Introduction
The history of this academic event exploring the snuff movie stems from discussions emerging out of the 2010 Cine-Excess international cult film conference on ‘Subverting the Senses’. Focusing entirely on the concept of the ‘snuff film’, this two day event endeavoured to engage with the varied historical, cultural and theoretical approaches with snuff in all its forms. It was specifically interested in exploring the global nature of snuff and identifying any local variations or differing interpretations of what is considered to be a snuff film.
The conference was a two-day event organised by Bournemouth University, and specifically by Dr Shaun Kimber, Dr Neil Jackson, Johnny Walker and Thomas Joseph Watson. Keynote speakers at the event were Professor Julian Petley and Dr Tina Kendall, the former speaking on Saturday and the latter on Sunday. After these concluding papers, each day had an additional session. Saturday saw a screening of Xavier Mendik’s The Long Road Back From Hell: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust (2011), framed with an introduction by Mendik and Julian Petley. On Sunday, David Kerekes was promoting a new edition of his seminal snuff movie book Killing For Culture. The range of subjects and approaches across the weekend illustrated clearly the contemporary relevance of exploring the concept of the snuff movie.
Authenticity and Slaughter: Historical Case-Studies of ‘Real’ Death
The opening panel’s theme was ‘Authenticity and the Snuff Film’ and the two papers not only explored this idea, but introduced key questions that would be discussed across the rest of the day. Simon Hobbs opened with his paper entitled ‘Animal Snuff: The Authentic Slaughter of Animals within Week End and Cannibal Holocaust and the Surrounding Cultural Dialogue’. Exploring the different approaches to censorship and critical engagement between art film and exploitation cinema, Hobbs straight away raised the question of the moral outcry that can surround snuff. In engaging with the theme of animal death, Hobbs’ paper also posed an important line of thought for the conference as a whole. Namely, how can snuff be defined, what constitutes a snuff movie, and to what degree does authenticity play a role? The second half of this panel encompassed the paper ‘Wild Eyes, Dead Ladies: The Snuff Filmmaker in Realist Horror’ from Neil Jackson. Here, Jackson discussed the myth of the snuff film, and how the snuff film-maker has been read as a perverse artist, narcissist and auteur. He argued that realist horror has often featured male violence to women and snuff films are an attempt to reclaim dominion in response to cracks in patriarchal control. Between the two papers, the first panel established many of the ideas and issues that would be explored from various angles across the rest of the conference.
The second morning panel of the day was ‘Snuff Aesthetics’ and featured just the one paper from Keith Brown which was entitled ‘A Real Horrorshow: Situating 1970s Snuff Aesthetics’. This discussion revolved around the aesthetics of violence in film and the ‘real’ in opposition to the ‘hyper-realistic’. Brown suggested that snuff film attempts to avoid stylised visual aesthetics in order to appear more genuine. In reference to the film Snuff (1976), Brown discussed how its attempts at realism are undermined by its production shortcomings, such as obviously continuity flaws. As there was only one paper, a long discussion followed this paper, in which numerous interesting topics were touched upon. Julian Petley discussed how, despite the myth of the ‘snuff films’ having been discounted, whenever a new controversy arises, such as the eighties video nasty scare, the media discusses the films as if they were real.
The afternoon session began with a third panel, ‘Snuff: Audience Complicity and Journalism’, which consisted of two papers. Xavier Aldana Reyes began with his paper ‘An Uneasy Complicity: Extreme Spectatorial Engagement in The Last Horror Movie’ and this was followed by Karen Oughton’s paper ‘Lights! Camera! Academic! The thorny issue of critical involvement with snuff cinema’. Reyes’ paper focused around Julian Richards’ 2003 film The Last Horror Movie, which took a mockumentary approach to the snuff movie as its lead character documents murders he is committing. Reyes suggested the film is aiming towards a serious discussion of the snuff film, holding a mirror up to its viewers, but that it ultimately stopped being scary and instead induced nervous-laughter with its audience. It is suggested in the following questions session that Reyes' paper better conveys the message of The Last Horror Movie than the film itself manages. The second paper perhaps attempted to hold a mirror up to the conference audience as Dr Karen Oughton seeks to explore how academics make the perverse permissible. Her talk was centred around the pseudo-documentary film S&Man (2006) that discussed underground horror films and featured interviews with noted academic Carol J. Clover. Oughton discussed the blurring between fact and fiction, noting that some viewers believed Clover to be a fictional character, and how academics can become involved with the films they had previously studied. Overall, this panel brought up some interesting reflexive ideas on how different audiences engage and interact with horror films.
