Torture porn wasn't always comedy hour.

So called torture porn films, such as Hostel (2005) and the neverending series of Saw films are very popular these days. Basically these films are all about showing an astonishing number of ways to dismember and murder humans, usually with a healthy helping of puritan moralism and poetic justice. In many ways they even have common ground with the right wing vigilante films of the eighties, and would make Ronald Reagen proud, if somewhat sick to the gut. However things weren't always so. There used to be a time when if you said torture and porn in the same sentence, people thought you were talking about something very underground and very nasty. I am talking of the elusive phenomenon of snuff films.

I was first made aware of snuff when I saw the film Hardcore (1979) in my youth. The film is about a father, portrayed by the class a actor George C. Scott who searces for his run away daughter. She's fallen prey to the vile and seeding underground of pornography, and his conservative christian morality can't really cope with that. As he goes undercover and infiltrates the darker side of porn he stumbles across snuff: women being raped and murdered on camera for the sexual pleasures of the audience. And all the torture and abuse is authentic. The film told the story about snuff from a perspective that makes it seem like a real and credible phenomenon. Quite uncomfortable to think of. But snuff was not something the director had come up with on his own. He was in fact drawing on a long tradition of movie making, even without taking on screen death into consideration.


Rumors of snuff films had allready been around for quite a few years, starting around the days of the Manson-trials, in the very late sixties. However the film that brought snuff rumors to main stream attention was the aptly titled Snuff (1976), which claims that the end of the film is exactly that - snuff. The viewer bears witness to rape and onscreen mutilation and finally murder, all done in guerilla style and made to look real. And people believed it. This scene was appended to a less than mediocre proto slasher film, trying to exploit the enduring moral panic generated by the Manson murders. Supposedly the last scene demonstrates how the fictional murders were carried out in real life. It was a very effective marketing ploy, and a grade c pile of crap was suddenly the talk of the country, and made millions. To the more trained eye however the acting and scenes of mutilation look about as real as Michael Jackson's nose, but certainly completely devoid of morality. Snuff was exploitation in every meaning of the word. And that we can like!


An exploitation genre was born. The year after saw the release of several films with this theme, among them one of my favorites. A strange and nightmarish, yet arty, film called Last House on Dead end Street (1977), about a gang of miscreants whose forrays into underground SM porn turns into snuff. Another near legendary exploitation film that claims to show onscreen death is Joe D'Amatos Emanuelle in America (1977), which shows Laura Gemser investigating a supposed film showing soldiers raping and murdering civilians. The film in the film is depicted in a quite realistic and credible way, and shows some nasty footage, of scenes that could place in any war near you. It's not real though, and the most shocking moment in the film is the scene where a woman administers a hand job to a horse. I shit you not. It's completely out of place, and probably quite illegal. D'Amato was never one to shy away from a bit of controversy.
Soon after persistent rumors claimed Cannibal Holocaust (1980) was depicting real human death. In fact actors had to go on a witness stand to prove that they were still alive, and some of the effects were required to be demonstrated in front of a judge. Gruesome as the film is, the director did not have people killed to make it.

Rumors about the existence of the real deal were persistent, as they still are. Investigations into the matter by british and american police unearthed nothing however. Still, umpteenth generation vhs copies of Gini Piggu 2: Chiniku no Hana (Guinea pig 2: flowers of flesh and blood, 1985) was to up the ante another notch. The films director, Hidesho Hino, was something of a prankster and a media critic as well as extreme film affecionado. His first Gini Piggu film, aptly titled "the devil's experiment" and the sequel both depict, supposedly real, extreme torture of a girl, captured on film - and it's certainly the most realistic looking torture and dismemberment I have ever seen as such. The sequel however was the most effective of the two because of its conscious use of the percieved snuff formula. A young girl is kidnapped, tortured, dismembered and killed by what is evidently a complete nut job in a samurai helmet. The torture even quotes some elements from the earlier film Snuff, in a fitting visual tribute. The underground nature of the film meant that it was distributed by copying, and when one such low grade copy was seen by Charlie Sheen a moral media panic ensued. The FBI investigated, and aquitted the film. While the effects look impressively real they don't hold up to professional scrutiny - and of course it did help that Hidesho Hino could verify the film as fake. A few years later he released the making of Gini Piggu on dvd.


