Sarah tells Mike about how snuff films don't exist but lots of near-snuff films do. Digressions include "Basic Instinct," gymnastics and YouTube’s righthand bar. Mike is palpably grossed out for at least two-thirds of the episode.
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Sarah tells Mike about how snuff films don't exist but lots of near-snuff films do. Digressions include "Basic Instinct," gymnastics and YouTube’s righthand bar. Mike is palpably grossed out for at least two-thirds of the episode.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Snuff Films
Sarah: And also, like, I finished watching Faces of Death this morning and I couldn't eat while I was watching it, so I'm hungry now.
Mike: Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where we circle back to things we've forgotten and re-forget them. Oh, it's so bad.
Sarah: You can't say it so haltingly. You sound like you're a lawyer presenting evidence that you don't fully understand. You're like, “The cell phone… tower…”
Mike: I don't know. We need a better tagline, but anyway, welcome to the show. I am Michael Hobbes, I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer for a bunch of different places. And Michael and I were just talking about my book that I'm allegedly writing, but really I'm just taking long walks and thinking about. So, I'm also a professional walker-thinker right now.
Mike: And today we're talking about snuff films.
Sarah: Yes. Oh God. This is just something I've been curious about for a long time and I feel as if I didn't really learn any new information about all of this, but I just sort of sat with this material for the first time since I was a young teenager. Because I was a big horror movie person when I was a teen, but I never saw Faces of Death, which is one of the texts we're going to talk about.
Mike: Yes. First of all, we should probably say what snuff films are. Because I feel like many people, especially people younger than us, who we're not around for the panic about snuff films don't actually know what we mean. So, snuff films – or at least my understanding of them – is that they’re raw footage of people being killed. There was this panic in, I suppose the eighties until the nineties, once VHS tapes became a thing. There were these tapes that circulated that were actual footage of actual people dying. And they were these rare and weird things that you would kind of hear through whispers that there were these networks of people through which you would get snuff films and they were videos of bestiality, and murderer, and horrible accidents, and people hurting themselves.
Sarah: And there are a lot of conflicting definitions, because we are talking about something which - based on the core definition - a bonafide example has never yet appeared.
Mike: Oh!
Sarah: The classic definition of the snuff film is of something that doesn't exist and the bare bones of that are that it is something created for commercial distribution. So it's not a video that a murderer takes of their victim because it's part of the way they like to do their crime, or it's not video that inadvertently captures footage of someone dying, like a news broadcast, which there are a lot of examples of and which we're going to talk about.
The idea of a snuff film that first emerged in the 1970s is that it’s something specifically made for commercial distribution and that people are killed in service of a commercial product.
Mike: Oh, so you're killing people for the footage.
Sarah: Yes.
Mike: It's not that you kill people, and it happens to be filmed. You're doing this so that you can film it.
Sarah: Yeah. So that's the core definition of snuff. It's essentially people being murdered for the creation of film, the same way that porn is about people having sex for a film. It's not like you're taking video and people happen to start having sex. And when you think about it, it does make sense. Because Deep Throat in 1972, which is the first year that rumors of snuff, as we now know the legend really emerged. In 1972, Deep Throat becomes this huge blockbuster success, and a lot of its profits go to the mob. And there's this idea that snuff is something that is propagated by these vast networks of organized crime and sex trafficking rings and you're like, you know, sure.
Mike: I’m seeing echoes of the Satanic Panic here, where you think that there's this whole network of extreme human behavior. When you think about it, killing someone is extreme human behavior. And then killing someone just so you can film it, is even extremer human behavior. And so it makes sense that there wouldn't be all that many people who are doing that.
Sarah: Let's then go to the start of the snuff film rumors. These come out in 1972 and these are, you know, post a decade of footage of the Vietnam war. I think we do have a sense as a country that American media has become kind of a snuff industry because we are sharing all these images of violence and death and torture, and hardcore porn exists as a viable market in a way that it hasn't before. The first hardcore pornographic movie to legally be distributed was in 1967. It was I think called, Swedish Wedding Manual. Those Swedes.
Mike: Something with Swedish, man. If you put ‘Swedish’ in the title, it's got to be porn.
Sarah: Yeah. And so, it's in the same way that Altamont, which happened in 1969, took place at a time when rock concerts of that, you know, large scale festival nature had only existed for four years. Porn had only existed for a few years at the time that rumors of snuff started appearing.
Mike: Or I guess porn as we know it, right? Like, porn in theaters, porn distributed. This is pre-home video.
Sarah: Right. But like, hardcore porn. You're seeing people actually having sex with each other for the purpose of the film, to be paid, in an industry, the same way we start imagining snuff later.
Mike: I mean, I’ve never watched pornography, so I'll trust you. You're clearly a pervert for having seen pornography, but anyway, yes. It sounds, it sounds terrible.
Sarah: It's an interesting discipline and we're still getting used to it and Deep Throat is also a porno that has reached middle America in 1972 in a way that porn hadn't really before. So the walls are starting to disintegrate. We're having an Inception kind of a time with exploitation media just, boong. Avalanche, Edith Piaf.
And in 1971, a book about the Manson family is published, where the author talks about rumors. And this is something that Rachel Monroe, our guest last episode, tipped me off to. She was like, “Maybe this is how the snuff rumors started.” This turned out, as far as I can tell, to be true. This author talks in his book about rumors that the Manson family had taken videos of the murders that they had committed, including the murder of Sharon Tate, and that there were these film canisters buried somewhere on Spahn Ranch depicting the murders. Which I find to be doubtful, because my first thought about that is those people could not have gotten it together to put together the kind of equipment they would need to film a murder in 1969. Like, the lighting alone would have been so far beyond them. They were just, you know, out of their minds on speed and LSD pretty much consistently. Like, they were not learning how to use A/V equipment at that time in their lives. That, to me, is where it falls apart. And people have searched the grounds of Spahn Ranch looking for these fabled canisters, but they've never found anything. There are a lot of rumors of things in the seventies that never existed, but that just seem like the kind of thing that the Manson family would do.
