There are Faces of Death type videos that show real killings. It’s not like there’s a lack of video footage of murders or other violent deaths.
But that’s not the same as saying there’s a snuff movie market. There’s nobody out there who’s saying “Well. I need a thousand bucks. I guess I’ll go out, kidnap some teenagers, torture and murder them on camera, and sell the tape.”
There may be people who think they can do this. But those people are just believing the same urban legends that have been floating around for decades.
If the OP had started by saying that Cecil’s definition of “snuff film” was no longer useful and then explained why, I wouldn’t have had a problem. Look at the last sentence in Cecil’s column. He says that his definition would require that “that there is some sort of snuff movie industry out there, complete with film crews, lab technicians, and, God help us, sacrificial actors; that these people film themselves committing capital crimes and sell the result to strangers; and that for nearly 30 years they’ve succeeded in concealing all traces of their handiwork.” The examples offered in the OP are ones where psychopaths record their murders. We already know that such people exist, and Cecil acknowledged that. Nobody is requiring you to use Cecil’s definition outside of a discussion of his column. You can’t use a different definition though and declare that Cecil is wrong.
Again, I think limiting it to money is too narrow, and never played a part in the definition as I perceived it. Respect is also a currency, as is gratification in fulfilling a demand. I have to imagine that the pedophilia market pretty much works this way now. Maybe some money is passing hands, but whatever the number is, it’s obviously not enough to cover the risks. The real payment is less tangible.
MODERATOR NOTE: Post #13, by jpor0824, was in a new thread (along with several responses) which I have merged so that all comments about the same topic are together. Sorry for the two-day delay in doing so, my fault, and causes a slight hiccup in the sequential reading of the posts.
I always thought snuff films were narrative fiction. Someone killed for real in order to depict his or her character’s death. Simply recording a murder and selling that doesn’t seem to rise to the same level of outrageousness.
Powers &8^]
But it’s like discussing being a prostitute or a hit man. Doing it for money is the distinguishing characteristic.
If you look at fictional depictions of snuff films in movies like Hardcore, 8mm, Bloodline, Videodrome, Strange Days, The Brave, Snuff 102, or Vacancy, you’ll see they all portray there being a snuff industry. But such an industry doesn’t exist in the real world.
From the 2014 ad copy: [INDENT]There has been a Cultural Revolution, or, more accurately, Evolution, since the first publication of Killing for Culture. Technology has seen to that. The World Wide Web has entangled almost the entire population of the developed world, and the mobile phone has evolved into a High Definition movie camera. Filming events is no longer the exclusive domain of the news media of film production crews. Near everyone is a filmmaker. (sic -mfm) A paradigm change occurred when videos depicting the murder of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg infected the Net and the minds of the millions who dared view the footage. A new peak in horror was indeed attained. The never-found mythological snuff film that secretly exchanges hands for tens of thousands of dollars is no longer plausible; the assumed punters of such fare can watch people die for free. The Internet has seen to that. [/INDENT] I say Snuff films (2014 definition) exist but Snuff films (1993 definition) never did and probably never will. That age has passed.
According to you, and Cecil, and Exapno. Like I said, I never perceived that money was the central thing. I’m not saying that my definition is superior or yours is wrong; just that it’s what my friends and I used.
I guess that’s a reasonable way to get a sense of how people thought of it. Of those, I’ve only seen Videodrome–though personally I don’t think that one reveals much since one of Cronenberg schticks was to take some element of the real world and stretch and distort it beyond recognition.
Still, this seems like a self-defeating definition. Of course reality will never live up to film portrayals. By this standard, “snuff film” isn’t a name for a phenomenon, but a label for a kind of story, like “urban legend.” By definition they don’t exist.
Cecil’s definition isn’t equivalent to calling it “an urban legend,” something that by definition can’t exist. Cecil’s definition was that for there to be such a thing there would have to be a “snuff movie industry out there, complete with film crews, lab technicians, and, God help us, sacrificial actors.” That’s not something that by definition couldn’t exist. There certainly isn’t anything logically impossible in that. Furthermore, that’s exactly what a lot of the people who have believed that snuff movies exist are claiming really exists, an actual industry with people consciously working on a long-term basis on such films.
When you use phrases similar to “does not exist by definition,” you should realize what you’re saying. it means that something is logically impossible. It doesn’t not mean that it is just unlikely. Yes, most of us have always known that a snuff industry was wildly improbable, which is why we’ve always been skeptical about the concept. Nobody has ever claimed that it’s logically impossible though, which is why the concept continues to be discussed at all.
To piggyback on Wendell, even the term “urban legend” has shifted in its connotations. Dr. Strangelove defines it as something that by definition does not exist. I agree that’s the way it is normally used in casual writing, and the vast majority of urban legends are simply made-up. Some are exaggerated tellings of real-world events, though, and sometimes the real world is exactly that bizarre. The Urban Legend page at Wikipedia has a good summary.