A fascinating side note about Gini Piggu needs to be mentioned. The film shows terrible scenes of bodily harm and death, such as a man plucking out the girls eye ball before licking on it, etc - and despite this there is not a single nipple portrayed in the film. The girl is covered by a blanket at all times, and we can surmise that Hidesho Hino does this to lampoon the double standards of comercial film: violence is OK, sex is not. He steps over the line of course, by portraying a level of violence that is rarely seen as ok on film, or in any other medium, but he still keeps it clean. No nipples, no sex and no pubic hair. Seeing how modern torture porn does the same thing without the same level of tongue in cheek self awareness is quite hilarious after watching Hidesho Hino's masterpiece.

Still to this day, not a single real snuff film has surfaced. That is, not a single film that depicts the deliberate death of a person, made for profit and sexual pleasure. There are numerous on screen deaths out there, but these are all captured for the personal pleasure of the perpetrator, by accident by news teams or by terrorists. As such they don't qualify as snuff. Still, the trope is incredibly poweful, thankfully, and until the first real snuff film emerges us eurotrash folks can enjoy our exploitation films drawing its energy from the supposed seedy phenomenon. Some of these films are quite excellent too. Occasionally there have been more comercial attempts at cashing in on snuff myths, such as the aforementioned Hardcore, as well as 8mm (1999) wich casts Nicholas Cage in a role not too dissimilar from Scott's in Hardcore. There is also the mediocre bordering on good film Tesis (1996). Tesis is a spanish flick portraying a female film student who stumbles upon an underground group producing snuff films. All these three are worth a watch, even if you're not into trash. In fact there are so many films that cash in on snuff, that it would be hopeless to list them all. One film however that is probably worth a mention is the recent snuff movie (2005), which blends modern torture porn with a story concerning snuff. Despite the initial fears that snuff movie is a snuff version of scary movie the film is not a silly comedy best left to rot and fester in a ditch somewhere... Atleast not for that reason.

It's been a long time.

Ian Curtis died thirty years ago today, may 18th 1980. He left behind a family, friends and music that's touched the hearts of generations.
I was two years old when he died, and naturally I only discovered his music long after he was dead. But when I did, it touched me in a way little music ever has.

I feel like telling a little anecdote. The last time I went to meet my mentor at the university I was wearing a Joy Division T-shirt, with the closer cover on it. I entered the door and my mentor, a really cool guy, said "I bought that when it came out." He was of course referring to the album. I had known him for three years, and I naturally knew that we had some common interests, but I had never taken him for a joy Division fan. But in fact he had a really big collection of rarities and everything.

So we sat there and talked about Joy Division, and Ian Curtis and J.G. Ballard (also sadly dead now) and other such stuff. He told me that he had in fact seen New Order live, on one of their first concerts after Curtis' death, and that it was one of the most chilling experiences of his life. I can imagine.

Ian Curtis lyrics, and his way of portraying the world was unique. So heartfelt and profound. I will never be able to understand how a man as young as was could write those lyrics. It was like he had lived a thousand lifetimes allready.

Rest in peace Ian. Your lyrics have made our lives richer.

Good enough to eat, Italian films for the true gourmet!

One of the many tasteless subjects I found fascinating as a child in the eighties was cannibalism. I can remember very vividly tales of cannibalism in books by Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert Louis Stevenson, or recounted by the adults around me. When I was probably 10 years old I remember reading about a pirate somewhere in Malaysia who had a penchant for eating his victims ears after roasting them over an open fire. Don't know if it was something he actually did, or just image branding. Regardless, I was enthralled. And it seems I was not the only one.

From the mid seventies to the late eighties Italy was a cinematic super power, atleast if you enjoy slightly offensive dehumanizing exploitation films with hardly any logic consistency scriptwise, and even more films that objectify women. And I do. I certainly do. In fact, I love it! Italians produced a wide range of exploitation films, starting with the so called mono genre, and developing into nunsploitation, nazisploitation, sexploitation, slasher films, giallo, zombie films and the subject for today's blog: cannibal films.

