Video Nasty #20
THE PICTURE THEY SAID COULD NEVER BE SHOWN...
Snuff
1976
THE BLOODIEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED IN FRONT OF A CAMERA!!
THE FILM THAT COULD ONLY BE MADE IN SOUTH AMERICA...WHERE LIFE IS CHEAP!
Original Film: The Slaughter (1971)
NTSC Runtime: The Slaughter - 74:19; Snuff - 5:33. Total NTSC Runtime: 79:52
The Slaughter
Written and Directed by Michael Findlay
Produced by Jack Bravman
Cinematography by Roberta Findlay
Starring: Mirtha Massa, Clao Villanueva, Enrique Larratelli, Aldo Mayo, Margarita Amuchastegui
Snuff
Directed by Simon Nuchtern
Produced by Allan Shackleton
Body Count: The Slaughter - 15; Snuff - 1. Total Body Count: 16
US Availability: Uncut Region 0 DVD from Blue Underground.
BBFC Status
Why it's a Nasty: Gore. And hype. Lots and lots of hype.
What was cut: No cuts, though the film was banned as a Nasty.
Current UK status: The uncut version of Snuff was awarded an 18 certificate on May 22, 2003...although the film has yet to see an "official" UK release.
UK Availability: Uncut Region 0 DVD from Blue Underground.
Snuff was successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, making it one of the DPP39.
Snuff was successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, making it one of the DPP39.
Confused by the credits up there? Good. You should be, or Snuff isn't doing its' job. I would like to note that all of the footage in the trailer above is from The Slaughter, not Snuff.
Most of us have heard the urban legend of the "snuff film" by now. If you haven't, it's pretty simple: a "snuff film" is a genuine murder perpetrated on camera for the explicit purpose of making money off of the film. No such film has ever turned up, anywhere, ever. Yes, death has been captured on film before, be it historical records of executions (Saddam Hussein, for example), accidental (news footage of 9/11, the Zapruder film), a private record of a monster's crimes (Russell Williams), or televised suicide (Christine Chubbuck, R. Budd Dwyer). But as a for-profit filmmaking venture, the snuff film does not exist. It's great as a plot device for horror and thriller films, but the reality is that it just wouldn't be worth the trouble. It's easier (and also, legal) to just make pornography. Snuff films do not exist. But if that's the case, why is the myth so persistent?
It all starts with this film.
In 1971, Michael and Roberta Findlay, a husband/wife filmmaking team headed down to Argentina and shot a cheap movie loosely based on the Manson Family murders. Titled The Slaughter, it's a cheapjack ($30,000) flick that doesn't have much going for it. The murders are poorly done, mostly gunshots and stabbings with minimal gore. There is some nudity and minimal sex, but if the measurement of success in cinematic sex is the stimulation of the viewer, then the sexual scenes of The Slaughter are failures. (Interestingly, my wife was listening without watching when I began the film and thought that the opening sequence of violence was pornography based on the sound. If you take a look at Michael Findlay's filmography, he specialized in "roughies", an early exploitation genre that emphasized violence during, and sometimes replacing, sex..) The Slaughter had a very small theatrical run (something like three theatres played it), and is a disjointed and poorly written mess (although the cinematography is good), with many of the trademarks of low-budget films: no on-location soundtrack, shoddy editing and acting, terrible special effects, and overuse of "event" footage because a) they had it, and b) it pads the running time (in this case, the event is carnivale), a technique that reached it's zenith (or nadir) in another Nasty, Bruno Mattei's Zombie Creeping Flesh.
In specifics, The Slaughter is about a cult leader called Satan (pronounced "suh-TAHN") and his four-girl army of killers. They want to kill the child of a German rich kid named Horst for reasons that are never explained. It's just an excuse to have them kill a pregnant woman because that's what the Manson Family did. The Slaughter ends with an attack on Horst's mansion by Satan's girls.
In specifics, The Slaughter is about a cult leader called Satan (pronounced "suh-TAHN") and his four-girl army of killers. They want to kill the child of a German rich kid named Horst for reasons that are never explained. It's just an excuse to have them kill a pregnant woman because that's what the Manson Family did. The Slaughter ends with an attack on Horst's mansion by Satan's girls.