The final academic paper of the Saturday was courtesy of Professor Julian Petley’s keynote talk ‘The Many Mythologies of Snuff’. In a serendipitous progression of events, Petley’s paper drew together many of the topics of discussion that had arisen throughout the first day. Petley suggested that the authorities have had an increasing problem with people accessing and having images of death. His talk discussed the history of the snuff myth, and how it had been perpetually linked to ideas of foreign ‘Otherness’, whereby the films were said to be shot abroad, “where life is cheap”. It is suggested that the myth of snuff legitimised police and trading standards actions during the video nasty scares and the impression is given that whether it was genuine or not mattered very little to those instigating the moral panics. The discussion leads into a critique of the government’s banning of extreme pornography and the difficultly in defining what materials are counted as such. Petley concludes by noting that the Malicious Communications Act was originally used to prevent threatening letters but with alterations in 2003, it is now used to make certain images illegal. Thus the day’s discussions had covered discussions on what snuff can be defined as, how it is interacted with, and the legality and controversies that surround it.
Following a day of stimulating papers, Xavier Mendik joined Julian Petley in introducing their documentary The Long Road Back From Hell: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust. Again drawing from discussions on censorship, and highlighting changes in the BBFC’s criteria, the introduction focused on the new almost-entirely-uncut edition of the film and how it had come about. The documentary itself was fascinating, and a suitable closing statement on the topics raised on the opening day of the conference.
The Body, Performance and the Pseudo-Real
The second day opened with the panel ‘Snuff, Gender and Sexuality’, which consisted of papers by Clarissa Smith and Lydia Brammer. Smith opened with her paper ‘The Breathless Jogger: An Extreme Case in Stafford’ which worked well as a bridge from the previous day which ended with mentions of extreme pornography. Smith identified the connections between the rhetoric against snuff films and that used in discussing extreme porn, with similar claims being made about both. In each case, the issue is brought to public attention to act as a ‘warning’, but the arguments work best by rendering the images discussed as unseeable whilst at the same time describing the depravity. Thus, for much more of the public the ‘idea’ of it is disgusting although they have not actually seen the material for themselves. Smith discussed ‘necro porn’ photography which depicts fictitious acts of death, but in a very staged, artificial and often parodist manner. The reality of the obviously faked images contrasts with the moral outrage or condemnation that can be attached to them. Lydia Brammer’s paper that followed also dealt with fake images of death, this time in the 1985 Japanese Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood film. Arguably more realistically done, albeit still stylistically excessive, Brammer argues that Japanese culture had at times replaced sex with violence. The discussion that followed the panel suggested that censorship led to the creation of new forms of ‘legal’ material. Thus the banning of depictions of the penis in Japanese cinema led in-part to the proliferation of the tentacle-porn sub-genre. Both papers dealt with issues of sexuality in snuff in differing yet interesting ways, and addressed the existing connections between sex and violence within many of these texts.