The genre grew out of the aforementioned mondo genre, which also originated in Italy before becoming international. Mondo is italian for world, and the mondo films were a sort of low brow sensationalist anthropological exploitation cinema - in the borderland between fiction and documentary. The films showcased a variety of perceived primitive practises from around the world, with a fair dosage of schock value. Shockumentary was another term used for these films. The genre devolved into death fetishism with the american Faces of Death and died out soon thereafter. Not really a great loss.

The Cannibal films can be seen as a direct off shot of this genre, both stylistically and with regards to the subject matter. Cannibal films transported the viewer to remote locations and let them witness a wide range of primitive (mostly fictional) customs - including cannibalism. The films also cashed in on the death fetishism of the mondo genre by including footage of animal death. Either stock footage of animals eating each other, or filmed sequences of natives slaughtering animals for food. These scenes are usually the most repulsive, especially considering that I'm personally a vegetarian. In addition these scenes usually had little to do with the "natural" behaviour of the supposed tribes who performed them. But they are what they are, and thankfully the climate for portraying animal cruelty in film has changed considerably since then. Let's not forget vicious treatment of animals was common in main stream films just 40 years ago.

An even more notorious example of linking to the mondo genre can be found in the most famous of all the cannibal films, IE Cannibal Holocaust (1980) by Ruggero Deodati. This film is about a mondo film crew who provokes a tribal war in the amazon, before being molested and devoured. The film attempted, quite successfully, to emulate a real documentary in certain segments and the premise is that a great deal of the footage is real. This led to rumors that the film did in fact contain the real on screen death of the actors involved. (And in fact there is a real life execution scene in the film, but through stock footage. None of the actors are in fact killed, or eaten, or any other such stuff.) Cannibal Holocaust is easily the most artistically well made film of the genre, and its reputation is well deserved. Ruggero Deodati even had to convice a court that the deaths were special effects, and spent some time in jail for the animal cruelty portrayed in the film. Don't see it if you can't stomach it.

The cannibal films are mostly trash, and I mean that in the most explicit sense. The editing is poor, the acting is terrible and the scripts are wafer thin. In addition the films are inherently racist and often come off as a remnant from earlier colonial times. The various exotic locations and tribes are always treated as savage, merciless and hellish and the death of a native is hardly worth a comment, while a scene depicting a white woman being molested can be lavishly detailed. In addition the supposed anthropolical aspects of the films are usually erroneous down to the very last detail. Prime examples are the portrayals of the amazonian Yanomamo as cannibals or the use of philipinos to portray Asaro mudmen from Papua - who also don't really eat people very often. (I have in fact met a couple of Yanomamo in real life, and they didn't try to eat me, or any other people.) But as it was with the mondo films, the value of these films is hardly in correct portrayal, but in shock and disgust.

In spite of this overdose of subconscious racism the films often have a anti-imperialist message. The filmmakers in Cannibal Holocaust clearly represent european interests with little respect for their film's subjects and end up being eviscerated and digested. Ursula Andress, of Dr. No fame plays a cynical capitalist searching for uranium in Papua has to witness the death of her brother (and eat his heart) and other horrors before escaping. While certainly not all the films have this premise it is certainly present in several of them.

Another aspect that can hardly be ignored is the direct sexuality these films have. I have allready mentioned the former Playboy model Ursula Andress, who displays most of her body in Mountain of the Cannibal God - where she is oiled and rubbed by a pair of native women. She is not the only one. In Emanuelle and the last cannibals (1977) the beautiful Laura Gemser once again undresses in front of the camera as Emanuelle (not to be confused with the more famous Emmanuelle), the world's sluttiest reporter. (One of the least interesting Emanuelle Nera films, go watch Emanuelle in America instead. Now that's offensive cinema for you!) Also any cannibal film that doesn't contain a healthy helping of naked savage women is not really a cannibal film. The same goes for rape, and to some degree explicit images of castration. It's all very delightful.

