Original subtitles

It's completely conceivable to me that there is some part of

the world where somebody is paying money to walk into a

room and kill somebody as a sexual act.

There's no greater controversy, no greater taboo than snuff murders.

I think anything that people will pay money for exists in the world.

And if people wanna pay for snuff, snuff will exist.

I'm sure in the age of video, one exists somewhere,

but I don't think it's being circulated.

I think that in a in a sense, snuff is like the holy grail.

Much talked about, long sought after, but never found.

The existence of snuff movies remains one of the most

enduring of urban legends.

Persistent rumors of an underground industry continue

to concern police around the world,

so much so that the FBI have even developed their own

definition of what a snuff movie is.

The key element is, number one,

it has to be a visual depiction.

Could be still pictures, moving images, whatever.

On this visual image,

someone was alive alive at the beginning and they're dead at the end.

The motivation for the murder is because the script requires it.

And this visual image is being put together for the sexual

gratification of viewers.

Okay. Great. And people look at this to get sexually aroused.

And then the final element is that this visual depiction is

commercially distributed.

Snuff has been a cinematic bogeyman for over a quarter of

a century and has its roots in one of the most shocking murder

sprees in criminal history.

A movie director Roman Polanski.

It was his wife, Sharon Tate, who was one of the victims.

In August, nineteen sixty nine, Sharon Tate,

the heavily pregnant wife of film director,

Roman Polanski was murdered.

These murders occurred on August the ninth

on Cielo Drive in West Los Angeles.

The killers, Charles Manson and his followers,

then went on a deadly rampage supposedly filming as they went.

Those films were never retrieved by the police,

and the rumors spread that copies were being bought and

sold on the black market.

Snuff as applied to a movie obviously relates to the idea

that someone is snuffed out like a candle,

I. E. Killed.

Seven years later,

Alan Shackleton decided to exploit these rumors,

buying a low budget film called Slaughter,

based on the Manson family murders,

in which a gang of female hippies go on a killing spree.

The film's rough and ready shooting style and terrible

acting gave it a limited appeal,

but Shackleton would add a new and controversial final scene

that would give birth to the legend

pockets.

So Allen rented my studio and hired a film crew to come in.

Thank you to go and show me.

They tried to match the last scene in the movie.

They shot this little special effects scene where,

the girl is slaughtered,

supposedly by the film crew.

Why don't you and I talk over to the bed and we'll we'll

get turned on, turn each other on,

With all these people watching The camera pulls out from the

last scene of the original movie to reveal what appears to

be behind the scenes footage of the production crew.

But instead of being a seamless continuation,

it feels more like the start of a different film.

Nothing matches. No.

The actors or the film stock or anything like that.

And then a woman is, duped into, you know,

getting a little amorous with the director on a bed.

What are you doing?

And then he's he murders her on camera in close-up.

You are a boy.

Bring you the camera. Give me a cell.

Let me go. Let me go. Let me go. Let me go. Let me go.

Let me go.

Let me go. Let me go. Let me go. Let me go. Let me go.

Let me go.

Let me go. Let me go. Let me go.

Let me go. Let me go. Let me go. Let me go.

Let me go.

Let me go. Let me go. Let me go. Let me go.

Let me go

cuts off her wrist.

From there on down was a phony arm,

and it was joined right at the wrist.

And the actor put his hand over the joint so you couldn't see it.

So her hand was gripping his hand,

and they had the jigsaw would cut through the phony arm.

It was actually very amateurish because,

after the the, arm was cut off, the hand is still moving.

The special effects are really cheesy.

Dime store rubber hand, raspberry syrup, blood.

Pretty much was laughable and and dull.

The action climaxes when the director snuffs out the actress

by ripping her stomach open and disemboweling her.

She was actually lying in a hollowed out section

of the bed, and her her body went from about here

down underneath this layer of pig

and beef intestines that were in a mannequin.

And he reaches in and just lifts,

this massive opal.

Pulls it up as if it was real.

To maintain the illusion that audiences are seeing footage

meant for the cutting room floor.

Shit. We run out of film. Shit.

The film simply ends when the camera runs out of film.

We got it on. Yeah. Let's get out of here.

Despite the crudity of the effects,

the idea behind snuff was irresistible to audiences.

The film opened on Broadway and was an instant smash at the box office,

outgrossing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for three weeks in a row.

