It’s hard to imagine that any of the people protesting the film
actually saw it. If they managed to make it through the 98% of the
movie that had been Slaughter,
they would have seen an obviously unconnected bit at the end: a film
crew has just finished shooting a scene; as they wrap things up one of
the guys starts hitting on a girl. In a ludicrous dialogue exchange he
convinces her to fool around with him on the bed on set while the crew
is still there. She gets upset as it becomes apparent that they’re
being filmed, and the guy produces a blade and starts stabbing her in
the neck. Next he cuts off her hand – you can see the hole in the bed
where the real hand sticks out of a bloody prosthetic – and then
disembowels her as she gurgles her last breaths. It’s all so utterly
fake. There’s a camera crew filming it, but we keep seeing the action
from other angles where nobody is filming. While nicely juicy, the
disemboweling is patently unreal, and the guy appears to be yanking her
heart out of her lower digestive tract. Then, to add to the ‘realism,’
the picture cuts out and we hear on the soundtrack someone say ‘Damn!
We’re out of film!’
Shackleton’s carnie promotion tactics were inspired. He created a fake group called Citizens for Decency and started a protest against his own movie. When it turned out there was a real group called Citizens for Decency they actually took up the cause for him, attacking Snuff and backing Vincent Sheehan, a crusader he had invented out of whole cloth. It was insane, and the police soon got involved; Shackleton never came out and said that Snuff contained real footage of a murder, but he certainly never denied it, instead dancing right on the edge of making a claim one way or the other, letting audiences decide for themselves. The tagline of the movie was “A film that could only be made in South America, where life is cheap!”
One of the really interesting sidenotes of the whole Snuff controversy is that it represents the first time the term slasher movie was ever used. According to Mark Whitehead’s Slasher Movies: Pocket Essential Guide, the term was uttered by New York City police detective Joseph Horman, who was quoted by the Kingston Ontario Whig-Standard as saying “the 8-millimetre, 8-reel films called “snuff” or “slasher” movies had been in tightly controlled distribution” . Horman was, of course, wrong, and the NYPD would later back off that claim.
But the ball had been set rolling. The group Women Against Pornography used Snuff as a rallying point, and feminist authors and anti-pornography advocates began simply claiming that snuff films existed. They would point to the world of porn as the entry way to snuff; former Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace testified to the Attorney General that washed up porn starlets were routinely killed on camera for snuff films! She was, of course, absolutely fucking bonkers and at the time of her testimony had already spent many years as an activist against the porn industry.
A few years later Ruggero Deodato would find himself at the center of a snuff film controversy, one that almost sent him to prison. His masterpiece, Cannibal Holocaust, had premiered in Italy to much public outrage and shock. Not long after the director was arrested for obscenity and his film was seized and banned. He soon found himself facing more serious charges, though – murder. It seemed that the authorities were so taken by the gore effects and Deodato’s cinema verite style that they thought he actually committed these killings on film. Deodato was forced to produce the still living actors to dodge a life sentence. Of course in many ways this is the ultimate compliment for a sleazy goremeister, one that hack filmmakers like those behind the Murder Set Pieces and Amateur Porn Star Killer movies would certainly love to be paid.
Probably the greatest snuff furor after Shackleton was started by none other than whore loving actor Charlie Sheen in 1991. Sheen, it seemed, had been at some kind of Hollywood party where scenes from a grotesque Japanese torture film was being played. Sheen saw a man in a samurai helmet and pancake make-up torturing, brutalizing and slicing up a woman. Horrified, and apparently unaware of what a movie looks like, Sheen thought that he had seen a snuff film and reported it to the proper authorities. And so a whole new brouhaha began.
The movie was 1985’s Flower of Flesh and Blood, the second film in the extraordinarily controversial Japanese Guinea Pig series. Flower of Flesh and Blood is disturbing, and it is presented as a faux-snuff film, and it is exceptionally graphic… but it’s also pretty obviously not a real murder on film. You’d hope that a guy in the movie industry would recognize that, or at the very least realize that any movie that contains insert shots and close-ups is probably a semi-professional production. Of course, that may be part of what fuels the snuff film legend – that these aren’t just the work of sickos with a camera and a tripod and a corrupted morality but are actually slickly produced entertainments. It’s not a guy in a basement doing this, there’s a whole crew and there’s post-production and a lab where the film is processed. It’s an industry.
At any rate, the FBI got involved, as did the Japanese authorities. They traced it all back to Chas. Balun, a writer for Deep Red magazine, who had made a splatter compilation tape, which is what Sheen had seen. From there the authorities managed to suss out that Flower of Flesh and Blood was fake, at least partially aided by a behind the scenes documentary released in 1986 which showed how all the gore effects were done.
But the Guinea Pig films wouldn’t get off so easily. While they weren’t snuff films themselves, they apparently influenced an already diseased mind. Serial Killer Tsutomu Miyazaki was a huge fan of the Guinea Pig series – so much so that he based one of his killings (he murdered four young girls and then sexually molested their corpses) on Flower of Flesh and Blood. Japanese authorities overreacted a bit and banned the films. Obviously Miyazaki was going to kill those girls no matter what films he watched, so blaming a gore movie seems like a stupid waste of time and a diversion from real problems that cause people to do some truly sick shit.