So now you know how to spend your weekend. Never mind clubbing or whatever, fire up Pirate bay, and get yourself some cannibal action! Once you've learned the joy of the dangers all natives present to white people trekking through a green hell, your world will never be the same again. I know I'm gonna get the last hufu out of the fridge and fire up Jungle Holocaust later today.

THULE

When I check the keywords people have used to end up on my blog one of the most common ones is "thule". Hardly strange considering that I use the word as my name - and in fact it nearly is my name. I've just left out a letter. As a kid I was even told that Thule was an older form of my surname. Don't know if that's true, but still it sounds cool that way. Sort of black metal industrial something-ish. And indeed Thule has been used in various conjunctions in different band names. It's a magical word I guess, and one with exciting connotations.

(Ultima) Thule is an ancient greek word, with a slightly mysterious origin and meaning. Literally it means "the farthest north", and was used as a geographical term to describe some northern region. Exactly which one is debatable. Some claim Norway, others Iceland and others Greenland - as evidenced by the Thule military base on the latter. Of course I am a historian, and this fact combined with the possible connection with my family name should tickle my curiousity and in a way it has. However, my interest for antique history is passing at best, so I don't really know so much about greek texts and trade routes or whatever. I do know a great deal about another subject with more ominous links to Thule though: national socialism. Nazism in more coloquial terms. And as you can see from the picture above, this is the connection I am going to explore in this post.

The most obvious link between National Socialsm and Thule lies in the Thule Gesellschaft (1918-1920), with its organizational, economic and ideological ties to Hitler's party NSDAP. While this society was a latecomer on the mystic nationalist scene, and far from the largest or even very long lasting, it certainly secured its place as more than a footnote in history thanks to these ties. In fact even the Swastika was adopted by the NSDAP as a sort of inheritance from the Thule Gesellschaft. This secret society is well known because of this link, and many have seen them as evidence that Hitler was an occultist and so forth. Perhaps even in touch with (possibly) green people from outer space. While the Thule Gesellschaft was quite evidently an occult group, inspired by rosicrucianism and theosophy - and even cabbala, their exploits have been widely exaggerated by rumors, just like the connotations of the NSDAP and Hitler's link to this group. Just to set things straight immediatly, and probably lose half of the readers at this point: Hitler was not the least bit concerned with the occult. Many high ranking nazis were (most notably Himmler), but not Hitler. Nor was he ever in touch with Crowley.

So why did the Thule Gesellschaft pick this name for themselves? An obscure referance from old greek texts describing a mythical and strange land to the north should be of little interest to modern educated germans? To find the answer we have to look briefly at a rather strange russian woman named Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891). She is famous for quite a few things, such as founding the Theosophical Society, inspiring Rudolph Steiner and Jiddu Krishnamurti among others, and making preposterous claims about lemurians living in California and Tibet and other such things. She was a nuclear reactor of occult power, in terms of creating and popularizing theories, and one of these was the theory of root races. In her view humanity had (d)evolved through a series of cataclysmic events, such as the sinking of Atlantis in ancient times. We were descendants of earlier more spiritually apt beings, and after these events we mated with various forms of apes to become the humans we are today. One of these root races was named "the aryans", whose symbol was the swastika...

Let's leave Blavatsky as she travels through India and other places looking for evidence of the secret masters and Lemuria, and travel to München in Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Germany had recently been united into a single political unity (excluding Austria and Switzerland though) and national pride was at its apex, as was the interest in mysticism and theosophy. Thousands of germans were involved in what has been called the Völkisch movement, and many of these were members of secret societies dedicated to unveiling the german people's secret past. This is the historical context we have to see this interest in Thule in. Mystics searching for a proud past for germany, by way of root races and lost continents, and this is where it starts to get real hairy.