It was a phenomenon.

People really believed that they were seeing the first,

real snuff film caught on, you know, caught on film live.

Shackleton didn't market the film as a real snuff movie,

but he didn't deny it was one either.

And his outrageous methods of promotion guaranteed the film was a success.

I

think he alerted a lot of these women's,

rights groups about the film just to get them outraged,

which they were.

And they picketed and all the newspapers showed up and a lot

of people fell for it.

Join us.

There were people on television calling it pornography and the

fall of civilization as we know it.

But what started as a publicity stunt was soon accepted as fact

by the general public.

And the legend was given even more credence by the movies that followed,

and by crazed fans who decided to make life imitate art.

The release of the film snuff in nineteen seventy six had

established a new genre of film where people were supposedly

killed on camera for the entertainment of others.

Hollywood soon began to cash in on the phenomenon with

mainstream releases like hardcore.

Hardcore is a very powerful film about a minister who is

looking for his daughter, who's been engulfed in the porno

industry, and, you know, this straight

laced guy has to go go into this underground

to try to rescue his daughter,

and he has to kinda wallow in the filth.

Released in nineteen seventy nine,

Hardcore reinforced the idea that an active criminal network

existed that produced and distributed snuff movies.

A film like this eight millimeter film cost two or

three hundred dollars to make.

Sold out right in a store. Shown in paint machines.

It's impossible to track down. Nobody makes it.

Nobody shows it. Nobody sees it.

It's like it doesn't even exist.

In his search for his daughter,

the main character played by George c Scott reluctantly

watches her in a porn movie and then has to sit through a

fictional snuff film to find out if she's in it.

You know, shot in a way by Paul Schrader to so you believe that this is

this stuff exists on the underground.

This is what it looks like.

There's a couple in in this grainy footage.

He's stabbed in the stomach,

and then the white the girlfriend has her throat slit.

And it's it's pretty realistic and graphic,

because the the fact it's so crude.

And then we feel the revulsion of the main character because

we're kinda complicit in the scene as well because we're

watching him watching it, and it's just very

disgusting and very upsetting.

A year later, the underground exploded into the mainstream with the release

of Cannibal Holocaust,

whose stunning panoramas and memorable score mysteriously

belied the savagery of its content.

Cannibal Holocaust falls into that category of a movie that's

so low budget, you kinda believe it's real.

And then you look at the people they use,

and they use real cannibals and, like,

jungle savages when they film this.

You think, what monster made this movie?

The courts accused me of really killing and torturing people.

The court wanted to see the film with me,

so they took me to a special room.

Immediately from the judge's reaction because he grimaced

every time he saw a shocking scene,

I could see that I would be convicted.

The film opened in Italy on the eighth of February,

nineteen eighty and caused uproar.

It appeared to show documentary footage where people were

beheaded, castrated, and eaten by cannibals.

It resulted in it being banned in Italy and Britain.

Four youngsters who never came back.

But let's have a look at them at the beginning of their

incredible The movie centers on four documentary makers who

disappear in the South American jungle whilst filming a study

of local cannibals.

Then, their footage and bodies are found by a shocked rescue party.

The shaky camera work and haphazard direction exactly

mirror the kind of footage an observational documentary team would shoot.

One of the most controversial moments in the film is when Le

Crewe crew discover the impaling of one of the cannibals.

And I've watched the scene over and over with a girl impaled on

a pole, and we thought that has to be real.

Like, of course, they took a dead body and just shoved the pole on.

It's

it's it's unbelievable.

It's it's horrible.

That scene is one of the grossest images ever,

you know, recorded for any film.

It was pretty, unpleasant and nasty,

but it was a powerful moment.

When the film made its way to the UK in the early eighties,

the lack of video licensing laws meant it was freely

circulated, and many thought a genuine snuff movie had finally surfaced.

There was a policeman who who publicly said he he'd seen a

snuff movie, and it was called Cannibal Holocaust.

And that was part of what caused the sort of,

moral panic about video analysis was this this view

that children could get access to this material,

and there was nothing in law to stop them.

The director of public prosecutions responded to the

resulting public outcry by banning the film.

The DPP set up a list of videos which were approved for

prosecution, and that became known as the the video nasty list.

And and that that persisted until nineteen eighty four when

the Video Recordings Act established regulation of all

videos in the UK.

