced by Playboy and Deep Throat in need of ever greater kicks, so the story goes, people for whom the snuff film facilitates one of the few perverse thrills that still remain alien. The unlikely medium for such a nefarious transaction is the Super 8 film reel or the videocassette, which is antiquated and highly impractical in the digital age. Furthermore, there is only ever one copy and it can never be found. And when individuals, such as Yaron Svoray and Jean-Pierre van Rossem, claim to have in their possession the real thing, the ‘Holy grail’, it vanishes before its existence can be corroborated leaving nothing but another demanding anecdote.

Feature films and fantasy role-playing snuff porn[58] buys into this ideology, empowered by the qualities of the elusive and the clandestine. There is no physical evidence that snuff films exist; all we have is the belief of what snuff possibly looks like and a cycle of rumours reeled off as fact. ‘People who purchase these movies probably do so out of curiosity or because this has long been a fantasy,’ determines Brenda Love of snuff in her Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices. ‘The greatest harm buyers of these films do is to provide incentive for producers to continue having innocent victims murdered.’[59]

Snuff as myth and snuff as reality, and faux snuff somewhere in between — this is the alarmist trinity, as close to Aristotle as it is to Brenda Love. Speaking of direct experience and representation, scholar Marina Warner acknowledges the instinctive pleasure we take in enjoying works of imitation and ‘looking at the most accurate representations of things which in themselves we find painful to see’.

Faux snuff and the custom shoot can be considered a part of this dichotomy, where idealized men and women are shot, hanged, strangled, hunted and fall victim to myriad other forms of fictional demise. These films offer a close proximity of death on film, the division very often being the simple understanding that we know it isn’t real. Fred Vogel doesn’t like real blood, he said earlier, but everything else is acceptable. His own Murder Collection depicts many deaths on camera, committed to CCTV, webcam, mobile phone, digital video, in what becomes the illusion of authenticity.

Why do we crave this ill-defined but comforting division which brings us so close to snuff but not quite? Society likes to think it has outgrown the scary tales around the campfire, but in truth it wants to control them and hopelessly tries to dismiss the phantasms by effectively ‘outlawing’ them. The work of Rémy Couture is not real, but it was treated as real. Continues Marina Warner:

Uttering the fear, describing the phantom, generally scaring oneself and the audience constitutes one way of dealing with the feelings that giants, ogres, child-guzzlers, ghouls, vampires, cannibals, and all their kind inspire. Dreaming of their horrors and desires and crimes, exaggerating them, reinforcing them, repeating them over and over again, works to squeeze pleasure out of the confrontation.[60]

Here Warner is talking about the images that scare us as children, to which we return as adults. She doesn’t mention snuff outright, but we see its place nonetheless.

Snuff films are frequently associated with rumours of a cult or underground network of some kind. The so-called Satanic panic is a prime example, which put the onus on suburbia trafficking in snuff and slaughter behind the veneer of boredom and routine. The suspicion of far reaching subterfuge appears in a number of other moral panic narratives, too. That of the organ theft narrative shares many similarities with the snuff film myth and might be regarded as a reinvention of that same myth, or an inversion of it. Here we are at the really dark stuff, the exaggerated horrors and desires and the crimes of modern folklore that society must quarantine in order for it to properly function and go about its own, everyday business. The story goes that organs are being taken from unwitting or impoverished donors for an international black market trade in medical transplants. As with snuff, the enterprise is said to have begun in South America (later switching to Eastern Europe and China), and the victims prey to duplicitous rich people in a covert world where money can buy anything — even life.[61]

The pursuit of an urban legend remains forever futile. The point of the snuff myth is no longer one of validation and proof of existence. It is a metaphysical symbol. A surfeit of photographic evidence from all quarters has given rise to snuff the paradox. A newsworthy subject does not come into existence until we can see it, and when we do see it we are sometimes compelled to dismiss it or dissect it in search of ‘truth’. When it was announced that US operatives had located and killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011, there were demands for photographs of the body. The world’s most infamous fugitive, said to have engineered the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, was not dead without picture evidence. His death therefore was a ‘non-death’, it did not belong in the way that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi belonged, whose deaths were captured on film. In the case of Gaddafi, a queue extended outside the morgue when his body was put on public display, with those in line waiting anxiously with camera phones at the ready.

Let us consider these acts of seeing as a communal belief system, leading to what Nietzsche would call the pathos of distance — the feeling of the superior over the inferior, that which is necessary for the human race to evolve. Footage from a war zone in the 2011 Libyan conflict depicts the demise of a captured mercenary. The blood-drenched man in question is stripped to the waist and seen hanging by his feet from a window. Another man stands by the victim chopping and sawing through his neck with a machete. The most remarkable thing about this otherwise now passé death scene, burdened with so many others like it, is the crowd of onlookers. It is huge and many have an arm raised while every raised hand holds a mobile phone. Observing the footage, we can see that captured in the display screen of each phone is a micro image of the man being butchered. The scene has the look of a prayer ritual, the onlookers as one, partaking in an arcane ritual redux. Glowing camera screens have replaced votive candles for an object of worship that is the deity of the death image itself.

On May 31, 2014, two young girls lured a classmate into a park near their homes in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and in a premeditated attack stabbed her nineteen times. Presently facing a charge of attempted murder, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, both aged twelve, said they had undertaken the attack to appease the Slenderman.

The Slenderman is a fictional character created as a scare story for an online forum in 2009. The story, credited to Eric Knudsen of Florida, soon began to find momentum in a series of memes and appearances on social media. Slenderman is myth but a Facebook user profile exists nonetheless, which makes a mockery of the idea of social integrity; that in being part of the online social network one belongs more. Doctored photographs posit the Slenderman as a shadowy entity, often lurking in a sinister fashion at the back of a crowd of people. He is unnaturally tall with a blank face and sometimes wears tentacles on his back.[62]

The girls said that murder would lead them to the Slenderman’s mansion in the woods. The mansion, like the Slenderman, is of course nonexistent. These actions however are not: The girls believed (therefore we must, too) that reality would manifest in online myth. Not dissimilar, Luka Magnotta was of the opinion that by killing he would become a star, like Sharon Stone. Ars longa, vita brevis — art is long, life is short.

The popularity of serial killers and murder in popular entertainment, television dramas, movies and novels, is a metaphor for ills such as snuff films. It brings us back again to the really dark stuff. Most people don’t have empathy with serial killers and so the entertainment is safe. If they do have empathy, it is because the serial killer is humane, like Dexter in the television show of the same name, who fights greater monsters more deserving of death. Thus, the fictional killer is absolved of his crimes. This is the ‘romantic’ notion of snuff; it is existential dread, a safe round trip to the outer limits.

Film doesn’t simply document, it creates, as was observed in the foreword to the first edition of this book: Whatever is put before the camera imbues the celluloid with life, granting those frames their existence. At the dawn of cinema, Maxim Gorky recognized the celluloid flicker as elemental truth: ‘It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only shadows.’ Truth and myth, one and the same to the observing eye. Years later, movies like Closed Circuit and Demons sought to directly rekindle this great mystery.[63]

Film is not one or the other; it is not fact or fiction. When somebody real is seen to lose their life on film, as in atrocity footage, as in Slivko, as in Dnipropetrovsk, their death becomes celluloid, an image that is subject to change. Witness the disinterment of famous deaths like JKF and Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Vietcong prisoner executed on a Saigon street with a single point-blank bullet to the head, as well as those subjects of so many reaction videos. These deaths are evidence, they are what once was and what will be. The Slenderman case evokes a state of cultural catharsis, whose pedigree is indebted to the feature films of the seventies and eighties. The mondo films and shockumentaries of the same era offered an inroad to existential angst. Illusion has brought identity under attack in an accelerated age of social media, being sometimes lost altogether among the multitudinous tentacles of our phantoms; hiding that which we find painful to see.

The extraordinary publicity campaign for the motion picture Snuff in the seventies, engineered by Allan Shackleton, has strengthened the beat of many a moral crusade through to the present. Snuff is power; the bad by which we measure good, as witnessed with the CDL and militant feminism, and the crusades that followed. Comes along 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick, and the duplicity of all these years finally has some semblance of substance to it. Indeed, the media is so unprepared that it dares not call it by the name snuff, which it has courted so often in the past. The ‘safe word’ does not fit because here suddenly is the utter antithesis of our ‘puerile’ ‘normality’ and the charade of so many years is drawn to an absolute halt. Yet if the goal of 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick is that of a bona fide snuff film, it falls short. Quasi-snuff, perhaps? When all is said and done, the true subject in this instance was and is the filmmaker; not the subject.

On September 11, 2012, the American embassy of a newly governed Libya was stormed and Ambassador Christopher Stevens killed along with other staff members. Photographs and videos of his corpse filtered onto the Internet. It was suspected that the attack had been sparked by an anti- Islamic film clip posted on YouTube. Most likely unrelated, the two incidents are now irrevocably linked. The short clip takes the form of a movie trailer. The movie being promoted, titled The Innocence of Muslims, is a mystery and there is a strong suspicion that it doesn’t exist; in other words the trailer is a fabrication. The clip (supposedly directed by soft porn auteur Alan Roberts) is post-dubbed and uses impromptu if provocative dialogue. Convicted fraudster Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Coptic Christian living in California, admitted to uploading the film and was consequently investigated by police.

If the purpose of the clip was to inflame the Muslim world, then it succeeded, given frenzied Islamists taking to the streets in Pavlovian riposte. Remonstrations against The Innocence of Muslims resulted in actual deaths, a far cry from the comparatively sedate protests levelled at Snuff and the faux murder scenes of that particular movie. When the furore finally subsided the number of fatalities had reached over fifty. Cast members have also been issued with death threats, lending another twist to the snuff paradox.[64]

Myths can obfuscate reality and manipulate cultural change. The Satanic panic that ruined so many lives was born of a similar subterfuge, so too The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake book presented as legitimate that has generated fear and hatred since 1903. So, too, The Innocence of Muslims, a film that doesn’t exist. Wars are declared for reasons less profound.

Snuff is the pinprick of public morality. Genuine death and murder footage is now prevalent, but snuff remains a ghostly anecdote. The hypothetical consumers of the snuff film are as mystifying and elusive as the theoretical makers and purveyors. They are the obscene collective; the wealthy, the aristocracy, the Satanists, the Jews, the Freemasons, the Illuminati. In other words, them — not us. Who else but the evil elite would desire to watch such atrocities? The reality is that we are all watching. Always do. The snuff myth is an escape plan, our sanity clause. Earlier on we witnessed a public 3–1 yes vote in favour of viewing the accident that robbed Argentine actor César Pierri of his hand and ultimately led to his death. This clearly is not a minority decision; not the peculiar reserve of the elite, that which JD Russell termed the beautiful people. Millions of regular folk have chosen to download Nick Berg’s decapitation video, and watched with shock and awe as Sergei Yatzenko was pummelled into a living pulp by the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs. This death alone has been viewed over three million times on theYNC, just one of many sites hosting the film.[65]

And popularity invariably breeds commerce: The loudest voice in the state of belonging. The website urbandictionary references 3 Guys 1 Hammer with an entry not only erroneous but accompanied by a link to kitsch paraphernalia. For sale we find 3 Guys 1 Hammer mugs, mouse mats, fridge magnets and tee-shirts.

That other video meme 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick is in recondite stasis, not available to view unless one makes a concerted effort (as opposed to many other shock videos, which are easy to find). However, it can legitimately be defined in terms of a cultural phenomenon. Posted online is at least one remodel of the now notorious footage. Complete with its own hooded protagonist, in this case it proves to be a promotional video for a rock band, Ponyboy, whose album Pussy Killer features an ode to Luka as well as an instrumental track called 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick, which lasts just about as long as its visual namesake.

Magnotta will assuredly be a test case for future studies of psychopathology. He will also make an ideal candidate to reignite the claims of Dr Corydon Hammond, whose notion of multiple personality snuff movie makers was discussed earlier,[66] so too the speculative Monarch Slave premise of Fritz Springmeier.[67] Conspiracy theorists are already working the case. By way of example Field McConnell makes the bold claim that ‘agents of the Sun newspaper hired Magnotta to produce snuff film images to be sold by Rupert Murdoch via his encrypted VideoGuard pay-per-view network’.[68] When asked for clarification, David Hawkins of Abel Danger told the authors, ‘The claim is based on an aggressive inference of guilt associated with Murdoch’s journalists monitoring Magnotta snuff films of kittens being killed prior to their interview with him in Wembley and their use of VideoGuard encryption to conceal the evidence of Murdoch’s involvement in the snuff-film trade.’[69] Typically, the story offers nothing of any substance, evidence or reasoning.

GETTING IT ALL

“Did you get it all?” This question is asked by one of the crew members at the end of the movie that started it all. Snuff was the inspired moneymaking dream of Allan Shackleton. It is ironic, given that snuff is all about seeing, that the phrase is spoken in total blackness. Echoing through the decades, this phrase has become the meme that dictates all memes.

Cyberspace is the fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol prophesied, except it has come to everyone all at once and not many people are of the mind to let it go again. There are casualties, of course. Not unlike the fickle constraints of bona fide celebritydom, the illusion of the online self is sometimes pursued to a devastating end. Submitting one’s life story — your soul? — to the system in exchange for anticipated betterment has clear Faustian undertones. Facebook, after all, is your life. However, not everyone can emerge from the cyber closet unscathed.

Luka Magnotta can be viewed as a relic of the ongoing wave of celebrity culture. He was striving for media attention but rebuffed constantly. With no one taking any notice, he had a tantrum and cut a man to pieces. His price of admission to the front page mainstream media was a human soul; the life of Lin Jun.

Answering charges in court on June 19, 2012, fittingly Magnotta was represented not in person but via video link. He pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, as well as to committing an indignity to a human body, publishing and mailing obscene material and criminal harassment of public figures, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and members of Parliament. This image and recent photographs didn’t at all match the carefree, pretty boy image that Magnotta cultivated for himself. Rather, the man in the photographs was ravaged, holding the observer in a dead, dispassionate gaze.

What exactly is 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick? Because it isn’t exactly murder on camera. May we consider it a seriously misguided performance piece, akin to the conceptual artwork of Arsen Savadov, Hermann Nitsch and Gunther von Hagens? The maker of the film intended to create snuff from the outset, as evidenced in the campaign that prefigured it. This isn’t a personal trophy intended for the private view, it is an unholy experiment, like that of the protagonist in Michael Powell’s 1960 movie Peeping Tom, whose filmed murders are unable to satisfy the morbid urge to gaze. The Ice Pick video was designed to be seen by as wide an audience as possible in order to generate as big a reaction as possible. The production is a one-man job, without recourse to a production crew. It is the work of a lone, mentally ill individual with a knife and a common off-the-shelf digital camera. There was no buyer or underground distributor waiting to take control of the final print. No Mr Big. 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick was created to provide a shortcut to instant notoriety and its content reflects this: There is no straightforward kill here (there is no kill at all; the instance of death is missing). Instead, the prone body of an unfortunate victim, Lin Jun, is seen mutilated and dismembered in a premeditated and prolonged attack that is little short of a demonstration. The result has been edited, albeit primitively, and given a musical soundtrack. Its intention to shock is apparent, but we also have here the whiff of creative performance piece.

The artist Hermann Nitsch is all about shock. As we saw earlier,[70] Nitsch promoted his Orgies & Mysteries Theatre with more of a sense of threat than a promise. It was a threat he tended to make good on. The public disembowelment and violent destruction of a dead lamb in Vienna in June 1962 was announced as ‘a manifest action’ and the ‘“aesthetic” substitute for a sacrificial act’.[71]

There is no aesthetic substitute in the films of Magnotta et al. Equally there is no doubt that 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick was an attempt to ape other shocking material found on the Internet, such as 3 Guys 1 Hammer. The clue is very much in the title. The maker of the film was only too aware of the reactions generated around these other films and anticipated his own place among them. Indeed, 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick appears to bait the viewer in a demented exhibition of one-upmanship: If you think that was bad, each frame goads, let’s see what you make of THIS! We cannot help but stare. And, oftentimes, those who do stare have an agenda of their own. Many of the participants in the reaction video canon are engaged in self servitude, micro-celebrities themselves on the make. “Oh, my God!” mocks one Magnotta reaction viewer. “Is he listening to New Order?!”[72]

The perpetrator of horrific crime, like the victims of abuse, can often appear detached from their body. The nineteenth-century serial killer HH Holmes, the first documented serial killer, was of the opinion that his wrongdoing had irrevocably altered the shape of his face. Our generic killers whose origins lie in South America, where life is forever cheap, are in a similar state of transition; they are the unknown quantity, not live nor dead but living a digital existence. The crash in the case of Luka Magnotta is the failed attempt to unite the dynamic cyber self with the cold, real world. The result is abject d‘art; art out of control. When police searched the killing apartment in Snowdon, Montreal, they found graffiti scribbled by Magnotta (or any one of his alter egos) on the inside of a closet. ‘If you don’t like the reflection. Don’t look in the mirror,’ it read. ‘I don’t care.’

The first inkling of the existence of Outsider Art emerged from the work of a few enlightened psychiatrists in the mid and late nineteenth century. Gradually it became clear that some psychiatric patients were spontaneously producing artworks — often on found scraps of paper — of unusual quality and power.[73]

So determines arts magazine Raw Vision of ‘outsider art’. The idea of snuff as a form of outsider art is of course outrageous and nowhere to be found in the above definition or any other. But as we have already noted, rules of engagement are in a state of flux, morphing within a psycho-digital landscape that is alien and evolving. The question of snuff ‘art’ was put to some people for the purpose of this book. In November 2012, the world’s first conference devoted to the subject of snuff took place in Bournemouth, England.[74] An interview with the event organizers turned to the idea of snuff film itself as performance piece. The question was inspired in part by the very notion of a snuff film conference, obtuse and unfathomable but a few years ago. Said Dr Neil Jackson: “Unless the victim is very much a willing participant, which is highly improbable, I think the notion of snuff as art remains beyond the realms of sensible discourse at the moment.”

Two of the other organizers were not quite so dismissive, acknowledging that some of the topics under discussion in the event related to authentic forms of body mutilation, albeit self-imposed, and that this oftentimes is presented as performance. “Snuff, in a way,” conferred Johnny Walker,

could be seen as art at its purest, insofar that ‘snuff doesn’t exist’… the fact that, if art is creativity, it exists enough for people to talk about it, despite there never being any evidence for snuff. Communally, people have generated and fuelled this myth, in a very creative way, to the point where snuff is almost an art form; it’s been created, it’s been constructed, and therefore, in a way, is some sort of philosophical art, if you like. If we ever see a snuff movie, maybe that’s different…

Plastered across the Internet are clips of genuine atrocity. These are far removed from Hollywood’s fantasy snuff, where victims pass from life to death in perfectly accommodating ways. In genuine atrocity, death is quick, pixelated and horrible. These films depict the grisly aftermath of murder and chance misfortune. In the few cases where actual murder has been caught on film, monetary gain is never proven to be the purpose or reward, ultimately the raison d’être of the snuff film. Snuff films depict the killing of a human being; a human sacrifice (without the aid of special effects or other trickery) perpetrated for the medium of film and circulated among a jaded few for the purpose of entertainment. The films of Magnotta, the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs and Slivko by contrast are a statement, whether intentional or otherwise. Even the squish videos exhibit signs of this dichotomy if we consider the fate of filmmaker Bryan Loudermilk, squish filmmaker, who didn’t die for cash but succeeded in crushing himself out of existence in his search for meaning (earning himself a 1999 Darwin award nomination in the process). We remind ourselves that Loudermilk’s death wasn’t captured on film, but that is not the point here. He made strange films with only a micro market that are altogether senseless and unacceptable to the majority of rational viewers. However, it proved an unquantifiable necessity for him to do this thing, equal in terms to Magnotta’s corpse butchery, Slivko’s burning of dead shoes and the hammer of Dnipropetrovsk.

There is never a clean kill. The victims in atrocity films are not simply executed, they are annihilated, their body, place and all purpose destroyed with them. This is the ideal of the Freudian need to dominate pushed to its limit. In these obscene actions, ecstasy and delirium are transported to the cyberspace universal where individual perception is redundant, contrary to the tub thumping Facebook proponents and CEO Zuckerberg.

Not long ago, the World Wide Web was a new and wonderful invention set to redefine the planet as a global village. Arguably it succeeded, but the village is a ghetto where faceless individuals are partying 24/7 in their millions. Movies until recently dealt with the popular dystopian idea of the death game show as an aberration, available to a decrepit few through encrypted channels (as in My Little Eye and Death Tube). Now the death game show is no longer relegated to clandestine websites hosted invisibly, but, as in a box office hit like The Hunger Games, is part and parcel of a worldwide entertainment franchise. The satire is clunky, and hardly novel, but nevertheless it remains a kiss away from The X Factor and the ubiquitous reality shows that presently pass for entertainment.

The web may be without physical frontiers, but localized laws still apply. We might care to conjure the popular image of a local bobby on his beat, fruitlessly blowing his whistle against a world he is altogether ill equipped to deal with or understand. Material displayed on the global high street may not be so acceptable or even legal in some countries. Confounding matters further, legislature now determines that real world rules are analogous with things that don’t exist. That is to say, the special effects artistry that lands Rémy Couture in court, not to mention cartoon imagery that is legal in Japan but construed most everywhere else as child pornography, tantamount to literal abuse with real world consequences.

Traditional rules of engagement are no longer applicable. Technology has irrevocably altered the way the world behaves, creating new social and cultural physiognomies to which we are adapting in a kind of evolutionary egg and spoon race. The reaction videos and the schoolboy critic seen earlier are a prime example.[75] The boy posts his reactions to material like 3 Guys 1 Hammer, while drawing parallels with the only other things in his world that come close: Star Wars and E.T. His juvenile observations are accompanied by links the boy has posted to yet more shock clips. It’s an illegal act under British law to post material that depicts a fatality or links to such material. Although at least one successful prosecution has been brought over the publication of a beheading video, that of Subhaan Younis and his sixty-day prison sentence, it clearly is an ineffectual threat in the face of social media and the workarounds available via Tor and other proxies and anonymity services.

It stands as a beautiful irony that a schoolboy should be the agent for clips like 1 Man 1 Jar and 4 Girls Fingerpainting and 1 Ass 1 Baseball (unwittingly alerting your humble author-experts to material a guileless thirteen-year-old should not know about, let alone publish!). Ten years ago these would be the actions of the world’s greatest subversive; now they’re literally child’s play and all but ignored.

The Internet is awash with mobile phone murder footage. People are beaten or burned to death so frequently that uploaded footage is often attributed to the wrong murder victim.[76] Children often feature in the videos, too, either as victims or killers. In one instance, kids batter a man to death with baseball bats, in another a group of youngsters beat a child to death with planks of wood. What is uniquely alarming about these videos, to western eyes at least, is the fact that the killings are carried out in public places with apparent impunity. Passers-by go about their business, or stand and watch, and vehicles slow down as they drive around a man screaming in flame or a boy losing his life under a hail of blows and bleeding out in the road. Mobile phones are not used to call police or an ambulance in the circumstance, but remain in video record mode, the priority being to digitize the final moments of victims unknown, that point at which life becomes death.

The ancient Arabian sex manual The Perfumed Garden issued a warning about this sort of thing; specifically the act of seeing and the unbearable necessity to see more. Looking into the cavity of a vagina, the book states, if we may draw the analogy, is injurious to the eye. The earliest extant celluloid film clues us in: Shot in 1888, it consists of twenty-four frames that together are shy of two seconds duration. The scene is a sunny day in a garden in Leeds, Yorkshire, where family and friends of the film’s director, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, are dancing in a circle and laughing. They take a few steps and… well, frustratingly, the film is over almost as soon as it has begun. Named Roundhay Garden Scene, this fragment, silent and crumbling with age, sets the tone for all film and cinema that follows. It is simple, yet inherently strange, tantalizing and mysterious. It shows us a little and we demand more of it. Ghosts of lives, living yet dead. But transpose these fleeting moments into an age of unparalleled access to many prurient desires, where the dance is virtual and open to interpretation, we might wish to consider where sits our gaze now.

1John Berger. Opening lines to his book, Ways of Seeing.

2The New Terrorism — Pornography is a Civil Rights Issue. Dworkin. 1986.

3In 1983, Saddam Hussein gave Donald Rumsfeld a gift of a videocassette. The tape allegedly contained evidence of Syrian atrocities. The footage on it lasts around three minutes and is shot in grainy black and white. It shows then Syrian president Hafez al Assad attending a military display in which children bite the heads off living snakes and men stab puppies to death. Rumsfeld commented: ‘Saddam’s message was clear: The Syrian regime was barbaric. Though his evidence was hardly convincing, his conclusion was a tough one to dispute.’ The footage is embedded in Rumsfeld’s website The Rumsfeld Papers.

4Certainly Facebook would like to change it. Among the profiles Facebook has banned from their site is that belonging to Native American Dana Lone Hill. The name in this instance is genuine, but the company decided otherwise. Dana Lone Hill received a message stating Facebook would ‘like to work with you to verify the name that best represents your identity.’ (Nadia Kayyali, ‘Facebook’s Name Policy Strikes Again, This Time at Native Americans,’ eff.org)

5Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You.

6Alternative 3 was a BBC drama aired in 1977 that was presented as a proper investigation into disappearing scientists and the fate of mankind. It was part of the factual Science Report series of programmes but missed its intended April Fool slot, which may have grounded the hoax somewhat. The BBC did something similar on Halloween 1992 when it aired Ghostwatch, a supposed live broadcast into paranormal phenomenon that was similarly fatalistic and generated much controversy.

7See chapter three: FOUND FOOTAGE.

8Mail Online, August 7, 2012.

9Of course, it may or may not be Coonan; anyone can set up up a Facebook account in someone else’s name.

10Reed Albergotti, ‘Facebook Experiments Had Few Limits.’ The Wall Street Journal online.

11Chapter ten: HAPPY SLAPPING.

12The blog courted much controversy in the UK and was even met by an action group. One live action comprised of people eating on the tube. ‘Underground picnic targets “Women Who Eat on Tubes” Facebook group,’ The Guardian, Monday, April 14, 2014. The Facebook page has since been taken down.

13Contrary to the moral indignation, developers i-Free stated that the app was withdrawn from iTunes because of a problem with functionality.

14‘Girls Around Me: An App Takes Creepy to a New Level’ by Nick Bilton on Bits (March 30, 2012).

15Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976.

16May 10, 2014.

17‘Harman found guilty for Abu Ghraib,’ by Spc. L.B. Edgar for Army News Service, via globalsecurity.org.

18‘Harman Tells Her Story,’ uncredited, ABC 20/20 website.

19It was Clark who informed police of the murder, later claiming that she had been in the apartment under duress the whole time. But this story doesn’t tally with the fact that she popped out to buy a roll of film for the camera that recorded the whole sorry incident.

20Dan first went live circa 1995.

21One apocryphal story claimed that the killer couple, not the brightest of pennies, took their undeveloped film to a local discount department store for processing.

22The Preg.org gallery provided two sets of NBK photographs, two different versions of the twelve images. The first was a ‘vanilla’ set as it had originally appeared on Dan’s Gallery of the Grotesque; the second showed the same pictures but in chronological order with annotations (by ‘Rusty’) pertaining to the facts in the case.

23Ronnie Noble, Shoot First! Assignments of a Newsreel Camera-Man.

24Greg Marinovich and João Silva, The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War.

25Original emphasis; mmo-champion.com thread: ‘Oldest comments on the internet?’

26There was an age before the web of old Japanese newsgroups, some materials from which are still floating around thirty years on. The oldest Usenet article as it appears in archive form can be found on Google Groups and is dated May 11, 1981.

27See chapter seven: DON’T SEE IT, BE IT.

28Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism.

29Though ‘Jihadi John’ is the prime suspect in the killing of the hostages we do not see him draw blood let alone decapitate the men. The footage ends as he brings his knife to the person’s throat. The image of the beheaded journalist, James Foley, shows the decapitation knife on the ground near to the headless body. It is a different style of knife to that which ‘Jihadi John’ carries and manipulates cartoonishly around Foley’s throat. Foley’s orange shirt is also differently arranged on the body than it is while Foley speaks to the camera. The sleeve cuffs are turned back, for example. Such discrepancies imply he was killed at a time after the dialogue video was shot.

30Including the fatwa that concludes the film, comprising a list of the names and addresses of other Jordanian pilots and the offer of reward for their killing.

31Jihadi Joseph not only dresses like, but apes the mannerisms of Jihadi John. Moreover, like Jihadi John he speaks English and is left-handed, frequently jabbing his knife towards the camera to stress his point or instil his threat with added menace. As of writing, the identity of Jihadi Joseph is unknown.

32Suleman Nagdi quoted on the Guardian website, October 5, 2014.

33The official police statement read, ‘The MPS Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) is investigating the contents of the video that was posted online in relation to the alleged murder of James Foley. We would like to remind the public that viewing, downloading or disseminating extremist material within the UK may constitute an offence under Terrorism legislation.’

34A released French hostage revealed that the British IS members were named after the Beatles. In which case, Jihadi John is clearly a more obvious sobriquet than Jihadi Ringo, Paul or George. One might care to draw another reference to the Beatles at this point: Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter, an invective for apocalyptic race war, was drawn from the Beatles.

35‘Put British jihadis on trial in British courts,’ Geoffrey Robertson, in Standpoint (October 2014).

36Alas, with a name like Jihadi John, one half expects the masked figure to leap out of the celebrity gossip columns, blighted like so many others by micro meltdown, and going toe-to-toe with the latest Big Brother eviction. Take note: Trending on Facebook on February 26, 2015, Jihadi John’s name ranked beside that of Madonna and Orlando Bloom. One was making news for having toppled over at the Brits, another had recently updated their user profile, and the other was identified as Mohammed Emwazi, a twenty-six-year-old British born university graduate from London. This was the true identity of Jihadi John, a man described by neighbours as outwardly normal. (The FBI had apparently identified him in September 2014, but withheld the information from the public domain.) He was said to have been wounded in an airstrike in November 2014, and, one year later, was reported to have been targetted and killed in another airstrike in Syria, coordinated by joint UK and US intelligence. (November 12, 2015.)

37‘Do we need darkness in our lives?’ Summer Nights, presented by Jay Rayner, airdate August 29, 2014.

38Marshall McLulan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

39Metro, June 20, 2014.

40‘Get looped in on GIFs! What the heck is a GIF? How is it pronounced? Why do I care? This animated infographic will get you looped in on GIFs.’ Photobucket email, June 27, 2014.

41May 17, 2014.

42Jonathan Grudih quoted in ‘Hyperstimulation is Making You Smarter’ by Tom Cheshire, Wired (UK Edition) December 2013.

43RM Satava quoted in José van Dijck’s article ‘Bodies without borders: The endoscopic gaze,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2001.

44WJT Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War Images of 9/11 to the Present.

45A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide.

46The Observer, May 19, 2002.

47Ibid.

48The Independent, November 16, 2002. The 2008 movie Untraceable contained an opening scene feasibly inspired by the Craig Chapman video. It depicts a kitten being glued to the floor and its death by gradual starvation recorded via a live web cam.

49A disingenuous review of Vilencia’s Smush appeared on the Screaming Stoner Video website: ‘The great thing about this film is that it was nominated for an Academy Award in 1995, which proves that the Academy can show an ounce of taste from time to time. This 8-minute and 30 second morsel delves into the worlds of both Foot-Fetishism and the more obscure Crush-Fetishism. It is a remarkably well done piece that stars Erika Elizondo, as a sexy lady who with her well sculpted feet crushes a myriad of earth worms in a highly erotic and somewhat gruesome manner. Equally arousing is the pixie-like voice that narrates the short film. All told, this movie captivates the viewer with its images of domination and sexuality in a way that even a none fetishist can enjoy. It may possibly persuade even the most inhibited to experiment with the world of the Crush Freak or Foot Fetishist.’

50Loudermilk’s wife was arrested and questioned about the circumstances surrounding the death, but no charges were made in this respect. She was, however, charged with animal cruelty when a tattoo identified her as a participant in the rabbit crushing videos.

51Susan A. Crane, ‘Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography,’ History and Theory 47 (October 2008).

52In the late eighties, a theory was doing the rounds that JFK’s limo driver William Greer fired the fatal headshot. The notion grew from a very poor VHS copy of the Zapruder film. What appears to be a gun in Greer’s hand as he turns to look at the President is in fact the Brylcreemed hair of the agent in the passenger seat transmuted by pareidolia and low resolution footage. Some, to this day, still argue that Greer shot Kennedy.

53Snuff Video Volume Red springs foremost to mind, with a narrator operating through optical and audio distortion who calls himself z.187, as deciphered by more astute viewers.

54See chapter three: FOUND FOOTAGE.

55John Taylor, Body Horror.

56August 16, 2012.

57The Metropolitan police were contacted once again on the matter of snuff films for the updated edition of this book. As of writing the police have yet to acknowledge the request, much less respond to it.

58The first part of this book and chapter eight, respectively.

59The entry on snuff films is sandwiched in the book between slaves and somnophilia. Brenda Love, Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices.

60Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock.

61A full and fascinating account of this particular myth can be found in an essay by Veronique Campion-Vincent, ‘Organ Theft Narratives,’ Western States Folklore Society Vol 56 No 1 (Winter 1997).

62“The bad part of me wanted her to die,” one of the girls in the Slenderman case later told detectives, “the good part of me wanted her to live.” The sentiment echoes that of the confused Sabrina Harman at Abu Ghraib and the Natural Born Losers in a Detroit basement.

63See chapter three: GOOD, BAD AND DIABOLIC TECHNOLOGY.

64A US court ordered Google to remove the video from YouTube in February, 2014 based on a copyright claim brought by one of the actresses. Google complied but stated, ‘we strongly disagree with this copyright ruling and will fight it.’

65The view counter registered 3,240,495 in March, 2015; this since its re-upload in May, 2010.

66Chapter nine: SATANIC PANIC REDUX.

67Ibid.

68Abeldanger.net June 2, 2012

69Email to the authors September 12, 2012

70Chapter seven: BODY-ART AND PERFORMANCE.

71Quoted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings.

72Not surprisingly, the mainstream, lost in countless television channels and generic reality shows, has adopted the reaction video. Channel 4’s Gogglebox is a light entertainment programme focused on sitting rooms across the UK and the opinionated couch potatoes within them as they watch mindless television shows just like their own.

73‘What is Outsider Art?’ opening paragraph, rawvision.com.

74The Cultural Mythology of the Snuff Movie. See appendix:snuff conference.

75Chapter ten: REACTIONS AND REACTION VIDEOS.

76Shocking scenes of a man doused in flammable liquid and burned alive was mistakenly identified as the murder footage of twenty-seven-year-old student Jack Briceño Ochoa, who was himself burned alive and filmed in the city of Juliaca, Peru, on September 5, 2009, after being mistaken for a local criminal.

MANSON INSPIRED MOVIES OF THE SEVENTIES

Made by Michael and Roberta Findlay, Slaughter (1971), later to become Snuff, was far from the only celluloid effort that sought to cash-in on Charles Manson. Here was the competition:

In David Durston’s I Drink your Blood (1970), a group of blood sacrificing hippies are infected with rabies and embark on a kill rampage through a small town. Frank Howard’s The Other Side of Madness (1970), re-released as The Helter Skelter Murders, tries to avoid overt references to Manson or the family but is a fairly earnest, if highly subjective, reenactment of the days leading to the Tate-LaBianca slayings. (It does credit use of a Manson penned song, Mechanical Man.) Director Russ Meyer and screenwriter Roger Ebert unsettled Hollywood with their major studio funded exploitation movie, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which wallowed in outrage and ended with a hippy massacre. Lee Madden’s The Night God Screamed (1971) follows a night of persecution for a woman who testifies against the ‘freaks’ who murdered her husband. Bob Roberts’ Sweet Savior (1971) aka The Love Thrill Murders is about a hippy called Moon who leads his followers into an orgy of murder. Troy Donohue, playing Moon, “looked more like Manson than Manson,” recalled Roberts in interview.[1] There is no confusing the inspiration behind Kentucky Jones’ one and only movie, The Manson Massacre (1971), whose hippy leader sleeps in a coffin while his girls kill rich people at a party for him.[2]

A good year for cinematic Manson clones, 1972 brought Ray Williams’ ‘roughie’ Wrong Way (1972). After rape and abuse perpetrated by ‘jeepers’ (men in a jeep), two young women stumble upon a group of hippies preparing to bury a body in the hills. Their leader, sporting a knife and wearing a kimono, otherwise looking like a car salesman, deliberates on matters of truth, ego and providence before deciding the girls must die.[3] The hippy guru of Ray Danton’s The Deathmaster (1972) is actually a long-haired vampire named Khorda (Robert Quarry) who casts an evil spell over his Californian acolytes. Al Adamson’s girl gang biker picture Angels Wild Women (1972), shot at the Spahn Ranch, home to the family at the time of Manson’s arrest, features William Bonner as Manson and actual family members as extras in some scenes. James Jameson’s obscure The Dirt Gang (1972) also features outlaw bikers, who in this instance create havoc when they encounter a film crew in the desert.

Rolling Stone magazine[4] refers to a porn movie by the name of Love in the Commune that reputedly features a ‘Manson-type balling a headless chicken’. But this is confusing; no movie with such a scene would exist until John Waters made Pink Flamingos [1972] some years later. Likely the review is a stoner riposte to Robert J. Emery’s drama by that name, which does have a Manson-type character in a central role. Alas no chicken.

