Way back when I was in college for my first stint there were rumors, scuttlebutt, college lore about a video that had been made by Trent Reznor and associates and distributed to his closest friends. One of these was bootlegged and it made its way as all things do onto the Internet. Other sensational rumors abounded, the most infamous of which was that it was a snuff film.
Well, as it turned out, such a film exists, made by Reznor and Peter Christopherson of Coil and Hypgnosis. Back then the Internet was new and slow and computers were expensive so you had to really want it to watch it or have a friend with a 16th generation copy of a copy on VHS. I had forgotten about it for years, but tonight I was listening to The Downward Spiral and Broken and I was reminded of it so I searched for it.
Jesus Christ. Why did I do that? In retrospect, the description of it was enough. I know I’m a wimp, but curiosity got the best of me once again and now I can’t unsee it. I knew Trent Reznor was messed up, his music speaks volumes, but damn. No, it’s not a snuff film (since they don’t actually exist), but it’s so graphically violent that I need to bleach my brain now.
Some things are best left as the legends they are.
TLDR- I watched something I had always heard about and now wish I hadn’t. If you have the stomach for it knock yourself out. I’m not ashamed of my lack of tolerance for ghoulishness, so have at it and report back. I won’t link it, but it’s not hard to find, unlike the old days when it was impossible to find. The good, sane old days. Like 10 minutes ago for me.
Hmm, it looks like Reznor accuses Gibby Haynes of the VHS leak. He’s the same man who’s shown me 60s era TxDoT “Death on the Blacktop” films over his show, so I’d buy it. He’s got odd tastes.
Am I gonna seek this thing out? Nah, I learned a long time ago that I can’t un-see anything. Real or make-believe, if I’m gonna watch horrors, I’m going to have to enter it knowing that I’ll learn something else other than “humans suffer”. You can get that from World at War in a more deep and meaningful way, IMHO.
ETA: Due to my exposure to things like the Surfers, World at War, and other stuff. I’d have to amend that to say “humans suffer in a magnificent way you haven’t seen before”. And not in the crazy fantasy land of say, human centipedes. Cambodia is terrifying enough to get the point across for me.
Is that the black and white video where the guy is attached to the weird torture machine thing that grinds him up at the end or is it a different video?
If that’s what this film is then the OP should avoid the movie Strangeland at all costs. I stumbled upon it on cable one late night, as one does when one is suffering a bout of insomnia. Thought I fell asleep and was having a fever dream but no, it was a real movie.
Written by and starring Dee Snider-- talk about human suffering and serial killers-- throw is some body horror, mutilation and WTF!!!ism and that’s Dee’s movie in a nutshell. A nutty, nutty shell.
I remember when I sought out and watched the clip of R Budd Dwyer committing suicide and really wished I didn’t. A description doesn’t do it justice because it doesn’t sound bad but it is awful to see the life leave someone. I hated seeing it. Similarly I listened to audio of someone who was on the phone in one of the towers on 9/11 when the tower fell. I regretted that as well.
Did some channels used to run ads for videos like Faces of Death…but real as fuck? Faces of Death is mostly fake. But these ads would show things like the (probably) infamous clip of a little kid pulling away from his Japanese fathers hand and running smack into the path of a bullet train. And the video in the ad would cut right before the impact.
What I’m asking is…did I imagine that ads for these videos actually ran on cable channels?? That these were dvds you could actually order?
