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Killed Because of Lousy Ratings: The Hollywood History of Snuff

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 38; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01956050903578414

1930-6458

Boaz Hagin,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

Abstract The urban legend about “snuff films,” in which people are really murdered on camera, has been circulating since the mid-1970s. This article critically examines the standard historical account of the emergence of this myth, which focuses on a single example in the context of exploitation films and pornography, and constructs an alternative account using Hollywood films. Keywords: death in filmsHollywoodjournalismpornographysnuff filmstelevision Notes 1. The existence of such films is uncertain. Law enforcement agencies, reporters, and film researchers have been unable to locate a single snuff film (Kerekes and Slater 246; Lim; Mitchell; Sobchack 247); on the other hand, antipornography feminist Catherine MacKinnon, who believes that the pornography industry produces snuff, claims to have seen snuff films but refuses to reveal her sources (Kipnis 10). To be sure, it is not in doubt that moving images depicting people (and nonhuman animals) really dying, being killed, murdered, and executed, on film, video, television news broadcasts, and the Internet exist. There is also evidence that some sadistic killers do make visual records of the abuses they commit, including films that might have existed, or perhaps still do, but are not disclosed to the public (Black 67, 69–71). What is not clear is whether the real deaths recorded in those moving images were deliberately executed by the filmmakers to be sold as entertainment. If snuff films do exist, they are not easily accessible and are, at least for the general public and for all practical purposes, no more and no less than an urban legend, a myth. 2. There are fascinating questions about the film Snuff and its reception, but they do not directly shed much light on the myth of snuff. See Johnson and Schaeffer for an analysis of Shackleton's advertising campaign in relation to extant exploitation film techniques and of the varied ways in which audiences understood and reacted to the film because of its confused generic identity and release in mainstream theaters, not drive-ins and grindhouses. This, however, only tells us about the specific junction in which the film Snuff came into being and was received, not about how the myth of snuff films became so popular. 3. This article focuses on the decades immediately preceding Snuff. But the very idea that people have a certain appetite to look at the death of others is ancient (see, for example, Plato 439e–440a). In modernity, entertaining the public with death and representations of death existed well before the advent of cinema, for example, in public executions and the Paris morgue and in representations of death (battles, disasters, the Crucifixion, famous murders and martyrdoms, deadly accidents) in photographs (some stereoscopic), the illustrated press, magic lantern slides, dioramas, panoramas, magic shows, theatrical “melodrama,” and wax museum displays (see examples in Mannoni; Ruby; Schwartz; Singer). 4. On allegory as being less “real,” see Todorov 62–74. 5. The myth and idea of snuff films can frequently be found within wider discussions that are not exclusively about pornography and in which the deaths are not exclusively of women (e.g. Sobchack; Lim; Kerekes and Slater). This is also true about the film Snuff. As Williams observes, Snuff was not pornographic, and it is not self-evident how it has come to be seen as a turning point in feminist thinking about pornography (190; see also Johnson and Schaeffer). 6. On the undecidable status of the snuff film as document or fiction, see Sobchack 247 and 265. 7. This, of course, was never true, and in later decades the idea of digitally manipulating and manufacturing virtual images that do not correspond to analogous entities in realty has caught the imagination of filmmakers in motion pictures such as Wag the Dog (1997, dir. Barry Levinson) and S1m0ne (2002, dir. Andrew Niccol). This did not seem to be of much concern in the films of the 1960s and 1970s, however. 8. Additional examples associate televised deadly competitions with death as entertainment, such as Rollerball (1975, dir. Norman Jewison), Death Race 2000 (1975, dir. Paul Bartel), and The Running Man (1987, dir. Paul Michael Glaser), which also, already, includes the possibility of manipulating virtual images that would be of more concern since the 1990s. 9. Significantly, print journalists were being glorified as television news was being demonized. In the same year Network was released, All the President's Men (1976, dir. Alan J. Pakula) presented print journalists as legendary heroes (Ghiglione and Saltzman 19) in what can be seen as a nostalgic throwback in an age dominated by television (Ehrlich 120–21). Slightly later, the most consistent heroic image of journalists since the 1930s reached a Hollywood blockbuster, as Clark Kent and the staff of the print newspaper The Daily Planet appeared in Superman (1978, dir. Richard Donner; see Ghiglione and Saltzman 25).