Love in the Commune (1969/70) follows a hippy group and their older leader, Sonny, as they face a freezing cold winter in Cleveland, Ohio, fortified by drugs, sex, song and the promise of revolution. Emery had his name removed when the movie was re-released as Ghetto Freaks, objecting to an insert that shows the commune performing a black mass ritual replete with bloodletting. (Further buying into the Manson myth.)[5] Love in the Commune is by no means a porn film, but interest in the Manson case did extend to porn elsewhere. The phantom of hippy psychosis rears itself in Sacrilege (1971) and Sexual Awareness (1972), two hardcore porn loops of the early seventies.[6]

It wasn’t just new films. Hippies, hippy leaders, hippy communes and hippy murder became the key ingredients in some exploitation pictures already in production. Another Al Adamson biker movie, Satan’s Sadists (1969) was already completed by the time the Tate slaying trial began, but that didn’t deter distributors from billing it as ‘The REAL story of California Sadistic Tate Murder Hippie Cult!’ The title of Robert Thom’s Angel, Angel, Down We Go (1969) was switched to the suitably more elegiac Cult of the Damned. Some movies didn’t even need to have the façade of association to feed into Manson hysteria. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s art house hit El Topo (1970) was considered an obvious allegory by critics J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, despite being, in their own words, ‘conceived and scripted before the world had ever heard of Manson’.[7]

MONDO CANE SYNOPSIS

The synopsis for Mondo Cane in the original US pressbook offers a scene by scene breakdown that captures the spirit of the film beautifully. Here it is:[8]

In the town of Castellaneta, in the instep of the Italian boot, the blood of Rudolph Valentino (nee Guglielmi) flows in the veins of hundreds of his close and distant relatives. For thirty years the young men of Castellaneta have waited for Hollywood to ‘discover’ among them the heir to the screen sheikh’s crown. But the Valentino legend is already being perpetuated by Rossano Brazzi. When the Mister Muscles of Romance (Italian, of course) went to a large department store to order new shirts, hordes of predatory American females left their hero in his shorts after ripping ‘souvenirs’ from his tanned frame.

The ladies are more direct on the archipelago of Trobriand, at the eastern tip of New Guinea. Here the women practice polyandry. There is no pretence about autograph-hunting and the first garment they tear off a captured male is not his shirt. Manhunting as a national sport has its analogous versions throughout the world. It’s just played more sportily in Trobriand, in the open air and with bare torsos. The manhunt is practised in the open air along the French Riviera, too, and — to all intents and purposes — with bare torsos.

In the heart of New Guinea, the kingdom of hunger, men who have eaten human flesh break the misery of a five-year fast to stuff themselves with primitively-executed pigs. (Barbecue recipe: a slight singe.) Hundreds of pigs, the only fortune accumulated in the long years of abstinence, are killed and devoured for three days and three nights. Then again the long fast.

We have seen that the savages of New Guinea give favourable treatment to their dogs. But only in America does devotion to dogs exceed the limits of the ordinary imagination. In the Pasadena pet cemetery which inspired the novel by Evelyn Waugh, there are elaborate headstones floral tributes and luxurious caskets for late pet dogs, cats and rats. The little graves of the departed animals are kept well-watered with the tears of their celebrated masters and mistresses.

The gourmets in Tai Pehi, on the island of Formosa, choose the most appetizing puppy directly from one of the cages in a restaurant. It matters not if the dachshund or poodle is intelligent, friendly and faithful, only if the animal is tasty.

In Rome, the baby chicks stuffed into Easter eggs have been immersed in coloured baths, then dried out in an oven at 140º Fahrenheit. How charming are the little dyed chicks and only seventy per cent of those submitted to the treatment meet with unfortunate accidents.

In Strasbourg, more than half a million geese have such quantity of food stuffed down their throats via funnel every day that even the silliest goose couldn’t digest it in a week. The liver of the goose is totally upset by enormous over-nutrition but it must be enlarged to appease the appetite of fanciers of pâté de foie gras.

Those expensive steaks served up in a few specialized restaurants in Tokyo and New York are from calves bred on a fancy Japanese farm about 200 miles from Tokyo. To help the process of fattening, every calf is given six quarts of beer daily, administered directly from the bottle so it will have no chance to go flat.

Like the Strasbourg geese, the most beautiful women of the tribe are shut up in narrow wooden cages on Tabar, main island of the Bismarck archipelago. Here they are stuffed with Tapioca until they weigh at least 265 pounds, then offered as wives to the ruler of the village.

To work off the excess poundage accumulated during her last marriage, the American woman slims down in one of the Vic Tanny gymnasiums to be alluring enough to land her next husband. The Tanny gyms are way stations in the American woman’s endless journey around the marriage circuit.

It is more difficult to get fat in Hong Kong. The little district markets are crowded with customers for crocodile, toad, snake, turtle, green lizard, etc., at five cents a pound. The price seems excessive to two million starving Chinese.

A light lunch costs around $20, at a New York restaurant where the bill of fare includes fried ants, stuffed beetles, butterfly eggs, roasted worms, rattlesnakes, water-rats, etc. Wealthy folks, in consideration of the rarity and excellence of the dishes, feel that the price is right.

No shopper is more finicky than a Malay in a Singapore snake mart. Since the Malay know their snakes, he carefully selects a reptile according to all the strict requirements for edibility: weight, length, colour, age, condition of skin. Rejects (about fifty per cent) are regularly shipped to America and Europe.

Faith in goodness is reflected by the annual parade in Cocullo, a village in the Abruzzi, when the image of Saint Domenico is carried in procession, with the faithful following it with their hands full of snakes. The legend is that the saint, with strength of love, once turned the snakes infesting the valleys into tame and non-poisonous creatures.

On Holy Friday in the village of Calabria, the flagellation of Christ is exalted in the rite of the ‘vattienti’ who lacerate their legs with corks full of pieces of glass and run along sprinkling their blood on the streets.

Mouth-to-mouth respiration is the most interesting part of the life-saving experiment on Sydney’s Manly Beach, where the ‘Girl Life Savers’ (aged sixteen to twenty) celebrate the tenth year of their dedication to saving bodies. Statistics show that Australian boys have become increasingly careless, and must be dragged from the ocean by ‘Girl Life Savers’ in an ever growing number.

The zoological world of Bikini atoll has suffered profound change since the last American atom bomb exploded in this zone ten years ago. Birds that usually stayed in their underground nests only long enough to hatch their eggs do not come out at all; even though a peril no longer exists, the instinct to survive by staying in their holes has been transmitted to successive generations. Fish that normally could live out of the water only briefly have learned to abandon the foul and radioactive ocean for many hours a day in the trees. Thousands of eggs that will never hatch cover the surface of the atoll. The sea turtle’s sense of orientation has been destroyed by the atomic contamination. Tired and bewildered, instead of going toward the water, it edges inland, where it will be killed by the sun and — fatigue.

In an underwater cemetery of the Malay archipelago, the natives bury their dead because their religion teaches that the sea washes the bodies of the dead and frees them from sin. The bones that remain after the sharks accomplish their devastating work are arranged among the twisted branches of the coral by parents and friends of the dead.

To provide rich Chinese communities inland with powdered sharkbone, a highlyprized aphrodisiac, the natives of Rajput, a village on the Malayan coast, continue to risk disfigurement, maiming or their lives. Fishing for man-eaters is their only resource; the village is poor and the Chinese pay well for their vices.

Commerce is renounced for the day as Rajput fisherman seek revenge. Each shark is returned to the sea with a poisonous sea urchin in its throat — to suffer for a week or more before dying.

In the Roman cemetery of the Capuchins, a museum today, the result of patient work of centuries is macabre, but indicates a genuine search for the beautiful. In an effort to introduce a feeling of immortality to a scene of death, the monks were buried in complete habits in an upright position.

The fraternity of the Red Sacks continue to protect the mortal remains of poor and unknown victims of the black plague buried here in Rome more than three-and-a-half centuries ago. The bones are honoured in periodic ceremonies; protected against the ravages of time by a few families of the quarter.

In a Hamburg beerhouse, memories of cemeteries are drowned in beer, beer and more beer. A rather desperate concentration on the cult of life distracts the Germans from the memory of the cult of death.

In Tokyo, the ancient ceremony of the bath and massage is celebrated as six million Japanese women take care of four million Japanese men. Every part of his body is explored, cleaned and revived. Japanese etiquette requires that the customer is nude, but to pay lip service to our own etiquette, we have covered him up.

A rich Chinese in the city of Macao gets a careful makeup in preparation for his funeral. Offerings of food are deposited on the temple altar by friends so that the dead may eat during the long journey; the dead man’s money is burned so that it may follow him to heaven.

“If you don’t die soon,” the Chinese pray, “your good dinner will get cold.” Notorious for their physical laziness, the Chinese saves both his money and energy for the table and the bed. Nowhere do people eat more than in the Chinatown of Singapore where at the table are celebrated religious and national holidays, weddings, births and even death. In the streets below a house of death, the relatives serenely await the moment of the funeral celebration.

For automobiles, the house of death is America. They are heaped up in enormous cemeteries, compressed into solid blocks of scrap iron, sent to the great European automobile factories to be restored to life and re-baptised as ‘utility cars’. In one of the best known modern art galleries in Paris we see that the bones of an old Ford has been rechristened suggestively ‘esprit de la carrosserie’, price $100,000.

The Czechoslovakian painter Yves Klein is ready. Dripping with blue paint they have smeared on their shapely bodies, the models go to leave their print on the canvas. Klein guides his human brushes with the dynamic magnetism of his creative genius. The work will sell for a mere $8,000.

Here is the arrival in Honolulu of 3,000 American tourists, their appearance almost a caricature of American tourists, ready (nay, eager) to follow the programme of the ‘Hawaiian Travel Organization’ point by point. What a blessing that everything is organized: the disembarkation with unctuous ‘Big Brother’ greetings via loudspeakers, the photographic documentation which later will prove to friends that the Hawaiian girls smothered them with smiles and flower leis.

The tourists are initiated into the art of the hula. They listen, applaud, are amused and moved, just as was stated in the program. They believe in the hula, in themselves, in their own and others’ happiness, this generation that has worked hard in youth and allows itself some rest only at the first signs of rheumatism.

Gurkha warriors, ferocious highlanders from Nepal, are required by tradition to dress in female attire for their celebration dance. Seeing them dressed as women, one wouldn’t think that when they were taken prisoner by the Japanese during the last war, 300 of them preferred decapitation to breaking the oath of fidelity to His Britannic Majesty.

In Villafranca de Xira, Portugal, the crowd gaily celebrates the traditional ‘Forcada’ by inciting the bulls let loose in the streets. The bulls provide the desired action by killing four persons and sending another eighteen to the hospital. In the afternoon, young noblemen give proof of great courage in the arena.

Here is a moment in any and every day, four, five, ten thousand years ago. Here are the last of the cavemen, still armed with clubs, in the mountains in the region of Geroka, in New Guinea. As wild and suspicious as beasts, they do everything according to the eternal drive of instinct: work, idleness, children, food, the need to communicate and to have an orderly and sociable life.

Fifty miles north, a Catholic mission is the last outpost of civilization. Where men only discovered the world yesterday, they immediately need a faith to give them the hope of being better in a better world. But not before five missionaries had been killed.

The ‘Cargo Cult’, which is simply a deification of the cargo planes the native has observed along the great oceanic route that connects Hong Kong with Australia, is a new faith. The natives of the Rozo and Mekee tribes have fashioned their own crude landing strips and wait motionless, scrutinizing the sky. They believe that the planes come from paradise, that their ancestors send them to them. The wily white thieves manage to attract them to the ‘great trap’ of Port Moresby. But sooner or later the ancestors will discover the fraud and will guide the planes on to their track.

THE GERMAN FACES OF DEATH SERIES

Sometime in the 1980s, the Faces of Death franchise fell into the hands of a German entrepreneur. Uwe Schier, editor of a handful of feature films in the seventies, evidently didn’t care much to create anything new or interesting with the franchise, choosing instead to repackage footage from various other sources. Even the musical soundtrack that originally accompanied the pilfered footage was left intact — any additional musical accompaniment comes by way of classical music.

With its computer generated title, the German Faces of Death 5 (1989) opens with an anti-drug message. It volunteers that the film about to be seen has been made and completed against all adversity and if it stops just one person from turning to drugs, it will consider its job done. But, seeing as the introduction has little to do with the film beyond this opening segment — and is written in English while the film itself is not available outside of Germany — it is unlikely that the blurb is referring to Faces of Death 5. Similarly, the closing credits (which attribute Wesley Emerson as director, Anthony R. Lovett as writer and Bruce J. Kelton as producer) are a bona fide list of credits, but not credits pertaining to this picture. A good percentage of Faces of Death 5 is taken up with footage from Nick Bougas’ Death Scenes (1989). Other footage includes JFK’s assassination; the exhumation of corpses in Matamoros, Mexico; troubles in Northern Ireland; troubles in South Africa; folk in a burning hotel leaping to their deaths; endless scenes of air disasters (many of which are played over again in slow motion); the murder of a cashier recorded on a supermarket security camera; gang wars in the US; napalmed children in Vietnam. None of it faked.

Schier’s Faces of Death 6 (1990), the following year, opens to riot footage. The commentary determines that riots today have become more violent while, onscreen, scenes of a demonstration in the sixties are shown. Should the viewer then reach for their VCR, hitting the Fast Forward to skip familiar sequences lifted from Fred Warshofsky’s 1979 Days of Fury, it might come as a shock to discover that when Days of Fury is finally over, so too is Faces of Death 6. Warshofsky’s film is played here almost in its entirety, with the original scenes of Vincent Price edited out. The addition of R. Budd Dwyer’s live on air suicide caps the lot off. The only thing of interest — other than sheer audacity — is the way in which Days of Fury has become that much more brutal without the rhetoric and recess provided by Price. No credits.

Uwe Schier also owned the rights to Mondo Cane for a time. His Mondo Cane IV (1992), despite being chronologically incorrect, is also more akin to his own Faces of Death episodes than the original Mondo Cane cycle. Mondo Cane IV opens on another lengthy sequence culled from Death Scenes. An intriguing b/w newsreel sequence, with the title ‘Chinese Justice’, depicts the cold manner in which condemned Chinese drug peddlers met their fate: on their knees, with a single bullet to the back of the head. (The footage carries the unlikely credit that it was produced and narrated by Mink De Ronda.) A lengthy part of the picture is taken up with the execution of war criminals. The whole film ends on the same footage as Schier’s Faces of Death 5 with Vietnamese civilians trying to escape the napalm dropped on their village. The only moment of Mondo Cane IV that hasn’t been lifted from other sources is the opening scene, which shows somebody’s pet snake devouring various live rodents thrown into its tank.

Mondo Cane V (1993) contained highlights from Shocking Africa and Addio Ultimo Uomo. It is believed that this is the last of the Uwe Schier video ventures. Tiring of the altercations he was having with the authorities over the nature of his product, the German businessman pulled out of the mondo market.

ANIMALS

Animals get short thrift in mondo films, and they aren’t much better served elsewhere. Directed by Victor Schonfeld and Myriam Alaux, The Animals Film (1981) is brutal to the point of fascistic in its condemnation of meat-eating. Over two hours of animal exploitation puts the point across via gut wrenching experimental research footage, factory farming and blood sports. Electronic music accompanies scenes of chicks having beaks cut off to prevent them from pecking one another in confinement. “We’re trying to breed animals without legs,” says one scientist, “and chickens without feathers.” A member of Animal Liberation threatens human life as a means to advance their cause. The film’s narrator is Julie Christie.

Man’s cruelty to animals has been revisited recently in the feature-length documentary Earthlings. Directed, written, produced and edited by Shaun Monson, with celebrity clout from Moby on the soundtrack, and Joaquin Phoenix, who provides the narration, Earthlings (2005) is the first instalment in a projected trilogy of socially pertinent films from the Nation Earth organization. It is available commercially as a DVD and is also streamed for free on the Earthlings website. The film opens with a statement of intent, which equates man’s abuse of fish and fowl as being no different to the less accepted forms of abuse. Intones Phoenix: “Racism… sexism… speciesism… in each case the pattern is identical.” A bull running festival in Spain is pitted against clips showing Nazi rallies, suffragette marches, and the aftermath of violence against children. It is clear within these first few minutes that the film means to bludgeon its point home in very clear terms. Parallels are drawn between man and animal, and of how animals serve man and how man mistreat animals. The examples are all too familiar, but no less harrowing for it. Once the beautiful images of Earth orbiting in space are out of the way, the barrage of despair comes thick and fast: Acts of cruelty in the name of sport, state sanctioned modes of execution, animals for scientific research, the cruel commercialism of pet culture, and so forth. The film deals a lot with the food chain, exposing the gleeful torture that takes place in some of our major slaughterhouses, and the fact that even the kosher ideal of clean butchery is farcical. A segment on circuses has one animal trainer detailing the methods he employs in striking an elephant with a stick. This is followed by retaliation, which comprises several clips of elephants breaking free of the circus and going on a rampage, stomping on whoever gets in their way. It’s almost welcome, given the bias of the carnage before it, and harkens back to Earthlings’ own exploitative mondo heritage.

Further to this theme of animal cruelty is the considerably more obscure film, Fields of Blood (c.2003). Whereas the focus of Earthlings is the abuse within sanctioned social parameters, Fields of Blood shows a different side, where animals are tortured and killed by individuals for underground sport or simply for no reason at all. It is a gruesome, no frills compilation of secretly shot footage. The man behind the film is an investigative reporter and ex-con by the name of Graham Hall. Hall made British newspaper headlines in November 1999 after he fell victim to a revenge attack by members of the Animal Liberation Front, who kidnapped him overnight, threatened him at gunpoint and scarred across his back ‘AL-F’. This was in retaliation for Inside the ALF, an award winning 1998 documentary in the Channel 4 Dispatches series, in which Hall went undercover to expose terror tactics employed by the animal rights group. He had used a similar undercover ploy to expose bloodsports, amassing the footage that would later become Fields of Blood. It was this material that helped win the confidence of the ALF.

Fields of Blood has never been publicly available. It is a completely harrowing record of animals being slowly torn to pieces for the entertainment of small, but organized groups of people. The problem is that we are also ring side at each brutal spectacle, courtesy of Hall’s hidden camera. The copy of the film under review was received unsolicited by the authors in the mail sometime in 2003. (It’s safe to assume the authors were not alone in receiving copies.) The press release that accompanied it, ‘Fields of Blood: One Man’s War on Illegal Bloodsports,’ provided a statement of intent. Hall wanted the film to help set the record straight after criticism from animal charities, who were not averse to using some of the footage for training purposes, while at the same time regarded Hall as somehow complicit in the horror. The press release also likened it to a British mondo movie, a balance of worthy documentary and prurient sensationalism said to be akin to Executions. It so happens that the production company behind Hall’s Inside the ALF was the same company behind Executions, David Monaghan Productions.

Hall set out to highlight the extent of organized bloodsports to the government with his footage, and to seek convictions against those people engaged in badger baiting, dog fighting, and such like. He won the trust of those people depicted. One person among them is perhaps more unhinged than most, having chosen to spend his nights trawling the streets alone in search of cats, which he summarily destroys in his basement. Footage shows this man pummelling one animal against the basement wall. An arresting freeze-frame reveals his face contorted in a paroxysm of demented glee, reason enough to have him certified, let alone convicted of a cruel and criminal act.

Taurobolium (1994). This often fascinating — albeit overlong — document captures every facet of the bullfight in Tijuana, Mexico. Filmed by Larry Wessel during the years 1991–93, no commentary accompanies scenes of matadors baiting the bull with their cape, killing the beast and cutting off its ears as a memento. Of course, it’s not that clean a fight and the bull is driven to exhaustion before attempts are made to fell it. Antagonizing the bull further are men on horseback. The horses, blindfolded and thickly padded, are almost invariably flipped onto their back when the bull charges. When the bull is weak and exhausted (but still managing to toss the occasional matador into the air), a sword is driven into it. Sometimes the beast will topple and die immediately. Sometimes it struggles to stay on its feet, tongue bloated and distended, blood snorting through its nose and pouring from its mouth. Then it will die. After the killing, as celebrations take place within the stadium, the bull is unceremoniously dragged off and butchered. The camera cuts from the matadors receiving accolade and posing for photographs, to the darkly-lit slaughterhouse wherein a team of men meticulously chop the dead beast into pieces.

GIMME SHELTER

“Is this gonna be Woodstock West?” In December 1969, several months after the Woodstock rock festival, some 300,000 people gathered in the dry hills of northern California for a free, open air concert by the Rolling Stones. The setting was the Altamont speedway track in Livermore, outside San Francisco, and it was everything that Woodstock was not.

Altamont was cold night and speed in comparison to the sunshine and grass of Woodstock, and came to be regarded as another nail in the coffin of the sixties. Whatever was left of the Woodstock spirit quickly dissipated amid the debris and the heavy presence of the Hell’s Angels. Violence erupted almost immediately and continued into the night, long after the murder of one member of the audience: Meredith Hunter.

David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s documentary of the Rolling Stones and the Altamont concert, Gimme Shelter (1970), was released to theatres with the auspicious ad-line, ‘The music that thrilled the world… and the killing that stunned it!’ The film was not at all as exploitative as the campaign implied. Regarded as something of a breakthrough in quality live rock recordings, Gimme Shelter captures the Stones backstage and onstage during the final phase of their 1969 concert tour of America. It opens with scenes from the band’s penultimate gig at Madison Square Garden, which is watched on a Steenbeck editing suite by the band themselves, whose comments and reactions are intercut with the footage under observation. (The title of the movie, Gimme Shelter, is seen only as a ‘secondary’ image on the moviola screen.) Scenes from the Madison Square Garden concert are also interspersed with scenes of lawyer Melvin Belli attempting to negotiate a final, charity performance for the band. (At around this same time, Belli was to receive a letter from the serial killer Zodiac requesting help.) Due to the unexpected size of the audience — and the reluctance of local citizens to provide space for it — there is a last minute change of location, whereupon a mass of organizers, motorcyclists and fans are seen surging into the Altamont arena. As darkness descends, the Stones arrive in a helicopter. Within moments of touchdown, as the band makes its way to the dressing room, a guy from the crowd rushes Mick Jagger and punches him in the face. “I hate you, you [indecipherable] fuck!” the attacker says. More Angels arrive, chapters from San Francisco, San Jose, San Bernardino and Oakland. Opening the concert are the Flying Burrito Brothers. Bikers are beating somebody with pool cues. A request goes out between songs for people to please stop hurting each other. The audience floods the stage and Jefferson Airplane start their set. One Hell’s Angel, guzzling booze, stands oblivious and detached to the fighting around him. “Easy,” sings the Airplane’s Grace Slick as the ruckus intensifies. The drums are knocked over. Guitarist Marty Balin leaps from the stage to help someone out. He is clubbed unconscious. “It’s getting kinda weird up here,” Slick says into the microphone. A verbal altercation takes place over the speaker system, the Jefferson Airplane on one mic and a biker on another. The biker blames the mess on someone having kicked over one of the motorcycles. When it’s time for the Rolling Stones to play, the Angels cut a path for them through the crowd to the stage. The band perform Sympathy For The Devil and the Hell’s Angels go berserk. They start to move in on the crowd and appear to be hitting people at random. One Hell’s Angel is dancing with a woman. Another frowns at Jagger, pacing to and fro in front of the prancing singer. “Keith, will you cool it and I’ll try and stop it?” says an ineffectual Jagger at one point. A naked fat woman struggles to climb onto the stage. Angels talk to Jagger regardless of whether he’s mid-song, trying to sing. “Why?” someone mouths from the audience. “Who’s fighting, and what for?” asks Jagger. “A voice off-camera calls for doctors. The Stones break into Under My Thumb. A confused member of the audience gets up onstage and stands in a daze clenching his fists, before an Angel spots him and throws him off again. The audience is growing wilder, the Angels more vicious, more fights are breaking out. The band aren’t able to play a number without stopping several times over.

“Can you roll back on that, David?” It’s back to the editing suite and Jagger is talking to the film crew. Stunned and disbelieving, he and drummer Charlie Watts watch rushes of Altamont and the fraças that is leading to onscreen murder. The incident was captured almost by accident and is over in seconds, but in slow motion a gun flashes in the audience, brandished by Meredith Hunter, a black teenager wearing a green suit (in other words, very much standing apart from the rest of the people present at the concert). An Angel brings a knife down twice before Hunter tumbles out of shot. “Don’t let him die!” a girl screams. Street Fighting Man plays and Jagger is prancing again. Jagger’s concern when watching the film is in contrast to his seeming detachment onstage, which has the curious implication that maybe the film is at fault; that the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin are somehow responsible because they have committed the deed to celluloid. In filming it they have made the action exist more.

A misconception over the years is that the Hell’s Angels were hired by the Rolling Stones as security at the free concert. “The Hell’s Angels were never hired,” clarifies Sam Goldstein, Gimme Shelter sound supervisor present at Altamont. No proper security could be in force because of the illegal substances that abounded. Further to this, says Goldstein, it was accepted policy that the Hell’s Angels would get the gig. They usually did so at events such as this, being paid in alcohol.[9]

The Hell’s Angels were out of control. An eyewitness by the name of Paul Cox testified before the grand jury that Meredith Hunter was being manhandled by one or more Hell’s Angels for fun, which led Hunter to pull a gun and resulted in him being killed. Others have refuted this claim. The fact of the matter, as Sam Goldstein points out, is that Hunter has a gun at all and is moving closer to the front of the stage. He is twenty feet from Jagger when the Hell’s Angels close in on him. As witnessed in the film, Hunter is struck by a knife blade in the shoulder. Stiffening momentarily, but continuing to run, Hunter is felled by a second strike from the knife. “I wasn’t going to shoot you,” he reportedly splutters before a garbage can is brought down on his head and other Hell’s Angels kick him. Dissipating back into the crowd, one biker remains to warn off any potential help. “He’s going to die anyway,” he says. “Let him die.”

Alan Passaro was arrested and charged with the murder of Meredith Hunter but acquitted on the grounds of self defence. Footage from Gimme Shelter helped detectives identify Passaro in the first place, while in court this same footage was played to help acquit him.

In A.E. Hotchner’s book, Blown Away (Touchstone, 1994), filmmakers David and Albert Maysles recall how they were unaware of the nature of the incident at the time, but simply saw an opening in the crowd and turned their camera on it. They say:

What were these two people doing? It looked like they were dancing, and then there was a flash of something shiny. The cameraman, his eye to the camera, said, “What the hell goes on, two people dancing with all this shit going on?” The camera was on it but what had happened was too fast for us. As it turned out, the camera had recorded the killing of the black kid. The dance we thought we saw was a dance of death.

Years later, Albert Maysles would liken the event to the (fictional) murder inadvertently captured by a photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966).[10]

Despite its objective stance, an audiovisual record of a rock band and the mechanics of a rock concert, the filmmakers cannot help but be moved by the stabbing. The sequence is replayed twice in slow motion. This film and the Stones themselves are foreshadowed by the murder of Meredith Hunter.[11] Gimme Shelter can never really be a film about a band or a concert. The Stones as a musical force were changed after it. So too the decade. If there remained any doubt that Altamont finished what Woodstock had begun, a passage from Barsam:

Repeated observations of New York audiences indicated that many young people sat through several consecutive showings of Woodstock, but that many of them left after one showing of Gimme Shelter with a look of pain, not joy, on their faces. Rock was their music, and film was their art; here was a film that fused the two in a new, disturbing way, and it was all the more disturbing because it recorded a reality, not a romp.[12]

Three other people lost their lives at Altamont: Two run over and one discovered drowned in a drainage ditch. Hundreds more were injured, some seriously.

UNABRIDGED AGONY

In previous editions of this book, Satoru Ogura’s Devil’s Experiment (1985) was identified as ‘probably the closest simulation of a snuff movie ever’. It is the first instalment in the Guinea Pig series of films, and an altogether more shady proposition in the mid nineties when almost nothing was known about it (poor quality dupe, no subtitles). Much as the press release for Mondo Cane (seen earlier in this appendix), we feel the synopsis for Devil’s Experiment, as it appeared in the 1995 edition of Killing For Culture, suitably conveys the relentless attack of the film. It is no longer the closest simulation of a snuff film encountered in this book, because now so much Japanese weirdness takes a similarly vacant and debilitating approach. Squirmfest springs to mind, as do odd things where willing female victims are pierced or their flesh elaborately sewn with needle and thread. More recent are the films from Daikichi Amano’s Genki studio. These include art-performance-porn overloads in which naked human stars ‘engage’ with an army of writhing and wriggling sea creatures and insects. At times Amano’s portraits of fish, bugs and girls looks like something conjured up by Arcimboldo, while the English film titles resonate with surreal intent (or perhaps clunky translation): The cockroach fritters and the mark remains, The fish originates the hanging smell in the net, The frog crawling on stomach is torn and smiles, and so on.

Here then is our synopsis for Devil’s Experiment as it appeared under the film’s then common title, Unabridged Agony:

A needle pierces an eye, entering the tear duct and exiting the cornea. The words Guinea Pig appear over a freeze-frame, followed by an introductory note in Japanese and the year ‘198X’ (?). A pair of female legs (in white shoes) are shown in close-up tied to the legs of a chair. The location is that of a basement and a woman (attired in white) is seen being slapped by a gloved man as another man holds her head. The quantity of blows is represented by the number ten at the bottom right of the picture. A third man takes the place of the first. He daubs his bare hands in water, then salt (?) and commences to strike the woman. The number at the foot of the picture is fifty. The woman’s face is bruised and purple. The gloved man returns and coins are placed into a cloth sack. A man drinks from a can in the background. With the cloth bag brought into play the total number of strikes reaches 100. This figure is reached not in real-time but via a series of edits. (Though some of the blows do actually strike the flesh, these are never heavy blows, nor are they often.) There is a film edit between the coins being placed into the bag and the bag being utilized. A close-up of the girl, head-bowed, dribbling ‘blood’, fades out to the next scene. With her hands tied behind her back, wearing a blindfold, the girl is kicked, tripped and constantly pushed to the floor by the three (clad in black) protagonists. They shout and taunt her. A brief note in Japanese opens each degradation. This sequence incorporates quick-fire editing and is soon over. The next sequence commences with a carefully composed shot looking down on the girl bound to a chair, the red steps of a spiral staircase rising in the foreground. A man descends the stairs. Close-up of the girl’s right hand and wrist manacled to the chair arm. Shot of a pair of pliers being passed from one man to another. The pliers pinch the back of the girl’s hand. Cut to her groaning face and back to the hand where the pliers continue to wrench at the flesh. Her face in closeup, the woman sighs and whimpers before the scene fades. The next shot opens not in the basement but outdoors with the woman secured to an office-type swivel chair, spun round by the three men. Amid her sighs and the groan of the chair, the sickening spectacle is intercut with shots from the woman’s POV, spinning but curiously tranquil with birds singing in the distance. The tally indicates 100 revolutions. The men count in unison, stop the spinning and pour spirits (almost a full bottle) down the woman’s throat. The revolutions continue until 200. Disorientating camera angles. The woman throws up. Fades. Next degradation opens to gloved hands switching on a reel-to-reel tape deck. An electronic white noise emanates. A pair of headphones are strapped to the victim’s ears courtesy of chunky white rope. She is again bound in a chair, groaning against the constant noise. A segue depicts time-lapse. The girl is still suffering the noise. The counter at the bottom of the screen reads five hours. She is screaming. The image cuts from the girl in portrait, to her clenched fists, to the girl in profile. Fade to ten hours. She is gibbering and lurching at her bonds. After ten hours she is silent, convulsing and with drool rolling from her mouth. Next instalment. Conscious again, the woman is suspended by a rope as hair is torn from her scalp and one of her fingernails (long and painted bright red) is extracted. Her moans are soft. The camera angles are again imaginatively composed. Freeze-frame. Fade. A pan of oil is heated on a stove. The counter indicates the temperature to be 70°. The woman is tied spread-eagled to a bed which in turn is covered by a black plastic sheet. Oil is poured onto her arm which visible reddens. The oil is heated to a further 150° and poured over the scalded limb. Her skin blisters. Live maggots are shown in close-up and are sprinkled over the burn, later over her face. Close-up of her eye with several maggots crawling over it. She is semiconscious. Maggots are poured over her legs and her thighs. Rapid editing intercuts the burned flesh and crawling maggots on her face. Fade. Still tied to the bed, the three men throw offal at the woman from a distance. They giggle insanely. Their faces are covered, presumably against the stench. The raw meat falls onto the woman’s hair, over her stomach and legs. She reacts most passionately against this particular episode, far more than any of the other tortures to have gone before. A fish-eyed lens view of the screaming girl is followed by a slow motion shot of the men hurling meat. The piles of meat sliding down the plastic sheets of the bed are accompanied by a laughing sound loop. Fade. A needle is sharpened on a sanding-disc. The girl, out cold, back in the chair and gagged, has her head held firmly and a chain around her neck. Again, a view from above via the spiral staircase. The girl’s once white dress is predominantly blood red. For the first time thus far, the camera allows the viewer to see two of the men’s faces at length (one wears sunglasses, the other thick-rimmed spectacles). They insert the needle into the woman’s face, near her eye. One man holds the eyelid open. Extreme close-up of the open eye, blood flooding it like tears. There is no sound but a mournful musical accompaniment. Rapid-fire flashbacks recall some of the torture moments. The eye bulges, gathers more blood before the tip of the needle finally emerges through the cornea. The woman makes no sound. Unabridged Agony concludes. There are no end titles.

ROSWELL: THE FOOTAGE

The 1995 edition of Killing for Culture concludes with a postscript examining the controversial release of Ray Santilli’s Roswell — The Footage, which he claimed depicted the actual autopsy of an extraterrestrial being. Santilli’s story was global news. The authors viewed the film and were unconvinced, concluding it was a hoax using a dummy and that it was shot on video as opposed to vintage rolls of film, as claimed. Years later Santilli confessed the story wasn’t true. His admission was not out of remorse toward those he had defrauded, but to publicize a feature film about his scam. Alien Autopsy (2006) starred British television personalities Declan Donnelly and Anthony McPartlin. Santilli was executive producer. Here follows the postscript to the previous edition of this book:

In 1994 rumours arose in regard to a bizarre piece of recently discovered film footage. On August 29, 1995, a small sample of this footage, depicting an autopsy, was screened on television around the world. The difference between this and other autopsy film lay in the fact that the subject was not of terrestrial origin. The mutilated body was a supposed alien being. Before this, a video of the original uncut raw footage was advertised for mail order sale at what could be described as an excessively inflated price.

The film is said to have been made in July 1947, and depicts events surrounding the recovery of an alien spacecraft and its occupants, rumoured to have crashed in the desert of Roswell, New Mexico. The footage was purchased by entrepreneur Ray Santilli in November 1994. Santilli claims the film was offered to him by the cameraman who shot it, who had worked at the time for the Army Airforce and special forces. Now in his eighties, the cameraman wants the money but wishes to remain anonymous.

Prior to the film being made available to the public, few people could have been unaware of its existence. Stories concerning the find were circulated on the Internet, and news of the film and photographs from it had appeared in newspapers and magazines worldwide. So too speculation on whether the film was genuine or not. Excerpts were shown in special closed screenings and on television. Indeed, the pre-publicity generated for the release of Roswell — The Footage was nothing short of huge.

For the avoidance of doubt we are presenting only footage which has been verified to our satisfaction.

So reads the disclaimer at the start of the raw footage as it appears in Santilli’s documentary (somewhat contradicting the ads which promised all the viewable footage). This includes autopsy footage and brief shots of debris as recovered from the crashed ship. All the reels are silent, grainy and in b/w. Each reel is presented in its entirety, preceded by technical data, such as

AUTOPSY
REEL NO. 64
HEAD NO. 2

AUTOPSY
REEL UN-NUMBERED
BRAIN

The first reel (which is labelled No.53) jumps into life with white leader and abstract shots of a floor and steps, eventually settling down on a figure lying prone on an autopsy table in a small room (of which we only ever see two walls). The figure is humanoid, on its back with its arms slightly outstretched, has a large head, a round distended stomach and what appears to be female genitalia (but no mammary glands). The creature’s right leg is badly damaged from its thigh area to just below the knee. Two men come into shot, each attired head to foot in a white protective suit with just a small visor through which to see. The camera refuses to stay still and sweeps around the figure and the two men constantly. As the pathologist investigates the damaged leg, the film bleeds to leader. The next (unnumbered) reel begins. The pathologist is in the same position, still examining the leg. A third person can be seen watching the events through an observation window. His face is also obscured, this time with a surgical mask. The photography remains relatively fault-free until the pathologist starts to do something of interest — like take a tissue sample from the wound in the leg — then the shots become erratic and unstable. Then the shot is out-of-focus. Then it bleeds to white. Reel No.56 has the pathologist making an incision with a scalpel down the near-side of the creature’s neck. The image is washed-out. He cuts into the chest area, preparing the full autopsy. The actual opening up of the cadaver is not seen, instead the footage skips a couple of reels (to No.59) where the chest and stomach is already open and internal organs exposed. In Reel No.61, the pathologist lifts out several organs and gives them over to his colleague. The film flickers to white as this is taking place. In the following reel, the pathologist starts to remove dark membranes covering the creature’s eyes. The film encounters further difficulties during this operation. In Reel No.63, another man in a protective suit walks into shot, but does nothing. The pathologist makes incisions along the creature’s head and peels its face back to expose the skull. The view is partially obstructed by the pathologist’s shoulder. For several moments the whole view is obscured — the cameraman doesn’t think to move to the opposite side of the slab until much later (when nothing is going on). The pathologist turns around and puts his hand over the lens. In an unnumbered reel, shortly after the skull is sawn through and the brain removed, the autopsy footage comes to an end.

