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.