Snuff movie

"Snuff film" is the term used for a film depicting unwitting people performing sexual acts, either willingly or under duress and subsequently are murdered.

There have been instances of murderers recording their crimes, and such evidence[?] is not released to the public, due to its disturbing nature, and out or respect for the victim. However, in all of these cases the recordings were for their own private use; there has been no documented example of any snuff movie ever being distributed commercially.

Pornographic snuff movies appear to be an urban legend.

The idea was spawned from the movie Snuff, filmed in 1971 and released in 1975. Produced by the husband-and-wife grindhouse[?] filmmaking team of Michael and Roberta Findlay, it was originally titled Slaughter, and had been conceived as a story about a Manson-esque murder cult, but an ending that purported to show the "murder" of a crew member was added, filmed in a vérité style. This was done, apparently, as a marketing ploy, so that the on-camera death could be promoted as being genuine. The promoters of the film even went so far as to hire fake protesters to picket the movie theaters where it was being shown.

The American film "Hardcore" (1979, directed by Paul Schrader)involves a runaway's father (George C. Scott) investigating the veracity of an 8mm film that appears to be of a teenaged girl being murdered. "8MM" (1999) is a similar movie starring Nicolas Cage as a private investigator of this genre of filmmaking.

External links

• The Snuff Film: The Making of an Urban Legend, Skeptical Inquirier, May 1999 (http://www.csicop.org/si/9905/snuff.html)