A statement supposedly prepared by the cameraman outlines his involvement in the Roswell incident. He refers to having spent three weeks ‘working on the debris’ of the ‘flying saucer’ that crashed and, in July 1947, being called to film autopsies on two of the creatures from it. Of the several hundred reels of film he claims to have shot, he sent one batch to Washington while processing separately ‘problem reels which required special attention’. Despite his constant calls to Washington, no one came to collect this second batch and it “has remained with me ever since”. In May 1949, the cameraman, despite not returning footage of the first autopsy, was called to film a third autopsy and in 1952 he left the forces. The camera used throughout the autopsy appears to have no focus facility; it has to remain a safe distance from the subject otherwise the image becomes blurred. In short, there is no detail in this film. By comparison, however, what little there is of the debris footage shows men in a room holding artefacts for inspection by the camera — close-up and in focus. (The identity of these men, like the men in the autopsy footage, is obscured. The setting is once again a room of which we only see one part.)

Santilli tells us there is nothing that points toward the film being fake, when in fact almost everything about it suggests it is a hoax, not least the footage which is visibly a special effect. It is curious how such valuable military film should be in the possession of the cameraman who shot it, and what’s more, be his to sell (throughout is the copyright warning ‘© 1995 Roswell Footage Ltd.’). But then the whole story is suitably vague. The cameraman insists on anonymity, yet, if he is who he claims, his identity could be easily revealed in army records. Considering he’s supposed to be a professional, his work and tools are extraordinarily primitive. (Compare this to other military footage of the same era.) The only evidence we have of his existence is Santilli’s word. Even when Santilli offers independent corroboration of the film’s authenticity, it too is vague and meaningless. Kodak confirmed that certain symbols on a strip of leader sent to them identified the leader as having been made in 1927, 1947 or 1967. The person who confirmed that it was from the ’47 era is identified as a ‘film expert’. As for the creature on the table, it is never moved other than a slight inflexion of the damaged leg. When the genitals are examined, no attempt is made to part the legs even the slightest. When the head is being opened it is not turned to make the pathologist’s work easier, it remains facing the ceiling. Such details suggest a non-articulated dummy. When the chest is sliced open, the skin is ridiculously thin and not attached to the subcutaneous layer. The innards and brain appear organic though their true identity — probably animal — is concealed by the convenient lack of film clarity. As the cameraman would have to unload, seal and mark each used reel, then reload with fresh film it is unlikely that the pathologist at the end of reel fifty-three would still be looking at the leg wound at the beginning of the next reel. In fact, the whole film looks to be shot direct on video (symbols that appear to spell ‘VIDEO’ are visible on a fragment of debris), edited, flawed, then broken down into ‘reels’.

The whole thing draws a comfortable parallel with factors already outlined in this book. The intrusive, handheld camera and film stock plagued by auspicious drops in quality are recurring features, common to many of the films discussed. Indeed, Santilli might be viewed as a contemporary Allan Shackleton, and in years to come, as having pulled off a feat comparable to that of Snuff. And, like Shackleton, Santilli himself is remaining suitably oblique about the whole thing — positively encouraging speculation with claims that the cameraman doesn’t himself regard the creatures as extraterrestrial. Instead, they’re “freaks…some goddamn experiment”.

Publicity for both Roswell and Snuff presented to the public a mystery. No matter how incredible it sounded, the implications should either film prove ‘real’ was too great to ignore. What’s more, as with Snuff, the Roswell film is already growing beyond itself, fuelled by rumours, hearsay, and befuddled media reports. For instance, there was initial speculation that a President’s face might be among the observers in the film; that the film was made to gain publicity for a British UFO convention; that the US government released the film to discredit those seeking to get to the bottom of a Roswell cover-up. Even those who deny the ‘evidence’ don’t always denounce the film outright, merely speculate further. Some believe that the body in the autopsy footage is a human corpse, doctored by unscrupulous filmmakers to look like an alien. “I wouldn’t put it past filmmakers,” said one commentator on BBC Radio, “certainly in South America.”

RYONA

On June 19, 2007, the BBFC announced it was rejecting the video game Manhunt 2, making its supply in the UK illegal. It was the first such decision on a game since Carmageddon, which had been refused classification ten years earlier. Manhunt 2 from Rockstar Games is set in an asylum for the criminal insane that doubles for a covert psychotropic experimental lab. The game follows Danny Lamb, controlled by you, the player, suddenly free of his cell and on a mission to flee the complex. Stealth and violence are a necessity in steering Danny through the game, which effectively boils down to having to kill anyone and everyone who gets in the way: guards, inmates and later hunters. Reluctant at first, an inner voice encourages Danny to “try it. See how it feels to own a life”. Methods of dispatch include beating, garrotting, stabbing, throat slashing and decapitation, committed with an assortment of weapons, rendered with malice and complemented with agonizing screams.

Outlining their decision to ban Manhunt 2, the BBFC (in a report dated June 19, 2007) objected to the bleak tone of the game and the way it encouraged ‘visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing. There is sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged, in the game’.

The game had not been without controversy on the other side of the Atlantic. An earlier incarnation of Manhunt 2 had featured a scoring system, incentive for the player to perform a more brutal kill. But this was dropped and the kills themselves physically obscured somewhat in order to receive a Mature (M) rating as opposed to Adults Only, which was tantamount to a ban in the US.[13] (It was this censored M rating that the BBFC rejected.) Nevertheless, a media backlash ensued, much as happened with Rockstar’s previous Manhunt game, which had a snuff film theme.[14]

Commenting on Manhunt 2, reporter Stephen Totilo makes the point (on the website MTV Geek!) that ‘Movies ask nothing of their viewer but to sit still and understand them. Games ask their audience to do something, and they recommend that certain types of actions get done’.

In effect, games are all about control. Doing something in Manhunt 2 is inextricably linked to the ‘reward’, which is a successful kill. Kills follow many minutes of skulking around in shadows and stalking victims, the sound of a heartbeat accelerating on the soundtrack as the player closes in on their quarry.

The game platforms available to Manhunt 2 are Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 2 and Sony PSP. Wii is an interesting development in that the traditional game console of buttons and levers has been replaced by the Remote Plus or Nunchuck, consoles which also react to physical motion. This is what a cnet review had to say of Manhunt 2 for Wii:

Once you release the button (or thrust the Wii Remote in the appropriate direction), the slaughter begins. On the Wii, you’ll also jab the Wii Remote and Nunchuk over the course of the kill in a manner that more or less imitates the moves you’re performing. The execution you perform depends on the weapon you have equipped and whether there are any interesting environmental features nearby. You might stab the hunter in the back, kick him in the crotch, then slam a manhole cover on his head. Or perhaps eviscerating him with a crowbar is more your thing. Or if you’re a pyromaniac, you may prefer to douse him in gasoline and set him on fire.

Despite the threat of government clampdown on supposed unsuitable video games, the BBFC reversed its decision to reject Manhunt 2 following a successful challenge by the Video Appeals Committee. The Board conceded in March 2008 that it would give the game an 18 classification.

The original, uncensored Adults Only version of Manhunt 2 is not officially available anymore. But unofficially it exists, thanks to dedicated game hackers having discovered the explicit content hidden to secure an M rating. This they cracked within twenty-four hours of the game’s release.

Hacks are not a phenomenon unique to Manhunt 2. Irrespective of the legal ramifications, hacks and patches abound on the Internet and are clearly an integral part of gaming culture. Certainly they have a place within the fan community, helping to shape it and game play itself in much the same ways as the more acceptable level editors and skins.

Take for instance Tomb Raider featuring Lara Croft, a game published by Eidos Interactive in 1996. This three-dimensional globetrotting adventure became a sensation, no small thanks to the focus of play being the titular Lara Croft, a lithe female archaeologist facing life-threatening dangers in a skimpy outfit with guns. ‘Sometimes a killer body just isn’t enough’ proclaimed the packaging, thus dashing the pretence that here was a riot girl avatar about to make a stand in a male dominated gaming world. The short of it was that Lara Croft really didn’t have to be doing very much at all to engage the boys.[15]If online comments are a good indication, many fans were content enough to follow the third-person ass across the polygon landscape. The next step in Tomb Raider development was therefore inevitable, if not wholly welcome. ‘Nuderaider’ was a fan-made patch that, when added to the game, dispensed with Lara Croft’s clothing altogether. Eidos tried to have it banned.

Technology and the Tomb Raider franchise have moved on considerably since the comparatively clunky architecture of the first Lara Croft. So too nude patches. A number of different sexy skin variants for the more advanced model of Lara Croft are now available online, as well as the avatars of many other games, created by fans and free to download. A one-stop site for this sort of thing is the Nude Patch website, whose pidgin remit is as follows:

With the advent of computer games new art named briefly as a nude patch was born. To change textures and skins of heroes of game, transforming the boring dressed heroines into naked beauties, to change registration wall-paper in game for a pornographic skin, or to think out new erotic clothes for the characters.

It is the female characters of high end action adventure games that are favoured for this type of hack. Be it Lara Croft, or the comparatively less known entities of a multitude of other games, such as Prince of Persia, Fallout, Half Life, Silent Hill, Aliens versus Predator, Resident Evil, and so on. Clothing and uniforms are dispensed with, or replaced by something sexier, thanks to these patches, feeding into adolescent male fantasy. But the mortal danger the characters must face doesn’t change, which creates a sexual dynamic different to the traditional interaction of player and game. In this context, ‘winning’ — reaching the next level and ultimately the end of the game, hitherto the ‘point’ of the game — becomes a somewhat secondary if not wholly irrelevant pursuit.

The term that describes this new arena is ryona. It refers not to the game in general but the violence upon a sexualized female humanoid, as perpetrated by another character or group of characters (male or female), or monsters. Game developers are not ignorant to it. A commentator on YouTube, in reference to the death scenes in Resident Evil Zero, suggested that publishers Capcom ‘have tried as hard as they could to make these deaths sexual’. In the case of Warner Bros.’ Lollipop Chainsaw, a game about a cheerleader who kills zombies with a chainsaw, mods hardly seem necessary (although they are available nonetheless). Here is a sort of Lara Croft for a new generation: cynical, brightly coloured and flashing her knickers. ‘Sex, blood and rock’n’roll’ announced the Lollipop Chainsaw teaser trailer.

The first game specifically devised as a ryona game is called Demonophobia. It dates from around 2008 and, from all accounts, is a fan made effort that appeared online with no indication as to who had authored it. It would seem to be of Japanese origin, or possibly Korean. The 2D gameplay is basic and without sound. It involves steering a young female avatar called Sakura through a nightmare world of booby traps, monsters and demons. When death comes, as it does at every turn, it is gruesome and protracted. Sakura may be impaled upon spikes, pummelled mercilessly in the face and stomach by a giant fist, impregnated by parasites, poisoned by spores, melted, dismembered, flayed alive… She is sometimes nude, and sometimes wetting herself in fear, and puking.

Content notwithstanding, Demonophobia resembles an arcade game of the 1980s. The simple interface takes on a decidedly surreal quality in its later stages, when the game adopts the look of a cut-price Yellow Submarine. The anonymous individual behind its production is said to be responsible for the similar, but comparatively higher quality follow-up, Xenophobia. This has sound and a heroine/victim who appears to be age ten.

Fan-made ryona is becoming more common. One example of a fan game that doesn’t appear to be of Asian origin is Another Dimension, by someone called AD_Dev. It is a very competent and addictive platform game that has sound and English dialogue. It follows a young female into the fourth dimension (a subterranean lair), who must face death and violation at every turn in her search for a way back home. She’s called Allie and her clothes are torn off as the game progresses.[16] Another Dimension was until recently a working demo, with updates and new levels posted on the developer’s website and fan forums. Feedback and suggestions were encouraged. But not all fan developers share such a relationship with their fans. Another developer, who goes by the name Vosmug, doesn’t intend his Prisonkage to be a community effort. (Nor is he any longer comfortable with explicit torture and porn, closing any debate on the matter on his website.) Both AD_Dev and Vosmug acknowledge Demonophobia as an inspiration.[17]

There are many examples of ryona to chose from. Some of it comprises walkthroughs and clips from dedicated ryona games, such as Demonophobia and its progeny. Plenty more is taken from mainstream games. These latter clips show games that have been enhanced with mods, or they simply depict the gory deaths and violence found in regular game play. The short selection below is compiled from a brief search for ryona on YouTube. (The titles are those under which the clips are posted.)

SKYRIM - DECAPITATION OF SEXY THRONE BITCH - RYONA: This clip opens in a cavern, where a scantily clad female is seated on a throne. You, the player, approach and chop off her head with an axe. Multiple angles of the scene follow, some in slow motion. Then you hack at the headless body with the axe, before pushing the body aside and claiming the throne. The clip is taken from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (developed and published by Bethesda), an open world game series set within a fantasy land of dragons. In open world play, characters are assigned tasks but there is no linear narrative and players are free to traipse off in any direction and interact with their environment. The comments beneath this particular clip touch on the subject of mods to improve the bloodletting (a geyser erupting from the neck). States one comment: ‘This kind of kill + crimson tide blood mod + db enganced [sic] blood retextures = blood pools.’

OBLIVION - BITCH BEATING RAW FOOTAGE CLIPS - RYONA: Another entry in the The Elder Scrolls series, this clip is compiled of material taken from part four, Oblivion. You pummel a variety of female characters with your fists. Some of the females are semi-naked, some dressed in armour. You hit them when they fall prone to the ground, and in some instances you remove their clothing. The person who posted this clip apologizes for the sound of beating that goes out of sync. There are other clips from The Elder Scrolls that depict dead characters being posed in their underwear, and one application of the ‘spasm’ mod, which produces a death twitch in victims decapitated or cut in two.

BEATEN UP HITOMI IN TROUBLE RYONA: This clip from Dead or Alive 5 (Team Ninja and Tecmo Koei/Sega) focuses on a female on all fours, bruised and battered following an attack that we have not been witness to. The gasping and heaving for breath is allowed to run on for about ten minutes. The game player in this instance is evidently in no hurry to grant Hitomi a reprieve and move on to the next stage.

THE EXECUTION OF SAILOR MOON - GMOD: Sailor Moon is a popular anime franchise, its eponymous heroine a schoolgirl with magical powers in a childlike world. This clip, from one of the several Sailor Moon video games, features the use of a mod that allows Sailor Moon to be guillotined for her crimes against the Dark Kingdom.

REBECCA CHAMBERS DECAPITATION (1080P): This clip from Resident Evil 4 (Capcom) features a modified character wearing Lara Croft type apparel. A head is lopped off with a chainsaw, followed by multiple replays, some in slow motion and from alternate angles.

STREET FIGHTER 4 IV - BEATING (ON) CHUN-LI - RYONA: The description that accompanies this particular post on YouTube reads as follows: ‘Some of the most painful moves from Street Fighter IV get applied to Chun Li. Sexy bitch gets beaten and bruised by the the [sic] most brutal of moves. Includes some slow motion for the most hard hitting moments.’

This isn’t a mod, but regular game play. The clip shows the character of Chun Li coming off worse against an assortment of combatants, being kicked, punched, thrown against walls, and even set afire. Capcom’s popular Street Fighter has advanced exponentially since its arcade origins in terms of punch ’em up graphics. Nevertheless, Chun Li gets off lightly when compared to the combatants of another fighter game, Mortal Kombat…

MORTAL KOMBAT 9 : FATALITIES ON MILEENA

MORTAL KOMBAT 9 : FATALITIES ON SINDEL

MORTAL KOMBAT 9 : FATALITIES ON SKARLET: The ninth incarnation of Mortal Kombat (NetherRealm Studios and Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment) is a ryona favourite. The violence is ludicrously exaggerated (meeting a ban in Australia), and includes x-ray shots that reveal the internal trauma caused by some blows. Clips on YouTube collect the grisly deaths of specific characters, most of them female — Mileena, Sindel and Skarlet, for instance. These high definition animated vignettes kick in whenever a player scores a victory over an opponent and a fatality is announced. Bodies are torn asunder, chopped to pieces and destroyed in a blood-drenched denouement. A skull and spine might be torn from the victim and used as a club to beat what’s left of them, or a hat becomes a circular saw that splits the opponent in half, crotch first. The victor gloats over the carnage. Or, in the case of Johnny Cage, they receive an award much like an Oscar.

SAINTS ROW 3 - STRIPPER GETS FUCKED UP!

SAINTS ROW THE THIRD FEMALE ENEMIES MOD: The latest instalment of Saints Row (Volition, Inc. and THQ) is a surreal open world urban shoot ’em up, with a lot of capacity for ryona in its normal game play (and official add-ons, such as the ‘Penthouse Pack’). The first clip here, which runs a little over one minute, shows a semi-naked female being shot repeatedly at point-blank range in the head, ass and crotch. The person who posted the clip (HammersGamingChannel) voices his surprise at its popularity: more than one million views in six months. The second clip depicts a mod that turns enemies into scantily clad or naked females, who are then obliterated by the strange bug-eyed Professor Genki. They fall under a hail of bullets and an assortment of other weapons, which include a flamethrower and long pink dildo.

There is a strong sense among the ryona community that the community itself is part of something bigger, destined to feed into wider culture. (Arguably this is already happening.) Members of the Ryonani community forum have been defining terms and discuss legitimacy. Questions are raised on such matters as whether ryona should be broken down into degrees of extreme, whether violence upon a male qualifies as ryona, and so on. Fans are keen to reinforce the fact that ryona is purely fantasy based with no place in the real world. Wikipedia disputes the idea of ryona, twice deleting an article on the subject. Or rather, certain Wikipedians called for the article to be deleted, recognizing the term only as a neologism. (According to Wikipedia guidelines, neologisms ‘are often created in an attempt to use Wikipedia to increase usage of the term’.) Nonetheless, ryona is common currency among a growing circle of people, and Wikipedia’s reaction simply opens up a whole new debate.

GURO

The Spanish novelist, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, observed that ‘without rules there is no game’. Truth told, the rules are not what they used to be, certainly in reference to pornography. Take for example scat porn. Some consider that the popularity of scat porn, focused on faeces and defecation, is entirely down to the Internet.[18] Scat porn was all but invisible prior to the Internet, relegated to bizarre specialist magazines published on the continent by the hardier pornographers, and then not without humour. The psychosexual aberrations defined by Krafft-Ebing et al at the turn of the last century are now subjects of widespread appeal. Nowadays companies specialize in scat films. V&R Planning, one of the first, happens to be the same company behind Death Women.[19] In the case of bestiality porn — ‘monstrous and revolting as it seems to mankind,’ to paraphrase Krafft-Ebing[20] — popularity is great enough to have become a threat to its manufacture, according to online warnings from the producers of such material, lamenting that pirates and illegal downloads will finish them.[21]

Indeed, we are to believe that everything can be sexualized. A trawl through the subdirectories of a handful of fetish sites will attest to the existence of some very specific sexual peccadilloes, while ‘Rule 34’ — an Internet meme — goes further to suggest that if it exists, there is porn of it. The rules of the Internet are arbitrary and not entirely serious, but they hold some mad truth nonetheless. Rule 34 generally takes the form of a photograph or original artwork in poor taste, usually the depiction of celebrities or popular fictional characters in sexualized scenarios, itself is a tradition that dates back to Tijuana Bibles in the 1920s. Among other rules of the Internet is Rule 36, promising there will always be more fucked up shit than what you just saw. These rules stem from the usenet, and anonymous message and image boards, collectively Chan boards.[22] Even the outwardly innocuous boards — those, say, devoted to the sport of fishing — are propelled by strange didactic ideas, with room for porn.

The clique of chan might be described as a test tube for Internet memes. Chan boards have helped birth Internetspeak, which is not unlike the secret gypsy language of Polari, replete with non sequiturs and backward logic. Here, for instance, members of 4Chan talk books:

Palahniuk: DO NOT WANT

Twilight: what is this i don’t even

Harry Potter: Newfag detected

War and Peace: tl;dr

Old Testament: Son I am disappoint

The Shining: U MAD

Neuromancer: Good luck! I’m behind 7 proxies and I’m running Norton!

Finnegans Wake: ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU SPEAK IT?

The Diary of Anne Frank: (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

120 Days of Sodom: hide yo kids, hide yo wives, and hide yo husband…Or, Rule 34.

There is a general acceptance of Japanese culture throughout these message boards, with the fetish porn cartoons of hentai perhaps the most favoured types of post. Hentai is a term confabulating a broad range of subject matter from a wide variety of artists working in many different styles. Hentai generally means the more outrageous or darker content, but in any case there exists a confusing overlap. Nekomimi, for instance, refers to pointy eared humanoid characters, while kemonomimi also refers to pointy eared humanoid characters but with tails. Either one may constitute lolicon or furries or furfags, which in turn may contain an element of, say, futanari, while falling under the aegis of doujinshi. Ad nauseam. Labels such as these occupy much discussion, but pigeonholing is one thing chan boards take seriously.

A less common aspect of hentai is guro. This is the name for cartoons of erotic grotesque, by and large the sexualization of gore and death. There is no limit to bloody extremes in guro, as a random selection of imagery from several boards will testify: lesbian death and torture images; women sliced by swords; a man fucked by his hangman while swinging from a gallows; womb related gore; dismemberment; a middle aged couple dining on the exposed brain of a young girl as a waiter looks on; a boy flayed alive; a boy with a giant dick bursting through his belly; a huge mallet crushing the head of a quivering female, already gored by a knife; pictures in which a girl’s teeth and tongue are removed… This is material predominately of Southasian origin, sourced from other fan sites, from countless published works, or elsewhere.[23] In many cases the work is originally rendered by the board’s own members. This is the oekaki — or doodle or scribble — thread, which may contain some doodling but some nicely rendered efforts, too, and even simple animation. The artist occasionally solicits suggestions on what torment his or her creations might suffer next.

One anonymous member on gurochan asks whether there exists on the board a thread devoted to necrophilia. ‘Don’t want to be picky or anything, but I just want to see stuff like image related.’ The accompanying image shows a woman being fucked in a bathtub, her head beneath the water. ‘No maggots or intestines strewn all over the place,’ the request continues. ‘Drowning completely optional.’

Guro is somewhat detached from the anthropomorphism that quantifies much other manga and hentai. There is less of a place for it in guro. Indeed, humanization doesn’t figure much at all in the realm of pornographic extremes. But the gurochan board does at least allow articulate and analytical discussion (if not also surreal and downright daft at times). There is mixed feeling about the place of guro, for instance, even among supporters. One member of the board deliberates that most people, in the real world,

won’t understand what this fetish is about because it sounds like something not normal. People just think that people who are turned on by guro are murderers and psychopaths because they don’t know that there is a whole community of (mostly) absolutely sane people who share the same little secret without actually going postal or something like that.

In opposition, another member believes there is absolutely no reason to be proud of being into guro, unless you enjoy being watched/depicted as a sick fuck by your average citizen, or think that it makes you cool. The common consensus is that guro is more than just masturbation fodder. Rather it is a form of beauty and art. According to some, guro is part of a tradition that extends to the old master painters and a few contemporary western artists, such as H R Giger. Purists disagree. A discussion on the matter was shot down by gurochan member Lolitoads, who responded thus:

What’s this about? Guro is EROTIC GROSTESQUE NONSENSE. You cannot divorce sexuality from guro, although it needn’t be outright pornographic as we celebrate here. Also, people seem to be treating Western art and artists as ‘guro’ which seems a little stupid, as if you’re studying a movement, you have to realize that those artists evolved independent of the erotic grotesque movement, which was a powerfully Japanese thing, and had very little to do with the West. If you want to bring modern horror and the like into it, by all means mention New French Extremity and the like, but don’t make yourself the bigger idiot by calling Goya an erotic grotesque artist.

But it would be wrong simply to talk of Guro in terms of the Internet and as a recent phenomenon. One should not forget the European tradition of comics, with the Italian fumetto by way of example dealing in some pretty extreme imagery. Perhaps the terminology wasn’t yet in place, but underground comix artists in the US in the sixties and seventies also dabbled with the erotic grotesque. Jim Osborne’s D.O.A. Comics from 1976 is a prime example. Considerably less accomplished than this, the self published Gory Comix offers more along the same lines years later. Distribution in this instance was through a classified ad in Fangoria. Edited by one JGP, aka Just the Good Parts, Gory Comix no 8 (November 1991) contains three black and white, loosely drawn comic strips depicting damsels being disembowelled by satanists and demons, or their flesh ravaged by spores from outer space.[24] This issue of Gory Comix bills itself as the second anniversary issue. An ad for Hemofilia at the back suggests that similar comics were emerging from Mexico. (Hemofilia issue two supposedly came with a free barf bag.)

This small press gore comics tradition continues today with the like of Frightfeast, a nicely produced digest sized assault on the senses, produced and published by Mark K. On a more commercial level, but certainly not pulling punches because of it, is Crossed comic from Avatar. Set in a world of plague, where the infected are sex and death hungry freaks (brandishing a red cross on their face that makes them look like England football supporters), this ongoing saga is available both online and in print. These stories, exhibiting graphic paths of bodily destruction, found a wider audience with issue 100, which welcomed a script by Alan Moore.

MEXICAN DOCTOR

This section concerns another film referenced in the first edition of this book. Of its origin nothing was known at the time, and the matter was relegated to a short footnote. Better equipped now to deal with the subject, what follows is construction of evidence from numerous quarters: Our initial discussion of the shadowy film fuelled a debate online, with persons deliberating upon the nature of the footage, which in turn we used for further research. The investigation into Mexican Doctor, the film in question, becomes worthy of discussion in itself.

Time isn’t kind. The video copy of First Transmission detailed ealier in this book[25] may well have segued straight into Psychic TV Vol. 2 — we simply can’t recall and the videocassette in question, a bootleg, is long gone. There didn’t appear to be any noticeable division between the two films. Whatever the case, Psychic TV Vol. 2 included one alarming sequence showing a bogus doctor conducting experiments on boys or young men. According to the introductory preamble, the footage was said to be under investigation by the FBI. Whether the film was authentic was difficult to determine. Shot on Super 8, it showed the subjects having low-voltage electrodes inserted beneath their skin for the purpose of erotic stimulation, or so it appeared. The operations are conducted in motel rooms. Finally, in the film, an adolescent boy has his penis amputated and an electrode attached to the remaining stump. The film is silent save for the whirr of the camera.

Scant information has emerged about the possible origins of this material. A thread on the website Digital Retribution has gone some way in addressing this, however, and awards the material the makeshift title of Mexican Doctor. The Digital Retribution thread commenced in 2008 primarily as a discussion on the possible existence of snuff films, before arriving at Mexican Doctor (some viewers believed one young subject in the film dies, but there is nothing onscreen to suggest that’s the case).

One post, originating from Adelaide, Australia, posits that a fifteen-minute format of the film had been circulating the heavy metal community in the early nineties. The general consensus is that the material was shot in the 1970s and was acquired by Psychic TV some years later (as opposed to being shot by them). Writes krakenslayer [sic throughout]:

To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if this footage was later circulated on its own in various unofficial, untraceable versions. As far as I can determine there is no onscreen title for this segment in the video — The Castration Movie seems to just be a conveniently descriptive informal moniker (although I might be wrong). I’ve seen people refer to it on the IMDb First Transmission forum as Misdeeds of a Doctor in San Diego (the first ‘experiments’ are carried out there before heading to Tijuana) and The Mystery Movie. I think people would just refer to it by whatever informal description was scrawled on the videotape label by the dodgey man in the pub they got it off. Mexican Doctor is just a very descriptive offhand title for this film.

krakenslayer paraphrases a couple of the user comments on IMBb, who offer a more detailed breakdown of the film, while remaining singularly confused and disturbed by it. The research continues. A little later, rossRadiation says that the description of the film brings to mind a

crazy documentary about this unregistered ‘doctor’ who was performing budget abortions, platic surgery and sex changes in his garage and in motel rooms. He got caught after about 20 years of illegal practice, because a patient died — the patient was dating an amputee fetishist and the doctor tried to amputate the guy’s leg by request, but he bled to death — the cops found the amputated leg in the desert (the doctor had thrown it out his car window whilst cruisng [sic] down the highway) and traced it back to the ‘doctor’ — wish I remember his name or the name of the doco…bizarre to say the least

The documentary in question was likely ‘The Worst Doctor in America,’ part of the CBS tabloid news programme Inside Edition. The subject was Dr John Ronald Brown, a surgeon who practiced without a licence for many years, finding his clients in the US and travelling to Mexico to operate. His speciality was the cut-rate sex change, but he dabbled in most anything that presented itself, from penile enlargements to facelifts. Brown was eventually tried and found guilty of second degree murder in 1999, when one of his patients died following complications. The victim in this instance was a seventy-nine-year-old male who suffered from apotemnophilia, the desire to have a healthy limb amputated. Brown removed the man’s leg (for $10,000) at a clinic in Tijuana and left him to convalesce at the National City Holiday Inn, San Diego. (Such a procedure is illegal, of course, and Brown disposed of the limb by driving it into the desert and leaving it to the coyotes.) But Brown had botched the job and gangrene set in, poisoning the patient.

Brown cannot be positively identified as the doctor in Mexican Doctor, but there are a number of pressing similarities. An individual called roadkill33 made the connection on Digital Retribution, going so far as to provide screen grabs comparing Brown (as he appears in the documentary) with the mystery surgeon of Mexican Doctor. The connection had evidently been made prior to this, however, given the comment on IMDb noted above, which refers to the film as Misdeeds of a Doctor in San Diego. San Diego is where Brown’s patient died.

An article that was originally published in LA Weekly,[26] now available to view online, adds more fuel to the conjecture. ‘The Peculiar Practice of Dr John Ronald Brown’ is an account by reporter Paul Ciotti, who had first met the errant surgeon in 1977. Ciotti tells the story of a man loved and loathed by his patients, whose unconventional ideas and general incompetence would be uncovered over time. The slovenly absent-minded Brown is not adverse to sipping coffee during his underground operations, while in one instance his trousers fall down.

Through the article we learn that Brown had a partner back in the seventies, an equally shady character who had no legal right to call himself a doctor, as so often he did. Before the two men had a falling out, they would frequently travel across the border into Mexico, where Brown met clients and operated on them without question or aftercare. Often these operations took place in motel rooms. Sometimes they were videotaped, by friends of the patient or by Brown’s associate. A number of these tapes were unearthed at Brown’s home following his arrest and used in evidence against him. One was titled Jack Has a New Pisshole Behind His Balls, which shows Brown adapting the urethra of the titular ‘Jack’ to enable him to pee sitting down. Another video, notes Ciotti in his article, features transsexual surgery and a scalpel so dull it can barely function as intended. During the video playback in court the judge asked whether he really had to watch the appalling procedure.

There is no reference to video footage that corresponds with Mexican Doctor in Ciotti’s extensive article, i.e., no boys with electrical implants, and there appears no reference to it by the police investigating Brown. Indeed, its inclusion in First Transmission/Psychic TV Vol. 2 predates Brown’s 1998 arrest and the seizure of his videotapes by several years. But, real or not, it seems fair to suggest that Mexican Doctor depicts Brown at work in some capacity.

SHOCK VIDEO FAKERY

The Dnipropetrovsk maniacs case draws a curious aside, the parents of the boys who murdered Sergei Yatzenko having created a myth of their own. The videos and photos have been manipulated, the parents say, in order to obliterate the identity of the real killers and replace their faces with those of their offspring, whom they claim are innocent. The reality of the situation is evidently too much weight to bear and so some people choose to believe the film is fake. But fakery does exist in the world of the shock video…

The blog Ark-La-Tex belongs to a US patriot group called 9-12 that is concerned with border control and terrorism, and — the primary tool in the terrorist arsenal — methamphetamine and other illegal drugs. It has regular updates pertaining to Mexican drug cartels. One post dated June 21, 2012, suggested that the cartels were venturing into realms of social media to promote fear. By way of example the blog gave the case of one Lucy Herrera Valdés Alamán, aka The Silky, of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, said to have been ‘slaughtered on Facebook’. The report provided elements of the victim’s Facebook profile, which had supposedly been accessed or possibly even created by her assassins. The Silky’s profile picture is a woman with her mouth taped over. She appears to be in her early twenties. Other photos show the Silky naked and wearing a blindfold on a concrete floor, where she is threatened with a knife. There is a pool of blood in some shots (but no evidence of a beheading as described). Translated from the Spanish, the profile description is said to have read:

i am the filthy EL FARMER but called THE SILKY. I was beheaded in June 2012. This will happen to the pigs curious in the territory of MM. Atte. THE SILKY DEAD.

Apparently, Facebook removed the profile within hours. The post as it appeared on Ark-La-Tex has also since been removed. No reason given. Likely it’s because the Silky, her Facebook profile and her murder are now debunked as an elaborate fake. Ark-La-Tex evidently took the whole business at face value in their crusade against the narco gangs. The Silky, who doesn’t exist, is a joke in poor taste perpetrated by individuals unknown.

An unsuspecting blogger might be forgiven for falling for such subterfuge. However, it is more problematic when the mainstream media — which certainly has the resources to know better — follows suit. In August 2004, a video appeared that purported to show Islamic terrorists killing an American citizen in Iraq. Strikingly similar to the Daniel Pearl video some years earlier, the victim here relates his name and address to the camera then utters a monologue about unjust war and a request that America withdraw its troops. His speech is intercut with photos of civilian war victims, before terminating with a brief shot of the man having a knife sawn through his throat. But the video is a hoax. The eagerness of the media to report the breaking news overrode journalistic obligation, such as first corroborating the veracity of the story. “Before he is killed, the man on the tape says he lives at 1510 Eddy Street in San Francisco,” stated ABC News. Meanwhile, Reuters decreed that a

group linked to al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has beheaded an American hostage in Iraq and posted a video of the killing on a website…“I have been offered for exchange for prisoners here in Iraq,” the terrified-looking American said in the video, rocking back and forth in his chair, his hands tied behind his back. “We need to leave this country alone. We need to stop this occupation.” The video then showed him being beheaded.[27]

A few minutes of investigation would have disclosed the truth. The victim, played by one Benjamin Vanderford, was very much alive and contactable at the address he gave at the start of the video, and reiterated by the press.

On May 7, 2006, a report in the Sunday Times claimed that video footage showing the killing of kidnapped Iraqi news reporter Atwar Bahjat was in circulation. Journalist Hala Jaber described the footage in graphic detail:

A large man dressed in military fatigues, boots and cap approaches from behind and covers her mouth with his left hand. In his right hand, he clutches a large knife with a black handle and an 8in blade. He proceeds to cut her throat from the middle, slicing from side to side.

Her cries — “Ah, ah, ah” — can be heard above the “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) intoned by the holder of the mobile phone.

Even then, there is no quick release for Bahjat. Her executioner suddenly stands up, his job only half done. A second man in a dark T-shirt and camouflage trousers places his right khaki boot on her abdomen and pushes down hard eight times, forcing a rush of blood from her wounds as she moves her head from right to left.

Only now does the executioner return to finish the task. He hacks off her head and drops it to the ground, then picks it up again and perches it on her bare chest so that it faces the film-maker in a grotesque parody of one of her pieces to camera.[28]

The report claimed that when authorities finally retrieved the body there was also evidence of torture with a power drill, with multiple holes in the arms and legs and the right eye drilled out. The footage was said to have been recorded on a camera phone that had been found on a member of the Shi’ite Badr Brigade killed fighting in Baghdad.

There is a serious problem with this account. Iraqi police had already discovered the bodies of Bahjat and her murdered colleagues, all having died from multiple gunshot wounds. The body of Bahjat in a Reuter’s photograph is fully clothed and has not been beheaded. It transpires that the video under review is something else entirely; an edited version of the murder of a group of ten Nepalese workers, kidnapped and killed by militants in 2004. The video has been edited and circulated to represent the death of Bahjat for reasons that are not clear. Equally unclear is how the Sunday Times fell for the hoax in the first place, given that the supposed female victim is clearly a bare-chested male.

THE CULTURAL MYTHOLOGY OF THE SNUFF MOVIE

The world’s first conference devoted to the mythology of snuff took place at the University of Bournemouth on one weekend in November 2012.[29] Bournemouth has a working pier and a cultural landmark in Mary Shelley, buried in the cemetery of St. Peter’s Church, along with her parents and the heart of husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. The nation happened to be on storm warning alert with scenes on television of property being washed away. In the media spotlight, Ricky Hatton attempted his boxing comeback and BBC2 broadcast, without irony, Gimme Shelter on the eve of a new tour by the Rolling Stones.

Attendance at the snuff conference was modest, but there was an overriding sense that something unusual and a little exciting was happening. One of the few negative reviews that Killing for Culture received in its earlier incarnation appeared in the scholarly film journal Post Script. The author of the review was unable to accept the validity of the book because of its ‘anti-academic flourish’ and condemned it as a pretence.[30] The snuff conference was clear indication of how attitudes have changed in the last two decades: the organizers and a number of the delegates had arrived in academia on the back of fan interests — and also Killing for Culture, about which authors David Kerekes and David Slater were invited as guests to talk. (In the end, only Kerekes attended.)

Delegates at the conference, to quote the programme booklet, spoke on matters pertaining to ‘critical, cultural, historical and theoretical perspectives linked to the sociocultural paradox that is the snuff movie’. This included animal slaughter in feature films, violent pornography, British jurisprudence, extreme body performance and reaction videos on YouTube. The organizers were Shaun Kimber, Neil Jackson, Johnny Walker and Thomas Watson. Their idea for The Cultural Mythology of the Snuff Movie sprang from another conference some years earlier,[31] where they had participated in a panel on realist horror and found footage films. They considered the snuff conference as a staging post for future work and a book.[32] The interview that follows was conducted on the evening of Saturday, November 24, shortly after the snuff conference concluded.

DAVID KEREKES: Why a snuff film conference, and why now?

