I’m questioning your assertion that there’s a real market for it. Has there ever been a situation where somebody got paid for making a snuff video?
I’m not talking about situations where people took videos they didn’t make and then began selling them.
You don’t think there’s a market out there for films of people being killed? You clearly have a particularly rosy-eyed view of the world. Trust me, there’s a market, as indeed there is for every perversion under the sun.
We’re using different definitions here, by your definition it would only be a snuff film if there was an actual industry out there offering sums of money for films.
I’m just claiming that if a film was made with the belief that it could be sold for financial gain it qualifies as a snuff film. The Dnepropetrovsk maniacs were quoted as believing that they could sell a film for money, they may have been deluded or been lied to, but its claimed that was one of their motivations for making the film.
I want to film various people using ask Skoal, Copenhagen, Kodiak and the like. I’ll then market my snuff film. Profit.
Here is Cecil’s definition of snuff films:
He specifically disallows news footage or other personal films that record accidental deaths, deaths recorded for personal and not commercial purposes, filmed executions, films by psychopaths of their killings, and realistic-looking but fake killings. What the “real” definition of a snuff film happens to be is irrelevant to whether Cecil is correct or not in that article. When someone carefully specifies what a term means, you can’t offer an example that doesn’t fit his specification and claim to have disproved him. You can say that his definition isn’t useful, but that’s a different matter.
The reason that snuff films became a meme for depravity was not because of a person being murdered - even the most blase public is all too inured to that - but because the murder was done dispassionately for profit, and the existence of an established ring of wealthy sadists who ordered up these films and viewed them regularly. In short, it’s pornography, which can be defined as the glamorization of depravity.
There’s a close parallel to this in another persistent theme of pornography, in which young women are kidnapped by or sold to academies that teach them to be sexual slaves who upon graduation are sold at auction to a cabal of wealthy sadists. No evidence of such a school or ring has ever been found, and the real world provides abundant proof that the rich can find any number of willing young women volunteering for their pleasure.
As soon as you take away those elements you have something that’s so everyday and ordinary that the very purpose of the horror is all but lost in the sordidness of reality. Yes, the proliferation of cameras have made it easier to film one’s own actions and the distribution is correspondingly trivial. Yes, murder is still a horror and the victims are no better off. Yes, sexual trafficking is a worldwide infestation. None of these are glamorized for profit. That’s a totally unnecessary expense.
People want to believe that the very rich are different from you and me. Their wealth can buy them not just luxuries but perversions that we can’t indulge in but can only imagine. Snuff films are not about murderers: they are about the rich who purchase them. That’s why any definition that removes the buyers defeats itself. It shows total ignorance of the subject in question.
One might argue that there’s a counterexample right in front of the world’s nose.
Then every single definition I’ve found is wrong and you are the world’s expert! :eek:
Incidently you no longer have to be rich to view snuff films. They are available on the internet. That says something about human nature.
I will concede that you are correct IF we allow you to use your own personal definition of what a snuff film is. But the only reference I can even find to profiting from snuff films is at Wiki and they only mention it secondary to the entertainment value.
Here’s the well-respected Oxford’s definition:
snuff film
noun
• informal
A pornographic movie of an actual murder.
I’ll ask again. What definition are you citing?
Missed my edit window. Internet technology has literally changed the definition of the snuff film.
Yep. Almost exactly on the nose. Except for the not being an academy of teaching them to be sexual slaves. And not having flithy rich clients. And not being secret. And…
Words and phrases change meaning. Happens all the time. Some people adopt them earlier than others and some people fight to keep definitions because they are so useful. I’m for change in some instances and against change in others.
In this instance, I feel your changed definition removes all meaning and purpose from the phrase and makes it impossible to understand why it ever appeared in the first place. My objection is noted and in the record. We’ll see what happens from here.
Sneezing porn exists. NSFW. Google it at your own risk.
Argh! Naked boogers.
This debate is starting to have a “no true Scotsman” feel.
As for the ‘sex academy’ trope, no, there aren’t sumptuous “Story of O”-type schools training slaves for rich men. But there is sex trafficking, and pedophile rings who pass around children; no mansion, but substantially the same thing.
Sigh. No. That’s my point. They are not remotely the same thing. Sordid reality is not the same as pornographic fantasy. The gulf is absolutely enormous and the distinction is absolutely critical.
We’re not talking about our personal definition. We’re talking about the definition that Cecil specified in his column. A snuff film, according to his definition, has to be commercial. The OP says that he found this film on the Internet. Then it’s not commercial. Nobody is making any money from it. Obviously, any column written in 1993 didn’t know much about the Internet and nothing about YouTube or any other free video-sharing website. You’re free to define the term “snuff film” any way you like, but that definition has nothing to do with whether Cecil is correct in his column.
By Cecil’s own definition–and I have no idea why we should accept that as the last word, but even so–the Maniacs may well qualify.
Exapno, is there some kind of criteria by which to distinguish between the fantasy and reality of sex slavery? This nice a brothel, but no nicer? I have no clue why you are so insistent that the general squalidness of the reality means it bears no relation to the fantasy.
I also wonder where Cecil and Exapno got their definitions. I grew up in the 80’s, and snuff films were talked about.
I agree that it’s more about the circulation than the creation. I don’t agree that they were only for the rich–money never entered the definition as far as I knew. Snuff films were always something that your friend’s cousin’s roommate had. He was a pervert and so were all his friends (supposedly), and yet the air of exclusivity made the idea compelling.
At any rate, I don’t see why the definition should exclude ordinary murders, as long as the tapes were only traded in exclusive circles for their pornographic value (whether intentional or not). By that standard, they probably aren’t possible today, because things spread far and wide on the Internet. That wasn’t true when I was a kid, though, and if you wanted a bootleg anything you had to know a guy.
A rosy-eyed view of the world? No, more like a realistic view of actual crime as opposed to crime as it’s portrayed in the movies. I’ve known thousands of actual murderers and I have some practical understanding of how crime works.
There are plenty of crimes that people get paid to commit. They get paid to steal things, to sell things that are illegal, to commit fraud, to assault people, to burn down buildings, even to commit murder. But to make snuff films? No, I’ve never heard of anyone being paid to make a snuff film. But you’re saying it’s an up and running business. So provide us some evidence to support this.
I say that the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs qualifies as Snuff by the 2014 definition, but not by the 1993 definition.
Your friend’s cousin’s roommate had a copy of Faces of Death. A pretty gross series (which I’ve never viewed) but something other than an underground market supporting a murderous group of pornographic film-makers.
Naw. Faces of Death was in the same category as Red Asphalt (which I did see in high school). A lot of gross-out film of dead people, but mostly fake and/or taken from stock footage, and definitely no murders. The alleged snuff films were always unnamed.
To be clear, I didn’t mean that my friend’s cousin’s roommate actually had a snuff film. It was the same thing as any other urban legend. It’s just how the story went.
So, I would actually reverse the years. If the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs tapes were released in 1993, they would only be available to a very select group of people. Maybe a police officer makes a few copies and passes them to some friends, and it circulates from there among people who are into that kind of stuff. Today, it doesn’t qualify, because it’s in no way exclusive–as the OP says, it’s easily found on file sharing sites.