Entitled ‘Snuff and the Body: Self, Performance and Affect’, the next panel of the day opened with a paper by Steve Jones on ‘A View to a Kill: Perspective on Pseudo-Snuff and Self’. Jones focused on the Amateur Porn Star Killer trilogy of films that combined an aesthetic of amateur pornography with snuff. Approaching the texts as reflecting contemporary issues in the philosophy of the self, Jones’ explores how the central character of Brandon is hidden behind the camera and is only constituted as an individual through the act of killing. Karolina Gruschka’s paper ‘In Terms of Liveness Discourse, and with Reference to The Bunny Game, What Are the Implications of the way Performance Art and Film are Combined within the Platform of Film’ compliments this discussion perfectly. Her paper discussed the blurring of lines between Body Art and the assumed artifice of film, and again addressed issues of how we perceive ‘reality’ in film. Misha Kavka’s paper on ‘The Affective Reality of Snuff’ picked up on the notion of the ‘real’ and addressed snuff in relation to reality television. She discussed the ‘unrepresentation’ of death, which remains intangible as the ‘truth’ of death cannot be captured on film. All three papers worked well to discuss what we perceive as reality, and how the lines can be blurred between the constructed world of film and a perception of 'reality'.
The final panel of the day was entitled ‘Online Snuff Production and Consumption’ and would prove to be one of the conference’s most fascinating. Sarah Downes began with her paper ‘New Media and the Amoral Spectator: Considerations and the Gaze’ which was focused around the 2012 film Gut. Centred around horror fans who are sent snuff tapes, Downes argued that the film suggests violent imagery in turn creates violence, and the distancing effect of the recorded murders resulted in moral lapses for the characters. Cameron Williams paper followed, looking at ‘2 Snuff Films 1 Internet: An investigative report on the operations of the snuff ‘film industry’’. This paper questioned how we defined snuff, and suggested it could only truly be snuff if it was intended to be consumed for entertainment purposes and also made for this specific purpose. Interesting in light of previous arguments, it perhaps best highlighted the varying approaches that can be taken in defining what we understand a ‘snuff film’ to be. The final paper of this panel was ‘OMG They Just Killed some dude...: Online reactions to the 3 Guys 1 Hammer internet chock video’ from Iain Robert Smith. Following on from the previous two, this looked at audience engagement with genuine death videos on the internet and how ‘reaction videos’ suggest a performative online community. Whilst Smith does admit they can be problematic he rightly identifies their potential as a rich case study into the consumption and distribution of ‘snuff’.
The final keynote was given by Dr Tina Kendall and was entitled ‘The Aesthetics and Ethics of Snuff in the Films of the New Extremism’. Kendall’s talk focused on the idea of ‘affect’ in regards to low budget transgressive films that sought to evoke familiar styles and notions of ‘realism’ in their depictions of snuff. Discussing controversial films such as Trash Humpers (2009), Kendall suggested they play on an audiences desire to see the characters antics, yet confront the viewers with the murders that are then committed. The characters in the films she explores seem indifferent to death or even amused by it, whilst YouTube is framed as a lawless world of unpoliced material. Kendall’s talk again tied in well with the central topics discussed across the day. The second day of the conference seemed more focused on ideas of sexuality, the body, performance, interactive media and the perception of realism which culminated nicely in the topics examined in this final keynote.
Concluding the day was the pre-launch introduction for the new edition of the book Killing For Culture, with a questions and answers session, and some final thoughts from the organisers. More than anything else, this conference has illustrated what a rich, varied topic for discussion the snuff film actually is. Rather than being restricting in its specificity, it actually allowed for a strong central focus around which ideas of censorship, authenticity, violence, and audience engagement could be be explored. The smaller number of papers on some panels allowed for a longer discussion afterwards, which only served to further debate these issues in some depth. In a digital age where real death is easily accessed online, and social media encouraged greater communication and interaction between audiences, the importance of studying the concept of snuff, whether fictional or genuine, and questioning forms of censorship for this material, is certainly as relevant as it has ever been. Indeed, even across two days, it would not be unfair to say that this conference has only begun to explore the ideas, issues and controversies surrounding snuff. However, it was a successful and intelligent beginning, that explored both the historical forms of snuff film and marked the beginning in explorations of contemporary forms and it will be both interesting and exciting to see in which directions these debates will develop next.