NEIL JACKSON: For me personally, I’d developed a real interest in this notion of realist horror. It’s something which has come out of academic approaches to the horror film in the last ten or fifteen years, I suppose. Perhaps even twenty years. But, looking for new angles from which to approach the realist horror paradigm, if you like. The whole snuff mythology seemed like a particular area of focus where we could really locate a very specific set of phenomena, and identify a whole series of conventions.

JOHNNY WALKER: When we were originally on the panel at Cine Excess, it was coincidental, in a way, but the more I think about it, the more I realize, well, actually, it wasn’t that coincidental, because it’s popular at the minute to talk about extreme horror genres, precisely because they’ve made quite a lot of money. Obviously the found footage thing gives credence to that. So, the more I think about it, the more I realize we were on point in that panel, insofar as we were addressing something which may date back to the 1970s, but, in fact, is possibly more contemporary than many people were willing to acknowledge. When it came down to doing a conference on snuff, I guess none of us really knew whether or not we’d get a response at all. In the back of our minds, we were thinking well, this could be a struggle; this could fall on its face. We had quite grand ideas of the final product: a two-day event for a start, rather than a one-day event. It was quite overwhelming how many people wanted to talk about snuff, and how many people were actually attuned to discussing snuff, at a level which was informed. It was quite interesting to see the kind of academically intellectual papers that we got, from a subject that, for such a long time, would have been ghettoised by the academy.

JACKSON: The more we looked at it, the more we realized that there were so many angles into this; into what is essentially a very niche area of what itself is a very niche aspect of academic approaches to the horror film. There are so many interesting angles from which you can approach this, and part of the reason is the developments over the last ten years, in terms of technologies, so-called ‘snuff’ material is now distributed, produced, and consumed. I think this weekend’s event has really consolidated the sense of it being a really viable project.

KEREKES: Did the conference have any resistance from the academy?

WALKER: I did. I was advised to be cautious about doing an event like this — for future career prospects. You’ve got to bear in mind that I’m coming to the end of my PhD, but when this idea was in its early stages, I was in the middle of my PhD. I was told by several people, just to be careful; you don’t want to ruffle any feathers, and you don’t want unnecessary media controversy either. But I think, take a risk, that’s what we did, we took a risk, and we didn’t get negative media coverage. Some academics thought it was probably not the best idea.

JACKSON: Contrary to Johnny’s experience, I received nothing but encouragement from my own departmental head. From a research perspective, I think she recognized that, in our own small way, we were perhaps breaking new ground within the field, we can say, in all modesty [laughs].

THOMAS WATSON: For my PhD research, I’m supervised by a guy who’s actually just presented at this conference, so obviously he’s been very supportive. The only resistance that I think we’ve faced relates to the resistance that Johnny experienced. Also, we set up a Facebook group to promote the event, and have a bit of dialogue with people that might want to attend. I think what started as a little bit of friendly debate — which was encouraged — got a bit heated in the wrong way, and a bit sort of nasty. It was conscious in our mind that if we stepped in, would we be then censorious, in terms of what a lot of people have argued against?

WALKER: Ban the sadist opinions, that’s what I thought… !

WATSON: What we decided to do was put a disclaimer up, and say what the event was actually trying to encourage. We’re not looking for any sort of sensationalist ideas. We don’t want to have this legitimate event under the pretence that, ‘ah well, we’re just really into blood, guts, and gore,’ you know? We’ve actually got something interesting to say about it. But that died down, once we’d intervened.

KEREKES: What is the next step in terms of future study?

JACKSON: We’re not quite sure what the next development is going to be. We’ve pretty much, for lack of a better term, discussed the state of the arts today; we’ve looked at what the most recent developments of the whole phenomenon are. Until a new technological means of dissemination and consumption becomes available — and it’s difficult at this stage to imagine what that’s going to be — I think we will continue to work in the realms of, certainly, Internet consumption. In terms of more mainstream popular culture, where appropriation of this kind of subject matter is concerned, there doesn’t seem to be a week goes by when there isn’t some kind of found footage narrative, torture porn, some kind of horror film which appropriates the handicam, or this realist horror, approach — whether or not it’s dealing specifically with the snuff mythology. I think, for several years yet, this kind of approach to horror is going to dominate. Although, at the same time, there has also been a reaction to those kind of realist developments of the last ten years. There’s been a reaction in the sense that there’s also been a return to the gothic sensibility, although in a highly contemporized form, with all of your vampire, your Twilights, your True Bloods — the popularisation of the modern gothic, if you like. That’s now the ‘respectable’ face of horror whereas much of the material which we’ve been looking at, remains in the realms of the transgressive. That’s part of the appeal for me. I don’t see any time in the imminent future whereby it won’t be transgressive, purely because of the extremities and the potential extremities, of this kind of subject matter.

SHAUN KIMBER: I think one area of further development is cross-platform media… well, generic hybridity hybriditives, in the way in which things like Sinister [2012] and V/H/S [2012], say, have brought in the supernatural to found footage/fake snuff. I think those generic hybrids will probably carry on and will create texts for analysis.

JACKSON: We’ve already seen that in science fiction monster movies. Cloverfield [2008], for example.

KIMBER: Absolutely. We talked very much theoretically, but I think, methodologically, the study of audiences, for example, is something that’s flagged up. We’ve been talking about audiences and their potential affects, identification. But I think actually speaking to people about their lived experiences of engaging with this material is possibly a route for further development. And an example of that, in terms of the methodology, would be Iain [Robert Smith]’s paper earlier, talking about reaction videos. The discussion straight away went into other areas of ‘yeah, but did you look at the comments [on YouTube]?’ and ‘what about the formal strategies that were used?’ As well as the theoretical insights and critical views, there is also the potential for developing methods for interrogating the consumption of some of these new forms. For me, those stand out.

WALKER: The event was called ‘The Cultural Mythology of the Snuff Movie’, but it’s much more than just cinema; it’s beyond the text, in a sense. It’s about the mythology, and how that transcends boundaries, just the fact that it is a mythology, where does that mythology take us? You know, discussions of popular media, but not even the media, ’cos you don’t necessarily have to have seen anything that is claiming to be snuff, or faux snuff, or whatever. It exists, regardless of whether or not you viewed the 3 Guys 1 Hammer video.

KIMBER: There’s a company called Sensium in Ireland that is experimenting with multisensory experiences with regard to film. They use it with music as well. You get an audience in to watch something and they’re wired up to heart monitors, and whatever you wear on your finger to test sweat. And the film adapts narrative, as well as what you’re hearing, according to your bodily response. Now, that sounds to me to be really fertile ground to play — experientially in terms of the audience, but narratively, in terms of the text that you generate for that — with snuff.

JACKSON: When you first wrote Killing for Culture in the early nineties, could you have possibly conceived a situation whereby snuff actually has an audience which is visible — not only visible, but also feeding back to the Internet community about their responses to particular types of so-called ‘snuff’ material? I think it probably was inconceivable, because — to misquote you in the book — snuff then was something which was viewed in private; it was something furtive, something secret. It was hardly ever perceived as a public activity. It was something that was very much underground. Now, it’s on the end of a mouse click.

KEREKES: That leads nicely into the last question (inasmuch as the last question would not have been conceivable back in the days of the original Killing for Culture): How about the idea of snuff as ‘outsider art’?

JACKSON: I find it difficult to conceive of snuff, in its purest form, as art. I think snuff, in its purest form, is the purest form of exploitation, okay? Unless the victim is very much a willing participant, which is highly improbable, I think the notion of snuff as art is beyond the realms of sensible discourse at the moment. Maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy.

WATSON: I guess in terms of what relates to the definition of snuff, I’ve never come across any art form outside of obviously cinema, and maybe fiction, that do play with the idea with real depth. But obviously, we’ve had papers today which are looking at more violent forms of performance art, say, and how that deals with what has been coopted into tropes of snuff, or has been placed over that. One of my research interests is violent art forms, or performance art, and there’s a few different people that do seem to deal with body mutilation, like very violently, explicitly, like chemical burns, self-inflicted, narrating these experiences in their own journals. I don’t think these people have actually been documented in terms of snuff mythology, or have been co-opted within that yet. So I think that might be another area which I personally would like to go down and investigate. So, in terms of snuff as an art form, I think it is possible to speak about it in those terms, yeah.

WALKER: Snuff, in a way, could be seen as art at its purest, insofar that ‘snuff doesn’t exist’… the fact that, if art is creativity, it exists enough for people to talk about it, despite there never being any evidence for snuff. Communally, people have generated and fuelled this myth, in a very creative way, to the point where snuff is almost an art form; it’s been created, it’s been constructed, and therefore, in a way, is some sort of philosophical art, if you like. If we ever see a snuff movie, maybe that’s different — but in terms of the mythology of snuff, it’s held some cultural weight. And it’s been added to, not just by academics or fans, but by contemporary culture more generally. In a way, it is a communal construction: it’s been created, it connotes certain things. It’s expressive. So in a way, the cultural mythology of snuff itself is art, on a very arbitrary, communal level.

WATSON: I like the idea of this communal aspect. Talking about the mythology of the snuff movie, in terms of the various different sort of facets that we have throughout the conference; it’s almost as if these various different areas of culture, from a communal aspect, are working to perpetuate that myth. Whether that be in terms of different art forms, like cinema, performance art, or — as Neil said before — advents in new media technology, and where that can ultimately take you, and how that sort of co-opts the aesthetics and mythology itself. And it’s just going to continue to snowball in that respect, I guess.

KIMBER: I’m torn; I’m really split between saying yes and no. In terms of snuff being the ‘other’ of cinema, then yes, potentially I could consider it outsider art. However, one of the big definitions that we heard today is about commercial, and of course that’s the big bugbear for a lot of people, isn’t it? For some, the fact that the pure definition of snuff is for commercial benefit would exclude it from that question in the first place. So, part of me thinks it is the cinematic, it is the cultural ‘other’. But on another level, it’s been modified through its sale and reproduction, this conference, your book, potentially our book, through institutional practice in terms of the BBFC — taking that into consideration looking at films like The Bunny Game [2010], for example, and through legislation.[33] It’s maybe difficult to be that much of an outsider when you’re that much part of the establishment [laughs].

JACKSON: The fact that we are talking about films like The Bunny Game, the fact that we are talking about things like performance art, under the general heading of snuff, just indicates to me how the term itself has been corrupted, and has metamorphasized over the years. We no longer think of snuff merely as the recording of death on film; it now seems to incorporate the recording of people — whether by their own consent or not — hurting themselves, or mutilating themselves, or allowing themselves to be mutilated, in very unpleasant ways.

KEREKES: Do you think academia is complicit in that?

JACKSON: I would say that this weekend’s conference would probably force me to respond in the affirmative.

KEREKES: That’s a good place to stop. Thank you.

1Bill Landis (uncredited), ‘Ahead Of His Time: The Bob Roberts Interview,’ Sleazoid Express, Spring 1999. Also in this same issue is a review of Sweet Savior, which draws parallels between the characters in the movie and their real life Manson counterparts. The movie disappeared shortly after its original 1971 release, ‘unanimously attacked by critics as being utterly tasteless.’

2It would appear The Manson Massacre was released in Italy as I demoni, an aka with clear satanic connotations (as well as being the name of an Italian television miniseries of the time based on the works of Dostoyevsky) and a poster that includes a scantily clad Caroline Munro, who isn’t actually in the picture.

3The altogether obscure Wrong Way was made the same year as Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972) and shares a similar thematic makeup. Two girls are kidnapped by miscreants. A worried father contacts police. A comedy sheriff is on the case. Wrong Way might easily have been shot in a single day and is populated by non-actors. The drug use doesn’t appear simulated — which is to say in one scene a Hell’s Angel is so stoned he keeps falling off his motorcycle.

4June 25, 1970.

5Love in the Commune aka Ghetto Freaks aka Sign of Aquarius aka Love Commune. By any name it’s a grim experience. A couple of sequences stand out, however, being an authentic glimpse into counterculture life at the time. The commune, which Sonny calls ‘the family’, is seen selling underground newspapers on the street and protesting against the Vietnam War in a rally in a park. The scenes capture the harsh attitudes facing the ‘freaks’ when in public. But not once does a Manson-type ball a headless chicken. It isn’t unthinkable that Rolling Stone fabricated this episode; after all, they did once review a nonexistent Beatles album for a lark.

6In Sacrilege, Cassandra’s pet cat Lucifer is actually a bedraggled, pussy hungry bearded hippy with a shit-eating grin and a psychotic glare. Nothing very much happens outside of sex, but the filmmakers seem to have had artistic aspirations and Sacrilege at least has a half decent soundtrack, some spooky moments, and in Lucifer an individual of disarming character. Sexual Awareness on the other hand lacks the oddball edge and is quite funny, if oftentimes unintentionally so. Sexual Awareness contains a hippy guru figure called Aaron, his faithful follower Jerome, and the successful indoctrination of several hippy girls into his cult. The girls are persuaded to “Obey… obey”, while passages from a book on Shamanism are read out to them. Things go downhill pretty fast during the sex scenes when the actor playing Aaron puts down the book and struggles for something profound to say in the moment. “Suck the almighty tip… You’re becoming one of us now,” he repeats as a hairy wench tickles his testicles. “Obey… obey.” Both films have been linked to director Ray Dennis Steckler.

7J Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies.

8The synopsis was originally presented without paragraph breaks. These have been added for the sake of clarity.

9Sam Goldstein speaking on the commentary track for the Criterion DVD release of Gimme Shelter.

10Albert Maysles speaking on the commentary track for the Criterion DVD release of Gimme Shelter.

11The rather mysterious Meredith Hunter for years was buried in an unmarked grave in Skyview Memorial Lawn in East LA. A short film by Sam Green, lot 63 grave c (2006), which uses clips from Gimme Shelter, alerted people to this fact.

12Richard Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History.

13One scene was removed outright for the M rating. This depicted one victim having his genitals torn off with a pair of pliers.

14The original Manhunt was released on the various game platforms in 2003 and 2004. The main character in this game is a death row inmate, saved from lethal injection in order to commit murder at the behest of a second character, a snuff film director. Although it was not banned outright in Britain, Manhunt was however linked to a teenage drug related murder and removed from sale by some high street outlets. Seventeen-year-old Warren Leblanc was reportedly influenced by the game when he beat and stabbed to death his friend Stefan Pakeerah, fourteen, in a Leicester park on July 28, 2004. The murder was determined to be drug related, and any link to the game was rejected by police and the court.

15Anne-Marie Schleiner has written papers on the subject of Tomb Raider and gaming culture in general. In ‘Female-Bobs arrive at Dusk’, she suggests that Lara Croft does in fact owe a debt to gender politics, specifically an early game patch that was created to redress the gender imbalance of a first-person shooter called Marathon Infinity.

16The text that accompanies each fatality leaves little to the imagination. Here is one such text, relating to Allie’s unfortunate encounter with a giant rat: ‘Allie screamed and struggled, tried to fight, throbbed and scratched, but it only further aroused the huge, nasty rat. The rat cruelly tormented and tore the most tender part of Allie, spraying smelly saliva onto her head. After a while, the rat injected its smelly sperm directly into the destroyed womb, and, satisfied, released the victim. Allie laid [sic] unable to move or scream, suffering from terrible pain and humiliation, until life left her.’

17AD_Dev chooses anonymity because of his day job in games. ‘You see, I don’t want to be identified,’ he replies to one post on his website. ‘I’m not from Blizzard or Valve or something THAT big and famous, but my games are popular, and you at least heard of them.’

18As per a discussion on the AV Maniacs forum.

19See chapter five: DEATH WOMEN.

20Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis.

21Films from a company called Kinkcafe carried such a warning.

22Internet rules 1 and 2 evoke the first rules of Fight Club — ‘Do not talk about…’ — perhaps to prevent the content of a specific board attracting undue attention elsewhere.

23One instance of non Japanese material appearing on these boards is a post of the comic strip ‘A Taste of Cherry’ lifted from Verotika no 4, published by Glenn Danzig.

24Movies in the reviews section are evaluated in one sentence or less. Blood Sisters has ‘Co-ed T&A, one closeup of slow hanging,’ while Deadly Obsession has the ‘Ubiquitous shower bathing scene, underwater choking.’

25Chapter nine: SATANIC PANIC REDUX.

26December 17, 1999.

27Original piece since deleted from Reuters.

28‘Part of Me Died when I Saw this Cruel Killing,’ Hala Jaber. Sunday Times. May 7, 2006.

29The Cultural Mythology of the Snuff Film. Weymouth House, Talbot Campus, Bournemouth.

day 1 (friday, november 23, 2012) Panel 1: Authenticity and Snuff Film-making. Simon Hobbs: Animal Snuff: The Authentic Slaughter of Animals within Week End (1967) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and the Surrounding Cultural Dialogue; Neil Jackson: Wild Eyes, Dead Ladies: The Snuff Filmmaker in Realist Horror. panel 2: snuff aesthetics. Keith Brown: A Real Horrorshow: Situating 1970s Snuff Aesthetics; Mark McKenna: Snuff: Marketing Murder — An Illicit Aesthetic [speaker unable to attend]. panel 3: snuff: audience complicity and journalism. Xavier Aldana Reyes: An Uneasy Complicity: Extreme Spectatorial Engagement in The Last Horror Movie (2003); Karen Oughton: Lights! Camera! Academic! The thorny issue of critical involvement with snuff cinema; Key Note speaker Julian Petley: The Many Mythologies of Snuff. screening and q&a. The Long Road Back From Hell: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust (2011) with Xavier Mendik and Julian Petley.

day 2 (saturday, november 24, 2012) panel 4: snuff, gender and sexuality. Lydia Brammer: Videotaped Torture: Snuff, Ritualism, and Women in Extreme Japanese Horror Cinema; Clarissa Smith: ‘The Breathless Jogger’ — An Extreme Case in Stafford. panel 5: snuff and the body: self, performance and affect. Steve Jones: A View to a Kill: Perspectives on Pseudo-Snuff and Self; Karolina Gruschka: In Terms of Liveness Discourse, and with Reference to The Bunny Game, What are the Implications of the Way Performance Art and Film are Combined within the Platform of Film?; Misha Kavka: The Affective Reality of Snuff. panel 6: online snuff production and consumption. Sarah Downes: New Media and the Amoral Spectator: Ethical Considerations and the Gaze; Cameron Williams: 2 Snuff Films 1 Internet: An investigative report on the operations of the snuff ‘film industry’; Iain Robert Smith: “OMG They just killed some dude…” Online reactions to the 3 Guys 1 Hammer Internet shock video; Key Note Speaker, Tina Kendall: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Snuff in the Films of the New Extremism. wine reception & book promotion: killing for culture. [The edition you are now holding, which wasn’t ready for the conference.]

30Review of Killing for Culture by Ken Gelder in Post Script vol 21 no 3 (Summer 2002).

31Cine Excess V in 2011.

32Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media scheduled for publication in 2016 by Bloomsbury Academic.

33Adam Rehmeier’s The Bunny Game centres on a prostitute who is abducted by a truck driver and subjected to a catalogue of sexual abuse and torture. Shot in b/w on a meagre budget, the most contentious element is that non-actress Rodleen Getsic (as Bunny) endures the pain for real. The Bunny Game was rejected by the BBFC, for ‘the unremitting sexual and physical abuse of a helpless woman, as well as the sadistic and sexual pleasure the man derives from this’. BBFC report dated October 12, 2011.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY & SOURCES

BOOKS: NON-FICTION

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———. (ed). Frederick Wiseman. NY: Monarch, 1976.

ATYEO, DON. Blood & Guts: Violence in Sports. London: Paddington Press, 1979.

BARLOW, GEOFFREY, & HILL, ALISON. Video Violence and Children. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985.

BARSAM, RICHARD MERAN. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974.

BARTON, BLANCHE. The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorised Biography of Anton LaVey. London: Mondo, 1992.

BATAILLE, GEORGES (translated from the French by Mary Dalwood). Eroticism. London/NY, Marion Boyars, 1987.

BAXTER, JOHN. Stunt: The Story of the Great Movie Stunt Men. London: Macdonald, 1973.

BETROCK, ALAN. The I Was A Teenage Juvenile Delinquent Rock’n’Roll Horror Beach Party Movie Book!: A Complete Guide to the Teen Exploitation Film, 1954–1969. London: Plexus, 1986.

BLOOD, LINDA. The New Satanists. US: Warner Books, 1994.

BORNOFF, NICHOLAS. Pink Samurai: The Pursuit and Politics of Sex in Japan. London: Grafton, 1991.

BOYD, ANDREW. Blasphemous Rumours. London: HarperCollins, 1991.

BROTTMAN, MIKITA. Offensive Cinema: Toward an Anthropology of Cinéma Vomitif. CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

BUCHANAN, LARRY. It Came From Hunger! Tales of a Cinema Schlockmeister. North Carolina: McFarland, 1996.

BUGLIOSI, VINCENT & GENTRY, CURT. The Manson Murders: An Investigation into Motive. London: Bodley Head, 1974.

BURUMA, IAN. A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture. London: Penguin, 1984.

BUTLER, JERRY (as told to Robert Rimmer & Catherine Tavel). Raw Talent: The Adult Film Industry as seen by its Most Popular Star. NY: Prometheus Books, 1990.

CAPUTI, JANE. The Age of Sex Crime. London: The Women’s Press, 1988.

CHRISTENSEN, F.M. Pornography: The Other Side. NY: Praeger, 1990.

CHRISTIE, IAN. The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World. London: BBC, 1994.

COHEN, DAVID. Aftershock: The Psychological and Political Consequences of Disaster. London: Paladin, 1991.

COLE, SUSAN G. Pornography and the Sex Crisis. Canada: Amanita, 1989.

COX, MIKE. The Confessions of Henry Lee Lucas. London: Warner Books, 1992.

DE MARTINO, ERNESTO (trans. Dorothy Louise Zinn). The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism. Free Association Books: London, 2005.

DELLAR, FRED. NME Guide to Rock Cinema. London: Hamlyn, 1981.

DI LAURO, AL & RABKIN, GERALD. Dirty Movies: An Illustrated History of the Stag Film, 1915–1970. NY: Chelsea House, 1976.

DREW, WAYNE (ed). BFI Dossier Number 21: David Cronenberg. London: British Film Institute, 1984.

DUNN, KATHERINE (text) & TEJARATCHI, SEAN (ed). Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook. LA: Feral House, 1996.

DWYER, SIMON (ed). Rapid Eye 2. London: Annihilation Press, 1992.

ELLIOT, JOHN. Elliot’s Guide to Film on Video. (First Edition) London: Boxtree, 1990.

ESKAPA, ROY. Bizarre Sex. London: Grafton Books, 1989.

FARBER, STEPHEN & GREEN, MARC. Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego and The Twilight Zone Case. NY: Arbor House Morror, 1988.

FRIEDMAN, DAVID F. (with Don De Nevi). A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King. NY: Prometheus Books, 1990.

FRIEDMAN, R. SETH. The Factsheet Five Zine Reader: The Best Writing from the Underground World of Zines. NY: Three Rivers Press, 1997.

GNOJEWSKI, CAROL & BROMWELL, DAVIS. Decadence: 300 Years of Japanese Fetish Art. WA: Fantagraphics, 2014.

GOLDEN, CHRISTOPHER (ed). Cut! Horror Writers on Horror Film. NY: Berkley Books, 1992.

GOODALL, MARK. Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation. London: Headpress, 2013.

———. Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens. London: Headpress, 2006.

GRAYSMITH, ROBERT. Zodiac. NY: Berkley Books, 1987.

———. Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America’s Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed. NY: Berkley Books, 2007.

GRETTON, THOMAS. Murders and Moralities: English Catchpenny Prints 1800–1860. London: Colonnade, 1980.

GRISSIM, JR., JOHN. We Have Come For Your Daughters: What Went Down On The Medicine Ball Caravan. NY: William Morrow, 1972.

HAND, RICHARD J., & WILSON, MICHAEL. Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror. Devon: University of Exeter Press, 2008.

HANDLING, PIERS (ed.). The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg. Ontario: Academy of Canadian Cinema, 1983.

HARDING, COLIN, & POPPLE, SIMON. In the Kingdom of the Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema. London: Cygnus Arts, 1996.

HARDY, PHIL (ed). Horror: The Aurum Film Encyclopedia, Vol 3. London: Aurum Press, 1985.

HARRISON, JOHN. Blood on the Windscreen. Australia: [self published], 2013.

HEBDITCH, DAVID & ANNING, NICK. Porn Gold: Inside the Pornography Business. London: Faber & Faber, 1988.

HEFFERNAN, KEVIN. Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953–1968. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2004.

HENRI, ADRIAN. Environments and Happenings. London: Thames & Hudson, 1974.

HIDO, HIDESHI. The Art of Hideshi Hino. Tokyo: Presspop, 2007.

HOBERMAN, J. & ROSENBAUM, JONATHAN. Midnight Movies. NY: Harper & Row, 1983.

HOTCHNER, A.E. Blown Away: The Rolling Stones & The Death of the Sixties. GB: Simon & Schuster, 1990.

HUGHES, ROBERT. The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980.

HUNTER, JACK. Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood and Madness in Japanese Cinema. London: Creation, 1998.

JACKSON, KEVIN (ed). Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings. London: Faber & Faber, 1990.

JAWORZYN, STEFAN (ed). Shock Xpress 1: The Essential Guide to Exploitation Cinema. London: Titan Books, 1991.

JOUIS, PIERRE (ed). Fantasy Film Memory. 21-23, Rue Victor Hugo, 94700, Maisons-Alfort, France.

KELTS, ROLAND. Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

KEREKES, DAVID. Sex Murder Art: The Films of Jörg Buttgereit. Cheshire: Critical Vision, 1994.

——— & SLATER, DAVID. Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History Of Death On Film From Mondo To Snuff, London: Annihilation Press/Creation Books, 1994.

——— & SLATER, DAVID. See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy. Manchester: Headpress, 2001.

KING, BRIAN & SWEZEY, STUART (eds). Fourth Dispatch: Sourcebook of the Extremes of Information in Print. LA: Amok, 1990.

KURNHARDT, JR., PHILIP B., KURNHARDT III, PHILIP B. & KURNHARDT, PETER W. P. T. Barnhum America’s Greatest Showman. NY: Knopf, 1995.

LANDIS, BILL & CLIFFORD, MICHELLE. Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square! NY: Fireside, 2002.

LEDERER, LAURA (ed). Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. NY: Bantam Books, 1982.

LONG, STANLEY (with Simon Sheridan). X-Rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker. London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2008.

LOVELACE, LINDA. Inside Linda Lovelace. London: Heinrich Hanau, 1974.

LOW, RACHEL & MANVELL, ROGER. The History of the British Film 1896–1906. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948.

LLOYD, GEORGINA. Murders Unspeakable. London: Bantam Books, 1993.

LOW, RACHEL & MANVELL, ROGER. The History of the British Film 1896-1906. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1948.

MACKINNON, CATHERINE A. Only Words. London: HarperCollins, 1994.

MACPHERSON, MALCOLM (ed). The Black Box: Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-Flight Accidents. London: Panther, 1984.

MARINOVICH, GREG & JOÃO SILVA, The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War. NY: Basic Books, 2000.

MCCARTY, JOHN. Splatter Movies. Kent: Columbus Books, 1984.

MCDONOUGH, JIMMY. Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer. London: Vintage, 2006.

MCFARLANE, BRIAN. The Encyclopedia of British Film. London: Methuen, 2003.

MCNEIL, LEGS & OSBORNE, JENNIFER. The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. NY: HarperCollins, 2005.

MITCHELL, WJT. Cloning Terror: The War Images of 9/11 to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

MORROCCHI, RICCARDO & PISELLI, STEFANO (eds). Bizarre Sinema! Sexploitation Filmmakers. Firenze: Glittering Images, 1995.

MORSE, L.A. Video Trash & Treasures. Toronto: Harper & Collins, 1989.

NEWMAN, KIM. Nightmare Movies. London: Proteus Books, 1984.

NEWTON, MICHAEL. Hunting Humans: The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, Vol 1. NY: Avon Books, 1992.

———. Raising Hell: An A-Z of the Occult/Satanic Underworld. London: Warner Books, 1994.

OLIVER, TED & SMITH, RAMSAY. Lambs to the Slaughter. London: Warner, 1993.

PARFREY, ADAM (ed). Apocalypse Culture (Expanded & Revised Edition). LA: Feral House, 1990.

PARISER, ELI. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. London: Penguin, 2012.

PARRY, RICHARD LLOYD. People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows. London: Vintage, 2012.

PEARY, DANNY. Cult Movies: A Hundred Ways to Find the Reel Thing. London: Vermilion, 1982.

———. Guide for the Film Fanatic. London: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

PHILIPS, BAXTER. Cut: The Unseen Cinema. London: Lorrimer, 1975.

PLAYFAIR, GUY LYON. The Evil Eye: The Unacceptable Face of Television. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990.

PRON, NICK. Lethal Marriage: The Unspeakable Crimes of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. NY: Balantine, 1996.

RAY, FRED OLEN. The New Poverty Row: Independent Filmmakers as Distributors. North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 1991.

RHODES, DUSTY & MCNEILL, SANDRA (ed). Women against violence against Women. London: Onlywomen Press, 1985.

RILEY, PATRICK. The X-Rated Videotape Star Index. NY, Prometheus Books, 1994.

RIMMER, ROBERT H. The X-Rated Videotape Guide I. NY: Prometheus Books, 1993.

ROBERTSON, PATRICK. The Guiness Book of Movie Facts and Feats (Fourth edition). London: Guiness Publishing, 1991.

ROEDER, JR, GEORGE H. The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993.

RUÉTALO, VICTORIA & TIERNEY, DOLORES. Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America. NY: Routledge, 2011.

RUPE, SHADE. Dark Stars Rising: Conversations from the Outer Realms. London: Headpress 2011.

SANDERS, ED. The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Batallion. London: Panther, 1976.

———. The Family: The Manson Group and its Aftermath: Revised and Updated Edition. London: Nemesis, 1993.

SARGEANT, JACK. Cinema Contra Cinema. Belgium: Fringecore, 1999.

SCHRECK, NIKOLAS (ed). The Manson File. NY: Amok Press, 1988.

SOOTHILL, KEITH & WALBY, SYLVIA. Sex Crime in the News. London: Routledge, 1991

SHARP, JASPER. Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Films. Surrey: FAB Press, 2008.

SMITH, KEN. Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films 1945–1970. NY: Blast Books, 1999.

SONTAG, SUSAN. Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin Books. London: 2004.

SPEED, F. MAURICE. Film Review 1984–5. Kent: Columbus Books, 1984.

STEVENSON, JACK. Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s. North Carolina: McFarland, 2010.

STILES, KRISTINE & SELZ, PETER (ed). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 1996.

STREIBLE, DAN. Fight Pictures: A History of Early Cinema. London: University of California Press, 2008.

TATE, TIM. Children for the Devil: Ritual Abuse & Satanic Abuse. London: Methuen, 1991.

TAYLOR, JOHN. Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.

THOMAS, GORDON. Enslaved. Bantam Press, 1990.

TREVELYAN, JOHN. What the Censor Saw. London: Michael Joseph, 1973.

TURIN, KENNETH & ZITO, STEPHEN F. Sinema: American Pornographic Films and the People Who Make Them. NY: Praeger, 1974.

TURNER, GEORGE E. & PRICE, MICHAEL H. Forgotten Horrors: Early Talkie Chillers from Poverty Row. California: Eclipse Books, 1986.

VALE, V. & JUNO, ANDREA (eds). Re/Search 10: Incredibly Strange Films. San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1986.

——— (eds). Re/Search 11: Pranks! San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1988.

VICTOR, JEFFREY S. Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend. Illinois: Open Court, 1996.

VOGEL, AMOS. Film as a Subversive Art. NY: Random House, 1974.

VON KRAFFT-EBING, RICHARD. Psychopathia Sexualis. NY: Stein and Day, 1965.

WANSELL, GEOFFREY. An Evil Love: The Life of Frederick West. London: Headline, 1996.

WARNER, MARINA. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

WEISSER, THOMAS & WEISSER, YUKO MIHARA. The Sex Films: Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia. Florida: Vital, 1998.

WELDON, MICHAEL. The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. NY: Ballantine, 1983.

WILLIAMS, BERNARD (ed). Obscenity and Film Censorship: An Abridgement of the Williams Report. Cambridge University Press, 1981.

BOOKS: FICTION

BURDETT, JOHN. Bangkok Haunts. London: Bantam, 2007.

CAMPBELL, ROBERT. In La-La Land We Trust. NY/London: Mysterious Press, 1987.

COHEN, JAMES. Through a Lens Darkly. NY: Warner Books, 1993.

COOPER, DENNIS. Frisk. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991.

——— & BLAKE, NAYLAND (art). Jerk. San Francisco: Artspace Books, 1993.

ELLIS, BRET EASTON. Less Than Zero. London: Picador, 1986.

HEDRIN, SAM. Network. London: Sphere Books, 1977.

HIDO, HIDESHI. The Collection 2: Hino Horror #8. Tokyo: DH Publishing, 2004.

KATUDJIAN, MARCOS FÁBIO. Snuff Movie: After the End of the World. São Paulo: [publisher not known], circa 2002.

KIRTON, HANK. Conservatory of Death. AQC, 2012.

PALAHNIUK, CHUCK. Snuff. London: Jonathon Cape, 2008.

ROYLE, NICHOLAS. The Director’s Cut. London: Abacus 2001.

SHELDON, SIDNEY. Bloodline. NY: Collins, 1978.

THOMPSON, RICHARD & DALY, TREVE. The Number To Call Is… London: Souvenir Press, 1979.

VACHSS, ANDREW. Flood. London: William Collins & Sons, 1986.

———. Blossom. London: Pan Books, 1991.

WOLF, GARY K. Killerbowl. London: Sphere, 1975.

WOLFF, GEOFFREY. The Sightseer. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974.

PUBLICATIONS

BOXOFFICE

CINEFAN

CINEMA SEWER

THE COMICS JOURNAL

CRIMEBEAT

DEEP RED

DEMONIQUE

ECCO

EROTICA

ESQUIRE

EUROPEAN TRASH CINEMA

EXCITING CINEMA

GENESIS

FATAL VISIONS

FILM THREAT VIDEO GUIDE

FILMRAGE

FILMS AND FILMING

FORTEAN TIMES

GRINDHOUSE PURGATORY

GAUNTLET

HEADPRESS

HOUSE OF HAMMER/HALLS OF HORROR

INVASION OF THE SAD MAN EATING MUSHROOMS

THE MOVIE

NIGHT AND DAY

OUI

THE PSYCHOTRONIC VIDEO GUIDE

SEWER CUNT

SHADOWLAND MAGAZINE

SHOCK CINEMA

SHOCK XPRESS

SIGHT AND SOUND/MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN

SLEAZOID EXPRESS

SLIMETIME

THE SPLATTER TIMES

SPLATTING IMAGE

TRASH CITY

ULTRA VIOLENT

VIDEO DRIVE-IN!

WEBSITES

See WEBSITES in the index for a list of online resources accessed and/or referenced in the production of this book. Sites not listed there include:

INTERNET ARCHIVE (WAYBACK MACHINE)

MONDO DATA MOVIE – Z

VHSCOLLECTOR

VINTAGE EROTICA FORUMS

INDEX

key: (*) refers to film or footage whose production/release date is unknown or uncertain (see main text for further details); (pub) denotes a publication or periodical; newspapers are not listed by title, but collectively under ‘newspapers’, ditto studios, and websites; page numbers in bold italics refer to illustrations.

1 Ass 1 Baseball 549

1 Boy 2 Kittens 411

1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick VI, 413–417, 414, 416, 418, 419–420, 420, 427, 538, 542, 544, 545–546.