The Thule Gesellschaft, and several similar groups, was founded on the idea that a grand aryan civilization had once existed in the north, probably in the regions around the baltic sea or Iceland. They had ruled over a large area and their culture was in fact the cradle of civilizations all around the world. They saw evidence of this in Vedic scriptures, where a nation of white people called aryans invaded India from the north, bringing culture and technology with them, and establishing themselves as rulers. They saw evidence in the depictions of ancient egyptians as mainly white people, and furthermore they saw evidence of this in the repetition of certain architectural forms in different cultures spread around the globe: pyramids and of course the proliferation of the swastika around the world. But their culture waned for some obscure reason, and their civilization fell. The aryans were left copulating with animals of various sorts and lost their spiritual and cultural powers over time. Their heirs in various parts of the world were left in different states of purity, with tibetans and germanic/nordic peoples being the purest. According to Guido von List survivors of the cataclysmic events had settled Iceland as refugees - which was the historical Ultima Thule of the Greek texts. These survivors' descendants had in turn spread to northern europe at some point.

To more modern minds this all sounds intensely outdated and quite simply wrong, and it is. However, in the latter half of the nineteenth century this was a rather common idea, known as a theory of cultural dissemination. The idea was that civilization had originated in a single area, and been disseminated, spread, to the rest of the world. This kind of thinking has been thoroughly discredited since, and only the most reactionary laymen still profess to this form of theory. Such as our very own Thor Heyerdahl here in Norway.

Anyway, back to Germanic occult nationalism. Thule and the civilization it represented was the aryan Atlantis, and their society was a golden age of magic and racial superiority. In other words the various Völkisch groups coupled their romantic mysticism with racist ideas, and antisemitism and nationalism, but it took someone else to propel these ideas into the rabidly frothing genocidal mania of the SS and Heinrich Himmler.

When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in Landsberg prison several of these mystic historical ideas found their way into his book. Despite the fact that he personally ridiculed Himmler's obsession with a germanic past he divides the various peoples of the world into three categories based on their ability to create culture. On top were the germans, which he claims founded all the high cultures of the world, while the jews were on the bottom. The jews had no ability to create nor sustain, they could only steal and destroy, and were in fact responsible for the loss of the aryan magical abilities. They were in the way of a new aryan world empire. We all know the outcome of that line of thought, but not all people are aware of the fact that Himmler's SS funded a great deal of historical research via the SS Ahnenerbe institute meant to provide a scientific basis for these ideas. The institute sent expeditions around the world to search for evidence of the lost Thule and the aryan tribes. While some of this research was legitimate, a great deal of it was also pseudo science and even genocidal.

But as we all know, Hitler shot himself and Himmler swallowed a capsule of cyanide after being arrested by the americans. Himmler's obsession seemed lost as his organization was dismantled, his ritual room in Wewelsburg castle (pictured above) was closed and his allies executed or sentenced to long prison terms. But not entirely. The National socialists were masters of branding, and the swastika, the aryans, the runic logo of the SS and other such originally mystic symbols would be connected with genocide and evil for generations to come. Still, the deeper meaning of these symbols would surface from time to time, and a new form of mysticism would arise. Just as Himmler lay rotting beneath the Lüneburger Heide the texts he had studied were exhumed - metaphorically speaking. Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, Guido von List, Karl Maria Wiligut and finally Rudolf von Seebottendorf and Walter Nauhaus - founders of the Thule Gesellschaft had found a new underground and vey eclectic audience. Some of their ideas are even strangely widespread today, such as the notion that the runes had some sort of magical deeper meaning, and could be used for scrying.

While the Thule Gesellschaft and its likes have been gone for nearly a century now their ideas have entered pop culture via the tyrants it inspired. Thule is perhaps not as linked to evil as the Swastika, but it certainly does have an ominous ring to it, and some of the modern ideas this society has fostered are certainly entertaining: vril power used as fuel for secret nazi UFOs, currently being used as material in a film depicting nazis on the moon in 2018. And that's just the tip of the ice berg...

boobies and agricultural revolution and stuff

The other day I was watching the news. It's been a couple of months actually, so you can imagine the pace my brain works at. Anyway, I was watching the news and there were these feminists, and they were swimming around in a public swimming pool with their boobs hanging out. I like boobs. I like them alot. But you know that when feminists are eager to show you theirs they have some sort of twisted and ridiculous agenda. And as always they did. They wanted to desexualize breasts. Titties are just meat, nothing sexual about that, or so these particular women would claim. The whole thing was laughable. While nobody really knows why men get aroused by looking at supple well formed mounds of pink flesh, with erect nipples surrounded by a perfect areola, it is hardly a logical phallacy to assume that topless women is hardly the way to reverse this reaction. Like I said, I like boobs - and I'm not the only one.