At least, I think it does. I've never seen the end of it, and no one seems to recall what happens after Angelica (Margarita Amuchastegui) stabs the pregnant belly of Terri (Mirtha Massa) in the original cut of the film. Just how does it end? (Seriously, if anyone out there has the skinny on that, shout it out in the comments down there, I would really love to know.)
The reason we don't know (and the reason we're even talking about this at all) is due to yet another unscrupulous distributor, in this case a guy named Allan Shackleton. Time for a bit of history.
In the early days of cinema, "personal hygiene" films traveled the American landscape. Kroger Babb went across country with sensationalized melodramas like Mom And Dad and She Shoulda Said "No!". Shown to sexually segregated audiences under the guise of "educational films", each screening was presented by "Elliot Forbes", who gave lectures to the audience about STDs (in the case of Mom And Dad), or whatever evil menace the films were demonizing, selling printed matter on the subject to the audience to boot. This was before there was a television in every home, everyone in town saw these things. And it wasn't one town at a time, either. There'd be dozens of towns in different areas featuring the show at once, each with its' own "Elliot Forbes" (with the exception of theatres in predominantly black neighborhoods. In that case, you got Jesse Owens. I'm not kidding, it really was Olympic runner Jesse Owens). Admissions were twenty-five cents, with the informative brochures sold at the shows going for another fifty cents. The total take per town per week sometimes went as high as $32,000. You do the math. Babb made a mint.
Mom And Dad is a film about the dangers of not giving your children proper sex education. It's a melodrama about the dangers of unprotected sex, like teen pregnancy and venereal disease...which was an excuse to show footage of a birth and disease-ridden sexual organs. The film was wildly successful and did huge business. It was a gimmick, designed to "exploit" the unique material the film presented. Voila! Exploitation film was born. (Mom And Dad was not the first such film...but it was the most successful, eventually taking somewhere in the neighbourhood of $100,000,000 over its' 30-year run through theatres and drive-ins.)
The "personal hygiene" film eventually gave way to burlesque films, nudie-cuties, roughies, and so on. A producer named David F. Friedman got his start playing "Elliot Forbes" with a traveling Mom And Dad show. He went on to make (you guessed it) exploitation films, teaming up on several occasions with Herschell Gordon Lewis. Friedman's name is on two Nasties: Blood Feast and Love Camp 7, both as producer and actor, and he came out of retirement to re-team with Lewis in the early 21st century to exploit (there's that word again) nostalgia for their early gore films with some new sequels to both Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs (although they sadly did not revisit their nudie-cutie days and resurrect Lucky Pierre). Friedman is often quoted as saying "Sell the sizzle, not the steak", meaning that success in the world of exploitation films meant that most of the work was done before anyone saw the film being promoted.
Allan Shackleton knew what Friedman did: That what is actually in the film doesn't matter as much as what you make people think is in the film. It is that "carnival barker" mentality that has produced some of the most memorable exploitation movies of all time, and Shackleton gave Snuff a place in that pantheon.
Shackleton had acquired the rights to The Slaughter through his Monarch Distribution company. But he didn't know what to do with it...until a naive acquaintance mentioned the film and mistook it for something it wasn't: genuine. Shackleton played up the idea, though he never came right out and said anything in the picture was real. He started putting out press releases, promoting his acquisition as a bona-fide South American atrocity (remember, the Findlay's shot The Slaughter in Argentina with local talent). Michael Findlay got wise to Shackleton right away, recognizing the film the distributor was alluding to was his own. After nearly blowing the secret in an interview, Shackleton paid Findlay to keep quiet and kept promoting. He hired director Simon Nuchtern to shoot a fake murder that would appear to be genuine, then tacked it on to the end of The Slaughter, removed all credits aside from the opening title card, and retitled the whole thing as Snuff. (Please note, if you have not already, that I do not consider this one film, but two, and when I refer to Snuff I am discussing only the fake murder footage shot at Shackleton's behest.)