Mike: I feel like we forget sometimes that this is the era before VHS. Right? So to film something, you did that literally. You filmed it on film, and film was hella unwieldy. I mean, wasn't it like you could only actually film things for eight minutes at a time before you needed a new canister? Like, it was extremely expensive and extremely inconvenient to film stuff.
Sarah: And you had to record your audio separately with a whole different system and apparatus. You didn't have a camera that could record sound simultaneously. So you would’ve needed, like, Tex Watson on camera, Susan Atkins with the boom mic.
Mike: And then the editing. I don't… like, I literally don't know how they edited back then. I don't know how you edited before computers. It seems wild to me that movies were ever made, basically before there was Final Cut Pro.
Sarah: And then back at the ranch, Linda Kasabian is busy in her editing suite. But this is the rumor. This is what people believed, you know? It’s just one of those things where the details don't make sense at all, but it just the kind of thing that just is so scary that it just goes along, I think, with the general sense of fear. Then in 1976, Allan Shackleton, who's an exploitation film producer, finds this movie, originally titled Slaughter, that Tom and Roberta Findlay, who were husband, wife, exploitation filmmaker duo in the seventies who made a bunch of intense exploitation movies that combined graphic sex and violence in a way that was apparently unprecedented in the sixties.
Mike: Awesome.
Sarah: They did a movie in 1967 called, The Touch of Her Flesh that was apparently groundbreaking in having sex and violence in extreme and equal measure. Then Tom Findlay was later killed in an accident with a helicopter propeller.
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: Like, the way that people get killed in the Omen movies. Anyway, they had made this movie titled Slaughter that was just terrible and it had basically no story and was sort of from the boom in the early seventies of Manson family exploitation films, because much as there were exploitation films inspired by Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, as we discussed in a previous episode, there were a whole bunch of exploitation movies that used the Manson family as an excuse to have just sort of soft core, violent, storyless scenarios for 80 minutes with a bunch of somewhat naked chicks and a guru kind of a guy. Like, this was a viable sub-genre for a few years.
Mike: God, the seventies were so much more hardcore than we remember them. Like, we have this rosy vision of mom and dad and Sally and John living in the suburbs, but like, Charlie Manson exploitation movies? I didn't even know this was a thing.
Sarah: Apparently there were exploitation movies of everything that one could think of.
Mike: So, was Slaughter… were they using real violence in that movie and real sex?
Sarah: No. It was a completely forgettable movie that the Finlay’s, I think the Findlay’s made 50 or 60 movies. I think they were just like, you know, “Crank it out. Be done. Move on to the next thing.” They were working in South America because it was literally just cheaper to make movies there and so a lot of their cast members did not speak English and so the movie kind of looks like Manos: The Hands of Fate, you know, which is similar to the problem that the Manson family would’ve come to if they had attempted to film their murders, is that they would have been so inept that everyone's dialogue wouldn't have been synced up correctly. So they made this basically unwatchable movie, but the producer Allan Shackleton was like, “I shall not waste a perfectly existing movie. I'm going to repackage it in some way,” and he realized that he could capitalize on rumors of snuff and so he commissioned and added in a closing sequence where we cut away from the movie proper and then show this actress pretending to just be a regular actress. “Oh, I just shot a scene,” and then she actually gets murdered and dissembled and cut apart by the camera crew and it's all real and they retitled it snuff, and the tagline was, “Made in South America, where life is cheap.”
Mike: Oh my God. Really? Jesus.
Sarah: Yes. And then one of the rumors is that Shackleton, the producer, hired fake feminists to pick at the movie because in 1976, if you wanted your movie to do good business, you had feminists protest it. People would see it.
Mike: It’s like the movie that feminists don't want you to see. That totally works now too.
Sarah: It worked for Basic Instinct. The feminists and the gays picketed Basic Instinct. It was just bound to be a smash. And so snuff, when it opens in New York, attracts – this is 1976 – it attracts significant attention. The hired feminists, maybe they're hired. There were a lot of genuine feminists who joined the picket line. Everyone refused to actually see it because they didn't want to give their $4 to someone who was profiting off of women's pain. You know, you look at the kind of porn that exists and has always existed and if you're living in a misogynist culture where sex is linked with violence, then hardcore sex movies are going to involve a lot of violence against women and that's what porn depicted in the seventies and one of the key arguments of anti-pornography feminism was that porn didn't serve as a reverberation chamber or a reflection of misogynistic impulses but was creating them to a significant degree and that porn was the cause of men behaving violently against women, which was never conclusively, as far as I know, proven by any definitive study.
The Meese Commission, which Andrea Dworkin testified before, as well as Linda Lovelace, in 1986, Andrea Dworkin consistently made claims that snuff movies existed. She had talked to women who had seen them. She believed these women and it's a lottable argument. It's just that nothing has ever appeared. Partly I think it's that we have this very specific idea of what snuff needs to be to qualify as snuff. It's something that is made in the porn model where you get, like, mobster backers and then you hire people to be killed, you know, not knowing that that's the job and then kill them in order to make a film as opposed to, like, you capture a death on film and then you put it on the news, and you make advertising money off of that. So it's just the need to believe in some kind of overriding, top-down structure for something to be snuff as opposed to depictions of human pain and suffering and violence being inflicted on people do make a lot of money even if no one necessarily planned it that way or developed a whole industry around it.
Mike: So how does Faces of Death fit into this?
Sarah: Did you watch Faces of Death as a teen?
Mike: My relationship with snuff films is when I was 14 years old I had been out, probably at Denny's because that's where I spent my entire teenage years. I came home and I could see light coming from the downstairs, so I knew my brother was watching TV.
Sarah: Oh no.
Mike: I went downstairs, and my brother was watching Faces of Death. I can't even watch, like, Quentin Tarantino movies. Like, I have to watch them through my fingers because I cannot handle movie violence, especially anything involving cutting, surgery scenes, like fucking Nip/Tuck, anything fleshy or red or moist.