Blurring the line between fact and fiction had serious

consequences for the director when the Italian authorities

put him on trial for the murder of the actors.

I originally had a originally had a contract with the actors

where they were asked to disappear for a year.

But when I was in court on murder charges and things were

going really badly, I had to bring one of them back to testify.

Diodato was pretty much a genius at try the way he tried

to fool the audience with the camera running out of film and stuff like that.

You know, he was very clever.

As unpleasant as the film is and as, as crude as it is,

you know, he does have a a pretty good grip of the

cinematic technique.

By appropriating the techniques of the documentary world,

Diodato had skillfully persuaded audiences into

thinking they were watching real uncut scenes.

This is especially true of the last footage shot by the

documentary crew in which they capture their own murders.

You look at the people they use,

and they use real cannibals and like jungle savages when they film this.

How do you direct a bunch of cannibals

in Colombia, in the jungle?

How do you do that?

Just that alone seemed to me like I I it was just it just

felt like some of it had to be real.

There's no laws. No one's watching them.

You just you it just gives you this really creepy feeling.

To avoid jail,

the director even had to reveal the secret behind the famous

impaling scene,

which had duped many into believing it was real.

Like, what crew members say, hey.

I'm gonna stick a pole up your ass.

It's gonna come out your mouth,

and you're gonna sit there naked for a minute on camera covered in mud.

Like, who would allow themselves to do that?

And she doesn't move. You don't see her blink.

You don't see anything.

I just don't know how they did that shot.

Special effects gave me a pole with a bicycle seat on it.

The pole was put into the ground.

The girl sat on the seat,

and she had a rod of light balsa wood in her mouth.

Then everything was covered in blood to hide the seat.

The way they faked that scene and other scenes in the movie, were, you know,

something that Hollywood special effects guys probably

couldn't duplicate with millions of dollars.

The outcry caused by a cannibal holocaust and the public's

belief in a real trade in snuff compelled the police to investigate.

Throughout the eighties, it was Michael Haines'

job as head of the obscene publications department to

uncover the truth.

We dealt with the most extreme end of, if you like,

the market, the pawn market.

So we were constantly seeing

terrible scenes of sadomasochism,

and there was always a suggestion

that in amongst all this, this, we would find a snush movie.

And so we're always aware, you know,

and alive to that possibility.

Haines' inquiries uncovered The Flower of Flesh and Blood,

a film thought by many to be the first example of real snuff.

It follows a sadistic samurai as he butchers a young woman in

his secret lair.

Made for the gore hungry Japanese market in nineteen

eighty five, it was not only promoted as a snuff film,

but its brutality suggested it to be one.

Here he comes.

Watching

a Japanese warrior

who is cutting off the hand of a woman

or what appears to be

very unpleasant,

unpleasant in each room.

The flower of flesh and blood not only found its way to Scotland Yard,

but it also made it to LA where a Hollywood actor saw it and

was convinced it was a real snuff film.

A gentleman who was writing for Fangoria at the time,

he used to get all these extreme movies including this

guinea pig film from Japan and he turned some friends on to

it who showed it to Charlie Sheen who he was working with at the time.

Charlie Sheen, thought the film was real and went to the FBI with it.

The film is so anatomically accurate that it's almost

impossible to tell if it's real or not.

This realism extends to the clinical method of dissection

complete with gruesome sound effects.

When I hear that this celebrity looked at a film and said that

it was the real thing,

that causes me to become more skeptical about the allegation.

So a lot of times,

what they're reporting is the myth and the legend of the snuff film,

and they dramatize that exaggerated and embellishing.

The flower of flesh and blood was discovered to be a

sophisticated fake,

but it remains one of the most convincing in the history of snuff.

It's extremely,

extremely nasty.

I'm looking at, the dismembered head

of the young girl, and the Japanese man who

did that is now licking the blood off her face.

Gross.

The film caused such a stir in Japan that in nineteen eighty

six, using behind the scenes footage,

the making of Guinea Pig was released to show how they

created the incredibly realistic special effects.

The body parts mutilated by the samurai were, in fact, all prosthetic.

It isn't it isn't genuine,

but it looks bloody real.

But the audiences loved it.

At a time when Cannibal Holocaust was outselling ET in

Japan, Flower of Flesh and Blood rocketed into the top ten

video sales.

