Snuff is a 1976 splatter film, and is most notorious for being marketed as if it were an actual snuff film.[1][2] This picture contributed to the urban legend of snuff films, although the concept did not originate with it.
Production
The film started out as a low-budget gore film titled Slaughter which was written and directed by the husband-and-wife grindhouse film making team of Michael Findlay and Roberta Findlay. Filmed in Argentina in 1971 on a budget of $30,000,[3] it depicted the actions of a Manson-esque murder cult, filmed mainly in silent due to the actors understanding very little English. The film financier Jack Bravman received an out-of-court settlement from AIP so the latter could use the title for the 1972 Jim Brown film of the same name. The Findlays' film enjoyed a very limited theatrical release.[4]
Independent low-budget distributor and sometime producer Allan Shackleton took the film and shelved it for four years—but was inspired to release it with a new ending, unbeknownst to the original filmmakers, after reading a newspaper article in 1975 on the rumor of snuff films produced in South America and decided to cash in on the urban legend. He added a new ending, filmed in a vérité style by Simon Nuchtern,[citation needed] in which a woman is brutally murdered by a film crew, supposedly the crew of Slaughter.[5] The new footage purportedly showed an actual murder, and was spliced onto the end of Slaughter with an abrupt cut suggesting that the footage was unplanned and the murder authentic. This new version of the film was released under the title Snuff, with the tagline "The film that could only be made in South America... where life is CHEAP."[6]
Once the film was released, distributor Shackleton reportedly hired fake protesters to picket movie theaters showing the film.[7] This soon became moot when Women Against Pornography began staging real protests, outraged at the film's purported imagery of sexual violence. The group's protest received coverage by such media outlets as the CBS Evening News.
Hoax
Although the film was exposed as a hoax in Variety in 1976, it became popular in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Boston.[8]
The rumours persisted that the film showed a real-life murder, and "prompted by complaints and petitions from well-known writers, including Eric Bentley and Susan Brownmiller, and legislators", inspired New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau to investigate the circumstances surrounding the films production[9]—who dismissed the supposedly 'real' murder as "nothing more than conventional trick photography—as is evident to anyone who sees the movie",[10][11] also reassuring people that the actress being dismembered and killed in the ending of the film "is alive and well", having urged the police to trace her.[12]
Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott) is a prosperous local businessman in Grand Rapids, Michigan who has strong Calvinist convictions. A single parent, Van Dorn is the father of a seemingly quiet, conservative teenage girl, Kristen, who inexplicably disappears when she goes on a church-sponsored trip to California. A strange private investigator, Andy Mast (Peter Boyle) from Los Angeles, is hired, eventually turning up a 8mmstag film of his daughter with two young men.
Van Dorn then suspects that his daughter was kidnapped and forced to join California's porno underworld. His quest to rescue her takes him into an odyssey through this "adult" underground.
Getting no results from the PI, the police or even from Los Angeles' adult shopkeepers and "rap parlor" women, a desperate Van Dorn ends up posing as a pornography producer, hoping to find information about his daughter. A straggly actor named "Jism Jim", who was in the film with Kristen, knows where she might be and sends him to a sometime porno actress/hooker named Niki (Season Hubley). Their uneasy alliance moves from L.A. to San Diego and ends in San Francisco where Van Dorn finds that Kristen may be in the hands of a very dangerous porn player who deals in the world of "snuff movies."