Sarah: Can you watch Alien?
Mike: I watched Alien with my hand on the fast forward button. I fast forwarded through the entire dinner scene because I knew what was about to happen.
Sarah: It's bad, man. Yeah.
Mike: So I walked into the basement and my brother was watching a scene from Faces of Death that was in my horrified, still traumatized to this day memory, was a man cutting his own face with a razor blade.
Sarah: Ooh.
Mike: And I lost my shit, and my brother was like, “Oh, don't worry. It gets better. It's not that bad.” I think I sat there with my hands over my eyes for about ten minutes until that little montage was over and then there were these scenes of, I remember it was a protestor in Argentina who got shot by the cops. It was, like, helicopter footage. I still have the images of this in my head and I still shudder when I think about them.
Sarah: And is that something that you wish you hadn't seen?
Mike: Oh yeah. There was an argument that we should all see the footage of people being tortured at Abu Ghraib or we should all look at the photos of Matthew Shepard after he was murdered. I get where those arguments are coming from, but I have literal nightmares when I see violent imagery, so I wish that I had never seen these. I wish that I did not know that they existed.
Sarah: I will respond to that with an anecdote about me when I was a younger child. When I was, I think, six, I saw the scene in Batman Returns where Michelle Pfeiffer becomes Cat woman, and she comes home and she goes nuts on her apartment, and she puts all of her stuffed animals down her garbage disposal. And I, as a young child, found that unbelievably disturbing. Like, that bothered me for years.
Mike: That was your Faces of Death?
Sarah: That was my Faces of Death as a first grader because as a kid you imbue your stuffed animals with, you know, a life force and so to me she had just off-ed a whole family.
Mike: Did you ever see snuff films back at the time?
Sarah: No. Interestingly, the way that I doubled back was that as a teenager I exposed myself to this course of horror movies. I had approached the idea for a long time of there being things that you can see that can just destroy you. That can be psychically too much for you.
Mike: Yes.
Sarah: And I really found it liberating to be like, I can just safely traumatize myself in my own home with my tapes and prepare myself for the worst that life has to offer me by watching a bunch of weird beheadings.
Mike: So, you actually watched Faces of Death?
Sarah: I watched it this week. It's a whole series. There's six of them and you saw one that I didn't see. I only saw the first one and the first one… it might contain no instances of actual un-reenacted death caught on camera. It has the aftermath of death, and it has, for example, a bicyclist who was run over by a semi and they show real footage of the remains of that person.
Mike: Oh, fuck.
Sarah: And that's real. It's from news footage and it sucks.
Mike: Yeah. Was it commercially released? Did it show in theatres and stuff?
Sarah: The director of faces of death is a guy named John Alan Schwartz and one of the things that he said about the movie, to connect to your experiences, is one thing that made this notorious was that once a kid saw it, a bit of innocence was taken away. When young, you're immortal. That's easily forgotten.
Mike: Yeah. Fuck you, John Alan Schwartz.
Sarah: So he knows that he's made this kind of Ring film where it circulates and does this to kids. So the story behind that is that he was working a day job in the industry on Leonard Nimoy’s show in the seventies and was trying to crack into filmmaking and he got this idea to do an exploration of death hosted by this doctor character, the first Faces of Death movie. I think the first three are hosted by a coroner named Dr. Francis Gröss, with an umlaut on the “o” that no one pronounces, and the doctor character narrates everything and he has this Rod Serling kind of a presence. What is The Twilight Zone narration? “Your imagination is the key to unlock this door.”
Mike: Is it him narrating over footage of people dying?
Sarah: It’s not just that, but it is also that. So he made the movie for a Japanese production company. The budget was $450,000, most of which they spent on the faked docu-footage.
Mike: Faked docu-footage?
Sarah: Yeah. Which is about half of the movie. Maybe more than that. And he was like, “You know, we made it and we didn't really know if we'd ever see it again. We thought it would just go to the Japanese video market,” and it ended up making $40 million.
Mike: No way.
Sarah: And these things are hard to tabulate for Grindhouse movies, but it's, you know, somewhere in that neighborhood is where the estimate is. I think it made $20 million in Japan because… yeah.
Mike: Woah. What is the faked docu-footage? So, the actual movie itself is a mixture of found footage and, like, reenactments of fake deaths?
Sarah: Yes.
Mike: How do they do that?
Sarah: When I was watching it, at first I was priding myself in being like, “Oh, I think that part's faked.” You know, I'm a thirty year old woman and I'm proud of my ability to tell when something looks not real and what I realized is that all of the actual depictions of people dying in Faces of Death are fake reenactment footage.
The opening is footage of an open-heart surgery and images of very old, very dead people in a coroner's office, and it does that overdetermined cable news thing where it shows you, “Here's a super dead person” and then it plays a discordant chord, you know, where it's like, wahoom. And it's like, yes, we know that it's unsettling to see a dead person. You could play minimalist music or something. Like, you don't really…
Mike: You don’t have to punctuate everything by telling me how I'm supposed to feel.
Sarah: So it starts with that and then Dr. Francis Gross tells us about the journey he's going to take us on and then we do animal death for a while. We're shown footage of animals in slaughterhouses and of a chicken having its head cut off for the first several minutes and at the end of that, the narrator is like, “I'm not so sure about eating meat.” And then it progresses and he's like, “I'm not so sure about execution.”
Mike: So, it gets more extreme as it goes along?
Sarah: It does, but it also has these moments where, you know, because it has such a professed goal of like, “Faces of Death. We are going to look at death,” and Dr. Francis Gross actually… so at one point he refers to the country of Africa.
Mike: Nice.
Sarah: And then another Francis Gross line from the opening of the film that I really liked in the way of, you know, great Twilight Zone narration is, “We have developed a world that refuses to recognize our own destiny.”