But the effects of its success took a sinister turn when in

nineteen eighty eight,

it was once again at the center of a police investigation,

fueling the debate of the link between real life and screen violence.

Anybody who might be aroused by someone dying could have those

arousal patterns fueled and reinforced by looking at snuff,

a simulated snuff type film.

Tsutomu Miyazaki had abducted and killed four little girls

aged four to seven to satisfy his strange desires.

He was finally caught in July nineteen eighty nine attempting

to kidnap his fifth victim.

Amongst the twenty seven year old's extensive video library

was a copy of Flower of Flesh and Blood.

Inspired by his favorite scenes from the movie,

Miyazaki reenacted them on his victims, filming their torture,

dismemberment, and murder.

But despite being inspired by a fake snuff movie,

Miyazaki's own recording is not considered to be an example of

the real thing.

Where this person was not killed for production value,

this person was killed for the sexual gratification of this

violent sex offender.

And after the visual record is made,

it's not for commercial distribution,

but those are not snuff films.

After seven long years, Miyazaki was deemed sane and

was sentenced to death by hanging.

After a decade of hype and hysteria,

a genuine snuff film had yet to be found.

But subsequent movies made it even harder for audiences and

police to tell whether they were watching the real thing or not.

The arrival of cheap home video cameras would mean snuff could

finally become reality.

Professional and amateur videos were thought to show assaults

and murders, including so called snuff videos.

It was different from the type of material which is readily available.

In the 1980s, the availability of cheap home video cameras enabled the

general public to capture life and death images as they

happened in a way that wasn't previously possible.

It signaled a new direction in the story of snuff.

For the first time in cinema history,

the greatest fear The birth of the eighties saw faces of death

emerge from the underground.

It claimed to be a compilation of the most graphic images ever

recorded, including scenes from

accidents, executions, and mortuaries.

Your own face of death.

This film came out at a time when nobody had done anything

like this before.

We came out at a time when this dark,

journey into the unknown,

had never really been explored on such an exploitive level.

Faces of death compiled the news clips deemed too extreme

to show on TV or in cinemas,

such as this police shootout where the hostage taker is

brutally gunned down on camera.

It broke new ground by showing actual clips of real life

tragedy caught on home video,

like this fatal parachute accident,

which is all the more shocking for being real.

Faces of death was banned in forty six countries,

including the UK.

The more controversial something is,

the more people are told they can have it,

the more they want it.

And thus, you know,

banning Faces of Death was probably the greatest press it could ever have.

April twenty second nineteen The reason audiences were so

convinced by Faces of Death was its clever use of real and

mocked up clips,

all shot on the same cheap cameras available to any member of the public.

I bought footage of a woman who was committing suicide jumping off a building.

That footage was about forty seconds.

So what we did is we shot inserts.

Video inserts of firemen running up the stairs and then

cut to her out front, and then all of a sudden she jumps.

And then we see her drop to the ground,

and then we did an insert shot with another actress with

brains on the sidewalk.

Much of the footage is faked.

Although for the the casual viewer,

I think it's quite difficult to work out sometimes what's faked and what's not.

Many people were duped by the electric chair scene,

which isn't real either.

It's time.

We built an an electric chair. We went up to Chino.

We hired an actor to play this this guy who's on death row.

Good luck, Joe.

And then we cut to as he turns the corner,

we cut to the a cell which we had built in a friend's loft.

The process is simple.

The victim is placed in the chair where electrodes are

attached to his leg and head.

And they taped his eyes and and they strapped him into the chair.

His eyes are taped to prevent them from popping out of their sockets.

And then we lined the guy's mouth with toothpaste.

We had tubes going around the back of his head

hidden by the tape so that when he actually got zapped,

I was calling out, alright. Here we go.

He would just have these convulsions and eventually we

had makeup guys squeezing blood.

We had toothpaste coming out of his mouth.

And the guy gave a really,

an Academy Award winning performance.

And that's why to this day,

people actually think we actually got footage of an

electric chair execution.

If you go out and you put your money down to get a film in

which people are dying,

there's a tendency for you to just kind of hey.

This is cool. People are dying in here.

And are you really using your critical thinking skills to

whatever extent you have them?

A lot of times people are not prepared to do that.

The final trickle of blood marked the conclusion to this

grotesque execution.

Because it contains some real and disturbing images of dying,

Faces of Death was reported as a snuff movie.

Faces of Death is not a snuff film.

