This is a special edition of CHUDsploitation. Rather than focus on a single film, I’ve decided to open things up a bit and examine a film phenomenon. A sick and disgusting film phenomenon known as snuff. The next edition of CHUDsploitation will return to the previous format. Look for that some time in January.

It took you a long time to find this place. Months of asking around, greasing palms. You started on a newsgroup, made contacts and nosed around, always dancing around the subject of your quest. You would call what you were looking for ‘the real thing.’ You found an underground slowly opening for you, each stack of cash getting you a little bit deeper. Finally it led here, a little store in Chinatown. It’s the kind of place that sells everything – videos, incense, trinkets, rugs, jade statues – and you have to give a password to the old man behind the counter. He lets you into the back room, a dirty, smoky little place where three or four hard looking guys – Triads, surely – are seated around a table, jabbering in a language you don’t understand.

They look at you suspiciously, trying to figure out if you’re on the up and up. If there’s the slightest thought that you’re a fed, you’re never making it back to the street. Your heart is beating pretty hard, and there’s a slight sheen of sweat forming on your forehead. Your deodorant has surely failed you.

You say the password again, and one of the toughs understands. He looks you up and down, more than a little disgusted. He names a price – it’s thousands of dollars – and you hand over an envelope with the cash. He counts through it and turns to one of the other thugs, saying something in whatever dialect they’re speaking. The second thug opens a cabinet, slides back a false wall, and spins the combination on a safe. He reaches in and pulls out a manila padded folder. Inside is what you came for. A video tape.

Shaking, you make it back out onto the street. You get home an hour later and after pouring yourself a stiff drink you put that tape in the VCR that you had to pull out of the closet. The tape is only about fifteen minutes long, but it’s the real deal: a girl is tied to a chair, terrified. And slowly, graphically, lovingly killed. It’s a snuff film.

Theoretically this scenario plays out all over the world. Deep underground rings of mobsters and opportunists, probably based out of countries where life is worth a little bit less than the computer on which you are reading this, create and distribute artless, sickening tapes that detail the last moments of a helpless victim’s life. These people don’t get any real pleasure out of what they do – they’re just filling a very profitable need, satiating the extreme desires of the most hardened, most despicable perverts and weirdos in the world. Somewhere a torture room sits empty, plastic on the floor, a camera sitting on a tripod aimed at a stained chair awaiting its next victim.

Except this never happens. There quite simply is no such thing as a snuff film. And yet the urban legend persists to such an extent that the FBI spent 20 years chasing the ghosts of snuff filmmakers. And eventually even they had to admit that there simply was no underground market of snuff film creators or customers.

It’s important to understand what a snuff film is and what it isn’t. Faces of Death is not a snuff film, and that’s not a critique of the many faked scenes on display. Most of the (real) deaths in Faces of Death or other sick footage compilations are simply fatalities caught on camera and not murders committed for the camera. A newsman filming a suicide isn’t making a snuff film, and neither is an third world army private filming a firing squad. The death must be staged specifically for the camera, and more than that must be filmed with the intention of distribution. That’s the element that sets murder videos apart from actual snuff films. Some would argue that a real snuff film would have a sexual aspect, especially rape or sexual torture, but let’s not hem this fictional genre in too tightly. Let’s say that any film where a person is murdered just for the camera and which is intended to be sold or traded is a snuff film.

The term snuff film entered the lexicon as part of the hysteria surrounding the Manson Family murders. Ed Sanders, in his 1971 book The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (now that’s a band name if I ever heard one), recounts a story told by an unnamed former Family member. According to this highly suspicious source, Manson and his ladies did some home-made porn using Super 8 cameras (they also once stole cameras from an NBC news truck, and some versions of the legend have them using this equipment to make their movies); one of these sex films included a decapitated woman. The book is unclear on whether the decapitation happened on film or if the body was already beheaded. In fact the guy telling the story doesn’t even sound like he saw the thing: “She was nude but nobody was fucking her. They said her head was just chopped off and she was just laying there.”

It’s the perfect beginning for the urban legend. Nobody’s ever seen a snuff film, of course, but they know somebody who once did. Even the origin of the term comes from a book written by a guy who never saw the footage in question, based on an interview with a guy who probably also didn’t see the footage in question.

Still, even if that footage existed it wouldn’t really fit the definition of snuff film as it came to be understood. That definition would be essentially provided by a perfect combination of schlockmeisters and feminists.

Michael and Roberta Findlay will probably come up again in a future CHUDsploitation column; the couple was an important step in the evolution of truly sick exploitation cinema, acting as a transitional form between Irving Klaw’s Bettie Page bondage loops and the weird and wild world of 70s hardcore and sleaze. Their 1967/1968 Flesh trilogy – The Touch of Her Flesh, The Kiss of Her Flesh and The Curse of Her Flesh – is a truly fucked up revenge/slasher/S&M series. Michael directed the greatest Yeti movie ever, Shriek of the Mutilated, and went on to find his own brand of infamy when he was famously decapitated in a helicopter accident atop New York’s Pan Am building.*

In 1971 or so the Findlays shot a movie called Slaughter. What happened to that film is arguable – some say it went unreleased while others claimed it played a small run in grindhouses – but the film itself is a crummy, shoddy take on the Manson Family. Shot in South America, Slaughter is about a charismatic motorcycle gang leader who uses attractive young women as his murder pawns. There’s some nudity and not much else – even by the low standards of exploitation cinema, Slaughter is a bust.

The film was bought up by a guy named Allan Shackleton. In what may have been the one moment of genius in Shackleton’s life, he shot a new ending for the film, released it in 1976 under the new title Snuff and then began feeding the media the rumor that the movie ended with an actual murder perpetrated for the camera. Feminist groups became enraged and began protesting and the film became a huge hit. In New York City it was the highest grossing theatrical release for three weeks running.

* For you 3D enthusiasts: Findlay’s death may have changed the course of 3D filmmaking forever. He was on his way to France to present to financiers a new, portable 3D camera he had invented. He used it to shoot a porn film called Funk. Up until that point 3D cameras had been bulky and difficult to use; Findlay’s test model was destroyed along with him.