Mike: I mean, sure. I was thinking, like, as you're describing this, you can just tell that he's going to use some high-minded excuse to show a bunch of footage, right? You know the whole point of the whole thing is exploitation and shock value, but you just know he's going to pretend that it's some interesting academic exploration and some woke, enlightenment, like, “We must look upon death to truly understand it,” and then it's like, “Here's a footage of some car accidents.” It's like Fox News, America's Worst Drivers type footage with this pretentiousness over top of it.
Sarah: Yeah. It absolutely does that and there's one part that I loved that's just Ed Wood-like where they show footage of the aftermath of a plane accident, but they don't have footage of the actual accident and so they have a still image of a plane and then they cut to footage of an explosion.
Mike: Nice.
Sarah: And they're like, “No one will notice. We just don't have the money for anything else and it's fine,” and it's just so beautifully amateurish and stupid and then they had, you know, footage of this tourist, you know, trying to lure a bear by feeding it bread and these things that were caught by a single camera but filmed by multiple angles obviously… somehow.
Mike: Oh, so that’s how you can tell that it's faked, is that the camera placement and the sound are a little too perfect.
Sarah: Oh yeah. And what happens is that they're like, “No! Don't!” and then the camera jogs away and then it comes and then you see, like, a bear eating a big piece of beef and they're like, “Oh my God!”
Mike: “Oh no, Jeff!”
Sarah: Yeah, exactly. And you're like, “Wow. I really feel that I've looked on death and confronted destiny” and I feel like that's what makes it a true American classic though, because this is this adolescent rite of passage that I always heard about, you know, boys being exposed to, like the film that they show you about your changing bodies.
Mike: I remember people talking about it in middle school and high school. It was this thing in whispers the same way that in the pre-internet era, the way that porn got shared around. That there was in my middle school of 1,200 people, there was a porn video that, like, “Oh, Steve has it this week. See if you can get it next week.” And then “Oh no, it's with Tom,” and “No, no, Matt has it,” and it was this thing that you had ask around to get and then each person would have it for a couple of days, like, the Stanley Cup or something.
Sarah: It's like life in Soviet Russia.
Mike: And I remember Faces of Death being like that too. It was this thing that you would hear rumors about, that somebody had it and “Oh, we're all gonna get together and watch it at this person's house.” It was this weird cult object that people fetishized and everybody wanted to get their hands on for reasons that even at fourteen I was completely baffled by. I understand why people want to watch porn. I don't understand why people want to watch the aftermath of a plane crash.
Sarah: I think there's something about Faces of Death that fulfills that adolescent wish fulfillment, where there are parts of it that are really grim, and they do show footage of mangled corpses, or they go into a morgue.
Mike: Did that seem real? The mangled corpses?
Sarah: Well, some of them I knew were real, but there's also this interesting thing that happens when you're questioning everything the whole time. Everything could be real, or it could be fake, and it's just both at once in a way. It's like Schrodinger's Mangled Corpse. There was the sequence that apparently everyone always talks about when they meet the director. They ask about the sequence where a group of diners in an unnamed oriental land in that sort of Edward Said’s Orientalism sort of way are all brought a live monkey whose head is then screwed into an apparatus on their table and they bash its head with mallets and eat its brains and it's like, “See? This is what life is like in Eastern lands.” That's a scene that people remember really vividly, and I was watching it and I was like, “Is this real? It could be.” I was like, “Did I just watch a monkey get its head beaten in or did I not?” And then I think there's a superstition that we’re also maybe more prone to have about filmed media when our abilities to encounter it hinged on being able to get our hands on these objects. They had more totemic power, I think, because they were limited to these little, sacred, you know, these little objects imbued with vitality. You couldn't just Google, like, “snuff” and then download this exploitation movie from the seventies and immediately watch it and be like, “Oh, that's fake.” You know? Faces of Death is on YouTube!
Mike: Oh, is it?
Sarah: You know? Isn’t it so weird to think about when you think about the struggles of all the teens, through all the generations of teens, you know, that have had to get their friend or their friend's brother to rent it for them and now you can just go on YouTube and search Faces of Death, and it is one of the least scary things on YouTube.
Mike: That's interesting. I guess it's like once something becomes easier to get, the quality becomes less important to you. There are all these studies of, if you think that a wine cost $40, you're more likely to report that it tastes good. Whereas if you think it costs $2, you're more likely to think that it tasted bad.
Sarah: Wine is such a shell game. I think it's all made up.
Mike: It's all constructed in your mind of how much something is worth and I think the fact that you had to hunt around for Faces of Death as if it was the Hope diamond probably made you think “Wow, this must be so amazing,” or “This must be insightful. This must be worth seeing because it's so hard to get.”
Sarah: Yeah, it has more meaning because it took more effort.
Mike: How did you feel watching it?
Sarah: I felt kind of prurient and weird at times and just also, still, I really returned to the feeling that I hadn't really thought about very much since I was a teenager of, “Is watching this going to scar me?”
Mike: Yeah.
Sarah: What's interesting about Faces of Death– so, Faces of Death came out in 1978 and it has this weird quality that reminds me of I Spit on Your Grave, which also came out in 1978 and is one of those movies that feels so real that I think at a time when you couldn't just go look up “Is this real or not?” had this kind of documentary quality that also made it feel real. I think both of those movies were made with weirdly sincere motivations behind them. To draw the connection between Faces of Death and I Spit on Your Grave, I Spit on Your Grave was made by the director Meir Zarchi after he was in the park with his friend in seventies New York and this naked, battered woman ran up to him and she had been a victim of a rape and assault in the park and he took her to the police station and was really horrified at how the police treated her.
Mike: Wow.
Sarah: And how they were just sort of barking questions at her and not comforting her and he felt not taking her seriously. So from this experience he made this exploitation film based on this idea that the system didn't care about women, which it didn't in the seventies. You know, I think rape was barely a crime in terms of something that actually was investigated and prosecuted. Have you seen… this is a pointless question. I know what the answer is, but have you seen I Spit on Your Grave?
Mike: No. I saw the title of that movie and ran in the opposite direction.