Shot in 1975 over the course of one afternoon in Carter Stevens' porn studio for $10,000 (a third of The Slaughter's entire budget), Snuff shows what purports to be the crew of The Slaughter finishing up for the day. The "director" and a female crew member start whispering about how the gory scene they just shot turned them on. He suggests they have sex on one of the beds and she (as only a woman in a 1970s exploitation film would) agrees, as long as the others are leaving. The crew instead keeps filming, the "director" produces a knife, and the woman is killed in a brutally gory fashion. But my (nor any) description will not replace the actual experience of seeing if for yourself. So click the link below. It leads to a very informative discussion of the sequence (referred to in that article as "The Snuff Coda"), particularly regarding the female crewmember who is helping with the murder. It also contains Snuff in its' entirety. I urge you to click the link and see the film. Snuff is the real attraction, and I offer it here so that you may satisfy your curiosity without having to sit through The Slaughter to see it. After all, this is why we bought our tickets, right?
Snuff
The first 11 seconds of that clip is the last bit of The Slaughter that we see, the remaining 5:33 is the whole of Snuff. As you can see, it is obviously faked. Not only is it easy to see past the illusion of the effects, but any genuine snuff film would have to be done in one take, which this is not. Multiple camera angles and cuts belie the truth: this is a staged event done with a realistic flavor. But that doesn't matter. Shackleton's work was done. The film was released to a furor of protest, first from planted picketers paid by Shackleton, then from genuinely outraged citizens who didn't stop to realize that if the film was indeed real it wouldn't be shown in commercial theatres. (But hey, it was the 70s, they were probably to high on coke to do much thinking anyway.) The film made money, became notorious, and cemented the notion that sleazebags with cameras will kill innocent girls for black market profit.
And that's how you create an urban legend. 35 years later, people still think such films exist. Show Snuff to a friend. See if you can make them think it's real. Be your own exploitation producer and keep the game alive. Sell the sizzle, not the steak.
It's been lovely spending time with you again. I hope you are happy, safe, and well. And even though we're sure these movies aren't real, I'd still avoid balding guys in "VIDA ES MUERTE" t-shirts. Best to be on the safe side. And that's advice I'll follow. Because my name's Justin. JustinCase.
The reason we don't know (and the reason we're even talking about this at all) is due to yet another unscrupulous distributor, in this case a guy named Allan Shackleton. Time for a bit of history.
In the early days of cinema, "personal hygiene" films traveled the American landscape. Kroger Babb went across country with sensationalized melodramas like Mom And Dad and She Shoulda Said "No!". Shown to sexually segregated audiences under the guise of "educational films", each screening was presented by "Elliot Forbes", who gave lectures to the audience about STDs (in the case of Mom And Dad), or whatever evil menace the films were demonizing, selling printed matter on the subject to the audience to boot. This was before there was a television in every home, everyone in town saw these things. And it wasn't one town at a time, either. There'd be dozens of towns in different areas featuring the show at once, each with its' own "Elliot Forbes" (with the exception of theatres in predominantly black neighborhoods. In that case, you got Jesse Owens. I'm not kidding, it really was Olympic runner Jesse Owens). Admissions were twenty-five cents, with the informative brochures sold at the shows going for another fifty cents. The total take per town per week sometimes went as high as $32,000. You do the math. Babb made a mint.
Mom And Dad is a film about the dangers of not giving your children proper sex education. It's a melodrama about the dangers of unprotected sex, like teen pregnancy and venereal disease...which was an excuse to show footage of a birth and disease-ridden sexual organs. The film was wildly successful and did huge business. It was a gimmick, designed to "exploit" the unique material the film presented. Voila! Exploitation film was born. (Mom And Dad was not the first such film...but it was the most successful, eventually taking somewhere in the neighbourhood of $100,000,000 over its' 30-year run through theatres and drive-ins.)