The history of this academic event exploring the snuff movie stems from discussions emerging out of the 2010 Cine-Excess international cult film conference on ‘Subverting the Senses’. Focusing entirely on the concept of the ‘snuff film’, this two day event endeavoured to engage with the varied historical, cultural and theoretical approaches with snuff in all its forms. It was specifically interested in exploring the global nature of snuff and identifying any local variations or differing interpretations of what is considered to be a snuff film.
The conference was a two-day event organised by Bournemouth University, and specifically by Dr Shaun Kimber, Dr Neil Jackson, Johnny Walker and Thomas Joseph Watson. Keynote speakers at the event were Professor Julian Petley and Dr Tina Kendall, the former speaking on Saturday and the latter on Sunday. After these concluding papers, each day had an additional session. Saturday saw a screening of Xavier Mendik’s The Long Road Back From Hell: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust (2011), framed with an introduction by Mendik and Julian Petley. On Sunday, David Kerekes was promoting a new edition of his seminal snuff movie book Killing For Culture. The range of subjects and approaches across the weekend illustrated clearly the contemporary relevance of exploring the concept of the snuff movie.
Authenticity and Slaughter: Historical Case-Studies of ‘Real’ Death
The opening panel’s theme was ‘Authenticity and the Snuff Film’ and the two papers not only explored this idea, but introduced key questions that would be discussed across the rest of the day. Simon Hobbs opened with his paper entitled ‘Animal Snuff: The Authentic Slaughter of Animals within Week End and Cannibal Holocaust and the Surrounding Cultural Dialogue’. Exploring the different approaches to censorship and critical engagement between art film and exploitation cinema, Hobbs straight away raised the question of the moral outcry that can surround snuff. In engaging with the theme of animal death, Hobbs’ paper also posed an important line of thought for the conference as a whole. Namely, how can snuff be defined, what constitutes a snuff movie, and to what degree does authenticity play a role? The second half of this panel encompassed the paper ‘Wild Eyes, Dead Ladies: The Snuff Filmmaker in Realist Horror’ from Neil Jackson. Here, Jackson discussed the myth of the snuff film, and how the snuff film-maker has been read as a perverse artist, narcissist and auteur. He argued that realist horror has often featured male violence to women and snuff films are an attempt to reclaim dominion in response to cracks in patriarchal control. Between the two papers, the first panel established many of the ideas and issues that would be explored from various angles across the rest of the conference.
The second morning panel of the day was ‘Snuff Aesthetics’ and featured just the one paper from Keith Brown which was entitled ‘A Real Horrorshow: Situating 1970s Snuff Aesthetics’. This discussion revolved around the aesthetics of violence in film and the ‘real’ in opposition to the ‘hyper-realistic’. Brown suggested that snuff film attempts to avoid stylised visual aesthetics in order to appear more genuine. In reference to the film Snuff (1976), Brown discussed how its attempts at realism are undermined by its production shortcomings, such as obviously continuity flaws. As there was only one paper, a long discussion followed this paper, in which numerous interesting topics were touched upon. Julian Petley discussed how, despite the myth of the ‘snuff films’ having been discounted, whenever a new controversy arises, such as the eighties video nasty scare, the media discusses the films as if they were real.
The afternoon session began with a third panel, ‘Snuff: Audience Complicity and Journalism’, which consisted of two papers. Xavier Aldana Reyes began with his paper ‘An Uneasy Complicity: Extreme Spectatorial Engagement in The Last Horror Movie’ and this was followed by Karen Oughton’s paper ‘Lights! Camera! Academic! The thorny issue of critical involvement with snuff cinema’. Reyes’ paper focused around Julian Richards’ 2003 film The Last Horror Movie, which took a mockumentary approach to the snuff movie as its lead character documents murders he is committing. Reyes suggested the film is aiming towards a serious discussion of the snuff film, holding a mirror up to its viewers, but that it ultimately stopped being scary and instead induced nervous-laughter with its audience. It is suggested in the following questions session that Reyes' paper better conveys the message of The Last Horror Movie than the film itself manages. The second paper perhaps attempted to hold a mirror up to the conference audience as Dr Karen Oughton seeks to explore how academics make the perverse permissible. Her talk was centred around the pseudo-documentary film S&Man (2006) that discussed underground horror films and featured interviews with noted academic Carol J. Clover. Oughton discussed the blurring between fact and fiction, noting that some viewers believed Clover to be a fictional character, and how academics can become involved with the films they had previously studied. Overall, this panel brought up some interesting reflexive ideas on how different audiences engage and interact with horror films.
