The film titled “Snuff”, mentioned in the column, most certainly wasn’t the way the concept entered the public consciousness, but a brazen and cheesy attempt to cash in on a thing that was already floating around.
Where that idea came from I don’t know, but I do remember the release of “Snuff” being announced, amid much hand wringing by the guardians of taste and propriety that some money grubbing producer would sink so low as to try and exploit this sick meme (though they didn’t have memes or even urban legends back then).
The movie came out, the few who saw it cried fake, and that was that.
He might mean that the terms weren’t in use in 1970. That’s true. Meme in the modern sense was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 and urban legend started being used around 1980.
I don’t doubt that some saw it that way. But well into the 1980s, there was the conviction in certain circles that snuff films existed. That 1993 column by Cecil was an important debunker years (ok 2 years) before snopes.com existed.
From Cecil’s column: Many people are convinced snuff films are real, possibly because it suits their ideological bent. For example, in her book Feminism Unmodified, feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon says flatly that snuff films exist. But when I asked her to elaborate she declined, and indeed was quite mysterious about the whole thing. She just knew. Feminism Unmodified was published in 1988 and was based upon lectures that the author had been giving for years. IIRC, she maintained that while there was a fake snuff film that existed during the 1970s, snuff films actually did exist. MacKinnon did decent business on the lecture circuit so the urban legend had wide currency, nonexistent evidence notwithstanding.
I wasn’t remarking on the belief or non-belief in the existence of snuff films, then or now, I merely meant to say the term was already in the public domain by the time someone thought to put out an actual film with the too-obvious title “Snuff”.
I wish I could remember where or how I first heard the expression “snuff film”. I don’t think it was one of those junior high school rumors, but something I saw in print. Wikipedia claims it first appeared in The Family by Ed Sanders, about the Manson brood, which might be technically true but as used in the book doesn’t really describe something made for distribution to paying customers.
It might have been in some news magazine, maybe a crime story, which could explain how it popped into the public discourse quickly enough to attract the notice of a fast-buck artist.
Bill Ellis, the folklorist Cecil quoted, got the year of Snuff’s release wrong. It was 1976, not 1970.
That makes much more sense, since a search of Google Books doesn’t gave any confirmable hits before that year. (Google has a well-known problem of indexing magazine archives by the first year in that series, so a 1975 date may actually refer to a 1976 article whose actual date is not revealed in snippet mode.) The ones I checked were all later and made mention of the film titled Snuff.
Sanders says in a later edition of The Family that he coined the phrase “snuff film,” although he had heard rumors about the existence of such films earlier, never confirmed. He uses the word snuff probably dozens of times, but almost always in a more general usage conveying death, as in the older “snuff out a candle.” Manson had a Snuff Squad and wanted to make a movie called Easy Snuff and this and that.
It could be that his extensive use of snuff as death was picked up when death film became snuff film. But I see no evidence at all that the term was in use before *Snuff *the movie in 1976. That’s not proof it wasn’t - that type of slang often takes time to be recorded. I’d still need better evidence than a memory.
Fair enough. As memories go, mine can be spotty but also quite faithful to small details from long ago. And I have a distinct recollection of an eye-rolling moment when I heard there was a film titled “Snuff”, and thinking “great, someone knows an opportunity when they see one”.
I can believe that Ed Sanders might have coined the phrase, he was fond of using hipster jive and surely “snuff”, meaning kill, goes back a ways. If he’d heard rumors about an underground market for movies with real murders in them, and gave the phenomenon a name, he deserves some credit.
But further research is called for.
snopes.com has a longer treatment, and discusses Sanders’ encounter with the term during an interview with a former Manson member. This was during the 1969-1971 period. Snuff Films | Snopes.com
Ted McIlvenny, director of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and caretaker of what’s probably the world’s largest collection of sex movies — 289,000 films and 100,000 videos — says that in his 25 years of following the porn business he’s seen exactly three films in which someone was killed on camera.*
Imagine watching 389,000 films — many of which would have the same plot — !
I read what Snopes has to say. I can’t agree with their broad definition of what makes a film a snuff film, in particular their outright dismissal of a profit motive on the part of its makers being a necessary element. At least as the public first came to understand it, that’s one thing that made the concept so horrible: “nothing personal, we’re just out to make a buck”.
I am not disputing that no such footage has ever come to light. What fascinated people was the possibility that it could be true, even though when you think about it you realize that being involved in such an enterprise would be quite risky.
Snopes like Cecil cites “Snuff” the movie as being the vehicle that launched this idea into the national consciousness; I think that movie was late to the clambake. I was there, and believe the last word on this has yet to be written.
In the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk, two teens killed and videotaped 21 murders and cited their motive as “wanting to sell the videos in America for $100,000 USD”.
This the TRUE definition of a snuff film, and video later appeared on websites and file sharing sites (Please, for your own sake DO NOT WATCH – IT IS REAL).
Another (yet looser) definition of a true snuff film is the one cannibal Luca Magnotta posted online.
IMO, both of these prove snuff is more than an urban legend – I’ve seen the first one and really, really wish I hadn’t.
Every definition of a snuff film rules out psychopathic nutcases filming themselves.
In addition, your own cites provide zero evidence of commercialism. The Wikipedia cite on the DMs give nothing more than secondhand speculation that they were doing the filming for any reason other than their own amusement. The page on Luca says he posted a video to the Internet. That is precisely the opposite of a snuff film made for underground sale.
Neither Free Online Dictionary, Dictionary.com or the Oxford dictionary makes any mention of the mental state of the makers of snuff films. It would be passing strange, in fact, for anyone other than a psychopath to commit such a cold act.
In addition none of those dictionaries mention in their definitions that the film needs to be made for a profit.
a) people make money with films from mobile phones, you don’t need a studio, lighting and technicians.
b) you don’t just have to make money by selling the film. Websites that host a video for free make money from the ad impressions, or from subscriptions or other monetization.
The DM’s uploaded a video of a real murder, it ended up on websites that made money off it (indirectly). We have quotes that there motivation was to sell videos, they just got caught before they could.
I think it’s the most common definition of a snuff film. The idea is that somebody is killing people and filming the murders because there is a market for that type of film.
Nobody’s disputing that some murders have been recorded. But I think all of these murders were performed for the “normal” reasons. The filming was just incidental.
There is a market for it, but your definition rules out anyone that produces a snuff film if they would have killed anyway. You seem to be claiming “its only a true snuff film if the SOLE AND ONLY PURPOSE for killing was to sell the film for money”.
Well it doesn’t work that way, guess what, people that would film a killing and try and sell it for money also tend to be disturbed and have other motivations for killing. If a real murder ends up on the internet, and it was filmed with the intention of selling it for money its a snuff film.
It doesn’t matter what other motivations the killer had for killing, the end product is the same: a film of a real murder that was filmed with the intention of financial gain.