So, Luka Magnotta - Canada’s latest sicko, made a film of himself raping and murdering Justin Lin. He then uploaded the video onto the internet for all to see.
So, is this a snuff film? I suppose dude was giving it away, as opposed to selling it; however, it seems that ‘entertaining’ a mass audience and gaining fame and fortune was Magnotta’s point in creating this abomination.
So, is it time for Cecil to add an addendum to his column?
Many murderers have filmed their crimes, but none of them qualify as a snuff film. By definition, a snuff film is a staged murder intended for sale to a public. It’s not a do-it-yourself project.
Twenty years after Cecil’s column it’s still true that no authenticated snuff film has turned up. The snuff film page at Wikipedia includes this:
That sounds more like prosecutors going for publicity than a true snuff film. This article contains the usual glurge about international markets but includes no proof whatsoever.
I do know the definition of a snuff film that is used in Cecil’s column; however, this film clearly was distributed to a wide audience.
I believe it is still available on some secondary sites should one be inclined to find it. Based on early reports, Luka Magnotta staged the entire thing in order to gain fame, going so far as to create his own Wikipedia page and edit it to include absurd details about himself and the film.
While I know that many killers have filmed the murders they commit, I think Magnotta was the first one to actively try to promote the thing. Also, I will note that some of our very own readers of this site have indicated that they’ve hunted down the film to view so the suggestion that there’s no international market for this kind of garbage is a bit thin.
People have a vast interest in morbid pictures. Running photos of executions or of celebrities in coffins always were guaranteed circulation boosters. These days posting a gruesome video to the internet serves the same purpose.
That is absolutely not the same thing as an international market for well-lit, properly composed, and expertly edited films set up by underworld sleazoids to be sold at outrageously high prices to other sleazoids.
My opinion is that one is obvious and ubiquitous and the other is imaginary. Magnotta doesn’t change that an iota.
It’s bizarre that “well lit, properly composed expertly edited” is used as a criteria for a snuff film. Nowadays you can make a video of a high standard with a $300 camera, a couple of lights from a DIY store and edit it on a $600 computer. Somehow I think that the hypothetical audience of a snuff film is not going to care about the lighting / composition or editing quality.
If it shows someone in a staged real life killing and its spread deliberately, either for infamy or money, then it’s a snuff film.
If you like. My opinion remains that this changes the old meaning of “snuff film” out of recognition and allows in material that the old definition specifically excluded.
That’s just an opinion. There’s no official sanctioning body on snuff.
IMO Cecil’s original column answers the question “is there a snuff film industry”. No there isn’t, but to say there has never been a snuff film he has to indulge in what seems to be a “no true scotsman” argument.
Why should home videos of psychopaths or murderers be excluded? As long as they deliberately spread them and don’t just keep them as private then it quacks enough like a snuff film to me.
Because the entire conversation used to be about the industry. That’s what motivated the question, that’s what defined the question, that’s what outraged people about the question. Gruesomeness from a murderer? Ancient news, literally. But an organized for-profit industry of murdering people? That was different.
If you punt the whole topic back to murderers being nasty people, then why even bother to discuss it? We all agree on that. Make it an industry and you have something.
And that’s why home videos are excluded. It’s like asking why fossils are special and bones aren’t.
This seems like a silly argument - the column of Cecil’s is 20 years old, before Al Gore invented the internet. Obviously the porn industry has changed in the last 20 years and perhaps the answer to the question
needs to be revisited. The film that was made in this instance was not made for the killer’s private stash of wank material - it was specifically made to be distributed to a wide audience for the purpose of gaining fame and infamy. The ‘plot’ if you will, was crafted after Basic Instinct, for Pete’s sake.
I don’t know how someone kidnapping, raping, and murdering someone on film for the express purpose of distributing it to as wide an audience as possible CAN’T be considered a snuff film.
One last time, and I quit. The difference has always been between a psychopath intent on notoriety and coldly rational businessmen hiring other people to do their murders to make a profit. That’s a huge difference and it remains a huge difference.
It’s interesting that this same problem appears in the thread on perpetual motion. People see the word motion in the term and get hung up on it, even though the basic definition of the term requires not motion but the ability to extract useful work out of the system. The word “work” doesn’t appear and so people lose sight of its criticality. You’re getting hung up on the meaning on the words that do appear in the term “snuff film” but are ignoring that the basic definition requires the separation of maker and killer because that’s not in the words. It’s possible to have continual movement; “perpetual motion” is impossible. Films of murders are known; the hiring of indifferent killers to make a profit by creating staged “snuff films” is not.
It’s the basic definition of the term. It may change from misuse, as have tens of thousands of other terms in English. I don’t think it has yet, and I personally don’t like to see it used in that new sense. If it does, then the new term will be applied to whatever murders the new sense happens to include. It’s not right or wrong; it’s usage, which is agree or disagree.
Again you are answering the question is there a snuff film industry, not the question that Cecil’s column is titled “is there such a thing as a snuff film”. Even then, a single person business is still a business, thats called a sole trader.
So serial killers are the sole traders of the snuff film industry. And yeah, there is such a thing as snuff films.
I agree with alice and coremelt.
Snopes agrees as well:
Link here: Snuff Films | Snopes.com
Note that the rumor is listed as being false but with this caveat:
Magnotta is apparently that foolhardy.
No, and not for the reasons given. Magnotta did not have the actual murder of Lin in his edited version of the film he uploaded to the Net. Otherwise, it would have been a genuine snuff film. Profit and “indifferent” killers are hardly worthy points of debate if you have film of real sexualized murder that has been distributed to an audience.
The concept of a snuff film industry will always be myth. The money isn’t there. A snuff film, however, probably has already been created or at least will be created eventually. Magnotta’s video is a step toward that final destination.