The "personal hygiene" film eventually gave way to burlesque films, nudie-cuties, roughies, and so on. A producer named David F. Friedman got his start playing "Elliot Forbes" with a traveling Mom And Dad show. He went on to make (you guessed it) exploitation films, teaming up on several occasions with Herschell Gordon Lewis. Friedman's name is on two Nasties: Blood Feast and Love Camp 7, both as producer and actor, and he came out of retirement to re-team with Lewis in the early 21st century to exploit (there's that word again) nostalgia for their early gore films with some new sequels to both Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs (although they sadly did not revisit their nudie-cutie days and resurrect Lucky Pierre). Friedman is often quoted as saying "Sell the sizzle, not the steak", meaning that success in the world of exploitation films meant that most of the work was done before anyone saw the film being promoted.
Allan Shackleton knew what Friedman did: That what is actually in the film doesn't matter as much as what you make people think is in the film. It is that "carnival barker" mentality that has produced some of the most memorable exploitation movies of all time, and Shackleton gave Snuff a place in that pantheon.
Shackleton had acquired the rights to The Slaughter through his Monarch Distribution company. But he didn't know what to do with it...until a naive acquaintance mentioned the film and mistook it for something it wasn't: genuine. Shackleton played up the idea, though he never came right out and said anything in the picture was real. He started putting out press releases, promoting his acquisition as a bona-fide South American atrocity (remember, the Findlay's shot The Slaughter in Argentina with local talent). Michael Findlay got wise to Shackleton right away, recognizing the film the distributor was alluding to was his own. After nearly blowing the secret in an interview, Shackleton paid Findlay to keep quiet and kept promoting. He hired director Simon Nuchtern to shoot a fake murder that would appear to be genuine, then tacked it on to the end of The Slaughter, removed all credits aside from the opening title card, and retitled the whole thing as Snuff. (Please note, if you have not already, that I do not consider this one film, but two, and when I refer to Snuff I am discussing only the fake murder footage shot at Shackleton's behest.)
Shot in 1975 over the course of one afternoon in Carter Stevens' porn studio for $10,000 (a third of The Slaughter's entire budget), Snuff shows what purports to be the crew of The Slaughter finishing up for the day. The "director" and a female crew member start whispering about how the gory scene they just shot turned them on. He suggests they have sex on one of the beds and she (as only a woman in a 1970s exploitation film would) agrees, as long as the others are leaving. The crew instead keeps filming, the "director" produces a knife, and the woman is killed in a brutally gory fashion. But my (nor any) description will not replace the actual experience of seeing if for yourself. So click the link below. It leads to a very informative discussion of the sequence (referred to in that article as "The Snuff Coda"), particularly regarding the female crewmember who is helping with the murder. It also contains Snuff in its' entirety. I urge you to click the link and see the film. Snuff is the real attraction, and I offer it here so that you may satisfy your curiosity without having to sit through The Slaughter to see it. After all, this is why we bought our tickets, right?
Snuff
The first 11 seconds of that clip is the last bit of The Slaughter that we see, the remaining 5:33 is the whole of Snuff. As you can see, it is obviously faked. Not only is it easy to see past the illusion of the effects, but any genuine snuff film would have to be done in one take, which this is not. Multiple camera angles and cuts belie the truth: this is a staged event done with a realistic flavor. But that doesn't matter. Shackleton's work was done. The film was released to a furor of protest, first from planted picketers paid by Shackleton, then from genuinely outraged citizens who didn't stop to realize that if the film was indeed real it wouldn't be shown in commercial theatres. (But hey, it was the 70s, they were probably to high on coke to do much thinking anyway.) The film made money, became notorious, and cemented the notion that sleazebags with cameras will kill innocent girls for black market profit.
And that's how you create an urban legend. 35 years later, people still think such films exist. Show Snuff to a friend. See if you can make them think it's real. Be your own exploitation producer and keep the game alive. Sell the sizzle, not the steak.
It's been lovely spending time with you again. I hope you are happy, safe, and well. And even though we're sure these movies aren't real, I'd still avoid balding guys in "VIDA ES MUERTE" t-shirts. Best to be on the safe side. And that's advice I'll follow. Because my name's Justin. JustinCase.