See also Magnotta, Luka Rocco

and Internet comments 415

and video content 413–414

1 Man 1 Jar 549

2 Girls 1 Cup 413, 427–429, 427

2 Guys 1 Horse 427, 428

3 Guys 1 Hammer 413, 427, 429, 534–535, 537, 544, 546, 548–549, 588, 591.

See also Dnipropetrovsk maniacs

4 Chan (web) 579

4 Girls Fingerpainting 549

8MM (1999) 45, 84, 85, 85, 87, 101, 264, 502, 503

9/11 261, 375–377, 376, 377, 389, 391, 454, 533, 536, 540

9-12 patriot group 585

9½ Weeks (1986) 29

11 Days, 11 Nights (1987) 29

15 Minutes (2001) 78–80, 78, 80, 83, 500

20/20 (tv) 81, 453, 517

28 Famous Murders (art) 440, 441

52 Pick-Up (1986) 59

60 Minutes (tv) 224

84 Charlie MoPic (1989) 52

100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012) 77

999 (tv) 369

2000 Maniacs (1964) 237

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 88, 135

Abbott, Bud 128

Abel, Alan 184, 188

Abel, Jeanne 184, 188

Abnormal: Ugly Abuse (1988) 75

Abraham, Edward Stewart 175

Abu Ghraib 393, 397, 517–519, 518, 519, 541

Abu Musa’b al-Zarqawi Slaughters an American 391. See also Berg, Nick

Accomando, Mike 330

Accordion Player (1888) 117

Ackroyd, Dan 369

Act of Killing, The (2012) 343–344, 343

Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, The (1971) 186, 337–338, 338, 338

Acts of Violence (1985) 224, 224

Adachi, Kaoru 244, 245, 246

Adam (1983) 469

Adam Walsh Child Resource Center 469–470

Adam Film World (pub) 277

Adamson, Al 553, 554

Addio Ultimo Uomo (1978) 114, 162, 200, 201–203, 203, 217, 242, 559

Adebolajo, Michael 398–399

Adebowale, Michael 398–399

Adnopaz, David 144

Adult Film Association of America (AFAA) 20, 24

Aes-Nihil, John 432

Africa Addio (1966) 112, 114, 144, 149, 173, 175–179, 175, 177, 178, 179, 179, 248, 441

and BBFC 176

and re-release in the 1970s 182

and unlawful killing 178

Africa Ama (1971) 144, 184, 185, 185, 194

Africa Blood and Guts (1966) 179, 182, 182. See also Africa Addio (1966)

Africa Screams (1949) 128

Africa Speaks! (1930) 124, 124, 128, 129, 130

Africa Speaks! (book) 124

African Lion, The (1955) 130, 131

Africanus Sexualis (Black Is Beautiful) (1970) 141, 141

After Hours with Carter Stevens 289

Afterschool (2008) 57–58, 59

Age of Sex Crime, The (book) 497–498

Aguirre, Javier 151, 174

Aguirre the Wrath of God (1972) 133

Ahearn, James 289, 289–290

Airport (1970) 147

Airtime, Johnny 362–363

Airwolf (1984-86) 370 Åkerlund, Jonas 57

Akut (tv) 346

Akwagyiram, Alexis 386

Aladdin (1992) 412

Alamán, Lucy Herrera Valdés 585–586, 586

Alaux, Myriam 559

Albergotti, Reed 515

Aldrich, Robert 96

Alexis, Raven 299

Alien (1979) 29

Alien Autopsy (2006) 568. See also Roswell — The Footage (*)

Aliens versus Predator (game) 574

al-Kasasbeh, Muath 524, 624

al-Khalayleh, Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal 392. See also al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab Allan, Davie 179

Allen, Kathy 474–475

Allen Shackleton Films 10. See also Shackleton, Allan

Allen, Woody 73

Allin, GG 317, 327

Allvin, Lúcia 36

al-Mahmadawi, Ahmad Alwan Hussein 397

Almodóvar, Pedro 84

Almost Illegal (2008) 254

al-Muqrin, Abdel Aziz 395, 396

al-Qaeda 391, 392, 395, 525, 537, 587

A.L. Shackleton Films, Inc. 10. See also Shackleton, Allan

Alternative 3 (1977) 513–514

Altman, Bruce 61

Alvarez, A. 529

al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab 392, 393, 395, 396, 587

al-Zubaidi, Ali Hussein Jassem Mohammad 397

Amano, Daikichi 565

Amateur Porn Star Killer (2007) 77

Amato, Gerardo 39

Amazing World of Ghosts (1979) 196

Amazonia (1986) 49

Amenábar, Alejandro 84

America Exposed: The Motion Picture (1991) 113, 115

America, Paese Di Dio (1966) 182

America’s Dumbest Criminals (tv) 252

America’s Most Wanted (tv) 73, 469

American Cannibale (1976) 13. See also Snuff (1976)

American Guinea Pig: Bouquet of Guts and Gore (2014) 484, 486

American Psycho (novel) 443

Amery, Carl 439–440

Am Here (app) 516

Amin, Idi 339

Amish Farm and House, The (*) 276

Amok Assault Video, The (1989) 315

Amok Fourth Dispatch (book) 315

Amram, Robert 187

Amsterdam Films, Inc. 265

Anal Birth of Bert, The (*) 318

Anaru, Tamakichi 334

Anatomy of Love (1969) 138

Anciano, Dominic 75

Andersen, Carl 151

Anderson, Dan 451

Anderson, Lindsay 58

Anderson, Paul W. S. 89

Anderton, James 487

Android of Notre Dame (1988) 330

Andromeda Strain, The (1971) 147

Angeli bianchi… angeli neri (1969) 113, 181

Angels Wild Women (1972) 553

Anger, Kenneth 16, 17, 18, 308, 436

Anguish (1987) 65

Animal Beta Project (ABP) 412–413, 417, 418, 533

Animal Liberation Front (ALF) 560

Animal Lover (1971) 141, 142

Animals Film, The (1981) 559, 559

Anning, Nick 31, 32

Another Dimension (game) 574–575

Answer Me! (pub) 312

Antal, Nimród 87

Anthem (label) 239

Anthony, Dean 17

Anthropophagous the Beast (1980) 31, 49, 486

Antichrist, The (1974) 29

Antonioni, Michelangelo 116, 564

Apartment 143 (2011) 77

Aphex Twin 426

Apocalypse Now (1979) 150

Applicant for Death (pub) 579

Aquarius Releasing 265

Aquino, Michael 454

Archives of Aesthetic Nihilism (mail order) 432

Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 565

Are You Scared (2006) 55, 88

Are You Scared 2 (2009) 84, 88

Argento, Dario 60, 62, 84

Armed Islamic Group (GIA) 525

Armstrong, Eugene 396–397

and video content 396–397

Army Medicine in Vietnam (1970) 325

Army of God 459

Arnett, Bailee 300

Arrabal, Fernando 13

Artmann, H G 328

Art of Dying, The (1991) 98

Aslam, Amar 387

Assault Video (*) 315, 354

Associates (publicists) 249

Assonitis, Ovidio 29

Astra Video (label) 491

Aswad, Du’a Khalil 388

Atkins, Susan 432

Atkins, Thomas R. 110

Atlantic Records (label) 496

Atom Smashers (band) 230, 232

Attack on a China Mission (1901) 119

Atta, Mohammed 391

Attner, Christina 471–472

Atyeo, Don 362–363, 365

Aubin, Patrick. See also Roy, Jean-Claude

Auditions (1978) 138

Auer, Anita 101

August Films Inc. 267

August Underground (2001). See Fred Vogel’s August Underground (2001)

August Underground’s Mordum (2003) 82, 83

August Underground’s Penance (2007) 82

Auschwitz 462

Autopsy (1975) 34

Autopsy (tv) 477

Avalanche (1978) 147

Avalos, Stefan 75

Avengers, The (2013) 377

Avengers, The (tv) 448

Avila, Jac 342

Azizov, Salakhetdin 401

Baader Meinhof Gang 321, 440

Babb, Kroger 9, 126, 173

Babcock, Grover 340

Bad Cops (2010) 258

Bad Girls Go To Hell (1966) 199

Badham, John 147

Badlands (1973) 470

Bad Timing (1980) 447

Bahjat, Atwar 587

Bailey, Bullet 370

Bailey, Leslie 450

Balazs, Claralyn 474

Balch, Antony 180, 463

Balin, Marty 562

Balun, Chas. 485

Band, Albert 273

Band, Charles 273

Bang-Bang Club, The: Snapshots from a Hidden War (book) 519

Bangkok Haunts (novel) 445

Banned from Television (1998) 152, 320, 320

Banned! in America (1998) 256, 257, 261

Banned! in America II (1998) 256

Banned! in America III (1999) 256, 257

Banned in America IV (1999) 256

Banned in America series 256. See also Banned! in America series

Banned in America V: The Final Chapter (2000) 255–258, 256

Barbareschi, Luca Giorgio 48

Barker, Will 123

Barlow, Geoffrey 487

Barnum, P. T. 124

barrage tapes 240, 315–320

Barrow, Clyde 120, 122

Barsam, Richard Meran 109, 336, 564

Bascom, Lionel C. 273, 436

Bashir, Martin 462

Basic Autopsy Procedure (*) 315

Basket Case (1982) 320

Bastille Day (*) 303

Bataille, Georges 384

Bathtime LOL 412

Battle of the Sexes (2006) 258

Battle Royale (2000) 55

Battleship (2012) 377

Bava, Lamberto 29, 102, 103

Bava, Mario 103

Baxley, Barbara 104

Baxter, John 370

B, Beth 309

Beach Boys, the (band) 432, 433

Beat ’em & Eat ’em (game) 496

Beatles, the (band) 17, 18, 64, 325, 432, 525, 624

and ‘butcher’ album 324, 325, 624

Beatty, Edgar 179

Beaudine, William 126

Beausoleil, Bobby 16, 17, 146

Beautiful People (1974) 130, 131, 187

Beautiful People, The (book) 435

Beckinsale, Kate 87

Beckowitz, Robert 518–519

Beeson, Ty 253

Behind the Green Door (1972) 139

Behr, Mike 491

Being Different (1981) 213

Belli, Melvin 562

Bell, Mary 230

Belvaux, Rémy 70

Bender, Erich F. 137

Benedict, Barry 470–471

Ben-Hur (1959) 370

Bennett, William 327

Bentley, Wes 73

Berandi, Michael 312

Berberian Sound Studio (2012) 65

Berger, John 510

Bergman, Ingrid 419

Berg, Nick 391, 391–395, 399, 404, 511, 521, 543

and Internet comments 393–394, 409

and the media 392

and video content 392, 393, 395

Berg, Peter 404

Berkowitz, David 453. See also Son of Sam

Bermuda Triangle, The (1979) 204

Bernardo, Paul 475–478, 476

Berthoud, Christopher 482, 482, 486

Besford, Christine 531

Bestgore (web) 385, 413, 416, 417, 418, 420, 511–512, 520

and fansigns 511–512, 511, 527

bestiality 108, 578

Best of Jihad Snuff Videos series 544

Best of Sex and Violence, The (1981) 273

Bevel, James 457

Beyer, John 351

Beyond and Back (1978) 149, 204, 204

Beyond Belief (Dispatches) (tv) 463–464

Beyond Belief: The Moors Murderers: The Story of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley (book) 422

Beyond Bengal (1933) 122, 125, 195

Beyond Bizarro (*) 319

Beyond Reality (1988) 153

Beyond the Dutroux Affair (pub) 503

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) 15, 552

BFI Dossier (pub) 53

Biafra, Jello 211

Bianco, Chaim 55

Bidet, Hugo 36

Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer (book) 166

Big Brother (tv) 88, 387, 514

Bigelow, Kathryn 54

Bigley, Kenneth 396–397, 396, 399

and video content 397

Big Mama Rag (pub) 493

Big Tits (*) 279

Bilton, Nick 516

Bin Laden, Osama 395, 399, 540

Birk, Ernie 309. See also Zedd, Nick

Biro, Stephen 486

Bittaker, Lawrence 215

Bizarre Cases of Death (*) 293, 295

Bizarre Rituals: Dances Sacred and Profane (1985) 224

Bizarre Sex (book) 450, 451

Bizarrism (pub) 312

Black 6, The (1973) 141

Black, Benjamin Harold 158

Blackboard Jungle (1955) 365

Black Box (1978) 309

Black Emanuelle (1975) 29

Black Emanuelle Goes East (1976) 29

Black, Jimmy ‘Carl’ 179

Black, Karen 267

Black Mirror (tv) 54

Black, Noel 97

Black, Rob 306–307

Black Sabbath (band) 323

Black September 521, 523

Blackman, Lucie 483–484

Blade in the Dark, A (1985) 103

blahgua (app) 516

Blair, Mark 69

Blair, Tony 397

Blair Witch Project, The (1999) 74, 74, 75, 512

Blanc, Erika 29

Blasetti, Alessandro 115, 154, 163

Blasphemous Rumours (book) 452, 463–464

Blastfighter (1984) 29

Blenman, David 386

Blind Shot (app) 515

Blockbuster (store) 91

Blood Bath (1971) 486

Blood, Betsy 466–467

Blood Feast (1963) 285

Blood & Guts: Violence in Sports (book) 362

Blood, Linda 465

Blood of the Beasts, The (1949) 338, 339, 339

Blood Sisters (1987) 582

Blood Sucking Freaks (1977) 180, 285, 486

Bloodline (novel) 443

Bloodlines of the Illuminati (book) 459

Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970) 533

Bloom, Orlando 526

Blossom (novel) 445, 502

Blown Away (book) 564

Blowup (1966) 564

Blue Collar (1977) 41

Blue Nude (1977) 39, 39–40

Blue Summer (1973) 8, 10

Blue Underground (label) 31, 491

Blutiger Freitag (1972) 189. See also Bloody Friday (1972)

BME Pain Olympics 427

B, Nico 323, 329

Bobbitt, John Wayne 317

Bob Roberts (1992) 73

Boccardo, Delia 104

Body Horror (book) 535

Body of a Female (1964) 6

Body of Lies (2008) 404

Body Works (1988) 340

Boenisch, Carl 362

Bogart, Humphrey 419

Bogdanovich, Peter 15

Bogosian, Eric 97

“Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” (book) 126

Boll, Uwe 150

Bombardment of Mafeking (1899) 119

Bonacci, Paul 455–458

Boner, Troy 455, 456

Bonner, William 553

Bono, Sonny 269

Bonzel, André 70, 72

Bookwalter, J.R. 240

Borat Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) 73

Borden, Lizzie 306–307

Borden, Stanley 25

Borkowski, Bogdan 338

Borkowski, Mark 73

Bornoff, Nicholas 228

Born to Raise Hell (1976) 306, 308, 318

Bostock, Nigel 489

Bougas, Nick 152, 235, 238, 239, 368, 558

Bougie, Robin 313

Boulevard of Broken Dreams (tv) 356

Bouyeri, Mohammed 400

Boxoffice (pub) 10, 11, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 273

Boyd, Andrew 463–464

Boyle, Peter 41

Bracken, Eddie 173

Bradford City stadium fire 360, 360, 362

Bradly, Bill 372

Bradshaw, Nick 109

Brady, Ian 412, 422

Brady, Nicholas 365. See also Levinson, Leonard Brakhage, Stan 186, 336–338

Brammer, Lydia 588

Brandkommando (band) 326

Brando, Marlon 84, 266

Brass, Dick 272, 274

Braun, Lasse 279, 280, 280, 309

Brave, The (1997) 84, 85, 93

Bravman, Jack 7. See also Frost, Jack

Brazzi, Rossano 554

Breivik, Anders Behring 514

Bride of Beyond Bizarro (2014) 319

Bridge, The (2004) 344, 344

Bright, Cameron 61

Briley, Linwood 248

Bring ’Em Back Alive (1932) 128

British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) 31, 51, 69, 70, 72, 87, 91, 100, 139, 155, 171, 192, 252, 259, 444, 487, 491, 593

and Manhunt 2 (game) 570–571, 573

Broken Movie (1993) 324

Bromhead, Colonel A. C. 119

Bromwell, Davis 441

Bronson, Charles 96

Brooker, Charlie 54

Brooks, Thor 172

Broomfield, Nick 101

Bross, Eric 87

Brottman, Mikita 34

Broussard, Paul 358–359

Brown, Christine E. 450

Brown, Eric 63

Brown, Erin 296. See also Mundae, Misty Browne, Roger 30

Brown, Gordon 506

Browning, Tod 150

Brown, Jim 8

Brown, John Ronald 584–585. See also Mexican Doctor (*)

Brown, Keith 588

Brown, Robert 187

Brown, Robert Delford 329

Brown, Trevor 326

Brückner, Christian 341

Brus, Günter 328

Brutes and Savages (1975) 25, 111, 114, 149, 189, 192–195, 193, 194

Bryant, Nick 458

B, Scott 309

Buchanan, Larry 136, 137

Buck, Frank 122, 127, 128

Budo: Art of Killing (1978) 195, 196

Bugliosi, Vincent 16, 434, 438

Bullaro, Angie 62

Bumfights: Cause for Concern Volume 1 (2002) 253, 258

Bumfights 2 (2003) 260

Bunch, Charlotte 497

Bundy, Ted 74, 215

Bunny Game, The (2010) 588, 592, 593

and BBFC 593

Buñuel, Luis 91, 132, 133, 134

Buono, Victor 196

Burden, Chris 329

Burdett, John 445

Burdis, Ray 75

Burke, Jason 504

Burroughs, William 180, 181, 463

Buruma, Ian 333

Bush, George H. W. 506

Bush, George W. 458

Butcher, The (2007) 75

Butler, Jerry 223

Buttgereit, Jörg 98

Byrum, John 15

Caan, James 442

Caesar, David 340

Cage, Nicolas 84, 502, 503

Calabrese Jr., Anthony 57

Calamity of Snakes (1983) 150

California Axe Massacre (1977) 289

Camera Comics (pub) 96, 96

Camera Ga Torareta Ketteiteki Shunkan (1984-92) 227, 228

Cameron, David 525

Campbell, Christy 249

Campbell, Robert 445

Campion-Vincent, Veronique 540

Campos, Antonio 57

Camps of Death (*) 227

Camp Video (label) 66

Canby, Vincent 183

Candid Camera (tv) 537

Candyman (1992) 101

Candy Tangerine Man, The (1975) 141

Canevari, Cesare 29

Cannibal (1976) 49

Cannibal Apocalypse (1980) 49

Cannibal Ferox (1981) 49, 488

Cannibal Holocaust (1979) VI, 48, 48–52, 49, 51, 75, 77, 84, 105, 151, 486, 498, 588, 624

and BBFC 51

and mondo films 105

seized as snuff film 50

Cannibal Holocaust The Beginning (2004) 151

Cannibal Terror (1979) 49

Cannibali Domani (1983) 49

Cannibalo Brutalo (1978) 202. See also Addio Ultimo Uomo (1978)

Cannibals (1979) 49

Caño, Manuel 150

Canutt, Joe 370

Capa, Robert 95, 96

Cape to Cairo (newsreel) 123

Capone, Al 94

Capra, Frank 79, 118

Capriola, Thomas 530

Captain Video and His Video Rangers (tv) 64

Caputi, Jane 497–498

Caradori, Gary 455, 456, 458

Caramba! (1983) 221. See also Sweet and Savage (1983)

Cardiff, Jack 150

Cardona, René 150

Carignan, Harvey 155

Carlson International 284. See also Macabre Video Underground

Carlyle, Robert 56

Carmageddon (game) 570

Carnival of Blood (1970) 10

Carnosaur (1992) 150

Carpenter, John 65

Carradine, John 189

Carr, Matthew 521, 525

Carr, Michael 147, 205, 209, 210

Carr, William Guy 507

Carson, L. M. Kit 73

Cartwright, Veronica 15

Casablanca (1942) 413, 416

Casanova (*) 280

Case, Darren 386

Cassidy, Joanna 56

Castellari, Enzo G. 29

Castiglioni, Alfredo. See Castiglioni brothers

Castiglioni, Angelo. See Castiglioni brothers

Castiglioni brothers 162, 173, 180, 185, 188, 201–203, 260

interview with 181, 185, 188, 202, 216

Castle of Frankenstein (pub) 311

Castle, William 215

Castro, Barnabas Gamez 403–404, 402–403

Catastrophe (1978) 152

Catastrophe 1999 (1974) 147. See also Last Days of Planet Earth, The (1974)

Cathode Fuck (1986) 315, 316, 354

Catholic Legion of Decency 270

Cattle Decapitation (band) 86

Caught in the Act (1995) 249

Causey, M. Dixon 230, 232, 233

Cavara, Paolo 103, 104, 108, 163, 171

Cazazza, Monte 230–233

interview with 232–233

CCVL (pub) 8

Cecil B. DeMented (2000) 100

Censorship in Denmark: A New Approach (1970) 182–183

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 459, 460. See also Faccia Di Spia (1975)

Cerimony (*) 280, 280–281

Certain Kind of Death, A (2003) 340, 340–341

Certain Sacrifice, A (1982) 284

C’est Arrivee Pres De Chez Vous (1992). See Man Bites Dog (1992)

Chaitkin, Anton 458

Chambers, Dawn 471

Chang, Chi 150

Chapman, Craig 531

Charles, Larry 73

Chase, Chevy 84

Chatroom (2010) 88

Chauvel, Jean-Francois 339

Chayefsky, Paddy 55

chechclear (atrocity film) 400

Chechen Terrorists (atrocity film) 400

Check Out 93 (tv) 88

Cheerleaders, The (1973) 11

Chen, Renee 366–368

Chiarella, Pete 278–279

Chien Andalou, Un (1929) 91, 134

Child Bride (1942) 132

Child Molester, The (1964) 373

Child of the Sabbat (1989) 285

Child Pornography: An Investigation (book) 499

Children for the Devil (book) 452

Chinese Justice (newsreel) 558

Chippindale, Peter 491

Christensen, Benjamin 181

Christie, Ian 119

Christie, Julie 559

Christmas, Triston 386

Chubbuck, Christine 55, 293, 354, 354–356, 358

Chudnow, David 172

Churchill, Winston 506

Church of Satan 113

Church of Set 454

Church of the SubGenius 66

Ciardi, Francesca 48

CIA Secret Story (1975) 197. See also Faccia Di Spia (1975)

Cigarette Burns (2006) 65

Cimber, Matt 139, 141

Cimino, Michael 29

Cine Excess 588, 589

Cinéfantastique (pub) 53

Cinema Blue (pub) 223

Cinema of Transgression 103, 309–311, 310

Cinema Sewer (pub) 312, 313, 317, 319

Ciotti, Paul 585

Circuito chiuso (Closed Circuit) (1978) 64, 64–65, 542

Citizens for Decency through Law, Inc. (CDL) 269–271, 273, 489, 503, 542

Citizens for Decent Literature 270. See also Citizens for Decency through Law, Inc. (CDL)

Citta Proibite, Le (1963) 165

Clamdigger’s Daughter, The (1974) 6

Clark, Jeannine Lynn 518–519. See also Natural Born Losers

Class of Nuke ’Em High (1986) 67

Clement, Aurore 65

Clifford, Michelle 182

Clift, Montgomery 422

Climati, Antonio 162, 178, 189, 190, 201, 203, 217, 222, 260

and newsreels 121

Cline, John 297

Clip (2012) 94

Cloning Terror: The War Images of 9/11 to the Present (book) 405, 529

Clover, Carol 77

Cloverfield (2008) 77, 590

Club Dead 291, 300

Cock Fight, The (1894) IV

Cock Fight no.2 (1894) IV Codling, Dan 330

Cohasset Snuff Film, The (2012) 100, 100

Cohen, Gary P. 66, 68

Cohen, James 445

Cohen, Larry 97

Cohen, Norman 179

Cohen, Robert Carl 179

Coleman, Joe 313, 329

Cole, Susan G. 498–499

Collector, The (novel) 475

Collegiates (1973) 265

Collie Sex (*) 309

Collin, Max Allan 535

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) 88

Columbine shooting 58

Columbo (tv) 97, 448

Combs, Richard 63

Comeau, Marie-France 478

Come Organisation (label) 327

Comes a Horseman (1978) 370

comic books 64, 96, 581–582

Comics Journal (pub) 333

Comizi d’amore (1964) 171. See also Love Meetings (1964)

Committee, The (Dispatches) (tv) 464

Como, Don 199

Condemned, The (2007) 55, 89

Confessions of a Blue Movie Star (1978) 439–440. See also Evolution of Snuff, The (1978)

Confessions of a Serial Killer (1985) 69

Congo, Anwars 343, 344

Congolaise (1950) 128, 130. See also Savage Africa (1950)

Conniff, Ray 412

Connor, Larry H 370

Conrad, William 112, 152

Conservatory of Death (novel) 446, 446

Conspiracy of Silence (tv) 455–457

Contamination (1980) 29

Contra Conspiracy (1988) 52

Conway, James L. 149, 204

Cooke, Sarah 531

Cooke, Sidney 507

Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover, The (1989) 490

Coonan, Peter 515. See also Sutcliffe, Peter

Cooper, Dennis 443–444

Cooper, Tommy 350, 350–351

Copp, Andy 317

interview with 318–320

Coppola, Eleanor 150

Coppola, Francis Ford 150, 453

Cops (tv) 73

Corll, Dean 215, 444

Corman, Roger 150, 209

Corrente, Simone 103

Corrupted (band) 326, 342

Costello, Lou 128

Costello, Savannah 301

Cotton Club, The (1984) 453

Couture, Rémy 535, 537, 548

Cover Me Babe (1970) 48, 97

Cox, Paul 563–564

Cozzi, Luigi 29

Crackheadz Gone Wild (2006) 254

Crack of Dawn, The (1989) 265

Crane, Bob 315

Crane, Susan A. 533

Craven, Wes 33, 35, 151, 440, 553

Crazy Dave Tape (*) 319

Crazy Ridiculous American People (1976) 198. See also This is America (1976)

Creative Technology Institute (band) 231

Creeley, Robert 337

Creepshow (1982) 59

Creley, Jack 53

Crespo, Borja 85, 326

Cresse, Bob 167, 174

Crichlow, Lenora 54

Crime Confidential (pub) 535

Crime Through Time (museum) 481

CrimeBeat: The Newsmagazine of Crime (pub) 374, 432

Crimewatch (tv) 225

Crisanti, Gabriele 227

Croft, Stephen 387

Cronenberg, David 41, 52, 53, 62, 186, 392

Cropp, Ben 365

Crossed (pub) 582, 582

Crow, The (1994) 369

Cruise, Jerami 82

crush videos 530. See also squish videos

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (tv) 448

Cuckoo Clocks of Hell (1977) 34. See also Last House on Dead End Street (1977)

Cult Movies (pub) 251

Cult Rapture (book) 459

Cultural Mythology of the Snuff Movie, The (conference) 546, 547, 588, 591

Cult Video (label) 323, 329, 490

Cunha, Claudio 36, 37, 39, 45

Cunningham, Sean 141

Currin, Jay 370

Cursed Woods (1983) 67

Curse of the Headless Horseman (1972) 10

Custer’s Revenge (game) 496

custom shoots 291, 295, 299–302

and themes 300–301, 304

Cut and Run (1985) 52, 234

Czolgosz, Leon V, 248

Daedalus (pub) 110

D’Agostino, Antonio 144

Dak Sangeki, The (The Big Tragedy) (1*) 624

Daley, James 447

Dalì, Salvador 101, 133

Dallas, Charles 581

Dalton, David 16

Dalwood, Mary 384

Daly, Tim 56

Daly, Treve 444

D’Amato, Joe 29, 30, 32, 49, 199, 486

Dames, Richard 21

Damiano, Gerard 11, 23, 278, 309

Daniel, Dennis 485

Dannaldson, James M. 127

Dan’s Gallery of the Grotesque (web) 518–520, 519, 520

Dante, Joe 365

Danton, Ray 553

Danzig, Glenn 447, 580

Darden, Severn 18

daredevils 362–365. See also Knievel, Evel

Dark Fantasies 293

Dark Side of Porn: Does Snuff Exist?, The (2006) 101

Dark Stars Rising: Conversations from the Outer Realms (book) 485

Darkside, The (1987) 60

David Holzman’s Diary (1967) 73

Davidson, Susan 469–470, 499, 510

Davies, Brian 67

Davies, Clive 8, 154, 227, 242

Davis, Arthur 111, 189, 192–195, 194

Davis, Geena 303

Davis, Ilah 41

Davison, Bruce 56

Davison, Emily IV

Davis, Victor 488–489

Dawkins, Richard 516

Dawn of the Dead (1978) 29

Dawn, Vincent 87, 151. See also Mattei, Bruno

Dawson, Anthony 49

Day, Doris 37

Day in Court, A (1953) 163

Days of Fury (1979) 112, 204, 244, 356, 558

D, Debbie 77, 292

Dead and Buried (1981) 59

as snuff film 59

Dead Guys (*) 303

Dead Kennedys (band) 211

Dead or Alive (game) 576

Dead Pool, The (1988) 57

Deadly Obsession (1989) 582

Deadly Weapons (1973) 199

Dean, James 422

Death Faces (1988) 153

Death Faces IV (1988) 153

Death File series 243, 244, 245, 246, 246, 251

Death in Focus (1989) 152

Death Magazine, or How to Become a Flowerpot (1979) 342

Death of Sharon Tate, The (performance) 328

Death On Request (1995) 347

Death Race (2008) 89

Death Scenes (1989) 235, 236, 239, 368, 558

Death Scenes 2 (1992) 238–239, 239

Death Scenes 3 (1993) 239

Death Scenes: A Homicide

Detective’s Scrapbook (book) 235

Death: The Ultimate Mystery (1975) 149, 196–197, 197

Death Tube (2010) 88, 88–89, 89, 548

Death Watch (1979) 54

Death Women: Josei Shitai Shuu (Death Women: Female Corpse Week) (1994) 242–247, 243, 251, 255, 578, 624

Death Women Part II (1995) 246, 247

Deathpile 326

Deathmaster, The (1972) 6, 553, 553

Deathrow Gameshow (1987) 55

Decadence: 300

Years of Japanese Fetish Art (book) 441

Decamp, John W. 456–457

De Concini, Ennio 163

Decorator, The (pub) 447

Dedicated to Peter Kurten Sadist and Mass Murderer (album) 326

Deep Arse (*) 280

Deep Red (pub) 485

Deep River Savages (1972) 49

Deep Throat (1972) 11, 23, 24, 25, 139, 309, 538

Deer Hunter, The (1978) 29, 98, 273

Deibler, Anatole 121

de la Iglesias, Alex 84

de Joode, Cees van Wendel 347

De Koenigsberg, Paula 223

Delaney, Ron 141, 142

DeLarge, Alex 411–412, 533

interview with 411–412, 416–417, 417

De Laurentiis, Dino 40, 267

Delcomyn, Ray 359

del Olmo, Juan 381

Deluxe Movies Video (label) 153

De Marchi, Emilio 103

De Martino, Alberto 29

Demonique (pub) 34

Demonophobia (game) 574–575, 575

Demons (1985) 103

Denham, Ellis 355

DeNiro, Robert 79, 500–501, 510

Dennis, Fred 100

Deodato, Ruggero 48, 49, 50, 52, 75, 76, 84, 105, 151, 234

De Palma, Brian 53, 58, 100

Depp, Johnny 84, 85

de Renzy, Alex 43, 142, 182

Dernitz, Pit 190–191, 191, 207, 241, 261, 261, 624

De Ronda, Mink 558

Derrickson, Scott 45, 77

Desert Victory (1943) 118

DeSilva, Larry 206, 207

De Sisti, Vittorio 180

Des Morts (1972) 147. See also Of the Dead (1972)

Despair (1982) 320–322, 321, 323, 327

Deux Ex (1971) 337

Devil Hunter, The (1980) 49

Devil in Miss Jones (1973) 278

Devil’s Experiment (1985) 330, 332, 565, 624

and synopsis 565–567

Devil Woman Doctor (1990) 330

Devil Worship — Exposing Satan’s Underground (Rivera, Geraldo) (tv) 453, 454, 462

Devil Worshippers, The (20/20) (tv) 452, 453

Dewier, Tom 52

Dexter, Mark 449

Dexter (tv) 448, 542

Dial Rat (1972) 97

Dick And Jane Drop Acid And

Die (1991) 67

Diesel, Vin 370

di Gianni, Luigi 117

DiMaggio, Nick 10

Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) 487

Director’s Cut, The (novel) 446–447

Dirt Gang, The (1972) 553

Dirty Cop No Donut (1998) 73

Dirty Harry (1971) 29, 57

Dirty Movies: An Illustrated History of the Stag Film, 1915-1970 (pub) 44

Dirty Sanchez (tv) 388

Disney, Walt 130, 459

Dispatches (tv) 463–464, 560

Dissecting Table (band) 325

Dixon, Tyson 57

Dnipropetrovsk maniacs 83, 406–410, 407, 408, 413, 427, 428, 510, 511, 527, 529, 542, 544, 547–548, 585

and 3 Guys 1 Hammer 427

and Internet comments 407–410

and video content 407

D.O.A. Comics (pub) 581

DOA (Dead On Arrival) (pub) 312, 313

Doberman Gang, The (1972) 273

Doc, Papa 342

Doctor Who (tv) 67, 449

Dogme 95 74

Dolcett (artist) 291

Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act, 1976 492

Donahue, Heather 75

Donahue, Phil 56

Donnelly, Declan 568

Donnelly, Dennis 286

Donner, Richard 29, 266

Donoghue, David 249

Donohue, Troy 552

Don’t Call Anymore (*) 306

Doomsday Chronicles (1979) 196

Doors, the (band) 269

Dorff, Stephen 88 Ðorðević, Mladena 92, 94, 95, 304

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 552

Douglas, Fred 473–474

Douglas, Michael 489

Downes, Sarah 588

Downey Jr., Robert 60

Downey, Lesley Ann 412, 422

Draculina (pub) 312, 313

Drago, Franz 171

Dragsbaek, Collin 370

Dreadful Pleasures (pub) 330

Dressed to Kill (1980) 492, 498

Drew, Wayne 53

Dreyfuss, Richard 15

Driller Killer, The (1979) 486

driver education films 238, 370–373, 371, 373

Dr Phil (tv) 253

Dr Sadismo’s Theater of the Macabre (1986) 287, 291

Drugs: A River of No Return (1989) 152

Dryden, Albert 357, 357

Duarte, Froilan Orozco 341

Duckenfield, David 361

Duck! The Carbine High Massacre (1999) 295, 298

Duc, Thích Quang 169, 170

Duff, John 492

Dunblane school massacre 526

Duncan, Lesley 287

Duncan, Patrick 52, 56

Dungeon of Torture Volume I (*) 281

Dungeon of Torture Volume II (*) 281

Dunn, Thomas C. 73

Dupont, Jacques 128

Durniok, Manfred 174

Durston, David 150, 552

Dust (band) 325

Dutch Wife in the Desert (1967) 334

Dvorsky, Peter 52

Dworkin, Andrea 4, 499, 510

Dwyer, R. Budd 239, 241, 256, 259, 293, 315, 352, 352–354, 358, 558

and mondo films 354

and the media 354

Dying: Last Seconds of Life (1988) 153

Earl, Roger 308

Earthlings (2005) 559, 559–560

Eastwood, Clint 57

Eaten Alive (1979) 49

Eating, Drinking, Pissing & Shitting Film, The (1967) 328. See also Reel III 16/67 (1967)

Ebert, Roger 15, 79, 552

Ecco (1965) 113, 114, 145, 167

EC comics 37. See also comic books

Eder, Richard 21

Edgar, L.B. 517

Edge of Evil, The: The Rise of Satanism in North America (book) 460

Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death (book) V

Edison: The Invention of the Movies (2005) IV

Edison, Thomas IV, V, 119, 248

Ehemänner-Report (1971) 137

Elder Scrolls, The (game) 575–576

Electric Blue series 480

Electric Flag, the (band) 180

Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) V Eliasberg, Jan 60

Elias (film director)

interview with 62–63

Elizondo, Erika 531

Elliot, Sue 40

Elliot, Susan 39, 40

Ellis, Bret Easton 60, 443

Ellis, David R. 84

El Topo (1970) 554

Elvin, Andrew 386

Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977) 30, 49

Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade (1978) 30

Emanuelle e le Porno Notti (1978) 199. See also

Emanuelle e le Porno Notti Mondo No.2 (1978)

Emanuelle e le Porno Notti Mondo No.2 (1978) 199

Emanuelle in America (1976) 28, 29–32, 30, 41, 52, 53, 197, 624

Embassy (label) 152

Embley, Mike 88

Emenegger, Robert 149

Emerson, Wesley 558

Emery, Robert J. 553

Emmanuelle (1974) 29

Emmer, Luciano 116

Empire of Madness (1989) 233

Emwazi, Mohammed 526. See also Jihadi John

Encounter with Disaster (1979) 204

Encyclopedia of British Film, The (book) 123

Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices (book) 538

Enough Rope (*) 471

Enslaved (book) 469, 499

E per tetto un cielo di stelle (1968) 65

Erotica (pub) 25

Eroticism (book) 384

Erotic Tattooing and Body Piercing (pub) 224

Errington, Louise 463–464

Eskapa, Roy 451, 499

España insólita (1965) 174, 174

Esper, Dwain 9, 126, 127–128, 132

Esquire (pub) 16

Essex, Robert 215

Essic, Mark V

Eternal Jew, The (1940) 118, 119

Ethnological Congress of Savage and Barbarous Tribes (exhibition) 124

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) 549

European Nights (1959) 115, 116, 135, 137, 154, 163

European Trash Cinema (pub) 53, 151

Europe in the Raw (1963) 166, 167

Evans, Marc 88

Eve and the Handyman (1961) 166

Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers (1977) 362, 363–364

Evil Cameraman, The (1990) 309, 310

Evil Dead, The (1981) 267

Evil Dead Trap (1988) 60, 61, 441

Evil Dead Trap 2 Hideki (1992) 60

Evil in the Deep (1975) 64

Evil Love, An: The Life of Frederick West (book) 308, 481

Evolution of Snuff, The (1978) 438, 439–440

Excuse Me, Do You Like Sex? (1968) 180

Execute Her Now (*) 305

Execution of a Chinese Bandit (1904) IV, 118

Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison, The (1901) V

Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, The (1895) IV

Executions (1995) 155, 162, 247–249, 249, 250, 256, 260, 561

and Associates (publicists) 249

and the media 248

Executions II (2005) 155

Exhumation, The (1986) 67

eXistenZ (1999) 53

Exorcist, The (1973) 29, 470

Expendables 2 (2012) 370

Explosion of a Motor Car (1900) IV

Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile (2002) 507

Extent and Nature of Organized Ritual Abuse, The (pub) 464

eyes (1971) 337

Eyewitness News (tv) 354

Faccia Di Spia (1975) 32, 147, 197, 198, 261

Faces of Culture series (tv) 157, 158, 624

Faces of Death (1979) VI, 108, 144, 147, 147–149, 149, 152, 153, 158, 163, 204–210, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 213, 227, 232, 234, 250, 257, 323, 333, 342, 429, 624

and credits 148

and German series 558–559

and origins of 208

and press release 148

and ritual abuse 454

at Cannes 209

Faces of Death (German series) 240

and Faces of Death 5 (German) (1989) 233, 558–559

Faces of Death II (1981) 213, 213, 214, 222, 624

Faces of Death III (1985) 153, 224–225, 234

Faces of Death IV (1990) 153, 237, 244, 489

Faces of Death 5 (1991) 234

Faces of Death 6 (1990) 558

Faces of Death: Fact or Fiction? (1999) 208

Faces of Dissection, The (*) 482

Faces of Gore (1998) 163, 243, 250–254, 252, 254, 260, 261

Faces of Torture (1988) 152

Faces of War (1999) 153

Facez of Death 2000 (2005) 255

Fact: Copenhagen Sex-Report (1971) 142

Factory 2000 295–297, 446

Factrix (band) 231, 232

Factsheet Five Zine Reader, The (book) 313

Fairweather, Lance 16

Faith No More (band) 317

Faking It (tv) 347

Falk, Peter 448

Falling Down (1993) 489

Fallout (game) 574

Family Movies (1984) 432, 433

Family, The: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (book) 16, 34, 314, 435, 511

and snuff films 436–439

Famous Monsters of Filmland (pub) 311

Fanfare Films 7

Fangoria (pub) 113, 285, 289, 311, 581

Fan Kill Britton (*) 301–302

Fantasia (1940) 131

Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth (1966) 11, 25

Fantasy Film Memory (pub) 50

fanzines 311, 311–315

Farmer, Donald 311

Farmer, Frances 97

Farmiga, Vera 61

Fatal Visions (pub) 69, 466–468

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (book) 457

Feardotcom (2002) 88

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 391, 526

and CDL 269–271

and Guinea Pig series 330, 484–485

and Mexican Doctor (*) 582

and Ogrish 381, 390

and ritual abuse 451, 454, 461–462

and Snuff (1976) 275, 277–278

and snuff films 268, 274–275, 276, 281, 416

and Stevens, Carter 279–280

and Vidimax 281, 286, 287, 289

Feinstein, Barry 180

Fellig, Arthur 96

Felony Fights (2005) 254

Felton, David 16

Female Sexuality (1968) 137

feminist groups 542. See also Feminist Women’s Health Center (FWHC); See also National Organization for Women (NOW); See also Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW)

and Snuff (1976) 493–496, 499.

