Exploring the snuff movie: the cultural controversy of the 1970s
The snuff film is something many people are aware of without having actually seen one for themselves, which is inarguably for the better, given the content. It’s hard to quantify it as a genre of cinema based entirely on what’s alleged to transpire, with the existence of snuff movies often being written off as little more than an urban legend.
Knowing how the world works, though, there are probably at least a few of them out there somewhere. The danger for anybody who wants to go tracking them down – a highly questionable and detestable tactic in itself – is that the places they’re most likely to be found on the internet are also the ones almost guaranteed to end in the authorities kicking the door down and dragging the viewer away in handcuffs.
Snuff doesn’t have any real narrative or artistic meaning, but in terms of its definition, they are short films, movies, or live productions that feature real-life, unfiltered murder being carried out. The word itself dates back to the late 1800s and was used to refer to somebody who dies by way of disease or accident, but it would be another century before it began entering the mainstream consciousness.
Rumours had always abounded of a secret underground sect of people who’d openly trade footage of death captured on camera. This is something Michael Findlay and Horacio Fredriksson leaned into when their 1976 film Snuff was marketed – and gained widespread notoriety – as the genuine article featuring an authentic murder.
Obviously, such a distasteful promotional tactic led to much controversy and an in-depth investigation, which concluded that everyone involved in trying to shill Snuff as the real thing was a bare-faced liar. In the loosest sense of the term, snuff videos have been readily available and widely circulated ever since the rapid advancement of the internet age, but never has there ever been a commercial film production depicting an actual murder.
However, because the online sphere can be a dark, dingy, and depraved place, videos and clips of people being killed under a variety of circumstances do exist, whether it’s during conflict, torture, or failure to meet ransom demands. One of the most infamous is Death 2 Kuffar, which shows a man being beheaded for real, and the unfortunate thing is that a large number of early adopters of internet culture probably know exactly what it is, such is the way it was passed around for shock value.
It’s never been a major concern of the mainstream film business, considering nobody in their right mind is going to kill somebody, film it, and then try and secure distribution or release for having committed a heinous crime and provided the evidence in an attempt to sell it for profit. Still, the controversy of 1976’s Snuff nonetheless encouraged a wave of thinly-veiled imitators to emerge in its wake.
Much like their progenitor, not a single one of them featured an actual murder, but the more morbid sections of the target demographic sought them out anyway. Technically, watching any footage where a person dies for real is a snuff film in the loosest sense, but as it applies to the medium of cinema, it’s a fabrication.