A snuff film is when somebody is is murdered on camera,

and it's really just down out down in dirty murder and sex.

Faces of Death is an exploration into death,

and no one was murdered to to expedite death in our film.

More than fifteen years after Snuff's release,

and despite there being no documented case of a real snuff

movie, the belief that they were out there persisted.

And the myth gained greater credibility by the actions of

depraved individuals like Alec Doughty.

In the porn industry, we had quite a few informants,

and one of them got in touch with

us to say that Doughty had been in touch with him saying that

he wanted to murder, torture two prostitutes,

and record it on film.

We had our undercover guy, who we'll call Todd,

get in touch with him,

and they arranged a meeting at a bar at Euston station,

and this guy started to talk about, quite freely,

what he wanted to do.

They would snatch the girls off the street,

drug them with chloroform,

take them to a location which they were discussing,

and to torch them and kill them.

All the time we were saying that, you know,

this this must have just be pure fantasy,

but but it got to the stage where he actually he started to

draw the implements themselves.

And then at one meeting,

he gave Todd some liquid.

I I mean, we had it tested. It was noxious substance.

So he was getting towards the act.

He then gave Todd

a name and telephone number of a woman in South London.

And we made inquiries and found out that she was, in fact,

a prostitute and she existed.

I thought we can't let this go on anymore.

We arrested him, and he was dealt with under the Mental

Health Act.

He was a very dangerous man.

If he'd succeeded and the police hadn't been involved,

then clearly that would have been a snuff movie.

Yeah, absolutely.

Alec Doughty had the desire, but lacked the ability.

But whereas in the past,

movie production required expensive kit and highly trained crew,

amateur filmmakers were now able to direct their own films

with cheap home video cameras.

Jeffrey Jones did just that in April nineteen eighty six

when he recorded himself murdering a young girl.

Jeffrey Jones was charged with murder.

He had hanged his victim,

and he had done so under the pretense,

of making a serious film of a decent nature,

whereas in fact, he had set out to make what in modern violence

would be called a snuff movie.

Jones used his own home as a filming location.

He lived in a suburban

house on the outskirts of Birmingham,

and in some ways, it's almost bizarre that the ordinariness

and decency of the of the whole neighborhood,

there should be a house in it where the attic of the.

Jones attracted would be actress Marion Terry to his

home with an advertisement in his local news agents to make a

film called Enough Rope.

He described making a film which

was going to culminate with a fake scene of hanging.

The rope was over a beam and a hook in the

attic of Jones's house.

Whilst the camera was turning,

she would be standing on the chair with a noose around her neck,

and it was at this point that he must quite deliberately have

kicked the chair away from under her.

In court, Jones insisted Marion's death was an accident,

and he was merely filming a simulated hanging.

I expect he would have,

anticipated that she would have hung there

alive, struggling for her life for, let us say,

five or ten minutes.

Just the very stuff of the perverts of snuff movies.

The film Jones was making has never been found.

I have a theory of my own that because he was so

deeply into all these versions,

he may have been in contact some sort of network of people

who were interested in snuff movies.

So in other words,

the film may have been made not merely for his own,

bizarre gratification,

but actually for the purpose of making money out of it.

If somebody has made a snuff movie,

then they're not really going to show it to the world at large.

That's direct firsthand evidence of the

murder being committed.

You would be more likely to just keep it hidden.

Despite the lack of video evidence,

the jury were quick to find Jones guilty of murder,

and he was sentenced to life in prison.

To take the life of any other human being deliberately

is an horrific act.

But to do it in such a calculated,

bizarre way, and to want to make and create a record

of your doing so, perhaps the word monster is not

wholly out of place.

Alec Doughty had the intention of producing a snuff film,

but was arrested before he could do it.

Jeffrey Jones had made a tape that was never found.

But a case in Germany suggested the snuff movie industry might

be more than just an urban myth.

In November nineteen ninety seven,

the two men kidnapped a twenty four year old prostitute from

the Christmas market in Dortmund.

They tortured her in front of their video camera,

but she escaped and led the police to a farmhouse near

Hagen, where they were to discover something far worse.

During the course of the investigations,

a body was found on the property.

A twenty one year old Turkish woman who was a prostitute had

been severely tortured prior to her death and had also been

sexually abused.

On further investigation,

they found a small torture chamber fitted out with carpet

so no one could hear the screams when they videoed their victim.