Sarah: The premise of I Spit on Your Grave is that this woman who is a writer from the city, goes to the country to “spend some time by herself.” So, she goes to the country and it's this classic seventies horror film narrative. The same kind of thing we see in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of urban versus rural. Also, the same thing we see in Deliverance, where she comes and all these local guys show up and they're like, “Hey, a rich city woman who's slutting around in her city clothes,” and what the movie presents is sort of an inevitable course of events. They show up at her house and gang rape her, and then leave her for dead. And then she slowly recovers and then lures them all to her and murders them spectacularly.
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: Including emasculating the lead rapist in a bathtub.
Mike: There's so many reasons I'm never going to see this fucking movie.
Sarah: Yeah. It's one of those things where if America were a kindergartener and this were the drawing it was making, you would be like, “What is happening at home?” And there was also still animal death in movies in the seventies.
Mike: Oh. Like, they killed actual animals?
Sarah: Yes. Not frequently, but it happened, and it was like, now if you kill a fish on screen in a movie, you would never hear the end of it and your career would probably be fucked, right? If you did it in the seventies, it was like, “Ah, you're pretty much Francis Ford Coppola. What are we going to do? So there's an animal death in Apocalypse Now, but it's considered quick and painless and Heaven's Gate led to the crackdown that we now have on animal activities in movies because the director killed, I think, multiple horses in a fairly painful and protracted way. It was this interestingly violent time I think maybe in a way that we don't recognize and there is one movie that I've seen that I wish I hadn't seen. There's one movie in the whole history of movies.
Mike: Was it Mamma Mia? Sorry.
Sarah: I haven't seen Mamma Mia. I really like ABBA though. No, it's Cannibal Holocaust. Have you heard of that?
Mike: For fuck’s sake, how are those two words in the same order?
Sarah: Quite inevitably, if you look at the kind of titles that, you know, Italian horror movies, late seventies and early eighties. I know. Yeah. So imagine young Sarah… young, 18 year-old Sarah saying, “I'm going to get Cannibal Holocaust and it's going to be a good time.” Cannibal Holocaust is interesting because it came out in 1980. It was made in response partly to the kind of rumors about snuff that people have been talking about throughout the seventies in the vein of I Spit On Your Grave and of Faces of Death of “Is this real? Is this fake? I don't know. Could be!”
It's very similar to the Blair Witch Project in some ways and it's fascinating that there was this found footage horror movie that was marketed as, you know, maybe it's real. Like, the stars of it were barred from making public appearances or being in other films for a year so that the public could wonder if they were dead, which actually ended up working too well because the director, Ruggero Deodato, was threatened with an indictment for murder.
Mike: Oh, wow. Also, it can't be great for their careers either… to be like, “Am I alive or dead?” It's hard to book work after that.
Sarah: Well, they were also being paid on set in Colombian pesos, so you really feel like they weren't benefiting from any of this at all. But anyway, the premise of the film is that Robert Kerman plays a distinguished anthropology professor in New York city and he is sent to the jungles of South America to try and recover the footage of this film crew that went down to make a documentary about local tribes and watch it to determine how they died and decide whether the New York TV stations should show it on television. Within this movie is this idea about what are we showing to people? What kind of an appetite for violence have we created? Because the professor watches the footage and determines that the documentary filmmakers went down and intentionally drove the tribe’s people into a burning hut to try and get staged footage of a massacre and did all these horrible, violent things which have become fodder for a movie.
So it's kind of like the drudge report article about– the killed Newsweek article about Monica Lewinsky, where you want to show people inflicting horrible crimes on each other and you're like, “We're going to make a movie about how it's terrible that people want to see that and in the process we're going to do it and we're going to not pay anyone enough.” So, the documentary footage reveals that they did all these horrible things to the natives and then the natives retaliated by murdering them and that footage is captured on the found footage, which is only shown to the TV people who are like, “My God. We shouldn't show this ever. It's too much for the people and our terrible pornographic approach to pain and violence has finally reached its natural end. We've learned something.” So again, it's weirdly optimistic like so many seemingly bleak texts, but the thing that really got me about Cannibal Holocaust is that it has all of these scenes of animal torture.
Mike: Interesting.
Sarah: And it's not just that they're killing animals. It’s that they're torturing animals and they're torturing animals for the movie. So you could call that snuff depending on the kind of life that you qualify within that. Like, there's a scene of them where they catch a turtle. They're going to eat a big sea turtle and they torture it for a couple of minutes and that's something that I can't unsee and it was horrible.
Mike: Yeah. That's awful.
Sarah: Intentional infliction of pain in reality on a living thing so that this horror film director could make what he imagined to be some sort of a point about media, which, go ahead. Make your point. Don't torture anything.
Mike: Well, yeah. Don’t do the thing that you're criticizing as you're criticizing it.
Sarah: Yeah.
Mike: It's like saying “Porn is bad and rots our brains. I'm going to show you an hour and a half of porn and then be like, ‘Well, you shouldn't be watching porn.” That’s, I don't know. It just seems really cynical.
Sarah: It is. Yeah. And that's not the only animal death. There's several. I, you know, was revisiting the list of the different deaths in it and you know when occasionally you're reading a Wikipedia page and you're like, “I appreciate the choices behind this.” One of the deaths was a tarantula and I can see another list compiler being like, “Well, that's just a bug. Whatever.” But, you know, it's a tarantula. You know that the movie wants to inflict pain on living things.
Mike: Do we know anything about the kind of person that enjoys watching snuff films? I mean, it's really obvious or it seems obvious that if you like watching deaths, you're probably kind of an asshole? Or that's the wrong way to put it but it seems obvious that if you like watching deaths, you probably have some mental stuff going on. Do we know if that's actually true or do people just like watching deaths and then they're really nice husbands and fathers the rest of the time?
Sarah: Again, because of the lack of actual snuff films, let's go back in time. We're going back to 1963. If I say Burning Monk to you, what do you think of?
Mike: Oh, I think of Vietnam.
Sarah: Yeah.