The final academic paper of the Saturday was courtesy of Professor Julian Petley’s keynote talk ‘The Many Mythologies of Snuff’. In a serendipitous progression of events, Petley’s paper drew together many of the topics of discussion that had arisen throughout the first day. Petley suggested that the authorities have had an increasing problem with people accessing and having images of death. His talk discussed the history of the snuff myth, and how it had been perpetually linked to ideas of foreign ‘Otherness’, whereby the films were said to be shot abroad, “where life is cheap”. It is suggested that the myth of snuff legitimised police and trading standards actions during the video nasty scares and the impression is given that whether it was genuine or not mattered very little to those instigating the moral panics. The discussion leads into a critique of the government’s banning of extreme pornography and the difficultly in defining what materials are counted as such. Petley concludes by noting that the Malicious Communications Act was originally used to prevent threatening letters but with alterations in 2003, it is now used to make certain images illegal. Thus the day’s discussions had covered discussions on what snuff can be defined as, how it is interacted with, and the legality and controversies that surround it.
Following a day of stimulating papers, Xavier Mendik joined Julian Petley in introducing their documentary The Long Road Back From Hell: Reclaiming Cannibal Holocaust. Again drawing from discussions on censorship, and highlighting changes in the BBFC’s criteria, the introduction focused on the new almost-entirely-uncut edition of the film and how it had come about. The documentary itself was fascinating, and a suitable closing statement on the topics raised on the opening day of the conference.
The Body, Performance and the Pseudo-Real
The second day opened with the panel ‘Snuff, Gender and Sexuality’, which consisted of papers by Clarissa Smith and Lydia Brammer. Smith opened with her paper ‘The Breathless Jogger: An Extreme Case in Stafford’ which worked well as a bridge from the previous day which ended with mentions of extreme pornography. Smith identified the connections between the rhetoric against snuff films and that used in discussing extreme porn, with similar claims being made about both. In each case, the issue is brought to public attention to act as a ‘warning’, but the arguments work best by rendering the images discussed as unseeable whilst at the same time describing the depravity. Thus, for much more of the public the ‘idea’ of it is disgusting although they have not actually seen the material for themselves. Smith discussed ‘necro porn’ photography which depicts fictitious acts of death, but in a very staged, artificial and often parodist manner. The reality of the obviously faked images contrasts with the moral outrage or condemnation that can be attached to them. Lydia Brammer’s paper that followed also dealt with fake images of death, this time in the 1985 Japanese Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood film. Arguably more realistically done, albeit still stylistically excessive, Brammer argues that Japanese culture had at times replaced sex with violence. The discussion that followed the panel suggested that censorship led to the creation of new forms of ‘legal’ material. Thus the banning of depictions of the penis in Japanese cinema led in-part to the proliferation of the tentacle-porn sub-genre. Both papers dealt with issues of sexuality in snuff in differing yet interesting ways, and addressed the existing connections between sex and violence within many of these texts.