They also found a tape.

The two minutes and three seconds on the video film that

was seized made it clear what the perpetrators had done to her.

You can see that the victim had to suffer the most agonizing

pain for many hours.

This has been amongst the most violent thing of this nature

that police officers and myself have ever seen.

The prostitute had been brutally killed.

The murdered woman's body was found very tightly bound.

Her head was totally wrapped in tear proof sticky tape.

Due to these circumstances, she died through suffocation.

Ernst Dieter Kausen was the sadistic torturer of the duo.

A psychiatric report on him found that beatings and abuse

were a regular part of his childhood.

During this period,

his experiences led to a strong connection in his mind between

fear, pain, and also lust.

In April nineteen ninety nine,

Khorsen and Mahn were jailed for life,

becoming the first people in Europe to be convicted of

murder while producing a snuff movie,

which they'd hoped to sell in the USA for sixteen thousand dollars

It seems that the disturbing truth behind why no snuff movie

had ever appeared before was that criminals had lacked the

means to make one, but not the

intent.

If you go back to the Moors murderers, Hindi and Brady,

when they killed those children,

they recorded the deaths on tape.

It's certain in my mind that had there been video recorders

in those days, they would have recorded those deaths on film as well.

So when you think about snuff movies,

they were creating snuff audio tapes.

So the genre

was there.

If access to video had given criminals the potential to make

their own snuff films,

the creation of the internet would unleash enormous numbers

of potential buyers.

What the internet is is the greatest invention in the

history of mankind for people who have narrow and

small sexual interests or really any interest to find each other.

San Jose police were amongst the first to recognize the

dangers of the net.

At the beginning of nineteen eighty nine,

a detective pioneered going undercover in cyber space by

posing as a bisexual pedophile.

He went on a sex bulletin board where he met Dean Lambie, thirty three,

and later, Daniel Depew, twenty seven.

These were two individuals who began to communicate with each

other about the possibility of kidnapping the snuff

film.

During a six month relationship,

the two Virginia men developed a plot to kidnap a boy from the

northern end of their state.

The plan was to keep him in captivity for two weeks,

repeatedly molest him, each time torturing him to just short of death,

eventually murder him and videotape the whole thing.

Why would you trust somebody you just started to talk to on the Internet?

This is not a smart thing to do,

particularly when you're talking about abducting and

murdering people.

But again, it's this need for validation.

A lot of these people communicate with each other

because what they want somebody to say is,

you know what I'm thinking about doing?

I'm thinking about abducting a kid, torturing him,

killing him, and filming it.

Now if you say that to your next door neighbor,

they say to you, you sick weirdo.

What's wrong with you? I'm calling the police.

The anonymity of the internet lulled the duo into a false

sense of security.

These individuals were placed under elaborate surveillance

and monitored and watched.

In August nineteen eighty nine,

when Lambie told the undercover police officer he had spotted a

likely thirteen year old victim riding his bike and that he

intended to carry out the plan at his Richmond home,

police and the FBI were forced to act.

Are we gonna wait till he grabs the kid and gets him in the car,

and then we're gonna arrest him before they get to the location

where they were gonna kill him?

I don't think so. So you have to move in pretty quickly.

Their plot, hatched on the Internet, was foiled,

and the two men are serving thirty years in federal prisons.

Although DePew and Lambie were convicted,

the increasing access to technology would make it easier

and easier to capture death on camera and to distribute it

without fear of being caught.

Cyberspace with all of its global opportunities was

calling and snuff was not about to turn away.

With the invention of the internet,

snuff found its natural home.

Any kind of deprivation was available online and tracing

those who put it there was complex and difficult.

If a genuine snuff movie was ever to surface,

this is where it would be found.

But the innovators in this area came from an unlikely source.

No.

I mean, the closest thing I saw to a snuff film was one of those Al

Qaeda decapitations, and that was enough.

Now, you literally could go on your computer and type Al Qaeda

Daniel Pearl and click a video and watch this guy getting decapitated.

And it's real. It's horrifying.

I can watch endless decapitations in movies because

I know it's theater. It's a magic trick.

When we see people like Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl murdered

on camera or pictures of it in the newspaper, you know,

that tops anything that Hollywood could come up with.

Because now, you know,

the the filmmakers are the terrorists who are making their

own snuff movies and and holding the world hostage with

images of of real horror.

