 Starring: Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini, Peter Stormare
Director: Joel Schumacher
Year Of Release: 1999
Plot:After a rich man dies, his widow hires private detective Tom Welles (Cage) when she discovers an 8mm film in a safe. It’s a tape of a girl getting killed just for the voyeuristic pleasure of the viewer – a snuff film. This starts Tom off on an increasingly obsessive mission to uncover the truth behind the film, which leads him into an ever darker and more disturbing world. |
Wanna know something? While rumours about snuff films have circulated for decades – which is where people have been killed on tape so that the murderers can sell the footage to sick voyeurs (rather than, for example, the accidental filming of a death, or a serial killer taping a murder for their own use) - there’s never been a single confirmed snuff movie ever found.
The term itself dates back to 1971 and a book about Charlie Manson and his family, which covered the idea that the nutty group may have made a snuff film, although no such movie was ever found. However the idea really took off in 1976 with the film Snuff. The movie is basically just a cheap, down and dirty Argentinean horror movie, about a Manson-esque murder cult. It was destined for obscurity until a producer called Alan Shackleton bought the American distribution rights and conceived a piece of marketing genius.
He filmed an extra bit to go on the end of the movie, where it looked like the filmmakers had decided to really kill one of the actresses in front of the camera. Although it’s very obviously fake and tacked on, it was marketed as if it was real and it’s even believed Shackleton went as far as to hire fake protestors to picket theatres showing it, which ensured much higher box office and the birth of a full-on urban legend.
Ever since then rumours of real snuff films have circulated, and there have been quite a few allegedly real snuff tapes that have been found, most of which come from the Far East and have since been proven to be fake. Even Charlie Sheen got caught up in this after watching part of the Japanese ‘Guinea Pig’ film, Flower Of Flesh And Blood (the Guinea Pig movies are a series of seven Japanese gore flicks), which is an apparent documentary in which a woman is drugged, chained to a bed, and then tortured and killed. After viewing it he was so convinced that he’d just seen a genuine snuff movie that he contacted the FBI, who immediately launched an investigation.
The initial official analysis of the tape is reported to have agreed with Sheen’s thoughts that the girl really was killed, until another film was uncovered that showed the same girl getting snuffed all over again. The Japanese authorities also forced the makers of these films to prove that not only did this woman not get murdered twice, but that she was still alive and well. Despite this, rumours still abound that two of the Guinea Pig movies were based on real snuff film that the makers had seen, although there’s no actual evidence of this. The Guinea Pig series became even more notorious when one of the movies was found in the collection of Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, and it was alleged that he’d re-enacted one of the scenes as part of his crimes.
Those involved in the Guinea Pigs movies are not the only filmmakers who’ve had to prove they didn’t really kill anyone, as Italian director Ruggero Deodato was also once called upon to offer evidence in court that none of the murders in his infamous 1980 movie, Cannibal Holocaust, were real.
Over the years other rumours of snuff films have emerged, including a case where a Russian child pornography ring was broken up in 2000, and it was said the criminals were also offering snuff films for sale, although there’s no record of anything other than illegal pornography being seized. However despite all this and films from 8mm to Tesis to Strange Days to Vacancy being themed around the discovery of snuff movies, not a single one has ever been verified.
Does this mean they don’t exist? Not necessarily, although if they do, they’ve been kept hidden incredibly successfully. If they are out there somewhere, you’d have thought that at least one would have been found, and indeed in a perverse way, considering the amount of other illegal, perverse stuff that most definitely does exist, such as child porn, it is almost surprising that nothing ever has been uncovered. Many are adamant that snuff films are very real, while others are sure that they aren’t. Whatever the truth, a macabre fascination will ensure there will always be rumours about them floating around, and moviemakers will always be drawn to make movies about them, such as 8mm.
TIM ISAAC
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