You are correct about tapes of people dying out there. Many of which are on the web.
The point is that many people often get concerned about presence of snuff films and the people who make them. Some people get the impression that they are not uncommon. That they are part of various cult rituals, etc. Some people have suggested that organizations like the FBI and Scotland Yard divert more resources towards catching the people who make snuff films. Both organizations have had to make statements to the fact that there has been never evidence of snuff films being made.
It is very possible that a snuff film might be found one day, but it is not considered an ongoing problem. This is why the distinction between “snuff film” and “some guy dying on tape” is important.
Gypsy: Tom, I don’t get you. Tom Servo: Nobody does. I’m the wind, baby.
Alphagene is the voice of rationality here. I will give $1000 to anyone who shows up at my apartment with a real snuff film and pops it in my video player. And by a real snuff film, I mean a film in which a victim was tortured to death, whether sexually or not, as part of the plot of the movie. I do not mean a “Faces of Death” type video in which executions, suicides, or accidents are collected on film. Also, I do not mean one of the fakes which Cecil, among others, has exposed.
I will, of course, turn over anyone who shows up at my apartment with a real snuff film to the police.
Alpha is right. Snuff movies are a macabre urban legend.
I believe it is not so much laws explicitly (ha) forbidding “hard” S/M combined with “hard” sex, but rather a function of the “community standard” criterion for obscenity cases in US courts, combined with some of the, shall we call it, “ethical correctness” that you mention.
Apparently there were enough jurisdictions where hard-SM+sex flicks could eb successfully prosecuted as “obscene” by local courts, that it became clear to the pornmeisters which was the path to lower legal costs. And the industry won’t bother making product with a 50/50 chance that it will send their distributors and retailers to jail. This apparently also affected a series of things that used to be depicted in X-flicks up to the early 80’s suddenly disappeared from the screen [and from the home-video versions] such as “watersports” and fisting.
A combination of right- and left-wing “sensitivities”, including a spreading mythology about mainstream porno being a cause of rape, child abuse, etc., helped further, as prosecutors on the one hand wielded these arguments before hometown juries, and the industry itself on the other hand, afraid of Meese Commission crackdowns and desperate for some degree of social respectability, began dropping such contents as pseudo-“rape” scenes, “incest” plots, and portrayals of characters as “teenagers”.
This last one WAS eventually actually outlawed. Later overturned in court, still on appeals last I heard.
The bottom line is that porno filmmakers are primarily businessmen not artists. They’re content to sell essentially the same product over and over again as long as the market exists. Why should they rock the boat by introducing new elements like S&M and take the risk of either losing sales or, worse yet, causing new restrictions to be placed on their business? Even if you had an auteur who wanted to be the porno equivalent of Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino and introduce violence for “art’s sake” he would probably be unable to find financing among the conservative money men of the industry.