Mike: The protests. The monks protesting.
Sarah: The really iconic image that, I think, we tend to think of was a monk named Quảng Đức, who immolated himself in 1963 to protest the South Vietnamese government's persecution of Buddhists.
Mike: Yes.
Sarah: And that was a government that was backed heavily by the United States because it was anti-communist. So it wasn't protesting the war. It was protesting American involvement in Vietnam.
Mike: But it gets twisted around and becomes this Jane Fonda thing of anti-war.
Sarah: It was about American-backed anticommunist regimes in fact. It was entirely about our bad decisions in some key senses. This was an image that became immediately iconic, I think, and the way that the Vietnam War really created so many iconic images of human suffering, because we didn't have those kinds of images of World War II, but we did of Vietnam. And of people running from napalm attacks. Like, if I say that sentence you have an image in your head, right?
Mike: Oh yeah. In journalism school, they always talked about how when you ask people, “What is the most censored war in American history?” most people save Vietnam because we assumed that because there was this fight between the government and the press during that time that there was censorship going on. Vietnam was actually the most uncensored war in American history at the time and World War II was the most censored war.
There were plenty of images of disgusting things from World War II that we did not see. A lot of the soldiers were extremely miserable. The entire Pacific front was in tropical conditions. People were getting boot rot and just horrible, disgusting things were happening, but nobody heard about it back home and when they came home, they were discouraged from talking about it. This is our grandparents’ generation. So, we think of World War II as this nice, sanitized story, but that's because of the censorship, not because of the actual war. So it makes sense to me that in the sixties was the first time we saw images of what war was actually like and how complicated these countries we were fighting over and about really were.
Sarah: You know, if you're going to the movies and seeing a newsreel about what was happening in World War II. First of all, you have it presented to you in this unified narrative of “The boys are going off to fight, Jerry.” You know? And everyone's smiling and smoking army issued cigarettes the whole time and you're seeing it outside the home, and I feel like one of the really scary things that happened in Vietnam was that people had TVs and in 1963, you would turn on the nightly news and there would potentially be footage of something like a monk immolating himself and you would see it and you would have this image inside of your home. Your kid would see it. But another thing that I found a really interesting connection with the monk narrative, a photo journalist named Malcolm Brown, was the only photojournalist there and he took what became a Pulitzer Prize winning photo of Kwon Duke and an interviewer speaking to him in Time magazine said, “What were you thinking while you're looking through the camera?” And photojournalist Malcolm Brown looking back on this occasion said, “I was thinking only about the fact that it was a self-illuminated subject that required an exposure of, oh, say F10 or whatever it was. I don't really remember.”
Mike: That’s terrible.
Sarah: I was using a cheap Japanese camera by the name of Petrie. I was very familiar with it, but I wanted to make sure that I not only got the settings right on the camera each time and focused it properly but that also I was reloading fast enough to keep up with action. I took about ten rows of film because I was shooting constantly,” and the interviewer says, “How did you feel?” and Malcolm Brown says, “The main thing on my mind was getting the pictures out.”
Mike: Oh my God. That reminds me of – I've spent all week working on this article for which I have interviewed people about some very emotional things and I've had many people crying on the phone to me this week at the end of hour-long conversations, two hour long conversations and there is, like, the part of myself that I hate the most is in these conversations when somebody is telling me something really personal and there's a part of me in my head that's like, “Yes, I got it. This is the story I'm going to use,” and it’s so terrible. There's this part of you that's already thinking of how you're going to reprocess this into a cute little anecdote. You're like, “Ooh, I've got my opening story for my article,” and it's so cynical and immediately after you do it, you're like, “Ugh, I'm terrible,” but there is this part of you that's like, “I need to drill down on these stories” or “I need to get details that I can regurgitate. I need to know when your parents were abusing you, what was the brand of boot they were kicking you with?” Like, you need these little details to retell the story.
Sarah: “He was menacing even in his hush puppies.”
Mike: Exactly. You need these details to make stories come alive and it's so terrible. This is the central task of journalism, but it's something that I feel super ambivalent about.
Sarah: Well, it's terrible because you become so predatorial in that moment. You're like, “Yes, that's the thing I need,” and it becomes this shiny object you need to grab and build your little bower with.
Mike: Because all of a sudden, you’re not a person. You're a journalist. Being a person in that moment is being like, “Oh my God, I'm so sorry you had to experience that,” and being a journalist is like, “Tell me more. How did it feel? What was it like? How much blood was there?” You need to drill down on these things. Can I ask, why do you draw a line between this monk immolating himself and snuff films?
Sarah: I feel like the things that that photojournalist said in that interview are kind of reflective of what Ruggero Deodato is doing in Cannibal Holocaust seventeen years later of he made the film partly in response to Italian news coverage of political terrorism in Italy in the seventies. I feel like he is responding in an inarticulate and regrettable but ultimately, to me, a meaningful way. What it does to you to be in the business of documenting and creating human pain as a horror filmmaker, as someone working in media and, you know, so the burning monk is on TV and twenty-four years later, this was something that I went back and researched just to do my due diligence and then was very surprised at what I learned. Have you ever heard of the suicide of Budd Dwyer?
Mike: No.
Sarah: This was, again, something that isn't snuff, but it's sort of at the perimeter of snuff. Like, one of the actual things that exists that's close to it. Or maybe it is depending on how you define commercial distribution to go back to your question because Budd Dwyer was a, I think he was a treasurer for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the 1980s and he was found to have accepted a bribe from, I believe, an auditing company to do some sort of state financial audit, something very boring. He accepted a bribe from an independent contractor so that he would give them the appointment, and he did, and this is the kind of thing that Pennsylvania, which is a fairly corrupt state, public officials do this all the time. But he was prosecuted for it, and he was ignominiously taken down and was being forced to resign and he apparently could not take this and called a press conference where he read a very long statement and then read his final thoughts and then took out a gun and killed himself.
Mike: Oh God. I have heard about this. On live TV, right?