Entitled ‘Snuff and the Body: Self, Performance and Affect’, the next panel of the day opened with a paper by Steve Jones on ‘A View to a Kill: Perspective on Pseudo-Snuff and Self’. Jones focused on the Amateur Porn Star Killer trilogy of films that combined an aesthetic of amateur pornography with snuff. Approaching the texts as reflecting contemporary issues in the philosophy of the self, Jones’ explores how the central character of Brandon is hidden behind the camera and is only constituted as an individual through the act of killing. Karolina Gruschka’s paper ‘In Terms of Liveness Discourse, and with Reference to The Bunny Game, What Are the Implications of the way Performance Art and Film are Combined within the Platform of Film’ compliments this discussion perfectly. Her paper discussed the blurring of lines between Body Art and the assumed artifice of film, and again addressed issues of how we perceive ‘reality’ in film. Misha Kavka’s paper on ‘The Affective Reality of Snuff’ picked up on the notion of the ‘real’ and addressed snuff in relation to reality television. She discussed the ‘unrepresentation’ of death, which remains intangible as the ‘truth’ of death cannot be captured on film. All three papers worked well to discuss what we perceive as reality, and how the lines can be blurred between the constructed world of film and a perception of 'reality'.
The final panel of the day was entitled ‘Online Snuff Production and Consumption’ and would prove to be one of the conference’s most fascinating. Sarah Downes began with her paper ‘New Media and the Amoral Spectator: Considerations and the Gaze’ which was focused around the 2012 film Gut. Centred around horror fans who are sent snuff tapes, Downes argued that the film suggests violent imagery in turn creates violence, and the distancing effect of the recorded murders resulted in moral lapses for the characters. Cameron Williams paper followed, looking at ‘2 Snuff Films 1 Internet: An investigative report on the operations of the snuff ‘film industry’’. This paper questioned how we defined snuff, and suggested it could only truly be snuff if it was intended to be consumed for entertainment purposes and also made for this specific purpose. Interesting in light of previous arguments, it perhaps best highlighted the varying approaches that can be taken in defining what we understand a ‘snuff film’ to be. The final paper of this panel was ‘OMG They Just Killed some dude...: Online reactions to the 3 Guys 1 Hammer internet chock video’ from Iain Robert Smith. Following on from the previous two, this looked at audience engagement with genuine death videos on the internet and how ‘reaction videos’ suggest a performative online community. Whilst Smith does admit they can be problematic he rightly identifies their potential as a rich case study into the consumption and distribution of ‘snuff’.
The final keynote was given by Dr Tina Kendall and was entitled ‘The Aesthetics and Ethics of Snuff in the Films of the New Extremism’. Kendall’s talk focused on the idea of ‘affect’ in regards to low budget transgressive films that sought to evoke familiar styles and notions of ‘realism’ in their depictions of snuff. Discussing controversial films such as Trash Humpers (2009), Kendall suggested they play on an audiences desire to see the characters antics, yet confront the viewers with the murders that are then committed. The characters in the films she explores seem indifferent to death or even amused by it, whilst YouTube is framed as a lawless world of unpoliced material. Kendall’s talk again tied in well with the central topics discussed across the day. The second day of the conference seemed more focused on ideas of sexuality, the body, performance, interactive media and the perception of realism which culminated nicely in the topics examined in this final keynote.
Concluding the day was the pre-launch introduction for the new edition of the book Killing For Culture, with a questions and answers session, and some final thoughts from the organisers. More than anything else, this conference has illustrated what a rich, varied topic for discussion the snuff film actually is. Rather than being restricting in its specificity, it actually allowed for a strong central focus around which ideas of censorship, authenticity, violence, and audience engagement could be be explored. The smaller number of papers on some panels allowed for a longer discussion afterwards, which only served to further debate these issues in some depth. In a digital age where real death is easily accessed online, and social media encouraged greater communication and interaction between audiences, the importance of studying the concept of snuff, whether fictional or genuine, and questioning forms of censorship for this material, is certainly as relevant as it has ever been. Indeed, even across two days, it would not be unfair to say that this conference has only begun to explore the ideas, issues and controversies surrounding snuff. However, it was a successful and intelligent beginning, that explored both the historical forms of snuff film and marked the beginning in explorations of contemporary forms and it will be both interesting and exciting to see in which directions these debates will develop next.