in Britain 492

Feminist Women’s Health Center (FWHC) 493, 495

Fenómeno Real (tv) 359

Ferbus, Jean-Pol 186

Ferman, James 70, 72, 73, 192

Ferrara, Giuseppe 32, 147, 197

Ferriol, Louis 264, 281, 285–287, 290, 485–486

and I Spit on your Grave (1978) 289

interview with 285

on custom shoots 290

Ferro, Alberto 280. See also Braun, Lasse

Festen (1998) 74

Fetish Shooting Series: Shotgun Blast #1 (2007) 301, 303

Fettkether, Deborah ‘Sunshine’ 258

F For Fake (1973) 183, 187

Fielding, Raymond 120, 121

Fields of Blood (*) 560–561

Fielers, Claudia 439

Fiennes, Ralph 54

Fight Club (novel) 579

Film 82 (tv) 368

Film as a Subversive Art (book) 449

Film Comment (pub) 82

Film Review (book) 491

Film Threat Video Guide (pub) 67, 70, 312, 313, 315, 346, 459, 485

Filter Bubble, The: What the Internet is Hiding from You (book) 513

Final Cut (1998) 75

Fincher, David 57

Finch, Peter 54, 96

Findlay, Michael 6, 7, 8, 12, 18, 24, 25, 268, 275, 552

and death of 24, 268

Findlay, Roberta 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 24, 223, 265, 266, 268, 275, 552

First Blood (1982) 29

First Transmission (1982) 230, 463–464, 582, 583–584, 585. See also Mexican Doctor (*)

Fisher, Hart D 447

Fishman, Bill 68

Five of Me, The (1981) 370

Flaherty, Robert J. 109, 123

Flanagan, Bob 324

Flaubert, Gustave 537

Fleshpot: Cinema’s Sexual Myth Makers & Taboo Breakers (book) 142

Fletch (novel) 84

Flood (novel) 445

Flor, Robert 131

Flower and Snake (2007) 334, 334

Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985) 330–334, 331, 481–483, 624

and Miyazaki, Tsutomu 483

and synopsis 331

and unlawful possession of 481–482, 486

Flying Acquaintances (1973) 9

Flying Burrito Brothers (band) 562

Flynn, John 41

Foley, James 406, 521–523, 525

Folger, Abigail 239, 435

Fonda, Peter 435

Forbidden Adventure (1936) 126

Forbidden Transmission (tv) 318

Forced Entry Director’s Cut (2002) 307

Forced To Sex (*) 280

Ford, Gerald 159

Ford, John 369

Ford, Margaret 131

Forensics: The anatomy of crime (exhibition) 329

Forest of Bliss (1986) 342

Forgotten Horrors: Early Talkie Chillers from Poverty Row (book) 132

Forgotten Village, The (1941) 109, 134

For Great Justice 411–413. See also Animal Beta Project (ABP)

Forrest, David 451

Forster, Robert 48

Fortean Times (pub) 432

found footage films VI, 74–76, 590

Fourth Man, The (1979) 191

Fowles, John 475

Fox, Damon 241, 242

Fox, Emerson 188, 189, 210. See also Olsen, Rolf

Francis, Joe 320

Franco, Jesus 49, 329

Franju, Georges 338

Frankenheimer, John 59

Frankenpenis (1996) 317

Frankenstein, Andy Warhol’s (1973) 25

Franklin Cover-Up, The: Child Abuse, Satanism and Murder in Nebraska (book) 456, 457, 458

Franklin scandal 455–458

Franklin Scandal, The: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal (book) 458, 458

Fratelli, Ricardo 159

Freaks (1932) 150

Fred Vogel’s August Underground (2001) 78, 79, 80–83, 534

Free Ride, A (1915) 43

French Blue (1974) 280. See also Penetration (1974)

French, Kristen 477

Freud, Sigmund 144

Friday the 13th (1980) 483

Friedkin, William 29

Friedman, David F. 20, 126

Friedrich, Ernst 238, 323

Friend, Tad 344

Frightfeast (pub) 580, 582

Frisk (1995) 444

Frisk (novel) 443–444

Fritz the Cat (1972) 10

From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse (book) 297

Front Page Detective (pub) 437

Frost, Jack 7

Frost, R. Lee 113, 167, 174, 181

Frykowski, Wojiciech 239, 436

Fuck (pub) 314–315

Fugitive, The (tv) 97

Fugs, the (band) 16

Fujita, Yohei 88

Fukasaku, Kinji 55

Fulci, Lucio 29, 84

Funhouse, The (1977) 35. See also Last House on Dead End Street (1977)

Furch, Robert 439

Gabb, Ian 449–450

Gaddafi, Muammar 510, 511, 540

Gaisseau, Pierre-Dominique 109

Galati, Tony 60

Gallagher, Hugh 313

Gallows12 (*) 290, 290, 624

Game (pub) 17

Gamer (2009) 56

Gamma Chronicles series 196

Gandolfini, James 502

Ganguly, Aubrey 248

Gang Violence (2006) 254

Gang Wars (2006) 258

Garcia, Felix Gamez 402, 403, 403–404

Gardner, Robert 342

Garfinkle, Louis 273

Garny, Dominique 186, 187

Garrett, Roy 49

Garrett, Sven 91

Garuti, Federica 87

Gate of Flesh (novel) 154

Gatewood, Charles 224

Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation (book) 323, 326

’Gator Bait (1974) 466

Gauer, Raymond P 271

Gbagbo, Laurent 400

Gee, Vanyoska 342

Geisel, Theodor 118

Geisler, Greg 69, 70

Gelder, Ken 588

Gellman, Emanuel 21

Gemora, Charlie 123

Gemser, Laura 29, 30

Général Idi Amin Dada (1974) 339, 339–340

Genesis (pub) 273, 436

Gentry, Curt 16

George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (book) 458

George, Wally 315

Gerlach, Joe 363

Gernreich, Rudi 179

Gertz, Jami 60

Gesichter des Todes (Faces of Death) series 234, 558–559. See also Faces of Death (German series)

Get Down, Grand Funk (1968) 11. See also Mondo Daytona: How To Swing on your Spring Vacation (1968)

Getsic, Rodleen 593

Get Your Aux Off! (2012) 317, 317

Geyser, Morgan 541. See also Slenderman

Ghastly Ones, The (1968) 533

Ghetto Fights 2 (1995) 258

Ghetto Fights 6 (2010) 155

Ghetto Freaks (1969/70) 552, 554. See also Love in the Commune (1969/70)

Ghostbusters (1984) 377

Ghostwatch (1992) 514

Giger, H R 581

Gilchrist, Ian 70

Gill, Liz 492

Gilmore, Gary 57

Gilmore, John 439

Gimme Shelter (1970) 142, 339, 442, 561–564, 562, 563, 588

giorno in pretura, Un (1953) 163. See also Day in Court, A (1953)

Girl Grabbers, The (1968) 267

Girls Around Me (app) 514, 516

Girls Gone Wild (label) 320

Gladwell, David 117

Glasser, Barry 9, 10, 18, 19

Gli italiani si divertono così (1966). See also Wild Weird Wonderful Italians, The (1966)

Glimpse of Hell, A (2007) 342

Glover, James Edward 518–519

Gnojewski, Carol 441

Goat, The (*) 43

Godfathers of Mondo, The (2003) 170

Gods Must Be Crazy, The (1980) 187

Gods of Death (book) 499–503, 500, 510

Godzilla (2014) 377

Gogglebox (tv) 546

Go! Go! Go! World (1964) 171

Goi, Michael 77

Going Postal (2011) 254, 258

Goldberg, Helen 10, 274

Golden Turkey Awards, The (book) 490

Goldstein, Al 144, 274, 289

Goldstein, Sam 563–564

Goldstone, James 150

Goodall, Mark 109, 146, 157, 323, 326

Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) 110, 141, 157, 183, 183–184

Good Night America (tv) 352

Goodsell, Greg 153, 342

Gordon, Richard 180

Gore, Chris 485

Gore Creatures (pub) 311. See also Midnight Marquee (pub)

Gore Gazette (pub) 311, 312

Gorgon Video (label) 234

Gori, Gabriel 87

Gorky, Maxim 64, 65, 542

Gory Comix (pub) 581–582

Gotoh, Juan 579

Gough, Lynda 481

Goulding, Barrie 249

Gow (1931) 125, 126, 144

GPS Messenger (app) 516

Grabowski, Laura 462. See also Stratford, Lauren

Grammer, Kelsey 80

Grand Guignol (theatre) 167

Grant, Shauna 223

Graysmith, Robert 470

Great American Snuff Movie, The (2003) 100, 101

Great Steam Fair, The (1964) 117

Great Train Robbery, The (1903) 65

Greenaway, Peter 490

Greenberg, Gary 465

Green, David Allen 406

Green, Grass 447

Green/Greenbaum, Dr 460–461

Green, John 416

Green, Morton 277

Green River killer 470–471

Green, Sam 564

Green, Walon 149, 184

Greer, William 533

Gregoretti, Carlo 178

Gregory, David 170

Grennan, Emmett 100

Gretton, Thomas 157

Grierson, John 109

Grindhouse Purgatory (pub) 278

Grissim Jr., John 183

Grobbelaar, Bruce 361

Grose, Francis 205

Gross, Adam 530

Gröss, Frances B. 210, 624. See Carr, Michael

Gross, Jerry 152, 182

Grudih, Jonathan 528

Gruschka, Karolina 588

Guariglia, Guglielmo 216, 217

Guenette, Robert 187

Guerrasio, Guido 180, 185

Guide for the Film Fanatic (book) 158

Guinea Ama (1974) 144, 151–152, 187

Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985). See Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985)

Guinea Pig series 60, 244, 329–334, 565. See also Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985) and filmography 330

Guinness, Alec 83

Gunderson, Ted 207, 454, 454, 457, 458

Guns N’ Roses (band) 432–433

Gunther, Michael 444

guro 291, 447, 578–582

Gut (2012) 61, 61–63, 62

Guts of a Virgin (album) 325, 325

Hackman, Gene 266

Hadaegh, Blue 340

Hadzovic, Eldin 399

Haggerty, George 342

Haines, David 522, 624

Hale, Gareth 448

Half Life (game) 574

Hallett, Caine 386

Hall, Graham 560, 560–561

Hall, Michael C. 448

Halloween (1978) 492

Halloween Horrorshow (2010) 318, 318

Halls of Horror (pub) 189

Hammid, Alexander 134

Hammond, Corydon 460–461, 544

Hammond, Dirk 277

Handling, Piers 53

Hand of Death 465, 467, 468

Hand, Richard J. 167

Hansen, Freddy 142

Happening, The (2008) 191

happy slapping 385–388, 527–528

and Tango ad 386, 388

Hardcore (1978) 40–45, 41, 42, 44, 52, 59, 85, 147, 267, 548, 624

Hardcore Life, The (1978) 624. See also Hardcore (1978)

Harding, Colin 64

Hari, Johann 445

Harlin, Renny 303

Harman, Sabrina 517–518, 518, 541

Harold, Gale 420

Harper, Jessica 15

Harper, Stephen 545

Harrison, John 372

Harrison, William 442

Harris, Peter 481

Hartman, Tim 313

Hase, Jun 483

Hashimoto, Izô 60

Hassan, Margaret 397

Hated (1993) 327

Hattersley, Roy 248, 249

Hauer, Rutger 60, 63

Haufen, Graf 115, 329

interview with 329

Hausfrauen-Report (1971) 137

Haven of Horror (1985) 284, 284, 285

Hawaii Experience, The (tv) 315

Hawke, Ethan 45

Hawkins, David 478, 544

Hayes, Jonathan 395

Head (1968) 322, 323

Headpress Guide to the Counterculture (book) 314

Headpress (pub) 34, 187, 265, 297, 312, 324

Hearts of Darkness (1991) 150

Heath, Ted 198

Heaven (1987) 342

Hebditch, David 31, 32

Heckert, Matt 232

Hedrin, Sam 55, 443

Heimans, Frank 224

He Knows You’re Alone (1980) 492

Helga (1967) 137, 138

Hellfire, William 295–297

Hellstrom Chronicle, The (1971) 149, 184, 208

Helms, Michael 69

interview with 468

Helter Skelter Murders, The (1970) 552. See also Other Side of Madness, The (1970)

Hemofilia (pub) 582

Hendrickson, Robert 432

Henenlotter, Frank 320

He Never Dies (1986) 330

Henley, Wayne 215, 444

Henning, Alan 522–523, 525

Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer (1989) 68, 68–70, 72, 81, 87, 91

and BBFC 68, 69–70

Hensleigh, Jonathan 52

Hensley, Jack 396, 396–397

hentai 580

Hepworth, Cecil M. IV

Here and Now (tv) 359

Herman, David 247

Herman, Norman 179

Her-Self (pub) 493

Herzfeld, John 78, 83, 500

Herzog, Werner 133, 342

Heysel stadium disaster 360

Hibler, Winston 131

Hickey, Darren 399

Hickman, Ted 390

Hidden Camera (app) 515

Hierens, William 467

highway safety films. See driver education films

Highway to Hell (*) 126

Hijohkaidan (band) 322, 323

Hilburn, Mike 488

Hill, Alison 487

Hill, Dana Lone 512

Hill, Jack 151, 313

Hill, Jackie 492

Hill, Reginald 448

Hillsborough disaster 361, 361–362

Hills Have Eyes, The (1977) 35

Hillside Strangler 496

Him, Her and Pets (*) 308

Hinckley, John 224

Hindley, Myra 412, 422

Hinman, Gary 17

Hino, Hideshi 331, 331–334, 624

manga artist 332, 332

Hinton, Ted 122

Hirschman, John E. 276

Hirst, Damien 329

History and Theory (pub) 533

History of the Blue Movie, A (1970) 43

History of the British Film, The (book) 119

Hitchcock, Alfred 58, 87, 303

Hitler, Adolf 232, 395, 501, 502

Hobbs, Simon 588

Hoberman, J 554

Hoblit, Gregory 88

Hoefler, Paul L. 124

Hoe Kom Ik Van De Grond? (How Do I Get Off the Ground?) (book) 502–503

Hogan-Howe, Bernard 388

Holden, William 55

Holik, Diane 473

Holland, Jesse 76

Hollywood Reporter (pub) 272

Hollywood’s World of Flesh (1963) 167

Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (book) 490

Holmes, HH 546

Holmes, James 514

Holocaust 2000 (1977) 29

Homolka, Karla 411, 420, 475–478, 476

Homolka, Tammy 475–477

H.O.M Productions (label) 481

Honest Man: The Life of R. Budd Dwyer (2010) 354

Hooligans (2002) 155

Hooper, Tobe 147

Hopper, Dennis 274

Horman, Joseph 272, 273

Horror Femmes 288, 289, 289–290, 291

Horrors of War, The (1992) 152

Horrors of War 2 (1994) 152

Horsemen (2008) 57

Horse Soldiers, The (1959) 369

Hoskins, James R. 215

Hospital (1969) 336

Hostel (2005) 86, 285

Hotchner, A.E. 564

House by the Cemetery, The (1981) 31

House on Haunted Hill (1999) 65

Hovarth, Imre 224

Howard, Creighton 100

Howard, Frank 552

Howard, Robert E 148

Howarth, Kevin 73

How Do I Get Off the Ground? (book) 502–503

Huberty, James 224

Huddleston, Jack 235

Hughes, Robert 327, 328

Human Experiments (1979) 486

Human Postmortem (1983) 321, 321. See also Despair (1982)

Human Rights Act 1998 51

Hunchback of the Morgue, The (1972) 151

Hunger Games, The (2012) 548

Hungry Bitches 428. See also 2 Girls 1 Cup

Hungry Freaks (pub) 313

Hunted (*) 300–301, 301

Hunter, Meredith 339, 561, 563–564. See also lot 63 grave c (2006)

Hunt for Jill Dando’s Killer, The (tv) 514

Hunt for the Yorkshire Grimace (1996) 319

Hunt, James 249

Hurst, Andy 55

Hurt, John 63

Hurwitz, Harry 138

Hussein, Saddam 382–383, 395, 510–511, 511, 517, 540

Hustler (pub) 496

Huston, John 498

Hutman, Ryan 100

Hyam, Peter 52

Hynes, Nathan 74

I Bury the Living (1958) 273

I Can See You (2008) 76

I demoni (1972) 624. See also Manson Massacre, The (1971)

I Drink your Blood (1970) 6, 552, 553

I segreti della città più nude del mondo (1971) 184. See also Naked Cities (1971)

I Spit on your Grave (1978) 147, 289

I Spit on your Grave, Part 2 (unmade) 289

Ide, Akira 151, 187

Idiots, The (1998) 74

If.…(1968) 58

Ikeda, Toshiharu 60, 441

Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS (1973) 167

I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! (tv) 88

Immoral Mr. Teas, The (1959) 166

Impact 911 (2011) 260

Incredible Torture Show, The (1977) 285. See also Blood Sucking Freaks (1977)

Incredibly Strange Films (book) 320

Independent Film Journal (pub) 9

Infant Brain Surgery (*) 482

Infernal Machine, The: A History of Terrorism (book) 521, 525

Infiltrator, The (1995) 502, 502. See also In Hitler’s Shadow (book)

Inflatable Sex Dolls of the Wasteland (1967) 334. See also Dutch Wife in the Desert (1967)

Ingagi (1930) 123, 124, 177

In Hitler’s Shadow (book) 499, 501–502

Inhumanities (1989) 152

Inhumanities 2 Modern Atrocities (1989) 152

In La-La Land We Trust (novel) 445, 502

Inner Depravity Vol 1 (2005) 535, 537

Innocence of Muslims, The (film, unmade?) 543

In Sarah’s Eyes (1976) 265

In Search of Noah’s Ark (1976) 204

In the Kingdom of the Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema (pub) 64

In the Name of Satan? (Panorama) (tv) 461–462

Inserts (1974) 15

Inside Edition (tv) 584

Inside Jennifer Welles (1977) 265

Inside the ALF (Dispatches) (1998) 560–561

Interdits Du Monde, Les (1986) 227

Intim-Report (1967) 137

Invaders, The (tv) 97

Invisible Darkness (book) 477–478

Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) 16. See also Lucifer Rising (1966)

Irwin, Justice 386

Isanov, Andrey 342

Ishikawa, Takeshi 244–245

IS (Islamic State). See Islamic State of Iraq and Sham

ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). See Islamic State of Iraq and Sham

ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Sham). See Islamic State of Iraq and Sham

Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) 525

Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) V, 521–526, 624

and the media 522, 522–523, 524, 525

Island of Lost Souls (1932) 132, 150

Is There Sex After Death? (1971) 181, 184

Is There Sex After Death? (book) 342

It Came From Hunger! (book) 137

It’s Alive (1974) 97

It’s a Woman’s World (1964) 154

Iwasaki, Akira 159

Jabberwalk (1976) 198. See also This is America (1976)

Jaber, Hala 587

Jacaré (1942) 122, 127, 127–128, 130

Jackass TV (tv) 388

Jack Has a New Pisshole Behind His Balls (*) 585. See also Brown, John Ronald

Jackson, Kevin 42

Jackson, Michael 462

Jackson, Neil 547

interview with 588–593

Jacobs, Joseph 232

Jacobson, Harlan 21

Jacopetti, Gualtiero VI, 104, 105, 108, 110, 146, 151, 157, 159, 162, 165, 167, 170, 173, 175–176, 183, 189, 203, 227, 240, 248

and newsreels 121, 163

as actor 163

on mondo films 109, 115, 146

Jacovoni, Alessandro 173

Jaeckin, Just 29

Jagger, Mick 562–563

James Dean Killer — 1 Man 1 Icon — Luka Rocco Magnotta, The 418

Janie (1970) 7

Janos, Victor 32. See also Watkins, Roger

Jarman, Derek 463

Jarmusch, Jim 101

Jaworzyn, Stefan 322

Jaws (1975) 22, 29, 198, 365

Jefferson Airplane (band) 562

Jennings, Claudia 466

Jeremy, Ron 151, 317

Jeriko, Orion 309. See also Zedd, Nick

Jerk (novel) 444, 444

Jerkoff, Meinheim 309

Jerry Springer Show, The (tv) 79

Jewison, Norman 55, 442

J.F.K. Assassination (multimedia) 351

J-Horror 66, 334

Jihadi John 513, 523–524, 524, 525–526, 624. See also Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS)

Jihadi Joseph 524, 624. See also Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS)

Jin Won, Kim 75

Joan of Arc (1895) IV Jodorowsky, Alejandro 554

Joensen, Bodil 142

Johnson, Don 98

Johnson, Lamont 86

Johnson, Paul Marshall 395

Jones, Daniel 256, 257

Jones, Geoffrey 302, 471–473, 472

Jones, Jim 52, 201, 215, 228, 230

Jones, Jones 473–474

Jones, Steve 588

Jones, Toby 66

Jordan, Minnesota sex abuse scandal 450–451, 510

Journey into the Beyond: The World of Supernatural (1975) 188, 189, 196

Jovanović, Mihajlo Z 92

Judge for Yourself (1998) 334. See also Psycho The Snuff Reels (1998)

Junichiro, Tanizaki 333

Junk series 243, 244, 245

Jun, Lin 417, 419, 422, 545. See also 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick

Just Like the Movies (2005) 377

Kahn, Parviz 398

Kallinger, Joseph 57

Kama Sutra: The Art of Making Love (1994) 155

Kamerić, šejla 329

Kanievska, Marek 60

Karamoja (1954) 126, 152

Kärlekens XYZ (1971) 139

Karloff, Boris 112, 113, 123, 171

Kary, D J 295

Kasper, Roger 248

Kassig, Peter 523–524

Katudjian, Marcos Fábio 37, 445–446

interview with 37

Kavka, Misha 588

Kayyali, Nadia 512

Keating Jr., Charles H. 270

Keaton, Diane 342

Keitel, Harvey 54

Keith, Harvey 159

Kelton, Bruce J. 558

Kemper, Ed 215

Ken and Barbie killers 475, 476. See also Bernardo, Paul and Karla, Homolka

Kendall, Tina 588

Kennedy, Arthur 6

Kennedy, Fred 369, 369, 370

Kennedy, George 112, 267

Kennedy, Jackie 352, 435

Kennedy, John F. VI, 137, 159, 198, 215, 238, 351, 533, 542, 558

Kennedy, Peter 399

Kennedy, Robert 198, 215

Kenner, Ron 439

Kenton, Erle C. 132

Kerekes, David 34, 59, 98, 289, 297, 314, 491, 588–593

Kerman, Robert 48

Kern, Richard 103, 309–310, 310

Keserü, János 341

Kesey, Ken 92

Kilgore, Charles 157

Killbaby (pub) 312

Killer Fiction (book) 465–466, 466

Killer Flick (1998) 100

Killer Net (1998) 88

Killerbowl (novel) 442, 442

Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen (book) 505

Killing Girl Snuff (2002) 302

Killing of America, The (1981) 41, 154, 163, 213, 215–216, 216, 217, 218–219, 224, 256, 482

Kill Me If You Can (1977) 56

Kilroy Was Here (*) 308, 481

Kimber, Shaun interview with 588–593

King, Brian 315

Kingdom, The (2007) 404, 405

King Elephant, The (1971) 184

King Kong (1933) 97

King Kong (1976) 377

King, Lawrence 455–457

King, Martin Luther 198, 215

King of Kongo (1929) 123

Kingsmen, the (band) 269

Kipple (2011) 319

Kirkman, Edward 272

Kirton, Hank 446

Kissaberg, Orvil 363

Kissinger, Henry 198

Kiyotaka, Tsurisaki 342

Klein, Yves 557

Klemann, Richard 310

Kline, Herbert 134

Kneale, Nigel 53

Knievel, Evel VI, 363

Knight, Derrick 117

Knudsen, Eric 541. See also Slenderman

Koch, Ilse 241

Koda, Shosei 397

Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75) 96

Korine, Harmony 82

Kosakowski, Michal 377

Kostenko, Andrzej 439

Kotcheff, Ted 29

Koto, Herman 343

Kowalski, Lech 151

Krabbé, Jeroen 101

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 144, 201, 231, 578

Kramer, Wayne 61

Krause, Tina 292

Kren, Kurt 328, 337

Krenwinkel, Patricia 432

Krik? Krak! Tales of a Nightmare (1988) 342

Kristel, Sylvia 29

Krueger, Margaret 473–474

Krueger, Richard B 77

Kumar, Arum 247

Kumdereli, Dumrus 397

Kürten, Peter 326

Kuznetsov, Dmitri Vladimirovich 504, 506

Kwaheri — Vanishing Africa (1964) 144, 172–173, 172, 173

Kyõi No Dokyumento: Nippon Yokujõ Monogatari (1971) 154

L.627 (1992) 70

LaBelle, Beverly 20, 23, 496

LaBianca, Leno 4, 6, 182, 239, 434, 552

LaBianca, Rosemary 4, 6, 182, 239, 434, 552

Labyrinth of Sex (1969) 138

Lacmant, Jean-Paul 50

Lady Cocoa, The (1975) 141

Lady M. (*) 280, 280

La Fontaine, J.S. 464

LA Free Press (pub) 493

Lafrenière, Ian 418

L’Age d’Or (1929) 134

Laing, R.D. 321

Lake, Leonard 474, 474–475

Lakinski, Christina 388

Lambert, Stephen 347

Lamb, John 143, 182

Landau, Martin 64

Landis, Bill 182, 311–312, 313, 552

Landis, John 365–367, 473

Land of Celtic Ghosts (1983) 196

Lands, John 88

Land Without Bread (1932) 132–134, 133

Language of Love (1969) 138, 139

L’annunziata (1962) 117

LA Requiem (1993) 342

LaRouche, Lyndon 457–458, 458

Larsen, Bob 468

Lasbats, Chantal 227

Lash of the Penitentes, The (1936) 132–134

Last Broadcast, The (1998) 75

Last Date (1950) 371

Last Day at the Beach (1990) 67

Last Days of Planet Earth, The (1974) 147

Last Exorcism, The (2010) 77

Last Horror Movie, The (2003) 73, 588

Last House on Dead End Street (1977) 32–35, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40

Last House on the Left, The (1972) 33, 141, 151, 266, 553

and Evolution of Snuff, The (1978) 440

Last Hunter, The (1979) 29

Last Machine, The: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (book) 119

Last Shark, The (1981) 365

Last Tango in Paris (1974) 11

Late Great Planet Earth, The (1976) 147, 187, 197–198

Laurence, William 159

Laurent, Ray 113

Lauro, Al Di 44

LaVey, Anton 113, 235, 241, 422, 454, 470

and Death Scenes (1989) 235

L.A. Vice (1989) 60

LA Weekly (pub) 585

Lawnmower Man, The (1992) 88

Lazov, Georgi 397

le Blanc, Pierre 87. See also Mattei, Bruno

Leblanc, Warren 571

Le Cilaire, Conan 147, 148. See also Schwartz, John Alan

Lederer, Laura 20, 23, 496

Leder, Herbert J. 374

Led Zeppelin (band) 17, 312

Lee, Brandon 369, 370

Leffler, Christian 100

Legend of Lylah Clare, The (1968) 96, 97

Legends (1983) 196

Lelouch, Claude 170

Lemmy 323, 323

Le, Myca Dinh 366–368

Lenning, Arthur 143

Lennon, John 6, 216

Lenzi, Umberto 49, 488

Leonard, Elmore 59

Leone, Sergio 159

Lepola, Tommi 102

Le Prince, Louis Aimé Augustin 117, 549

Leptirica (1973) 94

Leroy, Philippe 103

L’Espresso (pub) 178

Less Than Zero (1987) 60

Less Than Zero (novel) 442, 443

Lester, Richard 179

Lesy, Michael 313

Lethal Marriage (book) 476

Let Me Die a Woman (1978) 145, 145, 199, 312

Let Me Die a Woman (book) 199

Leveller, The (pub) 492

Levine, Terry 265

Levinson, Leonard 365

Lewis, Barry 450

Lewis, Herschell Gordon 20, 66, 237, 285

Lewton, Val 75

Leyden, Joel 388, 405

Libidomania (1978) 152, 199, 201

Libidomania 2 (1980) 210

Lieu, Kun 370

Life (pub) 352, 439

Life and Death of a Porno Gang, The (2009) 89, 92, 92–95, 93, 94

Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The (1943) 28

Life on Mars or Not (*) 276

Like Lambs to the Slaughter (book) 463

Lim, Alfred 392

Lincoln, Fred J 266

Lindsay, Robert 405

Lindsey, Hal 147, 197

Lipstick (1976) 86, 496, 497

Live and Confused (1988) 322, 323, 327

Live Feed (2006) 84, 86

Live! From Death Row (1991) 56, 57

Live Mermaid in a Manhole (1988) 330. See also Mermaid in a Manhole (1988)

Live! The World’s Greatest Stunts (1991) 362

LiveLeak (web) 383, 384, 516–517. See also Ogrish (web)

Living Desert, The (1953) 114, 130, 131

Living with Michael Jackson (2003) 462

Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, A (1971) 486

Lloyd, Georgina 472–473

Lloyd, Jessica 478

Loan, Nguyễn Ngọc 215

Logereau, Edouard 174

Lolita Vibrator Torture (1987) 334, 335

Lollipop Chainsaw (game) 574

London Day by Day (newsreel) 123

London in the Raw (1964) 145, 170

London Nobody Knows, The (1967) 136, 179

London, Sondra 465, 468

Long, David 102

Long Kiss Goodnight, The (1996) 303

Long Pigs (2007) 74

Long Road Back From Hell, The: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust (2011) 49, 588

Long, Stanley 145, 174

Lopert, Dan 184

Lopes, Daniele 359

Loren, Sophia 163

lot 63 grave c (2006) 564

Loudermilk, Bryan 530, 531–532, 547

Love (1985) 108, 144, 145, 224

Love 3 (1971) 139. See also Kärlekens XYZ (1971)

Love, Brenda 538–539

Love Camp 7 (1969) 167, 174

Love Commune (1969/70) 554. See also Love in the Commune (1969/70)

Love In Our Time (1968) 137

Love in the Commune (1969/70) 553–554

Love Meetings (1964) 171

Love Serenade (1996) 370

Love Thrill Murders, The (1971) 552. See also Sweet Savior (1971)

Love Variations (1969) 138

Lovelace, Linda 309

Lovers’ Guide, The (1991) 155

Lovett, Anthony R. 558

Low, Rachel 119

Lowry, Lynn 41

Loy, Mino 165, 166, 171, 183

Lubin, Siegmund 9

Lucas, Henry Lee 69, 224, 468–469

Lucas, Tim 53

Lucifer Rising (1966) 16, 17, 436

Lucky Bastard (2014) 77

Lucy Sky Diamond (1990) 60

Ludlum, Robert 63

Lumet, Sidney 53

Luna, Bigas 65, 84

Lunch, Lydia 159, 310

Lunsford, Darrel Edward 374–375

Lynch, Jay 18, 19, 274, 448

interview with 19

Lynch, Richard 267

Lyne, Adrian 29

Macabre (1980) 103

Macabre Video Underground 152, 284–287, 286, 287, 291, 485–486

Macabro (1965) 114, 136

Macfadyen, Matthew 449

Machiyama, Tomo 333

MacKenna, Kenneth ‘Mad Dog’ 446, 465–468, 467

Mackey, Karl 373

MacKinnon, Catharine 401, 498

Madden, Lee 552

Maddow, Ben 104

Made in Serbia (2005) 94, 94–95

Madonna 284, 526

Mad Video (label) 244, 246

Magia Lucana (1958) 117

Magician, The (2005) 74

Magnatta, Constantino 60

Magnotta, Luka Rocco VI, 79, 385, 411, 411–423, 413, 417, 511, 527, 529, 533, 537–539, 538, 541, 543, 544–547, 547–548, 624

and 1 Boy 2 Kittens 411

and 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick 413–417, 418, 419–420

and Bathtime LOL 412

and Cannibal Serial Killer — Luka Magnotta 422

and Casablanca (1942) 413, 416, 419

and fake identities 419–423

and Homolka, Karla 420, 477

and James Dean Killer — 1 Man 1 Icon — Luka Rocco Magnotta, The 418

and Medellin, Hervey 418

and music 412, 413, 422, 544, 546

and Python Christmas 412

as fugitive 417–419

Magnum Video (label) 227

Mahaffy, Lesley 476–477

Mahon, Barry 286, 289

Maier, Stephen A. 158, 159

interview with 158–159

Mailer, Norman 16

Major Disasters (British Movietone News) (1987) 229, 230

Making of Devil Woman Doctor (1990) 330

Making of Guinea Pig (1986) 330

Makow, Henry 477–478

Malamondo (1964) 171, 171

Mal d’Africa (1967) 114, 179

Male di San Donato, Il (1965) 117

Malenotti, Roberto 171

Malone, William 65, 88

Man & Wife: An Educational Film for Married Adults (1969) 139

Man Behind the Sun (1987) 151

Man Bites Dog (1992) 70, 70–73, 71, 72, 74, 81, 91

Man for Emmanuelle, A (1969) 29

Man of Steel (2013) 377

Man on Wire (2008) 377

Man Walking Around the Corner (1888) 117

Man Who Saw Tomorrow, The (1981) 187

Man with a Camera (tv) 96

Man with a Movie Camera (1929) 110

Mangini, Cecila 116, 175

Manhunt (game) 571

Manhunt 2 (game) 570–571, 571, 573

Maniac (1934) 132

Maníacos del martillo, Los (The Hammer Maniacs) (2010) 410

Mann, Scott 56

Mansfield, Jayne 112, 134, 171

Mansion of the Doomed (1976) 273

Manson (1973) 432, 432

Manson, Charles 4, 5, 6, 8, 17, 18, 34, 88, 101, 146, 181, 183, 272, 327, 461, 507, 511, 525

and Esquire (pub) 16

and Family, The (book) 16

and films inspired by Man-son and/or the family 6, 146, 181, 432, 552–554

and Game (pub) 17

and music 432–433, 552

and Rivera, Geraldo 57, 454

and Rolling Stone (pub) 16

and stolen film equipment 436–438

and the media 432–439

Manson Family Movies (1984) 432, 433. See also Family Movies (1984)

Manson, Jr., Charles 432

Manson Massacre, The (1971) 552, 553, 624

Manson Murders, The: An Investigation into Motive (book) 16, 438

Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and The Family (book) 439

Mansplat (pub) 312

Manvell, Roger 119

ManWoman 342

Many Faces of Death, The (1995) 153

Mapplethorpe, Robert 453

Marathon Infinity (game) 573

Marathon Man (1976) 85

Marcellini, Romolo 166

March of Time 1935-1951 (book) 120, 121

Marek, Mark 385, 417, 418

Margheriti, Antonio 29, 49

Marija Strangle with Gloves (2007) 304

Marinovich, Creg 519

Marrs, Texe 505

Marshall, John 301

Marsh, Mike 100

Martine, Karl 439

Martinelli, Franco 49

Martinelli, Marcello 171

Martino, Luciano 114, 184. See also Lopert, Dan

Martin, Jack 443

Martin, Maritza 240, 357

Martin, Matt 582

Martín, Miguel Ángel 326–327

Martino, Sergio 49, 182

Martin, Robert 374

Marton, Andrew 370

Marx, Groucho 269

Marzocchi, Paolo 377

Mason, James 112, 179

Massaccesi, Aristide 29, 49. See also D’Amato, Joe

Massacre in Bosnia & Croatia (atrocity film) 401

Massie, Mitch 86

Masters, Brian 505

Masters, Mark 386

Masters of Horror (2005-07) 65.