Anyway, while I was actively face palming I started thinking about this strangely irrational phenomenon, and where it came from, and as with everything else that is mind numbingly illogical in western society I ended up with the Bible.

Back in the days, the Bible teaches us, we were without sin and careless and free, and living in the garden. But then Eve, that terrible slag, had to go and eat the fruit of the tree of life, and present it to Adam just after having digested her helping. And God was severly pissed off by this, as he had clearly instructed them not to do so. They blamed the snake, but still got the boot and were cast out, and the garden was guarded by angels on steroids and a burning sword and stuff. You know the story. They sinned.

A common interpretation is that this is a parable for discovering sexuality, and a quite obvious one at that. Eve talks to the snake, and eats the fruit, then Adam eats the fruit and not long after they have children. Interestingly enough, this fall is also marked by the sudden need to hide their nakedness. Before Eve discovered the alluring snake and put stuff in her mouth she had no concept of nudity. And please do note how Rubens made Eve direct her gaze directly at Adam's serpent, while touching her mouth. No fellatio implied? (Though I suspect it was of a rather unimpressive girth and length, considering how little foliage it takes to hide it. Luckily for Adam he didn't have any competition around.)

The interesting bit is that this naive perception of covering up as a sign of sexuality is carried over by a bunch of highly educated atheist marxist inspired women in the present secularized society. Probably by way of Rosseau, and his noble savage. For some reason western culture and thought has obsesssed over the appearantly dichotomous "barbarian, natural, savage, primitive" on one hand and "culture, civilization, unnatural" on the other hand. Western culture is of course very much into dualism, and the duality of nature vs culture corresponds very well with religious concepts of body vs spirit, or even our mythic structures concerning the rise of civilization from a foraging nomadic existence via the agricultural revolution and into modern society.

Now this is where it gets all feministy and exciting. If we accept a pair of quite common notions atleast. Pre-agricultural society is generally held to have been a matriarchy where the gods were mostly feminine and the waxing and waning moon was a symbol of feminity and the feminine attributes of making babies and all that. As a contrast to this the agricultural revolution came bundled with patriarchy, male gods, sun worship and belief in sperm as the true origin of children (the homonculus theory). Just think of the potent freudian symbology contained in the image of a young strong muscular man driving his plow through the fertile fields of mother earth, and planting his seed in the hole. (When did this blog turn into pornography anyway?) Historically it's a massive over simplification, but as a mythic superstructure it is valid.

Okay, I've strayed pretty far from feminists swimming around with their mammaries exposed, but hang on just a bit further. Both the Bible and modern feminist theories tell us that there was once a pure and better way of life, and then there was a cataclysmic event (in spiritual and cultural terms) and we lost our innocence. It's easy to see how natural and unclothed becomes innocent and free in this sort of logic, and while I share some of these notions it's also an example of intellectual irredentism, for lack of a better term. Naive by any terms. What we also see is that some feminists also manage the logical leap it is to mix this all up with some culturally subconscious notions of sin. Having sexual thoughts about naked women is evidently a sin, and that is certainly not a marxist atheist educated way of thinking. While marxists certainly have their share of strange ideas, this is not one of them. Quite the opposite. The idea of sin linked with sexuality is a christian invention. Pluck out your right eye and cast it off! The difference between the feminists and puritanical christians lies in their proposed sollution to the "problem". The puritans covered their loins and petitioned the lord with prayer, as they say, while the feminists want to teach us men that their boobs are just udders and about as exciting as watching the laundry dry. Yet for some reason they don't like it when you as a man look at pictures of naked women. One should think that the more you look at them, the less exciting it gets. Atleast that's the exposure-thesis they seem to operate on when they burn their bras and swim around topless.

I don't get it. But I know one thing. I like boobs, and I can't complain about women who want to show them to me. Even if their reasons are distorted, incomprehensible and naive. Tittie power! Or something...