The deaths

in Iraq where people have been beheaded

are probably not snuff movies as such.

They are films that are being made for different purposes.

The purpose being to frighten us all,

and as as a weapon of terror.

But evidence that technology is enabling snuff to become a

reality emerged in October two thousand and four.

A thirty seven year old man lost his life to the latest

phenomenon sweeping Britain, known as happy slapping,

where acts of violence are recorded on mobile phones.

People are getting some sort of gratification,

not necessarily sexual gratification,

but but they're getting gratification

and so called fun Knock one.

Knock one. Knock one.

From

torturing other people.

And in the Southbank Bank incident, obviously,

that was to the nth degree.

David Morley, a survivor of the Admiral Duncan pub bombing in Soho,

became the random victim of a violent London gang.

It was killed on the Southbank by a group of teenagers who

were filming the attacks that they were making on people on

their mobile telephones.

The teenage girl shouted,

we're doing a documentary on happy slapping.

Then the attack on the pair began.

Mister Morley was repeatedly kicked and beaten.

He suffered forty four separate injuries.

And as he lay helpless on the ground,

his head was kicked like a football.

The gang were arrested and prosecuted.

And in January two thousand and six,

their sentence was handed down.

Today, the gang of four youths found guilty of David Morley's murder

were sentenced to between eight and twelve years in prison.

Had the gang charged their mates to look at what they produced,

they would have had the perverse pleasure of fulfilling

all the criteria required to define a film as snuff.

Now, thirty years after Shackleton released his film

Snuff, mainstream cinema is again exploring the concept.

On this on this website that I saw,

you could just walk into a room and shoot someone in the head.

Eli Roth's new film called Hostel is based on a real

website where users can supposedly pay ten thousand

dollars to travel to Thailand and kill someone for kicks.

I think I'm pushing the envelope in terms of,

oh my god, this could really happen.

I mean, we have such horrible atrocities happening to these

people, and there's no monster.

It's all done very realistic,

and it's actually really disturbing.

But I'm never claiming that it's real.

As in Hostel, no one dies for real in Snuff movie.

It supports the argument that because it's now possible to

make an utterly convincing fake,

there's no need to take the risk of actually killing someone.

Gentlemen,

please join me.

I want a show like a magician who's broken the code what the tricks are.

Stop.

It's the Doctor Strange love of snuff movies because I think

it's kind of humorous and piss takey.

What is this, candid fucking camera?

But at the same time,

uncomfortable makes you a little queasy.

At the climax of the film,

you purportedly see people physically harmed and tortured.

You think this woman is having a head shaved and she's being tattooed.

You think the guy's being for sure

stabbed in his torso.

It's done in a way that it's hard to believe it's not really going on.

But I can assure you it's fake.

Yes, they will never release this movie.

They don't need to because it'll be everywhere

all over the net.

It'll be passed on from computer to computer,

unstoppable.

I've seen all kinds of films,

and most people have seen films where for every standard that

anybody is aware of, it looks like someone was murdered.

Why risk killing somebody when you can make it look like you killed somebody?

And to the viewer who wants to believe this,

they're gonna believe it.

And yet, the possibilities opened up by internet and mobile technology

means there is less risk attached than ever in creating

snuff for real.

It now seems only a matter of time before a verified example

comes to light.

This is a theme that really doesn't seem to go away.

It works quite well as a plot in a horror movie.

But if such things really exist, who knows?

The possibilities of recording things on film is as extensive

as the human imagination is at its most perverse.

It's something about mankind that there are some people that

have the ability to do that to another human being,

to take their life.

I'm not suggesting that there has never been a snow film or

never will be a snow film.

Certainly, this is in the realm of possibility.

I wouldn't be surprised if there really is some kind of

sick perverted subculture that watches these films and

that the real thing probably is out there.

Although the existence of an underground snuff movie

industry is yet to be established,

the idea of it refuses to go away.

Unfounded allegations of snuff were first made against

mainstream cinema.

But now, it seems likely that an amateur filmmaker could be the one to

make a real snuff film.

The truth is that snuff is probably already out there.

We just haven't found it yet.

Tomorrow at five past eleven, the real animal farm.

The story behind a porn film that shocked a generation.

Next tonight, back to the late eighties for raves,

naughty nuns, secrets, and spies.

What the censors wanted banned in the UK.