Matheus, Jimmy 199, 201, 210. See also Mattei, Bruno

Matsuo, Company 244–245

Mattei, Bruno 86, 87, 151, 199, 201

Mau Mau (1954) 128, 129, 144

Mauthausen Orchestra 326

Mawdsley, Peter 486

Mawra, Joseph P. 151, 285

Maysles, Albert 561, 563–564

Maysles, David 561, 563–564

Mazer, June 496

McBain, Susan. See Elliot, Sue

McBride, Jim 73

McCann, Brian 531

McCarthy, Andrew 60

McCarthy, Paul 329

McClay, Charlotte 406

McConnell, Field 544

McCoy, Sylvester 67

McCullough Jr., Jim 63

McDonald, Gregory 84

McDonough, Jimmy 166, 312

McFarlane, Brian 123

McFarlane, Nigel 347

McGavin, Darren 96

McKay, Barry 472

McKenna, Kenneth 467. See also MacKenna, Kenneth ‘Mad Dog’

McKenna, Mark 588

McKinley, William V McLennan, Jim 332, 333

McLuhan, Marshall 53, 527

McNaughton, John 68, 69

Mcnee, Patrick 448

McNeil, Legs 24

McPartlin, Anthony 568

McPherson, Ryen 253

McQ, Charlie 372

Meat Joy (performance) 329

Meat Show (performance) 329

Meat Socket, The: Ordeal IV (multimedia) 314, 315

Mechanized Death (1961) 372

Medellin, Hervey 418

Media Carnage (*) 353, 354

Media Queen Enterprises (mail order) 465

Mediawatch UK 351

Medicine Ball Caravan (1971) 183. See also We Have Come For Your Daughters (1971)

Medved, Harry 490

Medved, Michael 490

Megan is Missing (2011) 76, 76, 77

Mei Chun Chang’s Dynasty (1977) 25

Melody Maker (pub) 482

Men and Sharks (1976) 199, 364

Mendik, Xavier 588

Mengele, Josef 460

Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971) 73

Mental Hygiene (book) 373

Meredith, Burgess 134

Merhi, Joseph 60

Merlin (mail order) 487, 487, 572

Mermaid in a Manhole (1988) 330, 331, 334

Merrifield, David 363

Merrill, Gary 105

Messina, Sergio 308

Meteor (1979) 147

Method (2011) 67

Mexican Doctor (*) 582–585, 583–584. See also Brown, John Ronald; See also First Transmission (1982)

Mexican drug cartels. See narco videos

Meyer, Russ 15, 166, 167, 552

Meyers, Sidney 104

Miami Vice (tv) 98, 448

Michael and Helga (1968) 137

Michelle Remembers (book) 453, 455, 458

Midnight 2: Sex, Death and Videotape (1993) 74

Midnight Blue (tv) 289

Midnight Marquee (pub) 311

Midnight Movies (book) 554

Milin, Srboljub 92

Mille E Una Donna, Le (1964) 171

Millennium Meltdown (2011) 260

Miller, Arnold Louis 150, 170, 174

Miller, Ezra 57

Miller, George 365

Milligan, Andy 76, 533

Mills, Peter 323

Mills, Shirley 132

Milos, Maja 94

Mindenburg, Ben 118

Mingozzi, Gian Franco 117

Mingus, Charles 313

miracolo di San Gennaro, Il (1948) 116

Miranda, Vince 20

Misbegotten Son, The (book) 471

Misdeeds of a Doctor in San Diego 583. See also Mexican Doctor (*)

Mi Socio Imposible (tv) 359

Mitchell, Cameron 149–150, 196, 197, 286

Mitchell, Edgar D. 188, 196

Mitchell, Elizabeth 61

Mitchell, Eric 309

Mitchell, Steve(n) 265. See also Stevens, Carter

Mitchell, WJT 405, 529

Mitton, Andy 76

Miyazaki, Tsutomu 483, 483, 484

Moana (1926) 109, 123

Moby 559

Modern Screen (pub) 434, 435

Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh 391

Molester Train (1975) 333

Molin, Tero 102

Mom and Dad (1945) 126, 126, 137

Monaghan, David 247, 561

Monarch Releasing Corporation 7, 9, 10, 11, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 268, 274, 275, 490. See also Shackleton, Allan

Mondo Art (2013) 158, 158

Mondo Balordo (1964) 111, 113, 146, 146, 171

Mondo Bizarre (1965) 174

Mondo Bizarro (1966) 137, 174

Mondo Brutale (1972) 151. See also Last House on the Left, The (1972)

Mondo Candido (1975) 151, 151, 189

Mondo Cane (1962) VI, 104, 105, 108, 108, 109, 136, 147, 149, 153, 154, 158, 162, 163–165, 164, 165, 171, 208, 312, 323, 565

and anti-American sentiment 166

and BBFC 165, 168

and music 114

and protests 166

and re-release in the 1970s 152, 182

and synopsis 554–558

as existential film 233

Mondo Cane 2 (1963) 149, 153, 158, 162, 168, 168–170, 169

and BBFC 168

and re-release in the 1970s 182

Mondo Cane 2000 (1988) 232, 233, 624

Mondo Cane German series 558–559

Mondo Cane IV (1992) 558

Mondo Cane Oggi: L’Incredibile (1988) 227

Mondo Cane Oggi: L’Orrore Continua (1986) 145, 227, 233, 234

Mondo Cane V (1993) 559

Mondo Cane VI 354

Mondo Canibilis (1974) 152. See also Guinea Ama (1974) Mondo Cunt (*) 151

Mondo Daytona: How To Swing on your Spring Vacation (1968) 11, 136, 179

mondo di notte 3, Il (1963) 166, 171

Mondo Erotico (1977) 199

mondo films

and Africa 144, 172–173, 175–179, 180–181, 185, 188, 216

and animals 114, 231, 555, 556, 559

and decline 152

and Italian tradition 116–117

and music 113–114, 179, 193, 205, 213, 235, 238, 240, 242, 255, 259

and narration 111–113, 145, 229, 235, 251–252

and newsreel tradition 110, 119–122

and propoganda 118–119

and roadshow pictures 123–131

and sex 134–143, 155, 182, 246

and sex change 145, 199, 227, 234, 241

and violence 144, 152–153, 223

definition of 109

in name only 150, 183, 187, 189

Mondo Ford (2000) 159

Mondo Freudo (The World of Freud) (1966) 135, 137, 167, 174

Mondo Hollywood (1967) 136, 146, 147, 179

Mondo Homo (1976) 230

Mondo Infame (1963) 137, 166

Mondo Keyhole (1966) 151

Mondo Lugosi (1987) 151

Mondo Magic (1975) 188, 188, 201, 210

Mondo Mod (1967) 179

Mondo Nagasaki (2008) 159, 159

Mondo New York (1988) 159, 159

Mondo oscenitá (1966) 151

Mondo Pazzo (1963) 168. See also Mondo Cane 2 (1963)

Mondo Rocco (1970) 141

Mondo Sexualis USA (1985) 144, 145

Mondo Teeno (1967) 179

Mondo Topless (1966) 137, 166

Mondo Trasho (1969) 151

Mondo Video (mail order) 311

Mondo Weirdo: A Trip to Paranoia Paradise (1989) 150, 151

Mongoloid Tapes, The (*) 319

Monkees, the (band) 323

Monson, Shaun 559

Montaldo, Giuliano 64

Montero, Roberto 146, 166, 171

Montevergine (1971) 117

Monthly Film Bulletin (MFB) (pub) 28, 63, 131, 152, 165, 171, 179, 187, 265

Moore, Alan 582

Moore, Christian 447

Moral, Malcolm 265. See also Stevens, Carter

moral panics 64, 528, 540

Mordum (2003). See August Underground’s Mordum (2003)

More About the Language of Love (1970) 139

Morgenthau, Robert 20, 22

Morgoth (band) 242

Mörkermännen (band) 326

Morley, David 386, 387

Morneau, Jr, Robert H. 497–498

Morra, Mario 162, 189, 190, 201, 203, 217, 222, 260

Morricone, Ennio 308

Morris, Lucie 248

Morris, R. Kathleen 451

Morrissey 324

Morrow, Vic 239, 365–368, 367

Mortal Kombat (game) 577

Moskowitz, Stacy 453

Moss, Betsy 141

Most Dangerous Game, The (1932) 150, 470

Mother and Child, Divided (exhibit) 329

Mothers of Invention (band) 179

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) 69, 73, 330

Motörhead (band) 323, 323

Mountaintop Motel Massacre (1986) 63

Moussaoui, Zacarias 377

Mou, T. F. 151

Movie Murderer, The (1970) 6, 18

Mr Nice (2010) 101

Mrs. Barrington (1974) 10, 11

Ms. (pub) 385, 401

Muerte! Death in Mexican Popular Culture (book) 239

Mühl, Otto 328

Mulcahy, David 492

Multiple Maniacs (1970) 93

Mundae, Misty 296–297

Munro, Caroline 552

Muppet Show, The (tv) 114

Murder Can Be Fun (pub) 312, 313, 313

Murder Collection (2009) 82, 534, 535, 539

Murderers, Mobsters & Madmen (1992/3) 235

Murder Junkies, the (band) 327

Murder Psalm (1980) 336

Murders and Moralities: English Catchpenny Prints 1800-1860 (book) 157

Murder-Set-Pieces (2004) 91

Murders Unspeakable (book) 472–473

Murdoch, Rupert 544

Murray, Ken 477

Music from the Empty Quarter (pub) 322

Musser, Charles IV Mutant Sexual Behaviour (1986) 144. See also Noi E L’Amore: Comportamento Sessuale Deviante (1986)

Mutations, The (1974) 150

Mutawalli, Mohammed 397

Mute Witness (1994) 83, 84

Mu zan e (1995) 440, 441

My Little Eye (2002) 88, 548

Myrick, Daniel 74

Mysteries of the Mind (1983) 196

Mystery Movie, The (*) 583. See also Mexican Doctor (*)

Nabi, Ghulam 404

Nagano, Kazou 356

Nagdi, Suleman 525

Nakagawa, Nobuo 171

Nakajima, Sadao 154

Nakata, Hideo 66, 88

Naked and Cruel (1984) 145, 221

Naked and Dead (*) 246

Naked and Violent (1970) 182

Naked Cities (1971) 114, 184. See also I segreti della città più nude del mondo (1971)

Naked England (1969) 138

Naked Witch, The (1957) 136

Nakoula, Nakoula Basseley 543

Nanook of the North (1921) 110, 110, 123

narco videos 401, 402, 402–404, 415, 520, 537, 585 402–404

Naschy, Paul 174

National Decency Reporter (pub) 271

National Enquirer (pub) 369

National Organization for Women (NOW) 21

Natural Born Losers 446, 519, 541

Naudet, Gedeon 376

Naudet, Jules 376

Naughty Dallas (1958/64) 136–137, 137

Near Death (1989) 336, 337, 338

Necrobabes (web) VI, 291, 299, 302, 305, 307, 473

Necrotic, The (1978) 285, 286

Neill, Art 66

Nekromantik (1987) 98

Nekromantik 2 (1991) 98

Nel segno del male (*) 217

Nelson, Russel 455

neorealism 74

Network (1976) 53, 54, 55, 55

Network (novel) 443

Neveldine, Mark 56

New Federalist, The (pub) 458

Newman, Kim 97

Newman, Paul 150

New Order (band) 413, 422, 546

New Satanists, The (book) 465

New Scientist (pub) 465

Newsletter from a Christian

Ministry, A (pub) 459

News Nightmares (*) 354

newspapers

Chicago Sun-Times 22

Daily Express 357, 489

Daily Mail 248, 249, 387, 523, 536

Daily Mirror 354, 482, 489

Daily Sport 358, 488

Daily Star 450, 487, 523

Daily Telegraph 351, 487–488

Detroit Free Press 272

Evening Tribune 4

Financial Times 406

Guardian, the 486, 489, 516

Hollywood Reporter 273

Independent, the 445, 463, 488, 489, 522–523, 531

Indianapolis News 18

Indianapolis Star 18

Los Angeles Times 57, 359, 360

Mail on Sunday 450, 463, 489

Manchester Evening News 347, 486, 488, 489

Mattino, Il 504

Metro 527

Minneapolis Star and Tribune 451

National Post 418

News of the World 248, 450, 451

New York Daily News 272

New York Post 272, 273, 274, 523

New York Times 5, 21, 183, 451, 457, 469, 490

Observer, the 504, 530

People, the 464

Pittsburgh Press 363

Reforma 403

San Diego Union 4

San Francisco Chronicle 470

Standard (London) 450

Sunday Times 249, 491, 587

Sun, the 492

Times Herald Record, the 21

Times, the 516

Últimas Noticias, Las 513

Wall Street Journal 390

New Statesman (pub) 406

Newton, Michael 499

New Women’s Times (pub) 493 23

New World Order (NWO) 506

New York Centerfold Massacre, The (1982) 285, 285, 286

New Yorker, the (pub) 344

New York Ripper, The (1982) 31

Next Step (1989) 211

Ng, Charles Chitat 474–475

Nicholson, Jack 498

Nicholson, Ryan 86

Nickelodeon (1976) 15

Nielsen, Leslie 59

Nietzsche, Friedrich 540

Nievo, Stanis 178, 179

Night and Day (pub) 277

Night God Screamed, The (1971) 6, 552

Night Mail (1939) 117

Night of the Bloody Apes (1968) 150

Night of the Succubus (1981) 231

Night Trap (game) 489

Nightshade (novel) 445

Niku Daruma (1998) 334

Nilsen, Denis Andrew 326

Nine Inch Nails (band) 324

Nipar, Yvette 64

Nippon 69 — Sekkusu Ryõki Chitai (1969) 154

Nippon No Yoru (1962) 154

Nitsch, Hermann 327–328, 328, 463, 545

Nixon, Richard 198

No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (book) 539

Noble, Ronnie 120, 519

Noichi Home Video (label) 258

Noi E L’Amore: Comportamento Sessuale Deviante (1986) 144, 145

Noll, Richard 465

Nolte, David 8, 467, 467–468

interview with 467

Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (book) 109, 336, 564

Norman, Barry 368

Norris, Chuck 92

Norris, Joel 471

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) 205

Notti E Donne Proibite (1963) 166

Notti Porno Nel Mondo, Le (1977) 199. See also Mondo Erotico (1977)

Notti Porno Nel Mondo No.2, Le (1978) 199

Novak, Kim 96

Novanta Notti In Giro Per Il Mondo (1963) 166

Nova (tv) 359

nowthatsfuckedup (NTFU) (web) 385

Nuchtern, Simon 9, 10, 22, 24, 266, 279

interview with 267–268

Nude Strangle (1998) 296

’nuff Movie (*) 306

Number To Call Is…, The (novel) 444, 444

Nunez, Emilio 357, 358

Nurses on the Battlefield (1899) 119

Nyamataro, Kisii 400

Oates, Warren 6

Obara, Joji 483–484

O’Brien, Cathy 458

Obscene Publications Squad 537

O’Byrne, Paddy 187

Occult Experience, The (1985) 113, 224

Ochoa, Jack Briceño 549

O’Connell, Jack 180

O’Connor, Brenda 475

Ocurrió Así (tv) 357

Odamanov, Shamil 401–402

ofex (atrocity film) 400

Of the Dead (1972) 147, 186–187, 186, 187, 204, 312

Ognjanović, Dejan 92, 94, 401

interview with 94

Ogre, Nivek 482

Ogrish (web) 380–385, 380, 381, 390, 407, 520

interview with 381–383

Ogura, Satoru 332, 334, 565

Ohno, Keizo 154

O’Kill, Patrick 323

Oklahoma bombing 454

Olivier, Laurence 85

Oliviero, Nino 114

Olsen, Jack 471

Olsen, Rolf 189, 210

O’Mahoney, Chelsea 386

O’Malley, Kevin 363

Omen, The (1976) 29

OM Theatre. See also Orgies & Mysteries Theatre Onassis, Aristottle 435

O’Neal, Ryan 15

Only Words (book) 498

Ono, Yoko 6

Ontario Censor Board 53

On the Beach (*) 43. See also Goat, The (*)

Operation Good Guys (1997-2000) 75

Operation of the National-Socialist Party of Russia to Arrest and Execute Two Colonists From Dagestan and Tajikistan 401

Operation Yewtree 507

Oppenheimer, Joshua 343–344

Oprah Winfrey Show 249

Options To Live (1979) 372

Ordonez, Ramon 191

Orff, Jack 433–434, 438

Orgies & Mysteries Theatre 327–328, 328, 545

Orient By Night (1962) 166

Orozco the Embalmer (2005) 246, 341, 341–342

Orridge, Genesis P. 230

Ortolani, Riz 51, 105, 114, 193

Osborne, Jennifer 24

Osborne, Jim 581

Osmani, Akhtar Mohammad 404

Ossuary, The (1970) 337

Osterman Weekend, The (1983) 63, 64

Ostfriesen-Report, Der (1973) 137

Oswald, Lee Harvey 48, 136, 137, 215, 351–352

Other Hollywood, The: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry (book) 24

Other Side of Madness, The (1970) 552

Oughton, Karen 588

Oui (pub) 448 18

Our Incredible World (1966) 175

Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (book) 496

Owen, Alisha 455

Owen, Johnny 213

Oxen Split Torturing (1976) 333. See also Shogun’s Sadism (1976)

Pace, Norman 448

Pact with the Devil (tv) 454, 454

Page, Jimmy 17

Pain Killer (band) 325

Pain series 308, 309. See also Slavesex series

Pakeerah, Stefan 571

Palahniuk, Chuck 445, 579

Palasinski, Marek 387, 388

Paley, William 119

Palme, Cole 231

Palumbo, Nick 91

Panik (pub) 312

Panorama of Hell (book) 332

Panorama (tv) 461–462

Pantano de los Cuervos, El (Swamp of the Ravens) (1974) 150

Paramedics (1997) 152

Paranormal Activity (2007) 77

Parent, Steven 239

Pariser, Eli 513

Paris in the Raw (1964) 170, 171

Parker, Bonnie 120, 122

Parrish, Larry 24

Parry, Richard Lloyd 484

Pasolini, Pier Paolo 116, 171

Passaro, Alan 564

Passions of Carol, The (1975) 265

Past Midnight (1991) 60

Patton, Mike 317

Paul, Dean 292

Paul, R. W. 119

Pauline, Mark 231, 232

Pawns in the Game (book) 507

Pazder, Lawrence 453

Pearl, Daniel 381, 388–391, 389, 399, 404, 405, 521, 586

and the media 390–391

and video content 389–390

Peary, Danny 157

Peckinpah, Sam 63

Peeping Tom (1960) 28, 29, 427, 545

Pegasus (1974) 187. See also Vase de Noces (1974)

Pejo, Robert Adrian 341

Pellini, Oreste 180, 185

Penance (2007). See August Underground’s Penance (2007)

Penetration (1974) 280

Peoples Temple 468. See also Jones, Jim

People Who Eat Darkness (book) 484

Peralta, Mariano 102, 103

Pérez-Reverte, Arturo 578

Perfect Witness, The (2007) 73

Perfumed Garden, The (book) 549

Pericolo negli abissi (1977) 198

Perilli, Frank Ray 273

Perils of Penelope, The (*) 295

Perlmutter, Dawn 454

Perry, Frank 347

Perry, Peter 179

Perversion series 280, 280

Perversion (*) 279, 280, 624

Peters, Allen 80, 81

Peter’s Art And Stories (web) 291. See also Necrobabes (web)

Peterson, Scott 312

Petley, Julian 53, 426, 588

interview with 426

Petroni, Giulio 65

Petschi, Rudi 399

Petty, J. T. 77, 78

Phantom of the Paradise (1974) 53

Philips, Kathy 473

Philips, Mark 458

Phillip, Randall 314

Phillips, Ron 363

Phillips, Todd 327

Philosophy of a Knife (2008) 342

Phoenix, Joaquin 559

Phoenix, River 422

Photobucket (web) 527

Photo Murders (*) 293

Photo (pub) 50

Pickton, David 478

Pickton, Robert 478

Pieces (1983) 496, 498

Pieces of Talent (2012) 102

Pierce (1990) 310

Pierri, César 359, 543

Pig Fucking Movie, The (1974) 187. See also Vase de Noces (1974)

Piggy Palace Good Times Society 478

Pinch of Snuff, A (novel) 448

Pinch of Snuff, A (tv) 448

Pink Flamingos (1972) 553

Pink Floyd (band) 365, 432

Pink Samurai (book) 228

pinku films 244, 251, 333–335

Pinyan, Kenneth 428. See also 2 Guys 1 Horse

Pirate TV (tv) 319

Pirkanen, Perry 48, 488

Pirro, Mark 55

Pittman, Randy 258

Plague, The (1978) 147

Playboy (pub) 67, 269, 496, 538

Play Dead, Inc. (1998) 293

Pleasure Palace (1980) 265

Plummer, Christopher 213

Pocaterra, Alberto 403

Poelvoorde, Benoît 70

Poeme, Le (1986) 338

Polanski, Roman 4, 16, 101, 182, 432, 461

and the media 433–436

on snuff films 440

Police State (1987) 310

Police Stop! (1994) 155, 155, 249

Police Story (tv) 448

Police Tapes, The (1976) 73

Polizia Incrimina, la Legge Assolve, La (1973) 29

Pollack, Sydney 41

Pollock, Channing 135

Polselli, Renato 143

Ponyboy (band) 544

Pool Without Water (1982) 334

Pope of Utah, The (1993) 55

Popple, Simon 64

Porn Gold: Inside the Pornography Business (pub) 32

Pornography (book) 499

Pornography and the Sex Crisis (book) 498–499

Pornography in New York (1970) 141, 141

Porno Guerilla (*) 95

Porno USA (1971) 142. See also Prostitution Pornography USA (1971)

P-Orridge, Genesis 464

Porter, Steve 102

Poruno No Joõ: Nippon Sex Ryokõ (1973) 154

Post Script (pub) 588

Powell, Michael 28, 29, 427, 428, 545

Power, Chris 74

Prescod, Colin 157

Pressman, Lawrence 149

Price, Elwood G. 129

Price, Michael H. 132

Price, Roland C. 132

Price, Vincent 112, 166, 204, 209, 269, 356, 558

Prichard, Robert

interview with 67

Primitive London (1965) 136, 150, 170, 174

Primitive Love (1964) 134, 136, 171

Prince of Persia (game) 574

Prisoner of the Cannibal God (1979) 49

Prisonkage (game) 575

Pritchard, Robert 66

Prizzi’s Honor (1985) 498

Process Church 461

Proia, Gianni 145, 166, 189

Project MKULTRA 458

Project Monarch 458–459

Pron, Nick 476–477

Prosperi, Franco 49, 104, 108, 151, 162, 163, 165, 167, 170, 173, 175–176, 183, 189, 203, 227, 240, 248

Prostitution Pornography USA (1971) 111, 139, 141, 142

Protection of Children Act 1978 91

Protocols of the Elders of Zion 506, 543

Prunas, Pasquale 175

Psychiatric Times (pub) 465

Psychic TV (band) 230, 231, 582–583

Psychic TV Vol. 2 582, 585. See also First Transmission (1982)

Psycho (1960) 29, 87, 492

Psycho (1998) 334–335. See also Psycho The Snuff Reels (1998)

Psycho The Snuff Files (1998) 334. See also Psycho The Snuff Reels (1998)

Psycho The Snuff Reels (1998) 334

Psychopathia Sexualis (Krafft-Ebing) (book) 578

Psychopathia Sexualis (Miguel Ángel Martín) (book) 327

Psychotic Adventures Illustrated 581

Psychotic Feed (tv) 319

Psychotronic Video (pub) 157, 312

Puchalski, Steve 33, 66, 67

Punk Rock (1979) 265

Purdom, Edmund 113

Python Christmas 412

Q — The Winged Serpent (1982) 97, 377

Quaid, Dennis 57

Quarry, Robert 553

Queen, Jeff 313

Queer As Folk (2000-05) 420

Queer… The Erotic, The (1969) 138

Questo Sporco Mondo Meraviglioso (1971) 183

Rabkin, Gerald 44

Racca, Claudio 144, 145, 199, 224

Radin, Roy 433, 453

Radivojević, Aleksandar 92

Rage (1972) 42

Raimi, Sam 267

Rainer, Arnulf 328

Raising Hell: An A-Z of the Occult/Satanic Underworld (book) 499

Rambaldi, Carlo 170

Rambo (2008) 301

Ramsey, JonBenét 419

Ramsey, Peter 386

Rape (1969) 6

Rasky, Harry 213

RastiMane (app) 516

Rate It X (1985) 223, 223

Rather, Dan 390

Raw Talent: the Adult Film Industry as Seen by its Most Popular Male Star (book) 223

Raw Vision (pub) 547

Ray, Kristi 102

Ray, Marc B. 24

Raymond, Alan 73

Raymond, Susan 73

Rayner, Jay 526

reaction videos 405–406, 427–429, 428–429, 546, 591

Reagan, Ronald 198, 224, 458

Real Blair Witch, The (2003) 513–514

Real Crime Videos (*) 624

Real Detective Stories (1999) 292

Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market (2000) 535, 535

Real TV (tv) 320

[Rec] (2007) 77

Red Cliff (2008) 370

Red Shoes, The (1948) 28

Reed, Joel M. 180, 285

Reel III 16/67 (1967) 328, 337

Reems, Harry 24, 309

Regarding the Pain of Others (book) 62

Rehmeier, Adam 593

Reich, Alexis Valoran 419

Reichelt, Franz 121, 122

Reichenbach, Carlos 36, 37, 39

Reichenbach, François 180, 183

Reid, Richard 389

Reiss, Jonathan 324

Renan, Sheldon 154, 213

Renee, Risque 298

Renville, Roger 416

Report from Stockholm’s Sex Swamp (1973) 142

Requiem for a Village (1975) 117

Reservoir Dogs (1992) 70

Resident Evil (game) 574, 576

Reski, Fernando 36

Retard-O-Tron (1998) 319

Revell, Graeme 322

Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976) 24

Reverend Fang Gory featuring

Red 13 (band) 86

Revier, Harry J. 132

Revolution (1968) 180

Reyes, Xavier Aldana 588

Reynolds, Burt 15

Reznick, Graham 76

Reznor, Trent 324

Rhino Video (label) 151

Richards, Julian 73, 301

Richardson, Natasha 60

Richmond, Warner 132

Ridgway, Carita 484

Riefenstahl, Leni 232, 501

Rifkin, Adam 485

Rigby, Daniel 54

Rigby, Lee 398–399, 398, 399

Rigg, Diana 448

Right Side of My Brain, The (1984) 310

Right To Kill (album) 326

Ring (1998) 66

Ripley, Robert 163

Ripper Street (tv) 449, 449

Ritter, Tim 73

Rivelazioni di uno psichiatra sul mondo perverso del sesso (1973) 143

Rivera, Geraldo 57, 351, 352, 375, 454

and JFK assassination 352

Rizzoli, Angelo 163

Road Rage (2006) 155, 254, 258

Robbins, Tim 73

Roberts, Alan 543

Roberts, Bob 552

Roberts, Nora 445

Robertson, Geoffrey 525

Roberts, Paul 67

Robinson, Dar 370

Robinson, Shirley 479

Robot Ninja (1989) 240

Robson, Mark 15

Rocco, Pat 141

Rockwell, Robert R. 497–498

Roden, Karel 79

Rodionov, Yevgeny Aleksan-drovich 400

Roeg, Nic 447

Rojinsky, Miguel 127

Roller Ball Murder (short story) 442

Rollerbabies (1976) 40, 267

Rollerball (1975) 55, 442

Rolling Stone (pub) 16, 439, 436, 553, 554

Rolling Stones, the (band) 146, 496, 561–564, 588

Rolling Thunder (1977) 41

Romano, Janet 306. See also Borden, Lizzie

Romantici a Venezia (1948) 116

Romero, George A. 29, 59, 268

Ronaldson, Jenny 492

Rondell, Reid 370

Rooker, Michael 68

Rookies, The (tv) 448

Rooney, Mickey 531

Root, Jane 492

Roper, Gary 386

Rose, Audrey 310

Rose, Bernard 101

Rose, Bob 287

Rosebud (1972) 6, 10

Rosenbaum, Jonathan 554

Rosen, John 477

Rosenkrantz, Seth 300

Rosen, Mark L 504

Rosenthal, Joe 119

Rost, Eric 77

Roswell — The Footage (*) 567, 567–570, 568

synopsis 569

Rotha, Paul 110

Roth, Eli 86

Rotsler, William 277

Rotten (web) 380, 385, 390–391

roughies 285, 552

Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) 117, 548, 549

Roussimoff, Ari 265, 471

Roustang, Pierre 179

Roy, Jean-Claude 138

Royle, Nicholas 446

Ruby, Jack 48, 136, 137, 215, 351

Rud, James John 450

Rude Tube (tv) 537

Rue Morgue (pub) 82, 92, 401

Ruethbach(er), Gunther 459

Ruhm, Gerhardt 328

Rule 34 578–579

Rumfitt, Nigel 398

Rumsfeld, Donald 510–511

Run If You Can! (1987) 64, 68

Running Scared (2005) 61, 79

Rupe, Shade 485

Russell, JD 435, 438, 511, 543

Russo, John 74

Russo, Patrick Anthony 473

Ryan, Scott 74

ryona games 574–577

Another Dimension 574–575

Demonophobia 574–575

Prisonkage 575

Xenophobia 574

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 144

Sacrilege (1971) 554

Sadisimo (1967) 179

Safe Driving! (1994) 374, 374

Safety Last (*) 471–472

Safety or Slaughter? (1958) 373

Sailor Moon (game) 576

Sailor’s Meat (1975) 329

Saints Row (game) 577

Salar, Mohammadine 248, 249

Salisbury, Edward 125

Salisbury, Luke 386

Salvador (1986) 95

Sambrano Villarreal, Baldemar 375

Sammy Somebody (1976) 11

Sánchez, Eduardo 74

Sanders, Ed 16, 17, 34, 436–439, 511

and Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts 314

Sanders, George 113, 145

Sanders, Richard 470–471

Sandler, Allan 149

Sang des Bêtes, Les (1949) 338. See also Blood of the Beasts, The (1949)

Santana, Carlos 484

Santilli, Ray 567–570

Sargeant, Jack 231

Sargeant, Reece 386

Satan’s Underground (book) 462

Satanic Bible, The (book) 422

satanic panic. See Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA)

Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) 207, 237, 452–465, 506–507, 512, 540, 543

Satanis (1970) 113

Satanists, The (1970) 39

Satan’s Bed (1965) 6

Satan Seller, The (book) 461

Satan’s Sadists (1969) 554

Satava, Richard M. 528–529

Satô, Hisayasu 75, 334, 335

Saturday Night Fever (1977) 147

Saunders, Robert 387

Savadov, Arsen 545

Savadove, Larry 152

Savage, Hazel 480

Savage Africa (1930) 191

Savage Africa (1950) 129, 130

Savage Africa (1982) 135

Savage Dawn (1985) 267

Savage Eye, The (1959) 104–105

Savage God, The (book) 529

Savage Man… Savage Beast (1975) 25, 115, 149, 162, 189–192, 190, 191, 203, 207, 220, 241, 261, 312, 441, 624

and BBFC 192

and Dernitz, Pit 190–191, 624

Savage Zone (1984) 111, 217, 222–223, 223, 242

Savile, Jimmy 506, 507, 507

Saw (2004) 88, 285, 403

Sayenko, Viktor 406, 407, 410. See also Dnipropetrovsk maniacs

Saylor, Steven 55

Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s (book) 143

Scarlet Blue (*) 286

scat porn 578

Scattini, Luigi 39, 40, 113, 135, 166, 171, 180, 181, 183

Schaefer, Eric 126

Schaefer, Gerard John 465–468, 468

Schaffner, Franklin J. 97

Scheider, Roy 59

Schenck, George 150

Schenck, Harry 125

Schier, Uwe 238, 558–559

Schiller Institute 457

Schoolgirl Snuff Education Necro Studies (2011) 624

Schleiner, Anne-Marie 573

Schlüsselloch-Report (1973) 137

Schmitz, Wilhelm 346–347

Schneemann, Carolee 329

Schneider, Romy 54

Schonfeld, Victor 559

Schönherr, Johannes 244

Schrader, Herb 188, 223

Schrader, Leonard 41, 215

Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings (pub) 42

Schrader, Paul 40, 41, 42, 85, 147, 215

Schreck, Nikolas 315

Schroeder, Barbet 339–340

Schumacher, Joel 85, 502, 503

Schwartz, John Alan 147, 148, 149, 204, 206, 213, 224, 237, 238, 260, 455

interview with 148, 208–210, 238

Schwarzkogler, Rudolf 328, 328

Science Report (tv) 514

Scorched Earth, The (1944) 118

Scorpio Rising (1963) 308

Scorsese, Martin 41, 60, 183

Scotese, Giuseppe Maria 49, 165

Scott, George C. 41, 42, 85

Scott, Ridley 29, 404

Scream Bloody Murder (1973) 24

Scream Greats (1986) 113

Screw (pub) 144, 274

Se7en (1995) 57

Seal Island (1948) 130

Sebastian, Beverly 466

Sebastian, Ferd 466

Sebring, Jay 16, 146, 239

Secret Africa (1969) 180–181

Secret French Prostitution Report (1969) 138

Secret Paris (1965) 142, 174

Secrets of Sex (1969) 180

Seed (2007) 151

See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy (book) 59, 491

Sekkusu Dokyumento: Erosu No Joõ (1973) 154

Sekkusu Dokyumento:

Seitõsaku No Sekai (1971) 154

Selfish Gene, The (book) 516

Self Loving (1992) 155

Selleck, Tom 6

Sellier Jr., Charles E. 204

Selz, Peter 328, 546

Senghor, Léopold 217

Sennitt, Stephen 464

Sensium (company) 591

Sentinel, The (1977) 150

Serbian Film, A (2010) 89–92, 90, 93, 94, 624

and BBFC 91

Serial Killers, The (1995) 155, 156

Sesame Street (tv) 319

Severed Lips 295. See also Factory 2000

Severe Penalties (1993) 265

Sewer Cunt (pub) 309

Sex and Astrology (1970) 141

Sex and the Single Gay (1970) 141

Sex by Advertisement (1969) 180

Sex Freaks (1974) 143

Sex Life, The: Hey Baby (1971) 154

Sex Murder Art: The Films of Jörg Buttgereit (pub) 98

Sex, Motivation, and the Criminal Offender (book) 497

Sexual Awareness (1972) 554

Sexual Freedom in Denmark (1970) 143, 143, 182

Sexual Inadequacies (1969) 138. See also Labyrinth of Sex (1969)

Sexuality in the Movies (book) 143

Sexual Murders III (*) 307

Sexual Partnership (1968) 137

Sexy magico (1963) 39, 140, 166

Sexy Proibitissimo (1964) 171

Shackleton, Allan VI, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 29, 36, 40, 45, 264, 266, 272, 273, 278, 279, 287, 436, 439, 441, 443, 448, 469, 480, 490, 492, 510, 542, 545, 570

and 3D 25

and biography of 9, 24

and FBI 274

as actor 9, 11

as theatre owner 10, 287

at Snuff premiere 19

Shakur, Tupac 317

Shameless (label) 51

Shape of Rage, The: The Films of David Cronenberg (pub) 53

Shark! (1975). See also Men and

Sharks (1976)

Shark Fighter (novel) 365

Shark Night 3D (2011) 84

Shauna, Every Man’s Fantasy (1985) 223

Shawcross, Arthur 155, 471

Shaw, Stanley 399

Shayler, David 533

Sheen, Charlie 330, 485

Sheikh, Omar Saeed 391

Sheldon, Sidney 443

Shelley, Mary 588

Shelley, Percy Bysshe 588

Shepherd, Jim 370

Sheppard, Steve 250

Sheridan, Simon 145, 174

Sherman, Gary 59

Shibata, Norihisa 227

Shi’ite Badr Brigade 587

Shimizu, Takashi 66

Shining, The (1980) 492

Shiver (2011) 301

Shivers (1975) 41

Shock Box 210. See also Mondo Magic (1975) and Shocking Asia (1980)

Shock Box 2 227. See also Camps of Death (*) and Shocking Asia 2 (1985)

Shock Cinema (pub) 66, 67, 312

Shock Ending (1987) 67

Shocking Africa (1982) 216–217, 559

Shocking Asia (1980) 108, 112, 144, 145, 153, 210, 342

Shocking Asia 2 (1985) 189, 227

Shocking!! collection (1989) 234

Shocking Menu (*) 153

Shock Labyrinth, The (2009) 66

Shock of the New, The: Art and the Century of Change (book) 327, 328

Shocks, The (1985) 144, 163, 225–227, 226

Shocks II, The (1986) 114, 227, 261

Shocks III, The (1987) 227, 228

Shocks IV, The (1988) 228, 229, 624

Shocks Part II, The: That’s Happening (1989) 228

Shocks Part II, The: The Super Crash (1989) 228

Shocks Part III, The: The Sports

Spectacle (1990) 228

Shocks Part IV, The: The Wild Panic (1990) 228

Shock Xpress (pub) 97, 432

Shock Xpress 1 (book) 322, 325

Shock X-Treme series 256

Shock X-Treme Vol 1: Snuff Video (*) 255. See also Snuff Video Volume Red (*)

Shock-X-Treme vol. 4: Real Fights, Round 1 (1999) 152

Shogun’s Sadism (1976) 333, 333

Shoot First! Assignments of a Newsreel Camera-Man (book) 120, 519

Shrader, Paul 267

Shriek of the Mutilated (1974) 6

Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, The (book) 505

Shyamalan, M. Night 191

Sibaldi, Stefano 112

Sickest Tape on Earth, The (2001) 317, 318–320

Siegel, Don 29

Sieveking, Paul 432

Sightseer, The (novel) 442–443

Sight & Sound (pub) 109

Signal 30 (1959) 238, 371

Sign of Aquarius (1969/70) 554. See also Love in the Commune (1969/70)

