Horrifying Snuff Films: Fact or Fiction?

You wouldn’t think that something as deplorable as snuff films would have such a rigid definition, but snuff aficionados hold their nightmare smut to high standards. Technically, a snuff film has to be a film that features the murder of an actual person, or people, that was made for the express purposes of financial gain. Is there really a market out there for actual snuff films? Who would spend their hard earned money on footage of someone being murdered? If the popularity of films and video games that feature plotlines based on snuff films are to be believed, people are at least willing to entertain the idea that snuff films are out there, and people are buying. If you’re ready to get dark, keep reading to discover what’s a snuff film hoax, and what films are truly for the worst people in humanity.

Are snuff films real? It’s a valid question. While there’s footage of people being murdered, or committing suicide online, that doesn’t technically make them snuff films. Although with the way online content is repackaged and uploaded on less than trustworthy sites that are covered with ads, you could argue that anything could be used for used for financial gain, even cell phone video of a brutal murder or some coked-up guy cutting up his lover while listening to New Order. Snuff films play into our fear of the unknown, and as we enter into an ever-expanding digital realm where you can know everything about any topic whenever you want, they play the part of the bogeyman lurking just a few keystrokes away. 

The warning that appears at the beginning of Cannibal Holocaust doesn't truly prepare you for the intense sexual violence and brutality that the viewer is about to experience. A woman is impaled on a spike, people are eaten alive by natives, and multiple animals are mutilated onscreen; audiences in 1980 weren't ready for a film like this.

In order to perpetuate the idea that the film was actually made up of found documentary footage, Cannibal Holocaust's director, Ruggero Deodato, had his main actors sign contracts that would keep them out of the public eye for a year and that plan backfired when he was arrested on charges of releasing footage of their deaths. After explaining how the effects were captured and that the actors were completely safe, the charges against Deodato were dropped. 

This film that allegedly shows two young boys in Tarzan costumes raping another young boy in a cage before he's murdered on camera played a large role in The Franklin Coverup, a child sex ring that was allegedly being run by Lawrence E. King, manager of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, and a vital member of the Reagan era Republican party. There's no proof that this video exists, but the many deaths of people surrounding this case lend an air of conspiratorial evidence to a story that would otherwise be deemed far-fetched. It doesn't help that the film allegedly takes place at Bohemian Grove, a private, mysterious, secluded camp for the wealthy elite.

Imagine going on the Internet one day and finding a video of some guy tying another man to a bed and stabbing him to death with an icepick before cutting him open and having sex with the dead body. All of this is set to New Order's "True Faith," by the way. This video is definitely very real, and it was just the beginning of a series nightmarish acts that Luka Magnotta would commit before being arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and being tried and convicted of first-degree murder. In a separate trial that saw the owner of a gore website go on the stand for hosting the film, Canada legally declared 1 Lunatic, 1 Icepick to be a snuff film, stating, "It has death, it has horror, it has cruelty, it has violence, it has dismemberment, and it has sex. This isn't staged. This isn't a person following a script."

On an unmarked video, a teenage girl begs for her life before she's raped and strangled with a wire, causing her to foam at the mouth and her eyes to roll back into her head. After the girl is fully dead, she's wrapped in a plastic sheet and dragged out of the room. No one knows when this series of events unfolded, but it was found on a VHS tape seized during a raid on a Latvian man’s house in Skelmersdale, Lancashire. The man who was in possession of the film, Andreas Bauminis, was sentenced to eight months in jail for possessing the film but no further investigating went into to finding out who the young woman was, or who murdered her. 

Dafu Love, if it even exists, was supposedly made by the very real Peter Scully, a man accused of running an international pedophile ring, and various reports have alleged that it features Scully and another man smashing two babies together as if they're having a pillow fight, or maybe they just torture them to death in a different awful way. While the existence of Scully's snuff film is up in the air, what is known is that Scully's sex crimes in the Philippines were so awful that the country is trying to bring back the death penalty just so they can execute him.  

In a lovely green meadow, one Eastern European man begs for his life while a teenager slowly and deliberately beats him to death with a hammer. Another boy from behind the camera says something. The two teenagers take turns posing over the older man's dead body. If you've watched 3 Guys, 1 Hammer then you know that the death of Sergei Yatzenko at the hands of Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuk is one of the most brutal slayings in recent memory. The fact that it's online for anyone to see is a real mind bender. 

Imagine popping in a VHS and watching as a camera lovingly pans over a table full of wooden instruments and a collection of jars containing something vaguely human. There are black and white photos tacked to a wall and a human head just sitting in some rope. Oh and don't forget the fish tank full of human hands. Flower of Flesh and Blood isn't a snuff film, but you try telling an early 90s (read: high on all the cocaine) Charlie Sheen that he didn't actually see a samurai drug a woman and then chop her up into little pieces. After viewing the horror film (which was given to him by Attack of the Show's Chris Gore) Sheen immediately called the FBI. The FBI investigated, but after realizing that no one was actually murdered in the making of the film, they quickly closed the case.

The video opens with a portly bald guy sitting in a recliner espousing his personal philosophy before cutting to footage of a series of women listening intently as that same man suggests that he's going to kill them if they don't cook, clean, and have sex with him and his friend whenever the two men want. Those men are Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who are believed to have raped and murdered up to 25 people between 1983 and 1985. Lake killed himself immediately upon arrest, but Ng stood trial and was convicted of 11 counts of murder. While there's no torture or any of the brutal mutilation that would happen to those women on the tapes, they're still some of the most chilling visuals you'll ever see. 

Poorly filmed videos of around 100 boys aged between nine and 15, all being sadistically abused and even murdered, were found when Italian police seized 3,000 of Dmitri Vladimirovich Kuznetsov's videos while they were in transit across Europe. British police allege that some of the videos were making their way to England where pedophiles were paying between £50 and £100 for Kuznetsov's tapes. According to The Guardian, Kuznetsov had been in the snuff film/child pedophilia business since 1998, and they published an alleged email transcript between Kuznetsov and an Italian customer:

"Promise me you're not ripping me off," says the Italian.

"Relax, I can assure you this one really dies," Kuznetsov responds.

"The last time I paid and I didn't get what I wanted."

"What do you want?"

'To see them die."

A bald guy in what might be a flesh mask hangs another man from the ceiling, rips his clothing off, and begins to scrape the skin from his body. So far, so good, right? But then Trent Reznor's voice booms over the video and things get really unsettling.

To advertise Nine Inch Nails' Broken EP, Reznor enlisted the help of Peter Christopherson of the band Throbbing Gristle to direct a short film that would act as a promo for the EP. Aside from being one of the preeminent figures in industrial music, Christopherson was also really good at making fake snuff films. So good that no one would agree to distribute the promo, leaving Reznor to hand-dub the tapes himself and give them out to friends. When the Internet finally came around, people were able to see that The Broken Movie is just some good ol' horrifying footage set to Nine Inch Nails b-sides.