Even so, it’s critical that urban legends be exploded as pure myth because some can be damaging. Snopes made an institution of it. Probably the most famous case is Procter and Gamble being forced to abandon its trademark when people started calling it a satanist symbol. Personally, I like the idea of telling people that their bizarrely stupid thoughts are stupidly bizarre.
It’s also wonderfully ironic that Dr. Strangelove is using a second changed definition for a term to refute my use of an original definition of a term. He’s not wrong to do so, but it’s an indication of the problems that not being aware of the history of a term can bring.
I read this book when it first came out. The other day I ran into the descriptive definitive online when researching for this thread and I’d have to say it depends on what is meant by definitive.
The book appeared to be a cheaply made, swiftly compiled listing and brief description of the present known type of snuff movies with pictures. I think there was some attempt at categorization. It seemed plain that Kerekes and Slater, the authors, were mainly motivated by profit and not educating the public.
It was somewhat a disappointment as I’d hoped that they’d discuss the cultural implications and the psychology of the phenomenon. In that sense it is not definitive at all. I’d call it a resource list.
High scholarship doesn’t exactly go with the territory, I suppose, which is why we’re all on our own regarding definitions.
Years ago I read a couple of books by the folklorist Brunvald, author of The Vanishing Hitchhiker. One of the characteristics of the urban legend is that there are typically multiple versions. Tracking them is the bread and butter of such scholars: veracity is secondary and tracing the legend back to its origins is considered a mug’s game. Such efforts are only rarely successful and are not particularly satisfying. Folklorists are more interested in why these memes spread.
So Exapno heard the rich guys version, I heard the feminist anti-porn version, the Faces of Death varietal and ultimately the Cecil takedown, while Strangelove’s legend was populated by pervs buying bootleg reels. Many were introduced to the concept in 1976, though some number were exposed to it earlier. Some heard about it as a story that was not to be believed, others were encouraged to swallow it whole. This sort of variety is typical: it’s far more unusual for an urban legend to have a single storyline.
ETA: Tethered Kite: Yeah, given the cover of that work, I’m not surprised that it isn’t exactly a scholarly treatment. Note also that the quoted ad-copy was only semi-literate.
And yet it promises an analysis of the social aspects of snuff film:
“Illustrated by rare and stunning photographs from cinema, documentary and real life, Killing for Culture is a necessary book which examines and questions the human obsession with images of violence, dismemberment and death, and the way our society is coping with an increased profusion of these disturbing yet compelling images from all quarters.”
In this case it appears you can tell a book by its cover but not by its description. I notice that the cover has been toned down for their 2014 edition.
Sure, they could exist in some alternate universe. In this universe it would take a giant conspiracy to keep that kind of thing under wraps. There are plenty of criminal enterprises that mostly stay under the radar but we still know about them.
I guess my point is just that just because some movie plot version of snuff films doesn’t exist, it doesn’t mean that no form of it exists. Hacking like it happens in the movies doesn’t exist, but stuff gets hacked anyway. It’s far more mundane than it appears in the movies and usually involves some brain-dead mistake on the part of the target. But we can still say that hacking exists as long as we don’t hold it to the fictional standard.
Okay, I have no idea what you’re trying to say here. You appear to be saying that you know that snuff films don’t exist but you believe that they do exist.
No, I’m saying that a definition that matches Cecil’s isn’t all that useful because it is so stringent that nothing could possibly match it in this reality. A looser definition (eliminating the commercial nature, for instance) could possibly allow some films to match (the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs comes close), although I make no claim as to whether any actually do.
The opposing view is to acknowledge that murder films do exist and likely have existed for some time. Those are distinct from snuff films. What is gained from conflating murder films with snuff films? That’s the question that you haven’t answered.
Cecil’s version of the snuff film was earnestly believed by the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, or at least it was repeatedly asserted on the college lecture circuit as well as her 1988 book. This was before snopes put a lid on such nonsense (though of course they didn’t put a stop to it).
Please. Making a quick buck is Kerekes and Slater’s oeuvre.
Agreed. If you read an account of a serial killer who kidnaps college coeds, imprisons them in his basement, rapes and tortures them, and then murders them and dismembers their bodies, nobody is going to be asking “Forget all that. What I want to know is if he filmed it. Because that would be sick.”
Nobody would care. The shocking parts would be the kidnapping, the torture, the rape, the murder, and the dismemberment. Any filming if it occurred would be seen as a minor incidental - like if he had stolen the victim’s car along with everything else he did.
The only reason filming the crime would be an issue is if it was the motive for the crime. If we read about some amoral person who was filming murders to make money, then we would be shocked by the filming aspect. Because a person who would commit terrible crimes for money seems more depraved then a person who would commit those same crimes out of insanity.
So the whole horror of the snuff film legend is based on the idea that it’s being done as a business - that people are doing this just to make money. Remove that financial aspect and it’s just another “ordinary” murder.