Sign of Evil, The (*) 217, 220

Silence of the Lambs, The (1991) 69

Silent Hill (game) 574

Silky, The 585. See also Alamán, Lucy Herrera Valdés

Silva, João 519

Simon, Alex 502

Sinema: American Pornographic Films and the People Who Make Them (book) 183

Sinister (2012) 45, 77, 590

Sirhan, Sirhan 215

Sisman, Ronald 453

Sister Courage (pub) 493

Sixth Comm (band) 323

Skeleton Crew (2008) 102, 102

Skinny Puppy (band) 482–483, 485

Skola, Nick 386

Skull and Bones 458

Sky Above — The Mud Below, The (1961) 109

Skyrim (game) 575–576, 576

Skyscraper Live With Nik Wallenda (2014) 220

Slater, David 59, 265, 491, 588

Slaughter (1971) 25, 223, 264, 273, 275, 552. See also Snuff (1976)

Slaughter of the Spy Journalist the Jew Daniel Pearl, The 389. See also Pearl, Daniel

Slaughter Special (1991) 330

Slavesex series 308, 308

Slave Trade in the World Today (1964) 171

Sleazoid Express (book) 182, 312

Sleazoid Express (pub) 311–312, 312, 552

Slenderman 541, 541–542

Slick, Grace 562

Slimetime (pub) 33, 152

Slivko, Anatoly Yelemianovich 518, 529, 531–532, 532–533, 534, 538, 542, 547–548

Slow Death: The Dismemberment (1985) 485. See also Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985)

Smallwood, Tharaza 531

S&MAN (2006) 77, 78, 83

Smith, Clarissa 588

Smith, George 210

Smith, Iain Robert 588, 591

Smith, Jamie 387

Smith, Ken 373

Smith, Michelle 453

Smith, Shephard 261

Smith, Tana Emmolo 231

Smush (1993) 531

Sneaky Shot (app) 515

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) 19

Snuff (1976) VI, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 15, 21, 23, 25, 28, 34, 37, 40, 45, 59, 223, 436, 439, 441, 443, 448, 469, 542–543, 545, 570, 624

and BBFC 491

and cast 8

and FBI 270, 272

and home entertainment markets 480, 487, 490, 490–491

and mondo films 25

and premiere 18, 274, 275

and protests 5, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 493–496

and sequel, unmade 24

and shooting the ‘snuff’ scene 264, 264–268, 266, 269

and Spanish language version 10, 281, 287

and synopsis 7, 12, 13

and theatrical screening outside US 22, 37, 278

and theatrical trailer 12

and Vidimax 287, 289

and West, Frederick 480

as precursor to faux snuff porn 264–265

as ‘video nasty’ 490–491

Snuff 102 (2007) 102, 103

Snuff 2000 (2002) 85, 326–327, 624

Snuff (2005) 101

Snuff: a documentary about killing on camera (2008) 504

Snuff (band) 17

snuff films

and academic conference 547, 588, 588–593

and anti-Semitism 118, 504–507

and CDL 269

and FBI 268–282, 276, 293

and formats 35, 43, 62, 66, 67, 73, 81, 87, 88, 272, 429, 538

and London sex shops 503, 530

and MacKenna, Kenneth ‘Mad Dog’ 466–467

and music 43, 82, 86, 320–326, 354, 485, 526, 534

and Roswell — The Footage (*) 570

and serial killers 468–471, 473–481

and Svoray, Yaron 499–503

and the deep web 423–425

and The Family (book) 436–438

and the Machine Man 86–87, 521, 523

as television drama 448

in fiction 441–447

Snuff-Movie (2005) 101. See also Snuff (2005)

Snuff Movie: After the End of the World (novel) 445–446

Snuff Movie (unmade) 273

Snuff (novel) 445, 445

Snuff Perversions: Bizarre Cases of Death (*) 293, 295. See also Bizarre Cases of Death (*)

Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (book) 588

Snuff Trap (2003) 86, 86–87, 101

Snuff Video Volume Red (*) 255, 257, 534

Solaro, Carla Dujany 87

Solomon, Joe 7

Song XXIII; 23rd Psalm Branch (1966/7) 336

Sonney Amusement Enterprises, Inc. 126

Son of Sam 453

Sontag, Susan 62

Sorched Earth, The (1944) 114

Sotloff, Steven 522

Soundtracks from Snuff Films (album) 324

Souperman (1976) 266

spankwire 427

Spasojević, Srðan 89, 92, 95, 304, 401

Special Effects (1984) 97

Spectator (pub) 84, 528

Speed, F. Maurice 491

Spiegel, Ed 184

Spielberg, Steven 29, 365, 367, 473

Spinegrinder: The Movies Most Critics Won’t Write About (pub) 8

SPK (band) 320–322, 323

SPK’s Despair (1982) 320. See also Despair (1982)

SPK’s Despair (Digitally Extracted) (2008) 321. See also Despair (1998)

Splatter Times, the (pub) 7, 311, 311

Splatting Image (pub) 115

Spots in the Sun (1964) 171, 205

Springer, Jerry 152

Springmeier, Fritz 458–459, 544

Squirmfest (1989) 244, 317, 565

squish videos 529–532, 547

and video content 530, 530, 531

Stafford, Harvey Bennett 239

stag films 43–45

Stalker (app) 516

Stallone, Sylvester 301, 370

Stamm, Daniel 77

Standpoint (pub) 525

Stankovic, Slobodan 95

Star Chamber, The (1983) 52

Stark, Casandra 103

Stark, Elizabeth 516

Starrett, Jack 8

Starr, Randy 16

Star Trek (tv) 266

Star Wars (1977) 148, 549

Stauffer, Joe 102

Steckler, Ray Dennis 66, 554

Steel, Eric 344, 345

Steel Hook Prostheses (band) 326

Steel, Max 227, 234

Steinbeck, John 134

Steinem, Gloria 309, 465, 496–497

Stendalì (suonano ancora) (1960) 116, 116, 175

Stenzel, James 504–505

Stevens, Carter 8, 10, 24, 40, 273, 279

and After Hours with Carter Stevens 289

and FBI 279

interview with 40, 265–266, 279

Stevens, Christopher 543

Stevens, Marc 266

Stevenson, Jack 142, 143, 325, 342

Stewart, Bill 204, 356

Stigma (1972) 150

Stiles, Kristine 328, 546

Stone, Oliver 95

Stone, Sharon 541

Stone, Virginia Lively 64

Stormare, Peter 101

Story of a Junkie (1985) 151

Strange Days (1995) 54

Strangler, The (2000) 296. See also Virtual Kidnapper (2000)

Stratford, Lauren 462, 462

Stratton, Dorothy 97

Street Fighter (game) 577

Strick, Joseph 104

Strickland, Peter 65

Stripper is Born, A. See also Naughty Dallas (1958/64)

studios (film and game) 121

Alternative Cinema 296

Annabellesfantasy 305

Avatar 582

Best Deaths 298, 303, 624

Bethesda 575

Blizzard Entertainment 575

British Movietone News 229

Capcom 576, 577

Casualties of Horror 299

Color Climax 309

Columbia Pictures 40

Dead Guys Cinema 303, 304, 305

Disney 114, 130, 131, 131, 412, 528

Ealing 29

Eidos Interactive 573

Extreme Associates 307

Eyewitness Video 302

Factory 2000 446

Fox Movietone 120

Gabrielles Fighting Girls 304

Gaumont 119

Genki 565

Hammer 333

Hearst Metrotone News 120

HorrorGasm Independent

Films 300

Inshadow 306

Kinkcafe 578

Kinky Love Story 307

March of Time, The 120, 121

Nation Earth 559

Necro Videos 298

NetherRealm 577

Paramount 8, 120, 266

Pathé 120, 122

Peachy Keen 301

Pinewood 118

PKF 624

Platinum Dunes 57

Psycho-Thrillers 303

RKO 121

Rockstar Games 570–571

Sega 489

Skeleton Farm 318

Smile Orange 319

Stranglenail 304, 305

Sunn Classic Pictures 204

Team Ninja and Tecmo Koei/

Sega 576

Toe Tag Pictures 82, 534

Troma 67

Twentieth Century Fox 48

Undead Entertainment 293

United Artists 15

Universal 120

Urban 119

US Army Pictorial Service 118

Valve 575

Vidimax VI

Volition, Inc. and THQ 577

Warner Bros 183, 367, 368, 574, 577

Wave VI, 264, 291–294, 291, 292, 293, 295, 298, 297, 624

Yoho FX Group 295

Stuff, The (1985) 97

Stuhlbarg, Michael 58

Stuntmasters (tv) 363

stuntmen and stuntwomen 369–370

Stunt: The Story of the Great Movie Stuntmen (book) 370

Stupak, Ivan 410

Subhuman (pub) 153, 312, 342

Submission Part 1 (2004) 400

Submit To Me Now (1987) 310

Sudina, Marina 83

Suess, Dr 118. See also Geisel, Theodor

Suicide, A (1978) 310

Sulev, Erik 53

Summer, Karen 223

Summer Nights (radio) 526

Sun-Il, Kim 381, 397

Superbeast (1972) 150

Superman (1978) 266

Superman Returns (2006) 377

Supersexy ’64 (1963) 166

Superstizioni (1949) 116, 117

Super Weapon, The (1976) 196

Suprunyuck, Igor 406, 407, 410. See also Dnipropetrovsk maniacs

Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) 231, 232, 324

Suspiria (1977) 60, 62

Sutcliffe, Peter 489, 491–492, 515

švankmajer, Jan 337

Svoray, Yaron 499–503, 501, 503, 510, 538

Sweden Heaven and Hell (1968) 39, 114, 135, 137, 180

Sweet and Savage (1983) 203, 217, 220–221, 221, 222, 242

Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens (book) 109, 146

Sweet Savior (1971) 552

Swezey, Stuart 315, 439

Swift, Jason 450

Sword and the Sorcerer, The (1982) 370

Swordfish (2001) 377

SXXX-80 (1980) 231

Syder, Andrew 49

Szulkin, David A 440

Taboos Around the World (1963) 166. See also Taboos of the World (1963)

Taboos of the World (1963) 136, 148, 166

Taggspiegel, Der (pub) 514

Take Back the Night (book) 20, 23, 496

Takechi, Tetsuji 154, 166

Take Off (1978) 265

Taktarov, Oleg 79

Tales of Terror (1962) 209

Tales of the Bizarre Vol 1 286

Talking Heads (tv) 365

Tamura, Taijiro 154

Tanberg, Jack 370

Tapeheads (1988) 68

Taranta, La (1962) 117

Tarantino, Quentin 70

Target… Earth? (1980) 196

Tarpley, Webster Griffin 458

Tate, Sharon 4, 6, 8, 15, 16, 182, 239, 273, 432, 461, 552, 554

and the media 433–436

Tate, Tim 452–453, 499

Tattoo (1981) 496

Tattooer, The (short story) 333

Taurobolium (1994) 561

Tavernier, Bertrand 54, 70

Taxi Driver (1976) 41, 60, 147, 267, 377

Taylor, Brian 56

Taylor, John 535

Taylor, Nick 501

TCC Video (label) 234

Teenage Babylon… (1989) 345, 345–346

Teenagers (1967) 179

Telehobby International (label) 31

Temirbulatov, Salautdin 400

Temple Ov Psychick Youth, Thee (TOPY) 230, 231, 463–464

Tempter, The (1974) 34

Ten Little Beauty Queens (*) 471–472

Tentacles (1977) 29

Terrorists Killers and Middle-East Wackos (2004) 155, 258–260, 259

and BBFC 259–260

Terrorists, Killers and Other Wackos (2004) 259. See also Terrorists Killers and Middle-East Wackos (2004)

Terror Tales (pub) 446, 447

Terror Tape (*) 314

Terry, Marion 471–472

Terry, Maury 453–454

Tesis (1995) 84, 84

Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974) 147

Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (game) 572

That’s Incredible! (1980-84) 362

The End (1978) 152

Geisel, Theodor 118

Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (tv) 546

Thesis (1995). See Tesis (1995)

They Eat Scum (1979) 309

theYNC (web) 384, 406, 413, 417, 520, 536, 544

Thief of Bagdad, The (1940) 28

This is America (1976) 121, 182, 198, 233

This is America (newsreel) 121

This is America Part 2 (1980) 162, 211, 212, 226, 228

This Is Spinal Tap (1984) 73

This Violent World (1978) 201, 217, 220

Thomas, Albert 29, 221

Thomas, Gordon 469, 499

Thomas, Philip Michael 98

Thompson, Hunter S. 457

Thompson, Peter 365

Thompson, Raymond 444

Thompson, Sean 386

Thom, Robert 554

Thor (singer) 7

Threat Theater (mail order) 251, 252

Thrill Kill Video Club (1991) 66

Throbbing Gristle (band) 231, 321

Through a Lens Darkly (novel) 445

Thrust in Me (1985) 91

Tierney, Dolores 84

Tiffany Minx (1981), The 265

Tijuana Bibles 578

Tildesley, Mark 450

Time (pub) 395, 395

Timlin, Addison 57

Tim, Tiny 180

Tina Krause Video (*) 292

Tinti, Gabriele 104

Tipping, Tip 369–370

Tipton, Stephen 342

Titicut Follies (1967) 335–336

Tjersland, Todd 250, 251–253, 255

interview with 251–252

Today Productions Inc. 33

Toddlers & Tiaras (tv) 454

Todd, Zen 100

Todesking, Der (1990) 98, 99

To Die For (1995) 422

Todorović, Srðan 90

Together (1971) 141

Tokunow, Alvin 142

Tokunow, Susumu 142. See also Tokunow, Alvin Tomb Raider featuring Lara Croft (game) 573–574

Tomboy — Sesso: Inferno e Paradiso (1977) 145, 199

Tomlins, Jason 56

Toolbox Murders, The (1978) 286

Toole, Ottis 69, 468–469

Tooley, Dale 22

Top Cops (tv) 375, 375

Top Secret (*) 280

Torrens, Charles 77

Torrent, Ana 84

Torture Dungeon (1970) 533

Torturer, The (2005) 102, 103

Totilo, Stephen 571

Tournament, The (2009) 56

Towering Inferno, The (1974) 147

Towers, Connie 369

Towers Open Fire (1963) 180

Towles, Tom 68, 69

Toxic Avenger, The (1984) 67

Traces of Death (1993) 153, 163, 240–241, 241, 255, 260, 354

Traces of Death II (1994) 242

Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888) 117

Trail of Blood (1995) 471

Trance Formation of America (book) 458

Trani, Maurizio 31

Trash City (pub) 332

Trash Compactor (pub) 312

Trash Confidential (pub) 433–434, 434

Trash Humpers (2009) 82

Traynor, J.R. ‘Chuck’ 309

Treasure of Jamaica Reef, The (1975) 64. See also Evil in the Deep (1975)

Tretta, Sean 100, 101

Treutle, William B. 152

Trevelyan, John 165, 176

Trevor, Simon 184

Trifunović, Sergej 90

Triumph of the Will (1935) 118, 232, 501

Troll Hunter, The (2010) 77

Tron (1982) 88

True Blood (tv) 590

True Detective (pub) 470

True Gore (1987) 153, 230–233, 231, 241, 624

as first video shockumentary 230

Tsukuba, Hisako 154

Tsurisaki, Kiyotaka 246

Tuke, Mark 467

Tumbling Dolls Flesh (1998) 334. See also Psycho The Snuff Reels (1998)

Tunnel, The (2011) 77

Turan, Kenneth 183

Turner, George E. 132

Turner, Kathleen 498

Turner, Paige 293

Tutti, Cosey Fanni 231

TV Disasters (*) 354

TV Sphincter (1987) 315, 316

Twain, Mark 110

Twilight (tv) 590

Twilight Zone The Movie (1982) 239, 317, 365–369, 366, 367, 368, 370, 473

and story episodes 365

Two Autopsy Films: Human Postmortem (1983) 321. See also Despair (1982)

Uchida, Kentaro 225, 227

UFO Exclusive! (1979) 196

UFO Syndrome (1980) 196

UFOs: It Has Begun (1979) 196

Ugly George 223, 224

Uitti, Grant 359

Ultimate Challenge (1991) 363

Ultimate Evil, The (book) 453–454

Ultra Violent (pub) 485

Underground Film Bulletin (pub) 309

Underground USA (1980) 309

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (book) 527

Unknown Powers (1978) 199

Unknown Russian Soldier (atrocity film) 400

Unleashed (band) 242

Untraceable (2008) 84, 88, 531

Uomini e squali aka Men and Sharks (1976) 198

Up, Up and Away (1976) 266

Urbon, Warren 457

Ustinov, Peter 112

Uys, Jamie 131, 187

Vacancy (2007) 87, 264

Vacancy, The (1985) 67

Vacancy 2: The First Cut (2009) 87

Vachss, Andrew 445

Vailati, Bruno 198, 364

Vail, Jason 61

Valentine, Debra 231

Valentino, Rudolph 108, 171, 554

Valley of the Dolls (1967) 15

Valorie in Hang for Real (*) 303

Vance, Bill 438

Vanderbes, Romano 115, 182, 198, 211, 228, 233

Vanderford, Benjamin 586–587

van der Reijden, Joël 503

van Dijck, José 529

Van Gogh, Theo 399–400

Van Horn, Buddy 57

Vanishing Prairie, The (1954) 130

Văn Lém, Nguyễn 323, 542

van Oijen, Wilfred 347

van Rossem, Jean-Pierre 502–503, 538

Van Sant, Gus 87

Vanzi, Luigi 115, 163

Variety (pub) 217, 240 21

Vase de Noces (1974) 187

Veneri Proibite (1963) 166

Venice Magazine (pub) 502

Verhoeven, Paul 191

Verotika (pub) 447, 447, 580

Verow, Tod 444

Version 90 (pub) 313

Vertov, Dziga 110

Vesna (*) 95

V/H/S (2012) 77, 590

Viaje Al Mundo De Lo Desconocido (*) 189

Viale, Mauro 359

Victory At Sea (tv) 233

Videas (label) 67

Video Appeals Committee 573

Video Drive-In! (pub) 188, 223, 250

Videodrome (1982) 52–53, 53, 186, 392

Video for Pleasure (label) 31

video games 489, 496, 535, 570–577

and mods 573–574

and ryona 574–577

Video Macabre Underground 281

Video Macumba (1991) 315

video mixtapes 240. See also barrage tapes

Video Murders (1988) 63

video nasties 59, 64, 156, 267, 480, 486–488, 490–491

Video Psycho (*) 295

Video Recordings Act 1984 155, 487

Video Screams (*) 317

Video Violence… When Renting is not Enough (1987) 65, 66, 68

Video Violence 2 The Exploitation! (1988) 66

Video Violence and Children (book) 487

Videodrome (novel) 443

Videorama (label) 481

videos: animal cruelty

1 Boy 2 Kittens 411

Bathtime LOL 412

Python Christmas 412

videos: execution

Abu Musa’b al-Zarqawi Slaughters an American 391

Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross, A 524, 624

Operation of the National-Socialist Party of Russia to Arrest and Execute Two Colonists From Dagestan and Tajikistan 401

Slaughter of the Spy Journalist the Jew Daniel Pearl, The 389

videos: extreme sex

2 Girls 1 Cup 427–428

2 Guys 1 Horse 427, 428

BME Pain Olympics 427

spankwire 427

videos: modern war atrocities

Atrocities on Mohajirs in Pakistan 401

chechclear 400

Chechen Terrorists 400

Massacre in Bosnia & Croatia 401

ofex 400

Unknown Russian Soldier 400

Videoscramble 1 (1988) 317

Vidimax 281, 284, 285, 286–287, 289, 290–291, 485. See also Macabre Video Underground

and custom shoots 290–291

Vikings, The (*) 280

Vikkers, Milton 141

Vilencia, Jeff 531

Villarreal, Reynaldo Sambrano 375

Vincent, Chuck 8, 10, 266

Vincent, Jan-Michael 370

Vinterberg, Thomas 74

Violations (1986) 281, 285

Violence (*) 280

Violence series 309

Violence USA (1981) 215. See also Killing of America, The (1981)

Virgil (Roman poet) 527

Virtual Kidnapper (2000) 296, 296–297

Vítimas de Prazer “Snuff” (1977) 36–39, 37, 38

Viva Africa (tv) 154, 154

Viva la muerte (1971) 13

Vogel, Amos 328, 449

Vogel, Fred 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 539

interview with 81–82, 534–535

von Hagens, Gunther 545

Von Hellen, M. C. 143. See also Lamb, John

Von Praunheim, Rosa 342

Von Stoetzel, Paul 504

von Trier, Lars 74

Voodo (1933) 125

V&R Planning 242, 244–247, 255, 334, 342, 374, 578

and Faces of Death (1979) 244

Wade, Nicholas 528

Wagstaff, James 159

Wakenshaw, Terry 369–370

Walker, Johnny 547

interview with 588–593

Walker, Kevin 502

Walker, Paul 60

Walking Dead, The (tv) 301

Walkley, Leonard 449–450

Wallace, Tommy Lee 56

Wallenda, Karl 220, 242, 363

Wallenda, Nik 220

Waller, Anthony 83

Wallis, Jennifer 326

Walsh, Adam 469

Walsh, John 469

Walsh, Kathleen 100

Walsh, Matthew Jason 74

Wansell, Geoffrey 308, 481

War Against War! (book) 238, 323

War of the Worlds (radio) 9

Warhol, Andy 545

Warmflash, Bob 35

Warner, Marina 539

Warshofsky, Fred 204, 244, 558

WASP (band) 496

Wasteland, The (2012) 342

Waterbury, Ruth 435

Waterhouse, Gavin 386

Waters, John 93, 100, 151, 188, 553

Watkins, Roger 34, 35

Watson, Thomas interview with 588–593

Watts, Charlie 563

Wave Productions VI, 264, 291–294, 291, 292, 293, 295, 298, 297, 624

Wave’s Most Gruesome Deaths (*) 292, 292

Wayman, Richard D. 372

Ways of Seeing (book) 510

Way To Eden, The (1985). See also Weg Nach Eden, Der (1995)

We Have Come For Your Daughters (1971) 180, 183

We Have Come For Your Daughters: What Went Down On The Medicine Ball Caravan (book) 183

websites 20/20 517

Abel Danger 478, 544

al-ansar.biz 392

alt.binaries.pictures.grotesque 519

Amazon 491, 520

Amazon-Warriors 301

APBnews 268

Ark-La-Tex 585–586

AV Maniacs 243, 578

Bestgore 385, 413, 416, 417, 418, 511, 520, 527

Bits 516

Canuxploitation! 60

chan boards 579–581

Cinema Treasures 10

Cinequanon 36

cnet 573

Craigslist 418

crazyshit 258

Cute Dead Guys 385

Dailymotion 420

Dan’s Gallery of the Grotesque 518–519

Decent Films Guide 131

Digital Retribution 583–584

Disaster Center 216

Disney 131

Dumpster 485

Facebook 411, 427, 512–513, 514–515, 520, 527, 529, 545, 548, 585–586, 590

Femmes Fatalities 299

globalsecurity 517

Google 427, 520

Guardian 525

gurochan 580

heyuguys 70

Hollywood Interview 502

Horror Drive-In 314

IMDb 68, 74, 131, 153, 190, 261, 266, 583, 584

IndieGoGo 486

Inner Depravity 535

Jew Watch 504

kagablog 308

Last Chance For Animals 418

LiveLeak 356, 380, 383, 384, 516–517

Meganismissing 77

Midnight Eye 244

mmo-champion 520

MTV Geek! 571

Music from the Empty

Quarter 322

Nation Earth 559

Necrobabes 473

Newsgrounds 355

New York online 395

nowthatsfuckedup (NTFU) 385

Nude Patch 574

Ogrish 380–385, 390, 407, 520

Orato 422

Photobucket 527, 528

Pinterest 527

Pornopolis 384

Preg.org 519

Raw Vision 547

Reality Sandwich 464

rense 505

Reuters 587

Rotten 380, 385, 390–391

Rumsfeld Papers 511

Ryonani 577

Screaming Stoner Video 531

Source Digit 426

Stranglenail 305

Sun 544

theYNC 406, 413, 520, 536, 544

Titaneia 301

Twitter 524

UCLA Library 496

VideasFilms 67

Websleuth 418

Wikipedia 227, 420, 427, 505, 520, 577

Women Who Eat On Tubes 515–516, 536–537

YouTube 261, 317, 351, 387, 388, 402, 403, 411, 412, 418, 419, 422, 429, 455, 537, 543, 574, 575, 577, 588

Wechsler, Judith 110

Wedding Trough, The (1974) 187. See also Vase de Noces (1974)

Weegee 96, 245. See also Fellig, Arthur

Week End (1967) 588

Weekly World News (pub) 115

Weetman, Barbara 102

Weg Nach Eden, Der (1995) 341

Weida, David 22

Weier, Anissa 541. See also Slenderman

Weiler, Lance 75

Weiner, Robert G 297

Weinstein, Harvey 24

Weird America (1990) 224

Weird, Wicked World (1964) 111, 112. See also Go! Go! Go! World (1964)

Welcome to the Jungle (2007) 52

Weldon, Michael 157

Welles, Orson 112, 187, 197

Wells, David 375

Werner, Eric 232

Werntz, Gary 98

Wessel, Larry 561

West, Adam 7

West, Charmaine 479

West End Jungle (1964) 170

West, Frederick 308, 410, 479–481, 479

and snuff films 479–481

West, Heather 479

West, Rosemary 308, 410, 479–481, 479, 480

Whaley, Frank 87

What the Censor Saw (book) 165, 176

Wheels of Tragedy (1963) 372

Whiles, Christie 83

While the Cat’s Away (1972) 10

Whitehouse (band) 326–327, 327

Whitman, Charles 215

Whitson, Gary 291

Whitson’s Amateur Video Entertainers 291. See also Wave Productions

Whitson’s Audio and Video Entertainment 291. See also Wave Productions

Whole Earth Catalog (pub) 315

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) 83

Wickman, Torgny 138

Wide-Open Copenhagen ’70 (1970) 142

Wiesenthal, Simon 501

Wife Swappers, The (1969) 138

Wife Swap (tv) 347

Wild Amazon, The (2012) 301

Wild Beasts (1983) 189

Wild Eye, The (1967) 103–104, 104

and mondo films 104–105

Wild Ride, The (*) 25

Wild Weird Wonderful Italians, The (1966) 134, 175

Wild Wild World (1965) 173, 174

Wilder, Nicholas 61

Willard, Frank 179

Williams, Cameron 588

Williams, David E. 324

Williams, Emlyn 422

Williamson, James 119

Williams, Pamela 473

Williams, Ray 552

Williams, Russell 478

Williams, Stephen 477

Wilson, Christopher 385

Wilson, Clare 465

Wilson, Dennis 433

Wilson, Luke 87

Wilson, Michael 167

Wilson, Woodrow 506

Window Water Baby Moving (1959) 337

Winer, Lucy 223

Wingo, Dorcey 366–367

Winner, Michael 150

Winning (1969) 150

Winter, Olaf 301

Wiper, Scott 55

Wired (pub) 528

Wirkus, Faustin 125

Wiseman, Frederick 105, 110, 335–336

Wishman, Doris 105, 145, 199, 285

Witchcraft ’70 (1970) 111, 112, 113, 181. See also Angeli bianchi… angeli neri (1969)

Witchcraft Through the Ages (1921) 181

Witchdoctor in Tails (1966) 141

Witness To The Execution (1993) 56

Wizard of Gore, The (1970) 66, 237

Wolff, Geoffrey 442

Wolf, Gary K. 442

Wollman, Leo 199

Women Against Violence Against Women (book) 492

Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) 21, 22, 23, 492, 492–496, 494, 495, 496

Women of the World (1963) 114, 168, 171

Women… Oh, Women! (1963) 154, 166

Women’s Liberation Movement 492. See also feminist groups

Women Who Eat On Tubes (web) 515–516, 536–537

Wonder of Love, The (1967) 137

Wong, Tartara 166

Wood, Graeme 345, 525

Woods, James 52

Woodstock (1970) 564

Woo, John 370

World By Night (1961) 115, 116, 117, 137, 163

World by Night No 2 (1962) 166

World by Night Today (1975) 189, 189

World of Acid (The Hippy Revolt), The (1967) 179

World of Death (1994) 153

World of Mystery (1979/80) 196

World of the Dead The Zombie Diaries (2011) 77

World Union of Documentary Filmmakers 109

World War Z (2013) 377

Worob, Mal 40, 265. See also Stevens, Carter

Worst Doctor in America, The (Inside Edition) (tv) 584. See also Mexican Doctor (*)

Worst of Faces of Death (1989) 234

Wrong Way (1972) 553–554

Wyler, William 370

Wynkoop, Joel D. 73

X Factor, The (tv) 548

X-Rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker (book) 145, 174

Xenophobia (game) 574

xXx (2002) 370

Yakuza, The (1974) 41

Yamanouchi, Daisuke 441

Yamashita, Ayaka 483

Yamashita, Bakushishi 242

Yamatoya, Atsushi 334

Yanqing, Lu 370

Yatzenko, Sergei 407, 408, 410, 428–429, 544, 585. See also 3 Guys 1 Hammer

Year of the Sex Olympics, The (1968) 53

Yellow Submarine (1968) 574

Yellowbrickroad (2010) 76

Yorke, Carl 48, 50

Yorkshire Ripper. See Sutcliffe, Peter

Yoshitoshi, Tsukioka 441

You Are What You Eat (1968) 180

Young and Innocent (1976) 6. See also Clamdigger’s Daughter, The (1974)

Young Divorcees, The (1972) 11

Young, James B 274

Young, Sean 56

Younis, Subhaan 406, 549

Your Job in Germany (1945) 118

Youth in Babylon, A: Confes sions of a Trash-Film King (book) 126

Zambrano, Jesus 375

Zappa, Frank 179

Zapruder, Abraham 339, 351, 352

Zarchi, Meir 147, 289

Zebub, Bill 77

Zedd, Nick 91, 103, 309, 310

Zéno, Thierry 147, 186, 187

Zhang, Ziyi 57

Zicari, Rob 306. See also Black, Rob

Zito, Stephen F. 183

Zodiac (book) 469, 470

Zodiac killer 470, 562

Zodia(c)k, Nick 309. See also Zedd, Nick

Zodiac Unmasked (book) 469, 470

Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (1978) 273

Zombie Creeping Flesh (1981) 87, 151

Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) 29, 31

Zombie Holocaust (1980) 49

Zombie Nightmare (1986) 7

Zombies: The Beginning (2007) 87

Zoroku’s Strange Disease (book) 332

Zuckerberg, Mark 512, 548

Zwerin, Charlotte 561, 563

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Catastrophe. Human failing. Stupidity. Despair. As you progress through this book, so increases the potency of its subject matter. To put this material together was at once fascinating, occasionally funny, always demanding. Protracted periods of research exact their pound of flesh, or at the very least a measure of the spirit. The following people helped make it a little easier. In alphabetical order: John Aes-Nihil, Trevor Blake, Tim Buggie, Jörg Buttgereit, Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni, Harvey Fenton, Alan Thorp, Douglas Clark, David Greenall, Dr R. J. Hetherington, David Hyman, Assunta Iantosca, Manfred Jelinski, Darren Jones, David Nolte, Jim McLennan, Leigh Neville, Nexus magazine, Robert Prichard, Roger Sabin, Phil Tonge, Ubbie, Larry Wessel, David E. Williams and Paul Woods. Particular thanks go to Graf Haufen, Stefan Jaworzyn and Christopher Glazebrook, whose assistance, loan of illustrative materials and support has been above and beyond the call.

For this new edition, our thanks extend to Tony Andrews, Mark Astley, Sly Bean, Mikita Brottman, JR Bruun, Monte Cazazza, Andy Coliseum, Clive Davies, David Hinds, Thomas Eikrem/Filmrage (loan of mondo images), Elias, Louis Ferriol, Michael Helms, Neil Jackson, Philippe Jacmain, Marcos Katudjian, Shaun Kimber, Jay Lynch, Stephen Maier/Indio Productions LLC (loan of Mondo Art images), Miguel Angel Martin, Patricia MacCormack, Bob Murawski/Grindhouse Releasing (loan of Cannibal Holocaust images), David Nolte, Simon Nuchtern, Dejan Ognjanović, Fernando Polanco, Gary Ramsay, Suzanne Rowe, Shade Rupe, Jack Sargeant, R. Schelts, Johannes Schönherr, John Alan Schwartz, Stephen Sennitt, the Sleaze Kid, Carter Stevens, Jack Stevenson, Ashley Thorpe, Todd Tjersland, Kiyotaka Tsurisaki, Fred Vogel, Johnny Walker, Roger Watkins, Thomas Watson, Jason Williams, Paul Zamarelli and VHSCollector.com/112 Video. Particular thanks to Jennifer Wallis for the topical news stories as well as enlightening conversations and proofing; Alex DeLarge, Baudi Moovan and all at Animal Beta Project for information on the hunt for Luka Magnotta; and Tom Brinkmann and Dr Spike, the source for vintage magazine articles pertaining to Snuff. (Spike also wrote the Headpress book The Bloodiest Thing That Ever Happened in Front of a Camera, which discusses the politics that birthed Snuff.) A conversation with Stewart Pringle inspired ideas that appear in the appendix, as did another one with Thomas McGrath, which added fuel to the concluding chapter. Thomas also offered good advice on a late draft of this book. Thanks to Mark Critchell for the layout and design, and many last minute changes. Our gratitude to many who helped but requested anonymity, and, finally, thanks to everyone who reviewed, applauded, acknowledged and bought this book (in its various editions) over the years.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Killing for Culture was first published in 1994, followed a year later by a revised and updated edition. Neither volume mentions the Internet, giving some idea of the divide separating those earlier books and this one. Within the covers of this edition are three new chapters, while all material from earlier volumes has been updated and for the most part expanded.

In terms of films that twenty years ago were obscure, reappraisal has been with an eye sympathetic to the mystery that surrounded them, undoubtedly part of their ‘power’ in the first place. Detailed synopses of films have been removed, however, so too the filmography, given that such information has become readily available elsewhere.

English titles of films are preferred unless a more common alternative exists.

A NOTE ON THE COLOUR SECTIONS

COLOUR SECTION FRONT OF BOOK (from top, left to right)
PAGES 1–3: Mondo film posters. PAGE 4: (i) The ‘snuff’ film in Emanuelle in America (1976); (ii) Hardcore Life aka Hardcore (1978) poster; (iii) Cannibal Holocaust (1979) poster; (iv) Super 8 box for Lasse Braun’s Perversion. PAGE 5: (i–ii) Faces of Death (1979) trade ad and host, Dr Frances B. Gröss; (iii) Faces of Culture (1983) television series trade ad; (iv–ix) The fate of Pit Dernitz in Savage Man… Savage Beast (1975). PAGE 6: (i–iii) Special effects in Snuff (1976) (iv); Boxoffice December 8, 1975 (v); Special effects in A Serbian Film (2010).

COLOUR SECTION BACK OF BOOK
PAGE 1: Faces of Death II (1981) Japanese handbill. PAGE 2: (i) Mondo Cane 2000 (1988) poster; (ii) True Gore (1987) video sleeve; (iii) The Dai Sangeki (The Big Tragedy) (1990s) video sleeve. PAGE 3: (i) Death Women: Josei Shitai Shuu (1994) video sleeve; (ii) Hideshi Hino in Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985); (iii) Sonic torture in Devil’s Experiment (1985); (iv) The Shocks IV (1988) video sleeve. PAGE 4: (i) ‘Butcher’ sleeve for the Beatles’ album Yesterday and Today (1966); (ii) Homicide Detective (January 1978), one true crime magazine that featured the (fake) murder from Snuff (1976) on its cover; (iii) Cover of the original 1994 edition of Killing for Culture; (iv) I demoni, Italian title and poster for The Manson Massacre (1971); (v) Snuff 2000 (2002); (vi) Gallows12, early faux snuff video. PAGE 5: (i–ii) Two faux snuff custom productions — PKF Studios’ Schoolgirl Snuff Education Necro Studies (2011) and Wave’s Real Crime Videos — one featuring hardcore sex, the other not; (iii) Necrobabes website links page in May 1988; (iv) Luka Magnotta; (v) Promo from Best Deaths website. PAGE 6: (i) Hostage David Haines and ISIS executioner ‘Jihadi John’; (ii) Caged Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh awaiting cue from director, and (iv) moments from death; (iii, v, vi) Yet unknown ISIS killer ‘Jihadi Joseph’ threatens the world in A Message Signed with Blood, atrocity video showing the mass murder of Egyptian Coptic Christians.

COLOUR PLATES THROUGHOUT BOOK
Pages 2–3: Scene from the end of Snuff(1976); 26–27 Hardcore (1978); 46–47 Gut (2012); 106–107 African Fury (1955); 160–161 Africa Addio (1966); 274–275 Behind the scenes at the end of Snuff; 282–283 Snuff 2000 (2002); 248–249 Assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald; 378–379 Rotten.com; 430–431 Charles Manson; 508–509 Dead Taliban souvenir photo; 550–551 Mortal Kombat video game.

A HEADPRESS BOOK
First published by Headpress in 2016
{e} headoffice@headpress.com

KILLING FOR CULTURE
From Edison to Isis: A New History of Death on Film

Text copyright © David Kerekes & David Slater
This volume copyright © Headpress 2016
Book cover, design & layout: Mark Critchell <mark.critchell@googlemail.com>
Cover images: (front) Scene from Hardcore (1978), public execution in Benghazi,
Lybia, c.2011; (back) Africa Addio (1966), Gut (2012)
Headpress diaspora: Thomas Campbell, Caleb Selah, Giuseppe, Dave T

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

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Images are used for the purpose of historical review. Grateful acknowledgement is given to the respective owners, suppliers, artists, studios and publishers.

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