Sarah: I don't think it was being carried live. The amazing thing about it is that the camera crews recorded it and then they all went home, and they went to their little studio, and they edited their shows and some of them played the death unedited. Some of them played footage…
Mike: You're kidding.
Sarah: … Of Budd Dwyer killing himself. Not on live TV. Not accidentally, but on purpose. They went and they went to their editing suites, and they put together the broadcast and then they played it on TV.
Mike: What?
Sarah: Yeah, they played it on TV and one of the fluky things that happened is that it was a snow day and so kids in Harrisburg, which was one of the cities that played the unedited footage, we're home at the new news broadcast and saw it. So there's also this generation of Budd Dwyer jokes known to Pennsylvania school children of the eighties.
Mike: Oh God. Did they give a disclaimer or anything? Like, “Warning. This footage contains disturbing…”
Sarah: No.
Mike: What?
Sarah: No, they were just like, “This is news. We're going to put this on TV.” You know, in the spirit of– if you play an immolating, a self-immolating monk on live TV, why not a state official killing himself?
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: And I watched that footage this week, too.
Mike: You did not.
Sarah: I did.
Mike: What's it like?
Sarah: Well, it's just terrible because you're watching someone who clearly, you know, he's been stripped of this title that gave his life meaning. He sees no way out. The psychic pain that you're watching is really terrible and then there's no gore when he actually shoots himself. It happens very suddenly and then there's this close-up of his dead body as people around him react and that was on the news and the news stations in America were like, “We're going to put this on TV. This is news. People should see this. Why not?” And it wasn't with this feeling of people should see this, but it also wasn't with the feeling of people shouldn't see this. It was just like, “This is news. It literally happened today.”
Mike: God, that seems so irresponsible especially with what we know now about the contagion of suicide and the way that suicide being framed can really harm people and – I hate to use this word – trigger other suicides. Like, it's wild that they just are like, “Here's this footage!”
Sarah: Yeah. And one of the examples that someone involved in this, someone from one of the stations, came up with, which makes sense in its way, is, “Well, look. We put the Zapruder film on TV. We put footage of the Kennedy assassination on TV. Why not Budd Dwyer?” And it's like, well, in a way, it's the whole precedent thing.
Mike: Ugh. I can’t watch the Zapruder film either even though it's grainy, even though it's far away. I cannot.
Sarah: Yeah, it's terrible. It's a terrible thing to watch and it is amazing to me that, you know, we are living in a time when we're so much better able to access horrifically violent imagery if we look for it. Like, there is so much footage of actual death on YouTube that Faces of Death is just this adorable, hokey, old thing compared to it. But in 1987, there was just this completely guileless sense of, “Well, it's news, isn't it? Of course we're going to put Budd Dwyer killing himself on TV,” and we would never do that today. So it's not as if we're doing better, but we're doing differently in some way.
Mike: So, in the London 2012 Olympics, there was apparently a vaulting injury. People don't know this. I used to do gymnastics. Gymnastics is an extremely dangerous sport where there's more injuries in gymnastics every year than in football because you're twisting your shoulders around and stuff and popping it out. So, according to this friend of mine, on live TV somebody had a horrific vaulting accident. I asked him not to describe it to me because I would faint, but apparently it was rated R type injury in the vault and they showed it on live TV sort of accidentally, but very quickly, he said, they cut away from it and they never showed it again. They didn't even really talk about it, or they mentioned so-and-so was disqualified after an accident, but they didn't.
I'm sure that if you're a complete asshole you can go on YouTube and find the footage, but they were very responsible about the fact that, “Someone has really been hurt here. They're in the ER. It is physical, human pain. We're just not going to show it, and we're not going to talk about it, and we're not going to exploit it in any way. We're just going to move on,” which I think is the correct way to do it. It's obviously news when somebody kills themselves at a press conference, but you don't have to show that act to describe that act. You can say, “Look, there was a really disturbing press conference today. This is the point where he pulls out a gun and shoots himself,” and stuff. You can pause the footage and not actually show it. I feel like that's what people would do now.
Sarah: And some stations did do that, but some played the whole thing, and it is interesting what are the things that we would unconsciously assume it's necessary to see with your own eyes. You know? And it also, of course, reinforces his intentions going forth because everyone knows who Budd Dwyer is.
Mike: Yeah. I guess it worked.
Sarah: His whole goal that he talked about in his lengthy press conference pre suicide was to establish the narrative that he had been unfairly targeted by the legal system, which was true in a way because he was being prosecuted for graft, which everyone was taking part in pretty much, but he did seem to develop this intense victim complex about it and, you know, then made himself a martyr on television and does get to be remembered that way. So it's really reinforcing what we, I guess, were just completely unsavvy about in 1987, which is that if you allow someone to take their private vendetta to television and convince, you know, and enact their personal narrative in a way that makes other people understand it and validates the way they wanted to see themselves through a spectacular death than other people will probably do the same thing and it will lead to other violent suicides.
Mike: Yeah. It is actually surprising to me that there's no evidence of snuff films because it always struck me as just common sensical that, you know, you set up cameras and you get people having sex in front of them. That makes sense and then you set up cameras and you beat somebody up or murder them in front of them. It just makes sense that that would be a natural extension.
Sarah: It's interesting because I feel like we're consistently able to, in some way, emotionally connect with how heartless America is but not describe the actuality of it in a plausible way. So the idea behind snuff is that there's just this whole capitalistically motivated network of filmmakers and producers and distributors and people who, according to Andrea Dworkin’s idea of how it works, pay 250 or a thousand dollars to get a seat to see a snuff film, that it's this extremely expensive, which therefore is able to bankroll it, kind of a venture and that people are signing on every day to kill people, torture them on film as part of a job and that people want to watch this.
