Snuff (film)

Snuff is a 1976 splatter film, and is most notorious for being marketed as if it were an actual snuff film. This picture contributed to the urban legend of snuff films, although the concept did not originate with it.

Production

The film started out as a low-budget gore film titled Slaughter which was written and directed by the husband-and-wife grindhouse filmmaking team of Michael and Roberta Findlay. Filmed in Argentina in 1971 on a budget of $30,000, it depicted the actions of a Manson-esque murder cult, filmed mainly in silence due to the actors understanding very little English. The film financier Jack Bravman received an out-of-court settlement from AIP so the latter could use the title for the 1972 Jim Brown film of the same name. The Findlays' film enjoyed a very limited theatrical release.

Independent low-budget distributor and sometime producer Allan Shackleton took the film and shelved it for four years—but was inspired to release it with a new ending, unbeknownst to the original filmmakers, after reading a newspaper article in 1975 on the rumor of snuff films produced in South America and decided to cash in on the urban legend. He added a new ending, filmed in a vérité style by Simon Nuchtern, in which a woman is brutally murdered by a film crew, supposedly the crew of Slaughter. The new footage purportedly showed an actual murder, and was spliced onto the end of Slaughter with an abrupt cut suggesting that the footage was unplanned and the murder authentic. This new version of the film was released under the title Snuff, with the tagline "The film that could only be made in South America... where Life is CHEAP".

Snuff film

A snuff film is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as "a movie in a purported genre of movies in which an actor is actually murdered or commits suicide". It may include a motion picture genre that depicts the actual murder of a person or people, without the aid of special effects, for the express purpose of financial exploitation, but that detail is extraneous, so long as it is "circulated amongst a jaded few for the purpose of entertainment". Some filmed records of executions and murders exist but have not been released for commercial purposes.

History

The first recorded use of the term "snuff film" is in a 1971 book by Ed Sanders, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. He alleges that The Manson Family was involved in making such a film in California to record their murders.

The metaphorical use of the term "snuff" to denote killing appears to be derived from a verb for extinguishing a candle. The word has been used as such in English slang for hundreds of years. John Camden Hotten lists the term in the fifth edition of his Slang Dictionary in 1874 as a "term very common among the lower orders of London, meaning to die from disease or accident". The word is descended (via the Middle English "snuffen" or "snuppen") from the Old English "snithan", meaning to slaughter and dismember, from "snide", meaning to kill by cutting or stabbing, from "snid", to cut.

Snuff-Movie

Snuff-Movie is a 2005 gothic horror film by British director Bernard Rose. It stars Jeroen Krabbé as a horror film maker named Boris Arkadin, whose pregnant wife, Mary, was brutally murdered by a Manson-like gang of hippy psychopaths during the 1960s...or was she? An eccentric recluse, Boris makes a come-back when he invites some actors to a large mansion in the English countryside to 'audition' for his new film. But unknown to most of them they are being filmed by hidden cameras linked to a 'snuff' website.

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