It's like, yeah, kind of. Like, look at the Vietnam War. Look at what we did to Vietnam. Look what we did to American soldiers. Look at how most of our industries in America, at least the ones that involve a significant labor force when those jobs still existed in the 1970s, involve destroying someone's health and you don't murder them on camera, but you gradually give them colorectal cancer. And some of the content in porn in the seventies and now does suggest this basic sense of violence toward and hatred for women. We do live in a violent society. And Andrea Dworkin, when she testified before the Meese Commission in 1986, talks about they said that battery didn't exist. They said that rape didn't exist. They said that domestic abuse didn't exist, and women always knew that those things existed and that's true and I feel like snuff is something– it is like the Satanic Panic.
It is like so many of the things we've talked about, where it, as a specifically imagined thing that was a product of self-conscious human evil, never actually existed, but all of the cruelty and indifference and desire to see other human beings suffering was real. It was just that we didn't ever have such a deeply totemic object. We had to suss out that argument from all these different sources and be like, “See the burning monks in Vietnam, and the Budd Dwyers, and the Deep Throat”, and all these different things that come together to tell us what kind of a world we're living in. We didn't have one perfectly expressive item that did that so we kind of made it up.
Mike: So you're saying the real snuff film was in our hearts.
Sarah: Like Father Christmas
Mike: But that’s interesting because that recasts Faces of Death for me because then Faces of Death is exploiting the anxiety and fear of snuff films. It's not actually an example of snuff films. It's playing on this idea that there are snuff films out there. “I'm going to show you one.” So one of the reasons it made so much money probably is because there was all this anxiety about snuff films and then it's like, “Oh, I've heard about these things. I can finally go see one.” So does all this mean that snuff films never went away. They just became YouTube. Is that why we don't hear about snuff films anymore, why there's no panic about snuff films? We all just assume that we're all watching a ton of death and we can go find death if we'd like to see it anywhere.
Sarah: Well, you know what’s something that we don't even think of as watching death but that absolutely was September 11th.
Mike: Oh yeah.
Sarah: When you watch a building collapse with people in it, you know what you're seeing on some level. Like, we all were united as a country by this experience of watching hundreds and hundreds of people die in an instant basically and here's something that we've integrated into our national being and then the first beheading video, the first beheading video that was done by a terrorist organization in order to spread their message through a terrorizing image, a terroristic image, was the beheading of Daniel Pearl in 2002.
Mike: Which I have seen, and I never want to see again. It's awful.
Sarah: And I don't think I will ever be in a place to seek that out and see that or see it on purpose and is that something that you feel like you can't get out of your head? Your mental image bank?
Mike: Yeah. I saw it accidentally. I forget the circumstances, but I didn't go seek it out. It was part of a documentary I was watching, or it somehow came into my vision non-voluntarily. I personally don't think that I need to see horrible things to think that they're horrible. It just ruins my day, and my week, and my sense of value, and it makes me really sad and angry for days and weeks afterwards. And so I try to avoid that stuff. I think it's important to know what the reality of things like Daniel Pearl's murder and Abu Ghraib and 9/11 are. It's very important that we don't whitewash those things, but just, as a person, I can't watch those things. How do you feel about it?
Sarah: I mean, I don't watch beheading videos. I don't… yeah. I feel the same way about it and I feel also that if, you know, if you watch a beheading video specifically or some kind of video made by a terrorist organization, like the beheading videos that ISIS now does, then you're completing the transaction that was begun by that organization. You become the reason that they made this. You become the terrorized audience and you know, you don't have to specifically witness someone's pain in order to, I think, have a basic understanding of what happened.
Also, I think there's the false sense that when you watch someone die or something like that that you understand some deeper, that you understand it in some way, and you don't. Like, I don't understand Budd Dwyer’s life from having watched him kill himself. Interestingly, I think to me there's a dividing line where I was like, “Okay, this was on TV. Kids in Harrisburg saw it. I should see it and see what it was like and also this was something that he chose to do to the extent that he was able to make choices at that time. It's not someone being murdered.
Mike: I remember reading years ago that apparently in Japan if you kill yourself by jumping in front of a train, they fine your family something like $10,000 because it holds everybody else up and you're affecting everybody else, like their commute, and there's something really gross about that, but there's also something, I guess, pragmatic about it too. That Suicide is an individual decision and I, I guess, if you'd like to kill yourself, you know, fine, but don't do it in a way that makes everybody else late for work. I don't know.
Sarah: Well, and maybe that does deter suicides because if you have the sense of opportunity of the speeding train and then you're like, “No, I can't impose that debt on my family. That will be terrible. Like, maybe…” And then you don't have another opportunity and it sort of fades for the period.
Mike: I don't know how that was relevant, but I just brought it up.
Sarah: I guess in conclusion I would ask you would you ever watch Faces of Death?
Mike: Fuck no. Even knowing that it's fake. I mean, the little clip of it that I saw was probably fake, but that scene in Django Unchained where the guy gets ripped apart by dogs is also fake and I also never want to watch that again. So, I am not planning on renting Faces of Death or going on YouTube anytime soon. I hate whenever you find out that there's some rabbit hole on YouTube that you haven't gone down yet. You're like, “Oh yeah. There are a lot of videos about eugenics on YouTube.” You're like, oh yeah. I guess this is another horrible corner of the internet that I just don't ever want to go down.
Sarah: But then you know about it, and you have this feeling of like, “Well, maybe I should, you know, for science.”
Mike: You know what I was watching the other day? I don't know why I did this. I was watching boxing videos. If you type in “Mike Tyson's best KOs,” there's, like, thousands of compilations and then that, of course, on the right-hand bar gets you to, like, “Best Evander Holyfield KOs” and I don't know why. Like, I'm not into boxing. I don't even like violence. I looked at the clock and like, three hours had gone by and then of course now it's recommending me boxing videos and thinks I’m super into boxing and I'm like, I'm never watching any boxing stuff again. That was a weird thing that happened to me one day and it's never happening again.
Sarah: It needs to have an “I'm over it” button. Like, “No, I'm done with that part of my life.” Whereas for me, no matter what I watch will always play, after a few auto play things go by, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s debut album Buckingham Nicks. That's my boxing videos.